The Frustration of Sickness

Sep. 19th, 2025 06:36 pm
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A kind friend recently remarked that I write in a universal voice. That is true, albeit not by conscious intent, although it allows me to have a journal that is both public and personal without falling to the superficial culture with its self-indulgence and sycophancy. Instead, I prefer to take those selective slices of the classics which have accessible meaning and relevance: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto" ("I am human and nothing human in alien to me", Publius Terentius Afer). It does serve a challege to us all - are we capable of truly understanding the experiences of others or, to quote Conrad (and nicely adopted by the punk-funk group "The Gang of Four"), do we live, as we dream, alone? Our existential experiences: life, love, hope, guilt, fear, sickness, death, shared by all but in very different degrees and often, we can express with sadness, wickedly imposed by people upon others.

The past few days, I have been struck by a minor malaise. In my convalescence, however, I thought about how even a minor illness can be so disruptive. "This sickness does infect the very life-blood of our enterprise", said Shakespeare (Henry IV, Part I). As a busy person, I was frustrated by a number of events that had to be cancelled or modified. A Chinese arts and culture delegation from Shenzen had to be guided through the National Gallery by the Vice-President of the ACFS instead of myself. An HPC presentation to research team leaders at work had to be handballed, and other meetings were cancelled, and, alas, dinner and other social plans with friends also suffered this fate. Operational work, research essays, and studies have likewise been delayed. Needless to say, my usual fitness regimen had been suspended as well.

The only way to deal with such illnesses is rest and nutrition, followed by gradual recuperation. In this regard, I have been truly blessed by the presence of Kate R., who put her professional nursing skills to good use for this patient. As for the feeling of frustration, that is often resolved by shifting focus to something that one can control. Even in a semi-delirious state, I managed to work my way through the new Duolingo chess skill tree, along with keeping up with Spanish lessons. However, most of my sparse waking time was spent in passive entertainment in the form of the series "Arrested Development". I first encountered this show almost twenty years ago and, despite a few efforts, I'd hitherto never even managed to complete the first season. The hilariously dysfunctional family with its internecine manipulations and suspicions suits my absurd and ironic sense of humour: "there's always money in the banana stand".
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The past several days, courtesy of my great book giveaway, I've had several bookish visitors gracing my abode. The sort of person who is interested in my academic books tends to be a person with a vibrant curiosity, so it has inevitably led to long and fertile discussions across the arts, the sciences, and the laws (to use the contemporary trivium). This has included Elliot B., Marc C., Liza D., Kate R., and, as interstate visitors, Dylan G., and Adrian S. It's been several years since I last saw Dylan, a former co-worker from VPAC days, so that was an excellent evening. Inverting the style, I visited Brendan E.'s new abode in Northcote, where he gifted me a first print copy of Wired magazine, which now, appropriately, sits next to my Mondo2000 User's Guide; cyberpunk forever. I have further updated my free book giveaway, this time with a small mountain of texts in computer science.

Other interstate visitors cam the week previous in the form of Lara D., and Adam B., from the Territory, and we had a glorious time at the French Impressionists at the NGV, after joining Anton W with a visit to the State Library where there is an excellent and highly recomended Misinformation exhibit. Of course, the works of the famous artists were at the NGV; Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, et al, but the one which really caught my attention was Fantin-Latour, whose simple subject matter made his skill in texture all the more clear. A few days later I would visit the NGV at Federation Square with Liana F., which always has excellent indigenous artworks, and the evening previous Liza D and I ventured to the Northcote Social Club (fine venue) to see Guy Blackman from Chapter records perform for his first album in "quite a while". His lyrical talent is really quite special, and his stage presence curiously enticing, and the self-deprecating humour pleasing. Certainly, this will be worthy of a Rocknerd review.

Going further back, I was thoroughly charmed to attend Nitul D's family gathering for Ganesh Chaturthi Puja, and a few days later, I would join him again, attending the 2025 Hugh Anderson Lecture by Marilyn Lake "Rapprochement with China" at the Royal Historical Society. Dr Lake was able to give some impressive history, a great deal of regional context and, of course, had a few words to say about AUKUS. It was the first time I'd been in the RHS building, a late-deco establishment and once a military hospital. Another one of Melbourne's hidden gems. On similar subjects, I must mention Dr Wesa C's birthday gathering last week at Vault Bar, a delightful little place and, as the name suggests, a former bank vault. It should be mentioned that Wesa is a bit of a hidden gem herself, and I had no prior knowledge of her singing talent!
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I had been fearful that we'd spend the whole week stressed over Elmer's transition to his new home and how well he was eating and such. And that's pretty much what happened.

