Just shoot me

Holy shit, ringworm is infectious!



You are looking at what I initially thought was a scab from a bump; but as all early diagnoses of bruise-spawned-scabs go, I am once again incorrect. And proven wrong by none other than the ringworm fungus once more, which seems to have taken up permanent residence in our home.

Where the fuck do ringworm fungi come from anyway? The cat was fine until we brought her home; we were fine until after we got the cat. Maybe it's some chemical reaction between cat, human and dust that somehow equates to infectious spores?

Ughhhhhh and as we speak another one appears to be developing on my knee:



Is it the cat's fault? Absolutely. She probably picked it up from licking the shower drain, the ferrel little thing. Why would such an obsessive-compulsively clean animal be attracted to the dark moldy depths of the shower drain is beyond me; but it's the only explanation that I've come up with so far and I'm sticking with it.

Need To Bleach Shower Cubicle.

Also, there's this little factoid:

Conditions such as heat, moisture and dirty, crowded living conditions increase the risk of fungi spreading.

Given that I'll be flying up north for jobs (again) next week (despite swearing never ever to return, again), where the climate is significantly hotter and where the level of hygiene leaves plenty to be desired, I am almost certain that I will have a flare-up of epic proportions, and be left scratching myself to death. All that while busy swatting away crickets, grasshoppers, spiders and other bugs the size of my face. I am not exaggerating, and this time I will take photos to prove it.

Because guess who's got a new caaamerraaah! :D :D :D



Yeh it's an IXUS. Only an IXUS, one might add. But guess what, this IXUS set my finances back about $500 and that's like over half of my fortnightly pay. -.- Although I'm looking at it as 10% of my tax returns, which sounds a lot more comforting. Because tax returns is everybody's pat-on-the-back for a year of hard work, and we all deserve to splurge a little! :)

The remains will be carefully distributed between savings and "Jill & Hsin & Shaun's Epic Adventures 2011". The latter warrants a whole entry to itself because a) I'm crazy excited about it; and b) it is THE trip we've been promising ourselves since our high school years. And you know what, it has been 8 years. And we've all been friends for over 10. It's worth at least two weeks of wicked debauchery, eh? ;)

Just kidding Yang, I promise I'll be good.

But I'll save that for another day. Because for now, my background movie is finishing and I'm actually half interested now even though I know what's gonna happen next. Plus, the next movie is a horror so wahey, cue for me to go to bed.

Till next entry, with better pictures. :)


xx
Hsin

Sympathy pain

Just a quick update.

The cat scab has been diagnosed as a mere ringworm lesion! Which sounds a lot worse than what it actually is: a fungal infection that requires little to no treatment. In fact the vet said we could just leave it and allow it to run its course over time, but we opted for anti-fungal tablets instead to speed up the process. Well, depending on whether she's willing to take them or not.


Pictured here after she dived nose first into the shower while Mitch was showering -.-

So yay, one less thing (that I shouldn't have) to worry about. :) Now we're just gonna need to clean up the house to rid of "fungal spores", and any other bacterias and plankton that could be lurking around the bathroom. They must have heard my anti-bacterial soap comment from the last entry. -.-

Death to evil microorganisms!


Damn straight that's an eye infection.


xx
Lazy-eyed Hsin

Crank up the Cranium

**Disclaimer: Long and wordy post up ahead.

I have a lot on my plate at the moment. Mostly little things, some even negligible, but all crammed up in a tiny corner at the back of my head. I think that's the Stress/Anxiety side of the brain, lodged in between the Rational Left and Creative Right. Or was it the other way round?

First off, my cat is ill. Well not exactly ill, but she has this scabby patch above her eye which appears to be getting worse by the day. Initially we just thought that she bumped her head and had a bruise (that was what it looked like at the start). But the scabbing got worse, either because she's been scratching, or it's something a lot more serious that warrants treatment. We've been waiting for our appointment with the vet this coming Monday (she has a sterilization due), but over the last few days the scab seems to be deteriorating rapidly. And so are my wits.


:: Ashamed of her scarred face :(

Mitch said not to worry since the cat doesn't appear to be too concerned about it, apart from her occasional scratching and pawing at it. But given that this is my first ever cat friend, and my tendency to leap into borderline-schizo paranoia, I am imploding with anxiety and worry.

What if it's serious? What if it's untreatable? What if she needs surgery? How am I gonna afford any vet services?? Well I can, but it's just so damn expensive holy shietz.

But see what I mean though, the excessive worrying. Probably explains why I'm the only person I know of my age who got hospitalized for anxiety attacks. -.-

Sigh, what does this say about me. I have every making of becoming a painfully over-protective mother in the future, and that's the last thing I want to be. Having grown up in what I deem to be a 'too-sheltered' household, and watching the younger generation in my family being subjected to even more protectiveness, I made a promise to myself to allow my kids grow by their own terms, and to live and play and learn at the expense of scraped knees, dirty clothes and perhaps even a fractured bone.

That's not to say that my family did a bad job raising me. If anything, my mother has always been and still is 100% supportive of my actions and decisions the past 25 years. I think that everyone just got too caught up with the bad things that are happening around them - disease outbreaks, natural disasters, the global obsession with germs (I stand by my belief that anti-bacterial soap will kill us all in the end), the neighbourhood crime, terrorism and warfare, 2012. A culmination of all these events eventually leads to a paranoid society, which trickles down to communities and family units, and inevitably, to individuals like myself.

