Happy Holidays 2025, Part V: The Powdering

Days until Christmas: 12
Days until my birthday: 7 

Diatomaceous earth goes everywhere. 

It coats everything near or around it in a thin, dust-like white powder, not dissimilar to flour. It sticks on clothes, carpets, furniture, walls, baseboards, curtains, and anything it touches. The furnace will propel a thin coating of it throughout the house simply because it'll pick it up in the air. 

But that's the point, in our ongoing war with the fleas.

Yesterday I stripped my ottoman and chair, and doused them with the powder. I always keep blankets on and in my chair and ottoman because I like to be comfortable. All of those blankets were pulled off and washed, the furniture was, ahem, powder coated, and then they were replaced and were again powedered for another layer of protection and flea stoppage. 

The diatomaceous earth dries out everything -- your skin, your lungs, your sinuses, your eyes, the air -- everything. Which makes it that much worse when it's already dry in the house and you're already running a humidifier on both floors of the house so that you don't have nosebleeds every day.

I speak from experience, shall we say. 

I have never seen a flea in my office, mind you. But I know there are likely some stragglers, as Mable, Hank, and Gary like to spend as much time in here with me as possible, and when he was alive, Pete spent the most time in here out of all of them -- on the ottoman or the chair. So I'm sure they're hiding somewhere.

As a reminder, fleas don't like humans; they don't want our blood, and they don't want to breed on us or around us as a general rule. And because of that I am not as anarchic, "burn the place down and salt the earth" about eradicating them as, say, Daisy is. It'll take some time, and I'm just doing the prophylactic measures I can. So, my Friday was spent doing just that -- washing, powdering, replacing. I wanted to get to the living room too and do the same there, but I did not have the energy or the time -- our washer/dryer can only handle so much at once and they take forever to run their cycles. I am also but one man, and a tired one at that. Halfway through the work I was doing yesterday, I had to retreat to the bedroom and take a nap in the bed with Hank and the Double Trouble boys. Daisy didn't even realize I'd passed out for a while.

Gary and Charlie are pissed that my room had been off limits to them all day because -- especially for Gary -- it is a sanctuary for him where he can get alone time with the dad and eat all of the fancy Hill's Science Diet food he can gobble down. They all like this food; it is the one cat food that has apparent universal appeal in this house. This one is "sensitive stomach" non-prescription food, but when we had Gary as a very little kitten and he was on the prescription version, we couldn't keep enough bags of it in the house -- everyone ate it to the tune of a 3.5 pound bag per week. 

We got the non-prescription version again because, well, as Gary grew up his stomach issues grew up with him and went away, but he still occasionally had diarrhea. Of course, Mable did as well, and Pete (because he was slowly dying) also did while his kidneys were failing him. So we figured, worth a shot, right? Well, they didn't forget how much they all love said food, and we have now switched to the seven-pound bags so they're not eating us out of house and home every single week. Daisy ordered another bag about two weeks ago, and I unboxed it today...shortly after ordering another one myself. Look, if the cats are gonna eat it and it's good for them, might as well let them enjoy it and stay stocked up. It also lets us completely wean them off cheaper cat foods and treats that likely aren't incredibly beneficial for them. Now, mind you, as Pete was in his final months, we let him eat anything he wanted, as much as he wanted, as long as it wasn't toxic to cats -- it was more important that he was eating period than what it was he ate -- and that is me almost directly quoting our vet there. Because of this, he got to eat like a king -- all sorts of different treats, multiple types of decently high-end cat food, liquid treats like Churus and Temptations Purr-ee, cat-food versions of all manners of bisques, soups, and gravies, and occasionally a can of tuna right off the shelf, cracked open and dumped into a bowl. The problem is that all the other kids liked this royal treatment as well, to varying degrees, and often would shove him out of the way to get to it themselves. Pete would not compete -- he was old and kind and never wanted to stop anyone else from eating, so he would hang back once the others were interested. So, slowly weaning all of the others off of this lifestyle of champagne wishes and caviar dreams may take a bit of time and patience for us. 

Today has, for once, been a very leisurely day; I don't think Daisy was out of bed longer than for a bathroom trip until around 3pm, and even then our day consisted of not much but lounging about -- this is exactly what both of us needed. The stress of Pete, and the stress of being go-go-go for everything recently has just torn both of us down. Add to this that it's currently single-digit cold outside and it snowed half the day anyway, and we're very grateful to just be indoors doing as little as possible. While it's cold now, we're supposed to get a warm-up over the next few days and temperatures are supposed to hit the high 40s and maybe even low 50s again later this coming week. This is good because of Daisy's jury duty and because we want the snow to melt off. We got a dusting, just enough to leave footprints and tire tracks in, but not enough to shovel -- but it's not going anywhere until those temperatures creep up enough to actually melt it.