But, the reports coming out of Boston continue to be great. He's eating wet food. He's grazing dry food & emptying his plate. He's playing with toys. He's following his new cat-dad around and talking to him.

I am pretty deliriously happy & am hopeful I can let go of the stress at this point because everything sounds great. It really looks like Elmer is as happy as we could have hoped and getting more interaction and attention in a house where he doesn't have to be kept isolated, just as we'd hoped.

Whew.

Things are also better at home.

Our house is no longer divided into multiple pieces. For the last several months, we'd either had the bedroom door or the stairway gate closed at all times, and I hadn't realized what a psychological effect that had, let alone it just being that much harder to get around.

We don't have to worry about Elmer wanting to come upstairs and trying to figure out how to get Megara into the bedroom when she's still not carryable.

Megara hasn't been locked up since we got home on Monday, except for 5 minutes to get her medicine-laced (anti-anxiety) churu most nights. Instead she's mostly been lounging about the towel we put out to share some catnip the night after we sent Elmer off.

Mango hung out with me for my workday yesterday, which he hasn't in quite some time (since he got wounded by Elmer, which was what made us realize we couldn't continue on like this). Instead, Elmer had usually been in my office, and Mango was off in the nearby family room or closet, not quite willing to share a room with his brother, but wanting to be nearby. And Mango doesn't flinch and run away when he suddenly realizes he's on the floor with a predator.

The goal here was win-win-win-win-win, and I'm very hopeful that we're there:

* Less stress for me and Kimberly.
* I get my orangie Mango cuddling with me sometimes at night again instead of being locked out.
* More attention for Elmer in a single-cat home where he's not isolated.
* Less fear/danger for Mango.
* The same for Megara (x10) and also free run of the house.

The ridiculously difficult task of getting Elmer all the way out to Boston now seems worthwhile too, as his new dad seems absolutely amazing from what we've seen of him in this stressful week. (In retrospective, we wish we'd flown Elmer out there ourselves and stuck around to help him acclimatize, but we didn't know how bad Island Pet Movers would be, nor how upset Elmer would be by the move.)

Super-hard, and we're always going to miss Elmer, but it wasn't working having him in a multi-cat home, so we really needed to rehome either him or the other two.

Boston Interruptus

Sep. 10th, 2025 07:44 pm
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I had one last fear for Elmer's move: that he wasn't going to eat properly once he got to Boston. Unfortunately my fears have continued to prove true since the move, at least the reasonable ones. I thought we were likely to get screwed at the drop-off, that no one was likely to show up at 4.30. Ding-ding. And I thought Elmer was going to have troubles eating upon his arrival. Ding.

So today I woke up and it was two days since we'd sent Elmer off, and his first fresh morning in Boston was by then six hours or more past. And there was still no eating. Which put us over two days since he'd last eaten and quickly heading toward three.

Now cats can cause problems with their liver by not eating. They start burning fat, the fat gets into their liver, which doesn't work as well as ours, their liver starts failing, they start having nausea, and so they eat worse. It's apparently particularly problematic for overweight cats, and Elmer is. I saw some places that said 2-3 days is when problems can start to occur, but the number 3-5 seemed more common.

So all three of us, Kimberly, me, and Elmer's new guy were all increasingly worried about this today.

Fortunately, Elmer's new dad is super responsible and really taking the cat-dad thing seriously. So he got a car so he could take him to the vet ER today, and did. Elmer was apparently looking good, but they were of course worried over almost three days of not eating, so prescribed him some Mirataz, which is a topical appetite stimulant. You just rub it in the ear, so there's no trauma from pills or anything. That all seemed great, but we knew the appetite stimulant wasn't going to have any effect today, because the general consensus is 1-2 days to take effect.

