They Give Me Cat-Scratch Fever

(I suppose you can read this blog without having read the earlier post. I can't stop you. But it's really going to make more sense if you read part one of this story, dated March 24th.)

My mother and I stared at each other for a second and then I said flatly, “Well, off to the emergency room.”

My mother said quickly, “I’m going with y...“and I, interrupting, said “Oh no, you’re not.”

Some people like attention and company when they are unwell. Some prefer to be left alone. And some people are complete maniacs on the subject of not being around a single solitary person they know when they are hurt or sick. I don’t want sympathy. I don’t want care. I want be given medicine by complete strangers and if the medicine doesn’t work, I want to be allowed to die alone on a gurney, taken home and stuffed into the composter.

My mother, knowing my more winning qualities, tried another tack. “But I’ll go with you to my ER. You'll get in sooner.”

This might have been true, insofar as my mother has volunteered at a local emergency room for nearly twenty years. Still, just because something is true doesn’t mean I care to believe it. I shook my head no. She persisted.

“It’s Saturday afternoon. If you go in without me, you’re going to be in Fast Track until Tuesday.”

She was probably right. "Fast Track" is where anyone who isn’t experiencing a heart attack, birth or a spurting gunshot wound is taken to be treated. Fast Track is, in fact, very, very slow. I think the call it Fast Track as a sort of mean, inside joke. I shook my head, staring down at my finger which had settled into a steady throb.

“I’ll avoid the whole ER thing by going to the pharmacy down the street. They have a nurse practitioner there. She’s got to be able to give me a shot and a prescription.”

Stubbornly refusing her help and her company about eight more times, I headed off to the pharmacy where the nurse quickly and efficiently gave me my shot and my prescription. I headed home, calmly basking in a job well done.

[Quinn, having typed this, falls on the floor in hysterical laughter.]

No, of course it didn’t happen that way. I can’t wear ankle-strap shoes, I can’t pronounce the word “Lecithin” and I can’t accomplish anything important the first time around. What actually happened is that I went to the pharmacy only to find out the nurse didn’t work on the weekends. The clerk gave me the address of a clinic down the street that covered for the nurse when she wasn’t in the office. This clinic happens to share a parking lot with Whole Foods so I spent a half-hour driving around in circles as people with hemp shoes and bags of soy products didn’t actually leave but stood in the middle of the lane discussing yoga classes and high colonics. Whe I did finally park, I raced to the clinic to learn it was closed on weekends.

By now, nearly an hour had passed. The good news was that the finger wasn’t bleeding anymore. That might have had something to do with my poor bitten digit being twice its usual size, which I imagined was somehow constricting the blood vessels. Also, weirdly, it was cold. I never did get to medical school but I suspected I couldn’t just ignore this and hope it corrected itself, like when certain lights go off on my dashboard. I called my mom to give her the update. She was very firm that I should go to Fast Track. I was very firm that I wanted nothing to do with a place that would have to be declared my place of residence before they saw me. Finally, she said “Well, there’s that emergency place in mid-town which only does small injuries. I went there once. It was pretty fast.”

Fine. Done. I called Consort, gave him the update and headed east. I found free street parking, which I always take to be a good sign. I walked in and there was only one other person ahead of me. Better still. While I was being checked in, a dapper French gentleman was released, having needed two stitches in his hand from a leek-mincing incident. I asked him how long it had taken. All told, he said, an hour and a half. Oh, I was happy, happy in a way I hadn’t been since the second before I had inserted the IV line and everything had gone all pear-shaped. I opened my book and prepared for the whisking away which would happen momentarily.

An hour passed. And then another hour passed. My hand now only felt right if I kept the hand elevated and the finger elevated above the hand. Being as I was bitten on the middle finger, I arranged myself so the hand was only facing a wall. I had long since given up on being whisked in and out, and was now just mutely and meanly glaring at anyone who appeared to be management. What was weird was that it wasn’t as if other people were getting seen ahead of me. This was still a clinic dedicated to little injurie. The emergency room was next door with another staff. I wasn’t being bumped for people being dissuaded from walking towards the light. The person who had been there ahead of me was still in the waiting room with me, as were the ten or so people who were now in line after me. The nurse kept coming out and saying apologetically, “I’m so sorry, we’re trying to get you all in. It’s just the beds are all full.” The mood grew ugly. Eventually, she stopped coming into the waiting room and took to telling us this from behind the Plexiglas security shield.

