Salamander
Fire Walking

All good entries start with cat updates.

Another month, another set of vet visits. This time it’s LBS, who still has diarrhea at one end and major kitty snuffles at the other end. She seems to be improving, but has lost weight to the point where the Prof is just about running after her with food in the hopes he’ll get her to eat a few more mouthfuls. Canned food doesn’t seem to meet her exacting standards at the moment, so I’ve been boiling chicken breast up until tender and then shredding it. THAT she’ll deign to eat, though with minimal enthusiasm. She’s on two more meds at the moment, an antibiotic and an appetite enhancer.

LGS still has Horner’s syndrome (one pupil larger than the other, weakening of one side of the face) with no good explanation. I’m figuring at this point that she’s going to be one of the idiopathic, ain’t going to get better cats. I should have just cut to the chase when I first got her fifteen years ago and named her “Idiopathic” then. It would have saved a lot of time on her medical charts.

The LBrS has a follow-up appointment with the vet coming up in a little less than two weeks. The antibiotics we have her on for her hack-hack-swallow-hack-hack syndrome don’t seem to have made much difference, but we’ll see if that interesting area on the chest radiographs has cleared up any.

B&WS seems to be getting over her tooth extractions, so I have hope that one out of four cats is mending up.

Work

No real news on the Psychopathic Co-worker. It seems that she comes and goes as she pleases; on days when she decides she’s going to take exception to something that was said or that happened she reacts by leaving early. I may have finally done something to cross the line with her this week; I was faced with a minor situation that needed immediate response, and so I made an executive decision regarding how to deploy people. I am not a supervisor, and it’s Psycho’s job to decide how to deploy most of the people at my office, but she dithers and we didn’t have time for dithering. She made it clear that she was not pleased with me. C’est la vie. C’est la Psycho.

The next part requires a little background. When I had my hip replacement surgery last September, I needed to be out for eight weeks. I haven’t been with the agency all that long, and I only learned six months prior to the replacement that I was going to need one. That meant that I didn’t have much leave saved up to cover the period I’d be out. I made arrangements with my Supervisor to take five weeks without pay. I filled out the paperwork for five weeks without pay. When I had to input my time into our computerized system there was no code that I could find for “leave with no pay”. I told my supervisor I was having trouble inputting this into the T&A system, and was told to just put it under sick time. I got paid for that period of time. I told my supervisor that I received pay. She was going to look into it. This happened for five weeks. I came back to work and found that they’d been debiting my leave time for this and that I was now NEGATIVE nearly 200 hours of leave. Gulp. I wasn’t going to have any sick time available for a long, long time while I worked that back, but I told myself at least I was paid and that I’d just have to use my vacation time as sick time for the next several hundred years.

Flash forward to present. It would seem that the Powers That Be in Personnel at Headquarters finally noticed (nearly five months later) that I have a rather incredible accumulation of negative sick leave time. This is Not Allowed. I was at first told that they’d be docking my pay until it was made up (as a reminder, we’re talking five weeks of pay here). This, on top of the fact that I spent thousands of dollars on the cats last month, had me pretty nearly ready to break into tears in a very public and unprofessional manner. A day later I learned that they weren’t going to dock my pay after all.

Nope, I’m going to be sent a bill for the entire amount instead. At least I don’t feel like breaking into tears any more. It’s hard to take anything this surreal too seriously. I filled out all the paperwork. I told them all along I was still getting paid even though I’d asked for leave with no pay. I was led to believe for months that I’d just be paying this back by accruing sick time against the deficit. The idea that my workplace is going to send me a bill that I have absolutely no way of paying seals my conviction that I am simply stuck in a bad dream and will wake up any moment.

I can’t wait to find out what the interest rate for late payment is going to be.

Home

Situations like this, of necessity, bleed into my home life. I’ve pretty much let go of most of the plans I had for home improvements that I wanted to push this year. I’d already ditched the old sofa and loveseat that were in the living room; moths had taken over and I didn’t consider either of them salvageable. I didn’t feel too badly about trashing them, as I hadn’t paid all that much for them and they were oversized for the current living room. The living room right now has a tiny letter desk that I use for my main desk, a television stand with an old TV that is hooked up for playing DVD’s only, and two bookcases in it. With the only seating in the room being an uncomfortable wooden chair, the room mostly goes unused at present, and I’d hoped to get new, appropriate furniture for it this summer. I also wanted to put new flooring down in it (the current carpeting has been ruined by the cats, who for some odd reason find that room preferable to all others to barf in). I’m seriously considering just hanging a sign in the room that says “Vomitorium” and letting the cats keep it all for their very own.

I also don’t see me hiring professional painters to paint some of the rooms in the house, nor do I see my car being paid off this year as I’d originally hoped. In fact, all the cockiness I’d been feeling about how good my bank account was starting to look in the beginning of February has pretty much vaporized. Still, there isn’t much better for the soul than a heaping dose of steaming reality. I just wish reality didn’t smell quite this bad.