Meanwhile, we'd decided that we'd just asked Elmer to do too much. We'd put him through a stressful trip and sent him to a new home and a new person. Cats don't do well with change, and that was too much at once. So we decided that Kimberly was going to fly out there so that she could help give Elmer someone he was familiar with, reducing the amount he had to deal with by one. If he got weaned back onto food, and then she disappeared again, that wasn't likely to cause problems. We figured worst case, she got out there and Elmer had already started eating, but with it taking almost a day to get there (we found some 16 hour flights with layover), we didn't want to put it off, especially when things could get worse by the day.

So, we OKed it with Elmer's new dad, found a flight, found a hotel, got everything booked, and at about 5 o'clock we headed out to the airport. Kimberly's flight was at 8.30pm, to arrive in Boston tomorrow at 3.15pm.

Less than a block out of the house, a message came through on my phone and I handed it to Kimberly so she could read it. Elmer's new dad had walked into the safe little closet that he'd put Elmer in after the vet and found him up and acting friendly. He'd tried churu one last time for the day, and Elmer had eaten it all. He'd purred, he'd licked his hand, and he'd eaten a few bites of wet food too! (And Elmer doesn't even particularly like wet food!)

Now that's still nothing calorie wise. Maybe 15 calories, and he should be getting 300 a day. But it sure sounded like a a big change in his attitude. I turned on the street between us and the highway rather than going out to the highway. As I drove up it, I asked Kimberly what she thought, and we agreed it sounded like a big change, and maybe she didn't need to go out to Boston. Besides the expenditure of time and money, it might actually interfere with the bonding process, and we were hopeful that the big push from her being there was no longer needed.

So another block and I turned again and took us back home, and I started cancelling stuff. Hotel was no problem. Cost of the plane flight was lost because it was same-day, and I didn't buy refundable (and it wasn't Hawaiian where I think everything is still refundable or at least changeable). But it had been a one-way trip at least. (I though "One-Way Trip to Boston" might be the name of this journal entry, went I figured I'd write it after dropping Kimberly off at the airport.)

Kimberly unpacked.

Ah well, I thought she could have an enjoyable visit in Boston after the Elmer situation resolved, as she hasn't had a real trip like that away to anywhere but Oahu in some time. Not this time. I do hope we can visit him at least once in the years ahead though. (I quite enjoyed Boston in my week there for Rebooting Web of Trust some years ago.)

Elmer clearly isn't out of the woods, but he sounds like might have calmed down a lot and be on the road to improvement, especially with the appetite stimulant cutting in sometime in the next day. (I joked that we'd scared him straight with that visit to the vet.) So we have hope that we'll be hearing better news tomorrow, and as Kimberly says, it feels generally like optimism now, not just hope.
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In lieu of an actual pushbike (my last one fell apart) I've taken up the exercise bike in the past month. Almost every day, across two cities and four different devices (fortunately, all a Matrix U1XE), I've smashed out 40km, which is the Olympic-distance triathlon bike leg, which sits in the middle of the standard course (1.5km swim, 40km bike, 10km run). Of course, the real challenge is doing these in succession. Nevertheless, ever a keen cyclist, my first times were around 70 minutes, which is pretty good, especially for an old bloke. After a few days and a bit more pushing, I found that I could regularly get around the 65-minute mark, and I was pretty chuffed when I got it down to 62 minutes.

Since my return to Melbourne from Darwin, I've continued the activity, and since then, I've even managed to get 60, 59, and 58-minute levels, all of which are extremely good. My method is pretty straightforward; get my speed to 40km/h and stay at that for an hour. In case you're wondering, yes, it is quite challenging, to say the least. Indeed, on a 58-minute run, I realised that my eyes were incredibly bloodshot. Apparently, I was experiencing a subconjunctival haemorrhage; that is, when blood vessels have burst and are haemorrhaging into the tissue under the white of the eye. It sounds and looks a lot more dramatic than it actually is, and one recovers fairly quickly. But by goodness, it really caught my attention!

Ever a data nerd, I have a bit of a rough habit of tracking some core measurements, albeit with a rough cut. I'm pretty happy with these results. But there's still some work to do.

October 1st, 2024: 117cm chest, 114 cm stomach, 112 cm waist. 105.7kgs. WHtR 0.62
February 8th, 2025: 118cm chest, 103 stomach, 102 waist. 94.9kgs. WHtR 0.57
August 20th, 2025: 110cm chest, 92 stomach, 96 waist. 84.8kgs. WHtR 0.47
September 11th 2025: Heart and Blood Pressure 118/75 46bpm

March 2025

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