Friday was this month's Happy Hour with Laney, and at her suggestion, we went to Witness, which is very close to her place. I walked straight there from work rather than going home first; Shobhit met us there, a few minutes late because he had to clean up cat puke just as he was about to leave. I think Shobhit being there is a big reason we were only there about an hour, whereas many times in months past Laney and I have hung out and chatted for as long as three hours. But, the food menu was limited and Shobhit did not want to order food there, which meant we still had to make dinner. I totally would have gone for their $6 Happy Hour Macaroni and Cheese, which was not on their online menu but was on the menu there at the bar, and maybe also tried the Hushpuppies, but Shobhit wasn't into the idea. And then Laney decided she wouldn't order any food either because she had so many leftovers of her own at home. So, all we all did was drink. I had two "El Diablo" cocktails (tequila, lime, ginger beer, crème de cassis -- very tasty) and I believe Laney had two glasses of wine; Shobhit had one drink and I forget what he had.

Shobhit took the above picture because he pointedly refused to take part in posing in a fun way for a Happy Hour photo. I would have loved to have the waitress get a picture of all three of us, especially with the fake window on the wall next to our table because Witness is designed like a church -- hence the prayer poses ("Glory to the Spirits" was my photo caption on Facebook) -- but I had to settle for this instead.

Not long ago I came across one of my old "100 Things About Shobhit" posts on LiveJournal from earlier in our relationship, which I did a couple of years for his birthday in 2005 and 2006, and was struck by this one from the latter year:

123. He is always a good sport. If, for example, I want to take a picture of us posed like a Pet Shop Boys album cover, he'll totally do it. [Note in 2018: I sure wish I still had the original of that latter photo; it was taken for a LiveJournal user icon photo and I can now only find it in that disappointingly tiny size.]

It sort of made me sad to read that. I feel like, honestly, I have lightened up and loosened up over the years, quite significantly. Shobhit has done the opposite. He's unbelievably uptight constantly, and he is the opposite of a good sport these days. When I tried to bring this up on Friday, his response was, "How often do you do things I like that you don't want to do?" I don't really think this is fair, because there's not really anything I refuse to do now that I was ever totally fine with, and this kind of thing is harmless and simple and he once did it freely and without complaint. Laney's theory was that it was a time when we were first together and he had more reason to try to impress me. I have a hard time subscribing to that theory when, by 2006, we'd been together two years and had had plenty of conflict.

I mean, he wants to join us so he can get a Social Review, right? But, he doesn't want to participate in anything fun. And putting him in my monthly "Happy Hour" photo, which until now I've always done when he joined us, makes it a much more generic photo -- and since I post that photo every month, I like to try and make it unique when I can. As in the above photo. I suppose the above photo is a better shot than one of the three of us from the side might have been, so there's that.

Anyway, it was kind of loud in there anyway and I really need to start researching multiple options in multiple neighborhoods for quieter bars and lounges where you can actually have a comfortable conversation. These places often deliberately designed to be loud in order to get people in and out faster -- and thereby make more money -- drive me crazy. Although maybe I should invest in these "Earasers" earplugs I found recommended in this Food and Wine article about bars that are too loud. This description very much appeals to me: they "are designed to reduce overall noise without distorting the frequencies you want to hear (like voices), keeping everything crystal clear." Maybe I should just ask for that for Christmas. Or my birthday, which is much sooner!

Laney had to get up early for rehearsals Saturday morning anyway, so it's not likely it would have been a very long Happy Hour even without Shobhit. She walked with us across the street to QFC and then said goodbye; we picked up a few things and then went home to have dinner.

-- चार हजार दो सौ और सत्तर --

Shobhit and I did our grocery shopping on Saturday, and that's about it as I recall, although it was rather spread out and complicated as it often is: first we went to pick up his paycheck at his work in Northgate, and since we were right by it, we went to Target to pick up a few things. Then on to Costco in Shoreline, where I ran into Erica from work -- several times, as we passed each other working our way down the same set of aisles but in opposite directions along each row. Then to PCC Greenlake Village, where I got very few things as these days we only get very much there when it's a day to use the monthly 10% member coupon to tack on top of my 15% employee discount. I wanted to make pasta with pesto cream sauce for dinner, and needed a few things for that at Trader Joe's, so we stopped there as our fourth grocery shopping stop just before coming home.

