took me a whole goddamn day but i FINALLY resuscitated my wacom from the factory reset she suffered when they replaced her broken fucking battery. my child is back and i love her

Quarantine, Day 49

One more note on the weird time theme of yesterday; today I got an Amazon Question in my email from somebody wanting to know about a camcorder I bought twelve years ago. (It is obviously hella discontinued, but there are apparently a few third party sellers still.) For those of you who were not paying attention to camera technology in 2008, phone cameras were basically still bullshit unless you were willing to shell out a couple month's rent for your camera, which I was not. I had a flip phone until 2014, I shit you not. So phone cameras were not as much of a thing, but you could buy little pocket video cameras that ran on AA batteries and were about the size of an Iphone 5, but a little thicker. They had an internal memory of maybe an hour, and a USB port that popped out like a switchblade so you could upload it to your computer. They were, honestly, pretty cool in a dorky sort of way. I used that camera for early pictures of the kiddo, along with a tiny handheld camcorder-shaped camcorder that could do things like "let me see what I was recording even outdoors." It's long gone, of course, which is why it was so funny to see that question pop up today, someone apparently legitimately wondering about the focal length of a crappy little camera from another lifetime. I hope somebody actually knows the answer. 

The kittens are doing well today and I was able to secure some more formula for them. I am very excited because Amazon informs me that people have bought formula from my wish list and it is on the way (<3<3<3) but kitten formula is apparently not essential enough to make the journey very quickly. Luckily I now have enough for at least another three or four days. They’re eating a lot and gaining quite a bit of weight, so it’s worth being patient.

 I am, however, quickly losing patience with the vet tech at my rescue. Vet tech school doesn't actually include very much information about raising orphan kittens, by and large, and she has picked up some extremely...nonstandard... ideas about the state of the art. I don't claim to be an expert myself, but I've been doing it for a number of years now with pretty good success, and I have done a lot of reading, consulted with a lot of incredibly experienced people, and attended official training given by reputable agencies. What I'm trying to say is that my kitten-raising strategies are not uninformed and I didn't just make them up in my head, and getting constantly bitched out over them by text message got old about three litters ago. I probably could not have saved my littlest kitten this time even if the tech hadn't insisted that I not use Pedialyte even though it was recommended by the kitten raising experts that our own rescue brought in to teach us how to raise kittens, but I don't think not using it helped at all. And when I want to switch to a formula that literally everyone I speak to says is either superior to or at least equal to the kind we are already using, it is not appropriate to bite my head off and say that veterinarians don't approve of it because it causes vomiting and diarrhea, so I'd better stop using it quicklike. I devoted quite a bit of time today to looking for _any_ evidence of that opinion online, searching for articles online, reading product reviews, and asking other fosters. Nada.

I do my very best to be polite, and sometimes the tech can be very helpful, but too often it is this bullshit and I have trouble coping with it when usually I'm operating on way too little sleep already. The trouble is, the tech has a large amount of power over policy at the rescue, and not doing what she says could get me in trouble. Honestly, at this point I am losing interest in complying anyway. What are they going to do, take my kittens away when they are finally healthy and growing? And there are other rescues out there, and they always need bottlefeeders. It just sucks because other than that I really, really like my rescue and I do not want to leave. Ugh. At least with healthy kittens, I need to consult a lot less often. 

Anyway, enough of my personal cat lady drama. The kittens are doing really well and are incredibly fluffy, and that is the important part! Now that Jackie is no longer so far down she can barely swallow, I can keep her clean much more easily and she is starting to rival Rosa for adorable soft squishableness. I am, however, increasingly willing to bet that they are not actually siblings and Rosa is several days to a week older. She's just so much bigger, and has more teeth! It's okay, they still love each other. Also, letting the kiddo cuddle with them or read to them or supervise their playtime is a good little motivating tool to help him power through his schoolwork. Double bonus! 

The big, big,big grocery order came in today, and it was indeed large. I now have two boxes of staple foods to tuck away for hurricanes and/or societal difficulties, plus several cans of mackerel for trapping wily feral cats! Feral cats love mackerel, it just smells soooo bad. I decided that if I was going to lay in some extra meat, it was mostly going to be sausage and bacon, because that's the sort of meat where a little bit goes a long way in terms of enriching the flavor of a meal. I got some ground turkey and beef, but I also have textured vegetable protein in the pantry to stretch it for things like spaghetti sauce, tacos, and chili. And I scored two ultra-rare bags of 15 bean soup mix, so I can use my other hambone! You guys don't even understand how much I love ham and bean soup, or how exciting this is. The weird thing is, two weeks ago when I made my last pickup order, the pickup area was packed solid with cars, and cars were even waiting to get into the spots. Today, I was literally the only car there when my food came out. The parking lot was packed, it's just that everyone was shopping inside. Not a great sign. 

Definitely the most fun I had today was playing with the excellent West Wing gifset that @donnajosh​ made of Josh and Sam. Watching their faces made me laugh very hard, and I had to caption it. It was a whole face journey, made by two guys who would absolutely follow the Delta shuttle all the way to Indianapolis if they were not stopped. Too funny! Thank god for people on the internet, just being there and doing stuff and making all of this feel less lonely.