Four hours after I arrived, I was ushered through the doors and placed on a chair in the hallway. Then did I learn that low-priority emergency rooms function as drunk tanks. Every room, every gurney, anything reasonably horizontal without a phone on it was sporting its very own alcoholic; there wasn’t any room to care for anyone who wasn’t flammable. Having entered the inner lair, a doctor looked at me, read my triage report, and was shocked to discover that I still had a cat bite. He asked me if it was painful and I honestly answered that it was fine as long as I didn’t lower my hand or try to make a fist. He then made me lower my hand and make a fist, which I thought was unsportsmanlike. I waited for an x-ray, to make sure some of her tooth hadn’t broken off in my finger and observed my fellow inmates.

The nurses spent a lot of time asking the drunks if they wanted to go to the bathroom; this was only slightly less productive than asking the thermometers if they wanted to go to the bathroom. It would go like this:

“Mr. Gutierrez? Do you need to go to the bathroom?”

(silence)

“MR. GUTIERREZ? DO YOU NEED TO GO TO THE BATHROOM?”

(snoring)

“MR. GUTIERREZ? DO YOU NEED TO GO- Oh God, he did. Someone call Custodial.”

Mr. Gutierrez, unlike the rest of us, remained blissfully ignorant that he had just urinated all over the floor. Vomit, feces, untreated diabetes-related wounds; there wasn’t a single unconscious alcoholic in there who wasn’t leaking somewhere. Without noticing, I had drawn my feet up off the ground and tucked my puffy cold finger under my armpit. No sense adding to the bacteria swimming around in my body.

My chair was directly across from a room with the only conscious drunk on the floor. Luckily for me, he was chatty. He spent the better part of an hour telling me about his life in some language not entirely unlike Spanish, with a light dusting of English obscenities thrown in for texture. I smiled pleasantly, nodded occasionally, and periodically asked the nurse to put his blanket back on, because his hospital gown kept riding up.

Ideally, you get your first antibiotics for a cat bite within six hours of the bite (Actually, ideally you don’t get bitten at all, but that boat had sailed); I was finally handed my first pills at the end of the fifth hour. The doctor also gave me a prescription for Vicodin, which I initially refused because Vicodin makes me seasick. He looked at me and then looked at my finger and said briskly, “You might just want to fill it. For tonight.”

Oh.

Someone dressed my wound, which meant turning my middle finger into a glowing white submarine of a digit, held rigidly upright. I was now inadvertently and endlessly telling everyone how I felt about this afternoon. One of the drunks blinked awake, saw my hand and snickered. I signed a few papers and was sprung. I went to the hospital pharmacy, got my ten days’ worth of antibiotics and my pain pills, which I was starting to suspect I’d need. I drove home, throbbing and oozing.

I pulled into the garage, and saw that our new feral foster-cat was scrunched in the back of her cage, glaring at me. I noticed that she might hate us and everything we stand for, but apparently our food wasn’t terrible. I refilled her food and water bowls and carefully cleaned her litter-box, using the non-bandaged hand. She gargled and hissed at me for disturbing her prison-cell. Without looking at her, I said in what I hoped was a calm and soothing voice, “Listen to me, little one. We’re pleased to have you, I’m happy to care for you and what I can only imagine are going to be some very cute little kittens of yours. But I’ve used up every ounce of my good nature in the last three days and I swear to God, if you attack me I’m going to leave you out in the recycling bin.”

Turns out, we all bite in our own way.

While we're waiting.

We'll finish my cat-bite story shortly. Meanwhile, my house, this morning:

I saw Consort had bought bananas again. I said, "You know I love bananas, but remember how I asked you not to buy bananas? They all have to be shipped in from places very far away. Bananas have a huge carbon footprint."

"Oh," Consort answered, "I was standing in the store and I remembered you said something about bananas, but I thought you said they had a huge carbo footprint, and I didn't think I had to worry about that."

I'm pleased to note that Consort kind of listens to me.

Doctor Do Little.

Oh, where to begin.

Does this story begin on Thursday, when I took the dog in for what I thought was his regular allergy shot because he was scratching his ears repeatedly and driving us all nuts, only to find out that he had a hot spot under his fur next to his ear which required shaving half his head and a ten-day supply of antibiotics and yet still no allergy shot because he couldn’t have that on top of the antibiotics and the hot spot? Does the story begin with a stinky dog-head and repeated applications of ointment? Shouldn’t all stories begin with the word ointment?