And that evening, I went to a local standup show to see comedian Amy Miller, who I had never seen live before but decided I liked after she was a guest/panelist/contestant several times on one of my all-time favorite podcasts, Doug Loves Movies. I also follow her on Twitter, so I can't remember now if I first learned she'd be coming to Seattle via her Twitter feed or if it was mentioned on the podcast, but either way I marked my Google Calendar weeks ago, and made a mental note to text Gabriel just days beforehand to see if he'd go with me because there was no way he'd make a commitment any further in advance than that. And I thought of that because when I went to stay the night with him last month, one of the things he suggested (which never came to fruition) was going to a comedy show.

So, I texted him on Monday with a link to her page at TicketBiscuit.com and wrote, You recently suggested a comedy show and Amy Miller is a frequent guest on Doug Loves Movies who I really like. I'm thinking about seeing her in North Seattle this coming Saturday night and I think you should come with me

Several days passed with no response, which was not really surprising. So I texted again on Thursday to remind him and he said he wasn’t sure, then on Friday he texted that he was in, which made me very happy. I was seriously considering going by myself if I had to, although I didn't really want to do that, but Shobhit is never into standup and I had little faith I could get Evan to come at such short notice, although that was a slight possibility. I assumed this sort of event would be the most fun with Gabriel.

I texted him again on Saturday at about 2:00 to ask what the plan was, and did not hear back from him until about 6:30, when I was literally looking at bus options since I had not yet heard from him. I would have had my phone not been away from me charging; I never heard it vibrating when he called twice at around 6:15. And actually I see now he even left me a voice mail at 1:00 that afternoon. How the fuck did I miss that? I learned later he had actually been in Seattle already, then gone back to Tacoma, and was now back in Seattle again. He was glad to get out that evening, though, and at one point at the club even said to me, "Thank you for getting me out tonight. I would otherwise not be doing well."

He texted me at 6:30 that he was trying to get a hold of me, though, and thankfully I saw that on iMessage I had running on my desktop where I happened to be sitting. I called him back immediately without even listening to his voice mail, and he was on his way, expecting to arrive to pick me up at 7:15. He said he had not eaten all day and was starving, and wanted to stop somewhere to get something quick to eat. He even found a place on Yelp rating "The Hot Dog Stand by Chop Suey," and when he discovered he was making good time and would now arrive by 7:00, I offered to go over and see if the hot dog stand was set up yet. I needed to go withdraw cash at the Bank of America that' right over there anyway.

Predictably, none of the typical weekend hot dog stands were set up yet; it was too early in the evening. Gabriel was delayed a few minutes when he discovered the Madison exit was closed for some reason -- I have never seen that happen before -- but he still made it there pretty quickly. He wanted me to wait for him at Bar Cotto on 14th, and only after he finally parked did he realize it was a sit-down place that would take too long and did not sell by the slice (I thought that had already been clear but okay). So, we just got back into his car, and headed toward the U District.

He was concerned that the show would already be sold out, which I did not expect would be the case, mostly just because Amy Miller is not a huge or particularly well-known comedian. As she noted in her headlining set, she only recently just started making a living as a full-time touring comedian. Still, who knows? So, I started checking online to see if I could buy the tickets in advance -- which I would have done already except I did not know until the last minute if Gabriel would be going; and I discovered that the "discount" of $15 tickets in advance versus $20 at the door was hardly a great deal when online fees still brought the advance tickets up to $17.80. Gabriel decided we should park and take stock of the crowd when we got there at about 7:35 or so, and decided then whether we wanted to wait until the second show she was doing at 10:00 -- and he said second shows are typically better anyway. Still, to my amazement, he stayed pretty committed to the 8:00 show, and the house was pretty empty still when we arrived. And, he was so hungry, he decided he would just order off their menu after all, even though in his experience comedy club food is shitty. He didn't exactly rave about the food he got (butternut squash ravioli and a side Caesar salad), but neither did he complain about it.

So now I have to tell you about the pretty significant thing that happened during the show, when Amy Miller actually singled me out. I knew full well, and even though about it, that this was a possibility, but still I did not particularly expect it. What are the chances, really, when she could choose anyone?

