Disconnect

Between every­thing that’s been going on at home, and all the drama on the inter­nets, I’ve been feel­ing strangely dis­con­nected from it all. Petty squab­bling and stu­pid drama doesn’t seem nearly so impor­tant when you look at the big­ger picture.

My dar­ling D still isn’t feel­ing well — he found out that he has a kid­ney infec­tion, and some major heal­ing because the surgery was a lot more inva­sive than we ini­tially thought. On top of that, one of the cats gave him poi­son ivy (he’s hor­ri­bly aller­gic and full of hor­ri­fy­ing weep­ing ooz­ing sores). After spend­ing the past two weeks at home recu­per­at­ing, he went back to work this week. It’s weird — he was dri­ving me crazy being home every day, but now that he’s not here, I miss him and worry about him con­stantly. I hate to see him hurt­ing, espe­cially when I can’t do any­thing to help his pain.

Even worse is the lack of phys­i­cal inti­macy between us — D can’t even cud­dle with me because his pain gets so bad. He’s up most of the night, try­ing to find a com­fort­able posi­tion. And sex is pretty much non-existent. They had to cut him open down there, so he’s heal­ing both inside and out. We did try, and while we’re phys­i­cally able to, it just wasn’t worth it… He hurt, and I was too focused on try­ing to make him feel bet­ter about it. Looks like,  for the moment at least, I’ll be join­ing all of the other sex blog­gers who aren’t hav­ing sex.

Smokey is still with us — we went to the vet on Mon­day and asked about putting him down because he just looks so mis­er­able. He’s back home with us, try­ing a new reg­i­ment of drugs and a hypo-allergenic food. I hate giv­ing him so much med­ica­tion every day, espe­cially pills, but he’s tak­ing it rather well, and the vet says that if he improves, we should see it within the next week. My father-in-law still teases me about “the most expen­sive stray” I’ve ever taken in, but if this works, it’ll be worth every penny. He’ll have to be on the spe­cial food and some of the med­ica­tion for the rest of his life, but he’ll be alive.

I’m back on the job mar­ket, actively look­ing for some­thing. With all the med­ical bills and vet bills, a sec­ond source of steady income would be very nice. For­tu­nately, even with the cor­po­rate hir­ing freezes and slow­ing econ­omy, I think I should be able to find some­thing. If I get some­thing part-time, I’ll go back to school to fin­ish out the six credit hours left on my degree…so, really it’ll be a win-win sit­u­a­tion, no mat­ter what.

But in the mean­time, inter­net hap­pen­ings seem extremely sec­ondary to the things going on in my real life. I’ve got emails to answer, peo­ple to write and con­tact, sto­ries to write, pho­tographs to edit, but all of it seems like it can wait for the moment while I take care of other things. That’s the best thing about the inter­net, right? Pull the plug, wait a bit and when you recon­nect, it’ll still be there wait­ing for you.