best friends

Hello, world!

It’s been awhile. I’ve been absent from my blog for almost two months now, in part because life is so busy and requires my complete and total attention, and also because for a while there I just didn’t have anything interesting to share with you.

However, I’ve recently returned from my annual high school girls trip and that is definitely worth sharing! Every year in the spring I go on a girls only trip with three of my great friends from high school. Last year we went to Charleston, SC. This year, my girls came here to Los Angeles.

LA is a big city, and for most of the vacay we wanted the feel of paradise. Originally, we had planned to go to Catalina Island, but El Nino is an asshole and we couldn’t predict whether or not the weather would hold up for us. So we opted to stay at a resort in Palos Verdes called Terranea. It’s one of the most beautiful properties I’ve ever seen, and spending four days there was absolute heaven. We hiked the trails around the cliffs of the resort, took a whale watching tour out on the ocean, laid by the pool and drank fun cocktails in the sun overlooking the Pacific. We laughed, cackled at each other, talked and caught up on everything that’s happened over the past year. Yeah, we know how to girls trip!

The view from our room!

From the pool, looking out over the Pacific ocean.

A Sea Cave!

Hiking trails

Whale watching!

Sea Lions!

There were, shall we say, moments that weren’t so perfect. But my annual girls trip wouldn’t be what it is without some mayhem and madness along the way. As usual, each of my friends has elected to use the name of their alter ego to protect their privacy and what’s left of their reputations. We come from a small town, so….you know.

The first night at the resort was the most intense. And by intense I mean absolutely, fucking, bat-shit crazy. Belinda lives a very responsible life of dedication to her family and her community. So during girls trip she likes to let go. With us, it’s a safe zone. Jasmine is slightly more tame than Belinda, but only just. Piper is far more restrained and likes to relax and rest during girls trip. I’m somewhere in the middle. I enjoy going out and having fun but I don’t want to feel like death for three days, so I try to balance my alcohol intake and late nights in a way that allows me to enjoy the entire weekend.

After an afternoon of drinking by the pool, and then drinking at dinner, Piper went to bed to read her book while Belinda, Jasmine and I went down to the lobby bar for some live music and more drinks. I was tired, so I knew I wouldn’t stay out long but wanted to experience the hotel and I love live music. After one drink in the lobby I went back up to the room, leaving Jasmine and Belinda behind to no doubt wreak havoc on the other guests and each other. (I later heard some stories about a male, Armenian ballet dancer???)

An hour and a half later, the girls staggered into the room. I have no idea what Jasmine promised Belinda to get her to go upstairs, but I have no doubt bribery was involved. When intoxicated, it takes an act of God to get Belinda to leave a party. Regardless, they had the brilliant idea to turn our spa-style bathtub into a “hot tub.” Piper was sound asleep. I wasn’t. I laid there listening to them filling the tub with scalding hot water, sloshing water all over our luxury hotel bathroom. The conversation was as you’d expect. Drunk, nonsensical hilarity. They didn’t have a candle for the ambience so they put Vick’s Vapor Rub in the “hot tub” water to make it smell like a spa. And do you know what happens when you’re drunk and you get into really hot water, which then thins your blood even more? That’s right, it heightens the sensation of being drunk, makes you dizzy and disoriented. And do you know what happens when you’re drunk and become disoriented?

I heard Belinda say, “I’m not feeling so well.” Annnnnd, here it comes. I was actually glad she got sick. That way she could expel all the alcohol from her stomach and she could just pass out and sleep it off. A little while later she stumbled to the bed and fell asleep next to me. I got up to use the restroom and spent the next twenty minutes cleaning up the bathroom. Water and vomit. Good times.

I tried to go to sleep. It wasn’t happening. I was so tired and I had Puky-McPukerson on one side of me and Snory-McSnorerson on the other side of the room. Jasmine was sick with a chest cold, wasted and passed out, snoring like a damn freight train. Somehow Piper slept through the cluster-fuck. I laid there, forever, pissed off and contemplating the purpose of this nightmare. Why was I awake and unable to fall asleep while everyone else caused havoc and then slept peacefully, unaware of how much I was hating the whole world in that moment?

Then it happened.

I heard Belinda making a weird noise next to me and realized she had begun to get sick in her sleep. I jumped up, rolled her over and ran to the bathroom to get a towel. At one point Piper woke up, saw me standing there with a towel in one hand and a pillow covered in puke in the other. Our eyes met and she registered what was happening. She smiled a smile that said, “better you than me,” and she rolled over and went back to sleep. Bitches.

I cleaned her up, made sure she was turned on her side, and tried to go to sleep. I’d like to think I was awake all night because I was meant to save Belinda from an ugly, Jimi Hendrix style death. But there was nothing I could do to stop Jasmine from snoring all night. So I laid there in my expensive, fancy hotel room. Hating the world.