Or maybe the story began on Thursday when the neighbor who found our dog found another puppy trotting around on a busy street near downtown and brought him home for the purpose of finding him a new home. She never asked anything of me but a spare leash and a little dry food, yet I took it upon myself to drive him to the vet on Friday morning for a worming pill. Yes, perhaps the story begins on Friday morning when a very small puppy vomited more than his entire body mass all over the back seat of my car.

Then again, it probably started on Friday afternoon when I had a family come over to meet the dog, and while we were all walking his silly puppiness around the block I got a call from the cat-rescue group where Daughter and I volunteer. Did I remember offering to take kittens this kitten-season? Did I happen to recall that someone was trying to capture a pregnant feral cat which lived in a nearby alley? Was I pleased to learn that she’d been captured and was looking for someplace quiet to finish out her confinement and spend the first few weeks of her kitten’s lives? The rescue-dog went off with the family, mutual love zooming around freely, and I went to clean out the garage or, as I like to think of it, The Cummings Home for Wayward Felines.

No. Let us stipulate that all these situations existed before Saturday and that the story itself begins on Saturday. It begins very early Saturday, in fact. Before dawn, I awakened to the sounds of great physical activity in my laundry room. Staggering out, I found Lupac shrieking and pouncing on something extremely tiny and clearly too young to have gotten the memo about our cat's killing prowess. When I arrived on scene, we weren’t yet in the killing phase but merely the “batting and shrieking” phase, which meant I got to spend a soul-searching twenty minutes determining if the baby mouse was actually dead or just terrified into paralysis. This involved leaning in to try to put a mirror under its nose to see if there was breathing and repeatedly sending Notorious C.A.T. out the room. Finally I decided the micro-mouse wasn’t actually dead, though I wouldn’t have suggested it buy extra-large jars of mayonnaise. I gently shuffled it outdoors, under a plant. The dog watched all of this from his crate and was rewarded with a morning dose of antibiotic shoved down his throat. Having communed with all the animals currently in the house, I went back to bed and got another hour of sleep.

At ten, I picked up the rescue cat, which is lovely, very pregnant and very, very frightened. The people who brought her to the shelter want to adopt her after the whole kitten business is over, and I commend them for that. They claim she’s very sweet and I have no reason to argue with them. Then again, she is also feral, knocked-up and frightened and I was in no hurry to experience the first cat bite of my life so I planned to treat her like unexploded ordinance. A cat’s mouth is incredibly toxic, filled with pathogens that certain rogue nations only dream of possessing. Before antibiotics, a cat-bite could easily kill you. Even now, you still have to go directly to the ER and hope the first round of antibiotics works because the second course of treatment involves an IV. I installed the cat in the cage, taking care not to touch her, and headed off to my mother’s house to finish my pet-tasks for the day.

My mother’s cat has delicate kidneys and needs an IV-line of saline twice a week. My mother's neighbor, a registered nurse, has helped my mother insert the line, which is a very nice thing for a neighbor to do. This weekend, however, the neighbor was out of town and my mom asked me to help. I was happy to do so, what with this being my mom and her cat having been my cat about fifteen years ago. Also, I'd done this before. For anyone who ever Googles the phrase “Rehydrating a cat” or “Inserting IV into cat,” I am here to tell you it’s pretty easy. The cat is lying down. You come up behind her, grab the loose skin between her shoulder blades and gently pull upwards. It creates a tent, with a little divot in the middle. You insert the needle into the divot. Your greatest concern is to not come out the other side of the skin-tent and poke yourself. The cat might complain when the needle goes in but settles down pretty quickly. A vet told my mom the actual rehydration relaxes them, which means your only job after the needle goes in is to watch the bag and make sure you’ve dosed enough saline. Bing, bang, massage the fluid around a little bit, you’re done.