It took a while to get to this point, though, because of course she was preceded by five local comedians, each increasing in skill and quality (except for a slight dip with the relatively bland guy who followed the legitimately weird-hilarious redheaded woman), including the emcee, who did a few minutes of comedy first, and was horrible. If that guy was setting the tone, it seemed it did not bode well. But, the next guy was not great but was better at least, and then the redheaded lady went up and turned things around. The very last guy, a Filipino man (something he made a note of in his set), was nearly as good as Amy herself.

Through all of this, there was a guy in the crowd who had apparently come by himself, was either drunk or high or both, and kept talking to every single one of the comedians, who handled him with varying degrees of skill. Amazingly, the guy was almost completely silent through all of Amy Miller's set, after an employee came and sat down next to him and gave him a little chat. I don't know what was said to him, but especially considering how not-sober the guy clearly was, it was amazingly effective. He did say something very brief and unintelligible early in Amy's set, but she did not engage, and that was it. It did make me think, I bet comedians like Amy Miller have to deal with shit like this regularly in cities all across the country.

Instead, she spoke to certain individuals in the crowd -- which is the way it's supposed to go. And it wasn't hard for her to decide one someone to talk to; I actually felt bad for her that the house was only maybe 60% full. Gabriel said the late show would probably be fuller. I hope it was, for her sake.

Anyway, it was clearly all part of a planned bit, and my answers complicated things a little for her, but she handled it impressively well. Here's how she set it up: she told us about leaving a McDonald's with an ice cream cone in her hand, and some homeless guy called out to her, "Hey! You sure you need that?" Part of the humor here was the idea of a homeless guy throwing out random insults at people like her, who, you know, have a home to go eat their ice cream in.

She went on to talk about how, "You have a homeless problem in Seattle," and proposed an idea for funding: pay homeless people to wait outside places you know people you hate are at, to hurl random insults at them as soon as they leave the building.

So she turns to me and says, "What's your name?" I said, "Me?", slightly surprised, and she said yes. "Matthew," I told her. And she said, "Who really, really infuriates you?"

Now, this is the thing. The honest answer to that is . . . pretty much nobody. Unless, I realized much later, you count my husband, who annoys me pretty frequently. It probably would have been just as funny for me to answer, "My husband." Instead what I said -- and the crowd and even Amy found this pretty amusing -- "My mother."

Now. I need to make something clear here, that of course I had no chance to make clear to Amy Miller or her crowd on Saturday night: Mom hasn't legitimately infuriated me in several years. It's pretty hard for her to, given her circumstances living a post-stroke life. But the people at Laughs Comedy Club didn't need to know that. I never did mention that she'd had a stroke; that quite obviously would not have gone over well. But, because I had a long history of her infuriating me in the first few decades of my life, and I had been unexpectedly put on the spot, she was the first person that came to mind. And, it was a pretty funny and unexpected response.

"So what does your mom do?" Amy asked. "Where does she go?"

"Well, that's one of the annoying things," I said. "She doesn't go anywhere. She never leaves the house." This part is kind of still true, and has been the case both before and after Mom's stroke. Both Mom and Bill have endless health problems -- mostly of their own doing, but whatever; it's the situation now -- but Mom is way better off than Bill, whose ankle pain prevents him from wanting to go anywhere pretty much any time anymore. Mom is typically much more open to going out, except she never wants to leave without Bill. And part of the whole "psychosocial rehabilitation" work that Holly used to do and Shelley does now was getting them out of the house, but that doesn't seem to happen much anymore.

Amy, clearly making assumptions that my mother is, you know, "normal" like hers, said, "Yeah my mom never wants to go anywhere either. But she must go somewhere sometimes, where does she go?"

"To the doctor," I said. "She's got a lot of health problems."

She had also already asked me what my mom's name is, and I told her: Jeanni. After hearing about the health problems, though, she began to talk about how she was beginning to have sympathy for her. "I'm kind of on Jeanni's side now!" she said.

Then she asked me, "What does Jeanni do that really gets you mad? What does she do that just makes you want to punch her in the face?"

My first thought was, Oh god, where do I start? There were specific things that I could have shared that would have been kind of horrible for me to talk about -- which I won't even mention here since, unlike on LiveJournal, I can no longer do friends-only "locked" entries. So I thought of a more innocuous one, but which was still just as true: "Well, she hiccups, in a way that's really annoying." Again, even this is not something I have experienced for years, but I can still remember it vividly, the way she used to hiccup really loudly, and so consistently that it made me want to tear the skin off my own face, I hated it so much.

