'ride the streets into the dawn...'

haven't written a personal entry in a while. our cat, robin, has been in and out of the vet a lot in the last few weeks because he has feline chronic renal failure, which is basically a terminal disease. we are giving him sub-q treatments for it (we just did the second one last night) in order to delay the onset, but really all we can do is delay it. for how long, we don't know- months or maybe years. sub-q treatments basically means we have to hook him up to an iv to give him fluids that help his kidneys function properly. we also have to feed him some special food that's low in protein. it's kind of difficult to come to terms with since it's essentially fighting a losing battle, but we want him around for as long as he is happy to be around and therefore we will fight it until that is no longer the case. he's been acting mostly like his normal, sweet self again lately and seems to be doing better than he has in years (he's always had a dry skin problem- probably an early indicator of this problem). he isn't quite as active as he was before the episode that caused us to take him to the vet (he started puking a bunch one night, got really lethargic and quit grooming himself)- he used to gallop across the apartment back and forth and he doesn't do that anymore. i did catch him trying to sharpen his claws on the leather chair the other day, which he isn't allowed to do but i found encouraging nevertheless.
basically, in a nutshell, this year officially blows- the whole brandon bullshit, the shitty, depressing summer, all of this crap that's gone down at work, our friends' greyhound seth (who we used to housesit for and spend a lot of time with- we were very fond of him as he was a total sweetheart) passing away and now our cat getting crf. what's more stefanie and i are just now getting over a monstrous cold. the only silver linings have been the handful of amazing shows we've played this year (only four), my sister's wedding and claire's wedding- which were both really fun.
i've also gotten a lot of quality music recorded this year- i just went through a bit of a creative fit earlier in the month. i have several mixes of 'chinese blue' tracks, some of them finals, most of them still needing strings or vocals by stefanie. i'm going to still try to buy some calibration tape and get a bunch of stuff mastered and the 'christmas suite' single is still in play- i just started on a new version of 'christmas song, pt. iii' last night that's already coming along very nicely (i'm not too wild about the first version of it). everything's going to be alright, dammit! i'm really hoping that 2011 is better than 2010, but then i was also hoping that 2010 would be better than 2009 and we ended up getting monstrously sick right around new year's day while we were housesitting for jay and diana. i didn't get over it until february. who knows. but anyway, boo on this year. i'm glad it's almost over and i'm hoping christmas will be fun at least.