I'm trying to move away from all that, and I honestly think there's progress. I mean first step in solving any problem is recognizing it, right? Hopefully in a few years' time I'll get a lot better, and I won't end up as a mother who sterilize her children every morning and send them to school in a kid-size bubble wrap.


:: Haha although apparently, someone's already beaten me to it.


Ok I digress. Moving on to bigger, more current things.

A possible job prospect. In the Eastern states. I know nothing about it to date, except that the CEO/owner is a friend of my dad's, and I'm given a name and a number to call in a couple of weeks' time (that's when he returns to Melbourne). I hope I'm not jinxing it by talking about it so soon, but I need to pen out my thoughts to make sense of them.

So what's not to consider about my treasured first, proper employment opportunity? Relocation, for one - since my lease for this place in Perth doesn't end till next February. I guess that can be sorted out if I'm employed full-time, although paying two rents a month will still be quite painful. -.- But I'll be leaving behind a boyfriend and a cat, and that will be a lot more difficult.

Second of all, and perhaps a bit more complicated for me, is the fact that this person is my father's contact. As you maybe know, my relationship with my dad is kinda... strained over the years. And ever since I could, I've stopped accepting any favours or help from him - simply because I don't want to owe him anything, and so I'll feel less horrible and ungrateful as a person. It's an issue that's taken up permanent residence in Anxiety Hind Side of Brain, but that's a story for another day.

So, if things do work out with this prospect, I'll be going against everything I've worked so hard to avoid. =/ It'll be silly to give up such a good opportunity over principles though - but I most likely won't, because I'm not the strongest of principle-keepers, and because I really really want a full-time job in my industry. And I have a deadline hanging over my head.

Maybe I'm just making excuses for myself. I'm afraid of being disappointed yet again, and this time it will be a major blow since it's the big connection/recommendation that's supposed to be an employment guarantee. Although truth be told, it will not be the first time that he broke my heart. =/ However if this doesn't work, I would have come close to exhausting my resources plus I'll have to deal with the shame of breaking principle. -.-

So how now, brown brown cow? How to impress a potential employer if I'm clouded with all these personal conflicts and doubts? How to convince him that I am, in fact, a worthy addition to his company while secretly bracing for disappointment? That while I may be a little messed up and throw lady tantrums in my head sometimes, I am pretty smart and have all the skills that meet the job description and more?

I think all these explain the throbbing headaches I've been having. I'm never one to get bad headaches, not even when I'm massively hungover. I think Hind Brain must be overworked overtime, and only getting paid $19 an hour. ;)


xx
Hsin

Cat Lady

Everyone, meet the latest addition to our family:


Hello I am Basil. My owner gave me a boy's name because she's silly like that sometimes.

Okay she looks a bit fierce in that photo, but I assure you that she's all hugs and cuddles most of the time. That is, when she's not busy being a cat in every other ways.

I have long since established my impression of the feline: needy, lazy, disloyal, think they are superior to men, temperamental, and harbouring a secret desire of killing me in my sleep.

And my few encounters with them so far haven't exactly done much to prove me wrong either; the strays back home enjoys pissing on my shoes, my neighbour's cat always turned away whenever I try to pat him, and Diana's cat used to hiss at me whenever I even try looking at it. -.- Although to be fair, Diana's cat used to hate people in general.

But look, I finally found a cat which actually likes me!


Forces her way into a cuddle usually when I'm on the laptop. As we speak, I've had to already put my comp away twice. -.-

We picked her up from Cat Haven, this cat shelter in Shenton Park which is only about 5 minutes away from our place. Initially we wanted to get a smaller kitten, something between 8-12 weeks old perhaps.

But as soon as we walked into the place, our kitten pretty well decided that she wanted us to take her home, and she was rather vocal about it too. Out of the 20 odd cats present, she was the only one meowing out to us with all her might, even falling over a couple of times in her desperate plea to get our attention.

Then, almost as fate would have it, the other smaller kittens were unavailable due to this rule they have about 'taking the last kitten together with its sibling/mother', and yeah we don't have the space for two cats. Sides, they didn't like us as much as Basil does. :)

She still displays all the usual cat-racteristics: scratching the furniture, perching on window sills, spending the bulk of her days sleeping and her nights keeping her owners awake. She eats moderately, but poos a heck lot for such a small kitteh. -.-

She also has her little quirks which may or may not be common in most cats (I wouldn't know better, and I'm only basing them on what Mitch tells me). For one, she does the "turns around on the spot before sitting down" thing like a pup. ^^ And most times she's pretty happy to be patted and cuddled, which is a nice change from cats who run away from me. T.T


I also like bags.

I've never had a pet my whole life. I've always wanted one, especially a puppy, but my mum had always said no. Which I thought was a little unfair since she had a dog previously, whom sadly passed away when I was still very little. :( I think the family wanted to spare me the misery of a dying pup; and spare themselves the misery at the same time probably.

And I don't resent them for that. I would have loved to grow up with a dog, but I don't think I had the best environment to raise one.

Things are different now though. Living where I am, with someone who's had dogs his whole life, in a city where I don't have to fear walking my pup in the park by myself when I eventually get one. Only after we've bought our own house though, considering pets are not allowed on most rented properties (shhhh..).

But for now, Basil's perfect for us. :)


xx
Hsin