As I noted to Gabriel later, as Amy spoke to him for a little bit as well, what she talked to us about, if we were to be really truthful about it, it would have just been way too complicated. My issues with my mother are very, very complicated. Ditto his issues with his girlfriend. So I tried to keep my issues as simple as possible, although as I said, I think my answers were not quite as simple as Amy Miller expected -- still, she rolled with them well.

And she brought it back to the idea of paying homeless people to hurl insults at people you can't stand. I'm still cracking up even as I write about this now: when Amy said, "So have a homeless guy wait for your mom to come out of the doctor's office, right? And then he screams, 'Hey Jeanni! Your hiccups suck!"

Of course you kind of had to be there, and there are even more details I'm leaving out and not quite remembering, but this bit had me laughing so hard I could not breathe. I was crying -- to such a degree that Gabriel later took a look at my face and told me I had mascara smeared on my cheek. I later tweeted about that, which got a retweet from Amy Miller herself, to her 11.3 thousand followers, which thus yielded another 2 retweets and 31 likes -- a lot for a nobody account like mine. (The tweet was seen over 2000 times.) Amy Miller later responded to that, "You're a sweet peach!" And some other random guy, who clearly had been at the same show, replied, "Yeah, but his mom..." And Amy replied, "Those hiccups!!!" (I'm wondering how if her interaction with me actually made the early show the more interesting of the two that evening, or if something as great happened at the late show. There are no further Twitter exchanges on her account from that evening to give any indication.)

In the middle of the bit, Gabriel even grabbed his phone for a second and said, "I should be recording this!" -- certainly neither of us expected that the headliner would wind up talking to me from the stage about my mother -- but, thankfully, he put the phone back down. Can you imagine if that actually did get recorded and somebody posted it? I'm sure Amy, like any comedian, appreciated not being recorded at all, actually. It must be distracting for performers.

She did talk to Gabriel as well, a little later, briefly after asking if anyone else in the audience suffered from insomnia -- something Gabriel has struggled with for years. That exchange wasn't quite as funny, and things got uncomfortable for a minute when they discussed the drugs they used and she suddenly said, "Did you rape somebody?" Uh . . . no. This is a comedian clearly unafraid to make rape jokes, though (something long being debated, whether it's ever okay to joke about rape -- my argument is always there's nothing off limits for comedy; it always depends on the context and how it's being talked about), and she later got a pretty big groan out of the audience with a quip about Bill Cosby. That was separate from the conversation with Gabriel, though.

To be clear, though, she was very funny even when she wasn’t killing me about my mother's hiccups. The show, just overall, significantly exceeded my expectations. I had looked up Amy Miller's comedy after her first couple of times on Doug Loves Movies, and liked what I saw, but it made a difference that I had never seen a complete set before. And Gabriel, who it turns out has gone to see standup shows at local clubs many times, especially in Tacoma, had a good point when he talked about how the intimate setting of a comedy club can make for a much more fun experience than going to a theatre show to see far more established, popular and famous comedians -- where things like that exchange with me about my mother would never have happened (not unless I were in the very front row, which I never am at theatre shows where I buy the cheapest tickets -- this show only cost twenty bucks). Still, I figured I would have a good time, and I wound up having a blast.

I even got out of the two-item minimum! I didn't realize this until well after the show was over, that all I had was one cocktail and nothing was made of it. Perhaps because Gabriel covered the tab (I paid him back at the next place we went to), and he had a beer and two food items, so there was still four things ordered between the two of us. I wonder if they even enforce that, anyway? The waitress did ask twice if I wanted anything else and both times I said no.

As we left we passed Amy Miller herself at a table selling her CDs, which brought to mind what a lonely existence it must be to be a touring comic -- no one was buying anything as we passed, the table was pretty sparse, and she was just standing there by herself, smiling and thanking people for coming. She did say hi to me and thanked me for being a good sport, and I immediately told her I laughed so hard I cried, which she appreciated.