I suppose I should be grateful; my hometown in West Virginia is getting blasted by a 6-12" snowstorm right now, the first big one of the season for the area.

We're a week out from my birthday now. Plans remain much the same at this juncture -- essentially Christmas shopping in Shadow Lake to appease my need for holiday retail therapy, followed by dinner with the parents and a quiet night at home before I return to work the next evening for a short two-day week before Christmas. This coming week is the last full week of work I'll have to do until well after the new year, and it couldn't come quickly enough. The same goes for Daisy, who has a similar schedule to me throughout the rest of the year. I've decided to go ahead and take off Sunday the 28th too -- I wasn't originally going to, but I have a spare day and we also have a dermatologist/skin checks appointment on the afternoon of Monday the 29th. 

What else is going on that I've neglected to mention due to stress and fatigue and a cat dying? Well...

A few weeks ago, in order to offset the time between now and my next doctor's appointment (and the refills that come with that), I found an online pharmacy that just charges a "doctor's visit fee" and will ship me my maintenance medications in bulk. So, after jumping through a few hoops from the comfort of my office chair, I now have bottles upon bottles of my three maintenance medications -- metformin, allopurinol, and rosuvastatin -- on my shelf here at home. The only one I cannot get this way is my Trulicity, and to be fair, I could get it, but I refuse to pay $1,800 a month for it. The other medicines are common and relatively inexpensive. 

You may ask why this was an option to me, and I'll tell you -- my insurance with my new job does not cover my doctor. She is out of network. Seeing her for routine things like bloodwork checks or prescription refills would be completely out of pocket, more or less. As I am not dying and my diabetes has always been well-managed, I am trying to let it ride for as long as possible until I can find a new doctor that is within my network, especially as my refill limits for my current doctor have now run out and I can get nothing else from her auto-refilled without seeing her again. There's no knowledge of the future involved here; I don't truthfully know how long Daisy or I will be at either of our jobs (I would assume a long time, for both of us, but that always remains to be seen) so I would really like to not jump through a bunch of hoops to see a new doctor only to have to switch healthcare plans yet again for another job and no longer be able to see them, either. Welcome to healthcare in the United States, folks. 

Daisy was skeptical about me ordering my meds in bulk until they arrived at the door. "How do you know they're American drugs and aren't some bullshit made in other countries?"

"[Daisy]," I said, "my rosuvastatin I get from Amazon Pharmacy legit says on the label that the manufacturer is Changzhou Pharmaceutical Factory. What's the difference? I don't care where they come from, I care that I can get them and that they work."

And this is the truth. I absolutely do not give a flying shit where the drugs come from. Are they what they're supposed to be? Do they work? Yes on both counts? Cool. Fuck it. It really does not matter to me. They could come from outer space if they're affordable and they do what they're supposed to do. 

However, per the website of the pharmacist I use, they are all US-made drugs and are shipped from one of their two laboratories -- Dallas, and Clearwater, FL. So, I guess we're in the clear, so to speak. 

I've got refills for a year before I have to re-up the "doctor's visit" fee. I've got enough in the house right now for probably eight-ish months when it comes to the metformin, and close to a year of the allopurinol and rosuvastatin. I plan ahead. You may be asking why I'm not particularly concerned about the Trulicity. Well...it wrecks my guts when I'm on it if I do not eat the same foods consistently, which bars me from enjoying restaurant food or holiday meals or really anything outside of the ordinary, and truth be told I hated injecting myself with it every week. I would come to dread it, and would come to dread the effects of it if I was off it too long and then stuck myself with it again. And over time, it only marginally affected my A1C and weight loss goals. I've not been on it since about a week before Thanksgiving and I've still lost eight pounds since November 4th, which tells me it's not as important in contributing to my weight loss as I thought it was previously. 

My weight is still slowly going down. I'm not going to be in modeling shape anytime soon, but if I progress as I have been, I'll be down close to 100 pounds versus eight years ago. Right now, I'm down 80. Eighty. That's wildly monumental to me. My goal for 2026 is to lose that last twenty and to then set a new goal. Will I get there? Eh, who knows. It's all about activity levels and diet, honestly. At least for me. I've been blessed and cursed with the type of metabolism that corresponds closely to what I'm doing in life. If I eat like an asshole for a month, I will gain weight -- sometimes ten pounds or more. If I don't, and I keep my food urges on a tight leash, get good sleep, and stay moderately active when I can...weight will fall off me. I also realize this is likely fleeting and won't last forever. As I get older, everything will slow down more and more. 