Except my mother’s cat did not agree to this being a mildly-unpleasant-but-on-the-whole-positive experience. Normally a wonderful amiable companion, my mother’s cat shrieked like a harpy when the needle went in, and then shrieked louder. My mother held her more firmly and I looked up at the bag for a second, to make sure it was draining correctly. In the second I looked up, the cat shook out the needle, which now started splashing saline solution around the room like a fountain at the Bellagio Hotel. I grabbed the needle and grabbed the skin on her neck to tent-and-poke again but my hands were slippery from saline. In the chaos the cat took this opportunity to bite me. For several wondrous seconds I attempted to close the tube so it would stop spraying water everywhere while simultaneously enjoying the sensation of a small, elderly yet remarkably stubborn cat’s jaws clamped around my finger. My mother was holding her down and prying her away from the other side. Between the two of us, we managed to dislodge my violated digit. I stared at my middle finger in disbelief. There was a serious dent in the skin, but the skin wasn’t broken. "Yes!" I hooted. “No blood! No blood, no pathogens, no trip to the ER for me! Dodged that bullet!”

And then, slowly but unmistakeably, drops of blood starting leaking from my finger, first from the dent and then from two little spots on the opposite side. I had been bitten by a cat, and I needed antibiotics right away.

Next time: The Resolution. I’ll tell you that everything works out alright, but I can’t finish this story today because my finger refuses to type another lette

Once I built a railroad, now it's done.

I'm certain you've all heard the cliche about how to cook a frog but I'll cover it quickly for that one person who hasn't: If you plop a live frog in a pot of boiling water it will jump right out again but if you put it in cool water and slowly heat it, the frog won't notice the gradual increase in temperature and will politely sit there and cook. First ... ew. Live frogs being boiled to death and then eaten? Someone having done this in order to think this up? It's like a Valu-Pak of disgusting images. Second, I have my doubts about the whole theory. Frogs, while rarely being on the receiving end of a law degree, have lived in one form or another for millions of years. They have to have developed some survival instincts. I've always suspected that at one point during this evolutionary experiment, a frog would think to itself, "Is it just me, or is it getting warm in here?"

Which leads us to last week. As I have noted before, it's generally understood things aren't going well, economically. I don't think anyone is feeling any better-off financially than they were a year ago this week, when only Bear Stearns had gone under and AIG was just two vowels and a consonant. But within the last ninety-six hours, the water temperature must have gone up again because no fewer than three couples I know have hit an inflection point. These aren't couples who have spent the last few years acting out their own private version of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," where the inevitable decline is met with public sorrow and private relief. And these are good couples. Loving couples. Couples who, had there not been once-every-century-financial-ruination-of-us-all forces acting upon them, would be chugging along nicely. But a combination of unemployment, underemployment, monthly four-figure COBRA payments, children constantly outgrowing shoes and a relentless cascade of bared-teeth credit card debt will make adversaries out of allies.

I sense your worry. No, this isn't my way of gently leading into the "Consort and Quinn aren't going to live together any more, but we still love you readers very much and it's not your fault." We're fine and, candidly, I'm grateful. I assume our stability is because only one of us is insane and the other is Consort. But, I feel like getting a pulse-check of the nation and the world (Waving "Hi!" to my readers in Indonesia, Austria and the United Arab Emirate).

Within your sphere, are you seeing marriages and relationships fall apart over the recession?

Wilkommen. Bienvenue. Welcome.

It didn’t come as a complete surprise. My mom had left me an email today to the effect of “Hey, ‘The Goodbye Girl’ is playing on cable. I guess you should be expecting a residual check. Try not to spend the whole thirty-one cents in one place.” Knowing that the movie showing somewhere on cable has sent my blog-audience upwards in past, I idly checked Hit Counter or, as I refer to it: The outer manifestation of my inner worth. Oh, how worthy I was. As of a few minutes ago I have had about eleven times as many visitors today as I usually do on a Sunday. I blame rainstorms in the Southeast, daylight savings time and a bunch of people pulling out their tax paperwork, spending twenty minutes on it and flipping on the television to get the taste of itemized deductions out of their mouths.

So, for those of you who are new here, welcome to my blog. Had I known the movie was going to be playing I’d have cleaned up, put out some snacks, found the source of the weird odor. But please, make yourself comfortable. I’ll try to answer your questions. I have always sworn I wouldn’t do the blog about the search terms which have led people to my blog because, really, everyone has done it and nearly everyone has done it better. Then again, I see a few in here that I can answer reasonably well. And, yes, these are actual queries that showed up on Hit Counter.

