That Gus...

Well, Gus has only a couple of minor ailments. He apparently is losing his remaining upper fang (why don't these damn cats brush their damn teeth?) to an abscess, which explained his horrendous cat-breath. He talked all the way over to the vet this morning, mostly voicing his admiration of Houston Rockets center Yao Ming. The vet called me a little while ago and said that not only did Gus have a bad tooth, but also ear mites and a tapeworm.

Now, to understand how bizarre that last item is, you have to realize: Gus is enormous. He's a mountain of bad cat engineering. He has his own zip code. You can't see one end of him from the other due to the curve of the world. If he had a tapeworm, it must be a pretty wimpy one, because it can't keep up with his enormous consumption of brown triangles.

The ear mite thing is annoying, because this pretty much means I have to treat everybody, including the reclusive cats like Tucker and Margaret, otherwise it'll all come back. At least there's a new miticide that doesn't have to actually go in their ears... that tended to get extremely messy, because you squirted this stuff in their ear, rub it around, and then stand back when they helicopter their head and all that stuff (with some ear crud) flies all over the place. This new stuff is more like modern flea killers, where you put it on their back and it kills the mites.

I am assuming it's expensive.

Speaking of which, it turns out that the barn that burned last night wasn't a barn, but a McMansion under construction. Apparently also, the circumstances are rather suspicious (supposedly gasoline was involved). Construction fires rarely break out on weekends, when nobody's working, so the fact that it happened right after dark on a Sunday night means something strange is going on. Anyway, they had it out in a fairly short period of time, and I suppose now they'll have to sort out the possible arson.

I don't like shitty new houses any more than the next person, but setting fire to them seems extreme.

I ordered a new set of keys for the little Segway. I gave up looking for the ring of keys that used to be on it... I knew I had them the night I crashed on an unseen object in the dark and cracked some ribs last fall, but can't account for them since. And no, it's not possible that the keys were lost at the place I crashed, because the unit shut down and I had to restart it... with the keys that are now missing.

So, $79 later, a brand new full set of keys is on the way. My phone is also on the way, presently roosting in a FedEx processing center in Indianapolis, Indiana. They're being paid for with the refund check I got from the bank that financed the Volkswagen... the payoff amount was less than the check I sent them, so I got a check and my lien paperwork back from them. Yay. Now I can trade it in on a TDI, if I can find a used TDI!