I think I finally fell asleep sometime after 4am. The last time I looked at the clock it was 3:45am. Then at 6am, Jasmine gets out of bed and starts moving around the room. She slams the bathroom door, twice. She opens the heavy draped curtains and let’s a flood of light into the dark room that blinds me, even with my eyes closed. She staggers to the phone next to me and starts randomly punching numbers in the dark, trying to call for room service. Then she stage whispers as loud as she can, “I’m so sorry. Did I wake you up? I’m still drunk and I feel like shit.” Then she says to the person on the phone, “I need a spoon! Can you bring me a spoon? I need a spoon for my yogurt. Does this room have coffee in it?”

Are you kidding me?! Awake….at 6am….for a spoon.

Much later in the day I was able to laugh about it. After I had taken an afternoon nap and stopped hating everyone. Belinda felt really bad. She thanked me for taking care of her. That’s what friends are for. You should never worry about drowning in sick while in the company of life long friends. And I know that if I was at my worst they would take care of me. Probably. If they weren’t all passed out drunk. Except they wouldn’t write about it and tell my sad tale for the whole world to read, which actually makes them better friends than me.

Sorry, not sorry. 😉

Lucy has resting bitch face.

Meet Lucy.

Lucy is my daughter Bryn’s cat, and she’s three years old.

My husband, Dan, rescued Lucy as a four week old kitten. He found her abandoned in the parking garage by his office. She was trapped behind a security fence without food or water. He heard her crying, and being the animal lover that he is, he went to investigate. His rescue efforts included contacting security to open the fence and then chasing this scared kitten through the garage and underneath a car to retrieve her. I remember his phone call that day so clearly. He said, “I can’t take her to a shelter. She’s so small. Can I bring her home?”

So, Lucy became a part of our family that day. She was tiny, malnourished and covered in fleas. Dan saved her life and brought her home to us. And that was probably the last time Lucy let Dan love on her.

Lucy is a one person cat, and her person is Bryn. She claimed Bryn for her own, and it has been so for now and all time. They do everything together. Sleep, eat, homework, you name it and Lucy is right there by Bryn’s side. When I wake Bryn up in the morning for school, Lucy helps. She will lick Bryn’s nose, or sometimes she will just lay right across her face when I’m trying to get her up. It’s very sweet to see them together. Best friends.

For all her love and sweetness for Bryn, Lucy is a bad girl. She has a terrible habit of eating things that aren’t food. She especially likes hair rubber bands and tearing up and eating these black foam rubber mats that lay underneath my treadmill. The mat is about an inch thick and protects the hard wood floors from the heavy equipment. Every few weeks I will find a pool of cat vomit with chunks of foam rubber matting or hair ties. I’m always shocked that she manages to puke it all up without hurting herself.

About three weeks ago, Lucy became very sick. Like, projectile vomiting dark green bile from her stomach sick. We were immediately concerned about an obstruction so we took her to the vet. They did abdominal x-rays but didn’t find anything. Everything else was normal, so they treated her for dehydration and sent her home. Three days later she started vomiting again. Back to the vet we go. She wasn’t eating or drinking and it was obvious she was dehydrated again. The vet hospitalized her and did two more rounds of abdominal x-rays over a 24 hour period. The radiologist who reviewed the x-rays observed an area of the her small intestine to be somewhat enlarged and recommended an ultrasound. We transported her to another vet’s office who had the staff and ability to do an ultrasound, as well as emergency surgery if it became necessary.

We were right. She was obstructed. The ultrasound revealed that there was something in her small intestine and other things in her stomach that should not have been there. The vet recommended emergency surgery right away.

Do you want to know what abdominal surgery on a cat costs? It costs about $3,300.00. And this is in addition to the $1,800.00 we already spent at the other vet. What would you do? How do I put a price tag on the life of my daughter’s best friend? How do I say this cat’s life isn’t worth $5,000.00? Those were the choices we were left with because without surgery, her intestine would have ruptured and she would have died.

If I didn’t have the resources, this would be a different post. If Lucy was a fifteen year old cat diagnosed with terminal cancer, this would be a different post. But I did have the resources, and Lucy is a healthy three year old cat with something stuck in her belly. So, after I drank half a bottle of wine and ate a HUGE piece of Coconut Joy cake for dinner to calm myself down, we gave the vet the thumbs up and off to surgery she went!

The vet called us after surgery and told us they removed a piece of the black foam rubber from her small intestine. They also sucked some other debris out of her stomach. When we picked her up, they sent home the offending object, and I was shocked to see it was a piece of foam rubber about two inches long and an inch wide! How she got that down her throat without choking to death is unbelievable!

See that three inch incision on her tummy? Scars are cool.

Lucy is one very lucky little cat. And based on her new loving personality since she’s been home from surgery, I think she knows just how close to death she came.

Meet Lucy. The cat who lived.