“Quinn Cummings dead?” No. Your first clue that I’m alive is that dead people hardly ever write blogs. Then again, maybe I’m some person only pretending to be Quinn Cummings, which I think would show a remarkable lack of ambition. Personally, if I were going to pretend to be any former child actor who annoyed a percentage of the population, I’d pretend to be Robbie Rist, who played Cousin Oliver in the last years of The Brady Bunch. But I’m really me and I’m not dead. The greenish-yellow tinge to my skin is just a by-product of caffeine consumption.

“Quinn Cummings gay?” I wear flat shoes, I have no talent with eye-liner, I really like the Indigo Girls, and yet I am not a lesbian.

“Quinn Cummings divorced?” I am not divorced, neither from a man nor from a woman. I did, however, once have a tabby cat that left me and moved in with the family next door because he hated me so much. There wasn’t much property to divide, thank heaven.

“Quinn Cummings naked pictures” No. Not when I was young, not now, and not ever unless I am cited in the Journal of Unexplained Bruises. Even then, I will demand one of those black bars over my eyes and a kicky pageboy wig.

“Quinn Cummings worst child actor ever” That seems less like a search term and more like someone hoping to find a chat group of like-minded individuals. I can’t imagine there’s much to say to one another after you all agree that I’m the worst child actor ever. Maybe you could exchange recipes.

“Quinn Cummings blog” Again, welcome! Here’s the blog. Here are the regular characters: There’s me. There’s Consort, my stylish and occasionally absent-minded better half. There’s Daughter, who gracefully accepts that I will sometimes write about her. There’s the dog, who is quite handsome when he’s not filthy. There’s the cat, who used to be known as Lulabelle until we found out that someone popped a cap in her ass and is now known as Lupac. The house occasionally makes a guest-appearance, mostly as a cautionary tale to anyone who has ever romanticized fixing up an old house.

"Whatever happened to Quinn Cummings?" I've wondered that myself quite a bit. As far as I can tell, mostly salt-retention.

“Quinn Cummings blog about?” I think what you’re asking is what my blog is about. Am I one of those people who have chosen to document making every food referenced in the Bible? Am I knitting sweaters for a chilly segment of some beleagured population and following my progress? No, I am not. My blog is about very little. I have a nearly eidetic memory for when I’ve made an idiot out of myself in public and writing about it seems to fulfill some need. Also, I like to write about toast. *

“Quinn Cummings book?” Thank you for asking. It’s called “Notes from the Underwire” and it will be out on July 7th. I’m very excited and I plan to never read a single review so that I can keep this level of happiness.

“Quinn Cummings stupid?” I prefer differently abled.

In sum, I am not dead, I am heterosexual, I have spawned and I sometimes insult little people. I hope this answers your questions. Come again soon!

________________

[* More than I realized. Type "toast" in the Search Blog box up there in the top-left corner.]

Answer to Twitter question.

On Twitter, I am Quinncy.

Quinn finds a new way to marginalize herself.

My quick-and-dirty pleasure read this weekend was Ammon Shea's Reading the OED, wherein we follow his yearlong adventure reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary. Short chapters about reading, followed by words you have never considered before in your life. It's just the most fun little read; a gimmick but an engaging and clever one and I recommend it highly. But, until you get it or decide to read the OED yourself (Keep in mind, the Oxford English Dictionary runs twenty volumes), I have decided to put up a definition a day on my Twitter account. As a friend astutely noted, you can then say that you've read that I've read that someone read the OED.

Because if you don't check out Twitter and you're too busy to read a new book right now, how would you ever know that Peristeronic means "Suggestive of pigeons"?

Bananarama

I don’t totally blame Kate Hudson, but I kind of blame Kate Hudson.

There’s been a steady drumbeat in my head that I should be less weird, more in tune with the wide, well-lit highway we like to call pop culture. I watched every episode of “The Wire” but I've never seen a single “American Idol.” This is not because I’m a culture snob but because drug policy in an embattled urban landscape makes me less nervous than people being mean to other people who sing off-key. See? Weird. I have never seen “The Bachelor,” “Lost,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” or any show starring Heidi or Spencer. Again, not a snob; it’s just that there are so many documentaries about unfortunate medical conditions on cable and we freaks have to prioritize.