In other news, I am waiting for a drop shipment from China for the second time.

Let me explain.

Back in October -- before Halloween, in fact -- I ordered a ton of music t-shirts from a website claiming to be the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Store but ended up being a dropshipper from China cranking out bootlegs. I was mostly aware of this at the time due to the prices -- 15 shirts and two hoodies for less than $50 would always be too good to be true for authentic stuff -- but honestly, I've never really cared about a lot of that Chinese bootleg stuff as long as it looks fine and fits fine. It is what it is. And for $50 I was willing to take the risk on it.

Well, it shipped, and I tracked it halfway across the world, very slowly as it moved. It reached Omaha and sat in the delivery facility for a week, and then on Thanksgiving I was told it had been delivered here to my house. It was not. 

I got with customer service, who told me that they had the same tracking as I did, and it had been confirmed delivered, though they did not have the options for photo proof of delivery or anything like that. I told them, again, that it had not been delivered, nobody had come to my house to deliver anything to me, and if it was delivered to another address nobody had let me know or brought it to me (and our neighbors are generally pretty cool; if they'd received a package for me/us they would've brought it over and dropped it off). 

Despite the fact that all of this sounds scammy, the tracking website is not; I have used it to track other shipments from China in the past, like when I was ordering vapes in bulk through FastWeb -- the site is legit. 

After a second email back to their customer service saying that yes, I had checked everything thoroughly and no, my items still had not arrived, they agreed to re-ship everything again at no cost and expedited shipping of 7-15 business days. Okay, sure, I'll play the long game here. Within 24 hours I had another tracking number for another shipper and confirmation that it was all the same items, the same sizes, etc being re-shipped. The second shipment is currently traversing the planet (or so the tracking says) and I'll see if it ever gets here. If it does, great. If it doesn't, it's a "live and learn" sort of lesson and I'm only out $50 that's already been paid for three billing cycles ago now. I'll keep you folks posted either way, because the suspense of the long game here is amusing to me if nothing else. 

I guess I can always go in and do a charge dispute via my credit card if it doesn't get here the second time. I don't know how that works for stuff that's several months old though. Maybe that's part of the long game -- get the money from the unwitting consumer and then when they don't get the goods, it's too late to dispute the charge. Whatever. $50 isn't gonna make or break me anymore, it's not 2011 and I'm not poor scraping by to survive anymore. It's simply a lesson to learn these days. 

Anyway.

Daisy says she's been working on a final Christmas/birthday present for me in secret. It's something she has to design and has been doing for a few days now, but hasn't been able to get it completely right. I assume it's something art-related, and I'm guessing it's a mural of the cats -- or likely more accurately, a mural of our three dead cats. She asked me what I thought she was working on, to tease me, and when that was my first guess she immediately dropped and changed the subject -- so, I'm guessing I was a little too close for comfort there. 

I delight in knowing that there's no way Daisy will know what I got her this year for Christmas, because it's so outside the box of things I've gotten before. It's also mostly things I know she's wanted and/or has asked for over the past year or so, in passing and probably not even thinking about it, with the exception of a few small extra items and one thing we both needed in order to stay with the times. I'll leave it at that, but yeah -- we're very blessed to have relatively few wants and needs. 

The first gifts from my parents arrived today; they consisted of two very nice cobalt blue dishes and a set of glasses-cleaning microfiber wipes. We thanked them graciously. Because of the weather and time constraints, I must admit that I have yet to pack, seal, and send their Christmas box to them and as we are now in the home stretch before the holidays hit, I just don't know when we'll be able to do it. Daisy wants us to go out to lunch on Friday (the day before my birthday), which she took off -- but I told her I can't commit to that yet, and neither can she -- who knows if she'll still be stuck on a jury or if I'll be feeling okay and have energy, or if the weather will cooperate with us. Any of those things could snarl our plans. 

So life marches on -- tomorrow I'll do my normal household chores and watch the Chiefs (likely lose), and will return to work for my last full week of the year. Daisy may or may not go to the shelter for kitten feeding as they haven't had kittens for her to feed for the past two weeks, and they're now on a "hey, let the next person know via our email chain if there's none to feed so they don't have to come in" sort of thing. On Monday, Daisy will report to jury duty for however long they need her, and sometime within this next week I expect us to get a call stating it's time to come pick up Pete's ashes and keepsakes. There's never a dull moment in this household, it seems.