But as the book inches forward, I have been encouraged to try to write for other mediums beside this blog. Other places aren’t nearly as patient as you all are about hearing about Lupac, my short-term memory issues and random small plastic dealies. Magazines care about what their readers care about, and readers care about things I have never actually experienced. Magazine readers don’t care about documentaries about cane toads or typefaces, mystifying as that is to me. So, I’ve been trying to catch up to the rest of the world. But it’s hard to cram a decade’s worth of People magazine-information into one's brain in a week. Do you know that “Lost” makes no sense? Are you aware that Amy Adams and Isla Fisher are, in fact, the same person? How do the Gosselins have so many children when it appears they hate one another? And I’m still not certain what I’m supposed to do with Elizabeth Hasselbeck. Please do not think I am placing myself above anyone who takes pleasure in these shows. I’m no better or smarter than the mainstream viewer. I’m weird. For the most part, I live with my weirdness the way I would live with a supernumerary ear; it causes me no pain and it only makes me marginally more unsightly.

Which leads me to the gym, where I am frequently unsightly. Sometimes I am very organized and bring something obscure to read as I walk to nowhere. Mostly, I listen to Planet Money podcasts so I can play the at-home version of the economic collapse. Yesterday, I was all caught up on our upcoming depression and had forgotten to bring my biography of Emily Post (See: weird, Quinn), so I grabbed a copy of Elle from the pile of magazines at the gym. Kate Hudson was on the cover glaring at me, but I didn’t take it personally. I started climbing to nowhere and skipped through the magazine. Ponytails are back, check. It seems that MC Hammer pants are back as well, check (with a derisive snort on my part.) And then, in a golden glow of youth and wealth, was Kate Hudson. Kate lolling. Kate pouting. Kate bending. And then the article, which was ostensibly about her (then) upcoming movie in which she not only starred but also produced.

Mostly though, this writer and Kate’s publicist were very concerned that we understand Kate Hudson is a much better person than you, the reader. Kate adores her parents. Kate gets along fabulously with her ex-husband. Kate gained sixty pounds while pregnant and not only lost it all, she lost it in all the right places. If you, the reader, have any unfinished business with parents, or exes, or are still carrying baby-weight and the baby is taking his driver’s test, well you’re just not Kate Hudson, are you? And then, because someone out there wasn’t feeling her inadequacies deeply enough, they got a quote from her friend Jen Meyer. Jen recounted how she’ll go over to Kate’s house and Kate will be looking perfect in a bikini, and then Kate will tell her son sweetly to get ready to go for a bike ride -- just as soon as the banana soufflé Kate has made without a recipe is out of the oven.

I climbed. And I brooded. I know the point of any celebrity’s public persona is to create the best possible image. This article would be known as a “Puff piece,” and expecting depth in here is no more productive than expecting to hear Nine Inch Nails at a Gymboree class. But this puff piece got stuck in my throat. It was that damn banana soufflé. You can either know how to make a banana soufflé or you can fit attractively into a bikini, but you can’t do both. Even if Kate said to herself, “I shall have no more than a bite of soufflé and then I will take extra stripper-aerobics classes to atone for that bite,” she’s still got a soufflé sitting around the house. What, she just ignores it? Next week I’ll be found unconscious in a pile of Girl Scout cookie-crumbs and Kate Hudson can deny herself warm banana soufflé? And don’t think I didn’t get that "without a recipe” dig; some of us aren’t too proud to admit they need to check The Joy of Cooking before baking a potato. The way I read it, I am supposed to understand that Kate Hudson succeeds at being both a traditional woman and a modern woman. Kate Hudson, like many people in pop-culture, is successful, smart, talented, kind and capable of wearing booties with miniskirts without looking stupid. I succeed at being her fat, off-putting friend who falls up stairs.

This is all too discouraging; I’m going back to being unapologetically weird. Heidi and Spencer will have to watch themselves.

Animal lovers and owners, we've been called into service.

Chris just left me this comment-

I need advice re: my miniature poodle, Lizzie. We're converting to all hardwood floors and she won't eat on anything but carpet. (See hisunfinishedwork.blogspot.com)Any ideas? You were the first one I thought could help due to your obvious love of animals.

You all showed remarkable initiative, bravery and cunning on the whole "Pill the pet" issue. Besides keeping a small swatch of the carpet and placing it under the food bowl, what should Chris do?

Random fact, which will lead to a blog shortly.

Today is the birthday of Dr. Suess. Put especially festive socks on your fox today in recognition. The red fish and the blue fish could be dressed up a little as well.

Don't bother changing the cat's hat; as you already know, the cat in the hat will do exactly what he likes.