In fact, I had already tweeted at her on February 26 that I was hoping to come to her Seattle show, and she replied, "Yes please do!!" So once we got back to Gabriel's car, I found that exchange to add another reply: "...Aaand I did! I’m the one with the hiccuping mother in Idaho! The show was great and you deserve a bigger audience!" And she replied again, "You were great!" with two little hearts.

Gabriel had much to talk about still, as always, and so we went looking for a place to get another drink after the show. I thought of the District Lounge on 45th because it was likelier to be a quieter place, assuming it wasn't too busy, but it turns out they've closed. Bummer! We found a German place he likes but it was very loud; I said I was still fine with it but he looked up more places and drove us down to Pioneer Square. We went into one place and it was loud too, but the alternative place, a bakery he likes that he figured would be quiet, was closed.

So we stayed where we were, at the frankly stupidly named Good Bar, and with no place to sit, we began by standing at a standing-only high counter in the center of the room. Gabriel said their drinks are excellent and I ordered a "Timber City Roulette," where you choose a base spirit and they make a "Mule" cocktail with a random seasonal ginger beer. I ordered one with vodka. While I was in the middle of that drink, a woman at the table next to ours raised her own Moscow Mule copper cup and said "Cheers!" to me because we both had ordered the same drink (ish -- I don't know what her base spirit was), clearly embarrassing the two younger women at the table with her.

. . . And, then I got updated on Gabriel's life, which remains a genuinely existential struggle, and I don't mean that in any facetious or sarcastic or trite way. I guess he's officially single again; he said "We're done," and he hadn't quite uttered that phrase yet. That's all I'll say about that, except to say it's to a large degree what we talked about, in addition to the stress in his life being so severe that his body is breaking down and he's getting acid reflux to such a severe degree that he's cut all acidic things completely out of his diet -- even tomatoes! I don't know how he functions, but so far, he persists. I'm glad for that, anyway.

By the time we were at that place it was pushing midnight and I was just about falling asleep at the table. Gabriel said he was going to ask if he could come up and use the bathroom, and although of course he could, my first thought was, oh, god -- I remain wary of him and Shobhit being in the same room together, which hasn't happened since the blow-up between them at the end of my Birth Week last year. Gabriel seems to have forgotten about it, which I suppose is for the best. I don't think Shobhit has. Gabriel ditched the idea when he could not find a parking spot anyway, so he just dropped me off. Then I got home and Shobhit wasn't even there; he had gone out to the Eagle and later was at Lost Lake Cafe, apparently eating tater tots. I was in bed when he got back shortly thereafter.

-- चार हजार दो सौ और सत्तर --

-- चार हजार दो सौ और सत्तर --

That brings us to Sunday!

Shobhit decided to come along with Laney and me to see A Wrinkle in Time, which none of us really liked. I found it so dull that I nodded off several times, once long enough that I was pretty sure I missed an important plot point. Not that it mattered, the movie was otherwise so boring -- pretty to look at, but severely lacking in substance.

A couple of interesting things about the experience, though. First, the Seattle Jewish Film Festival, now in its 23rd year, was going on, and when we walked into the lobby of the Pacific Place AMC Theatre, there was a table with leftover bagels and scrambled eggs -- just a couple of paper plates full. Laney asked some people nearby who appeared to be packing up, and they said they had just finished some kind of reception for the festival. So I asked if I could have one of those bagels, and they told us to help ourselves to any of the food there. So, I cut a bagel in half and made a sandwich with the eggs, thereby making myself an early lunch. There was also a plate of fruit but I didn't have any of that. Shobhit also took a bagel but did not bother with the eggs.

We all went to sit down and I finished telling Laney and Shobhit about the exchange with Amy Miller about Mom and her hiccups. I was eager to tell them about it because, until that point, I was thinking I would not be writing about it here -- I was afraid it might be too offensive to friends of Mom's who might read this. But then Laney said, actually, my mom might even find it funny -- and I realized she was right. Mom and Bill might actually get a kick out of that story, so maybe I will tell them about it. I do need to call my mom sometime soon; we haven't actually spoken since Christmas.

So, after that, I decided I would write about it after all. It was the funniest thing I had experienced in a while, and I wanted a record of it.

The other interesting thing: I used my MoviePass to get my ticket, and was completely expecting to pay separately for Shobhit's ticket -- the official line is that you get one ticket per day using the pass. But the guy at the window told me I could use it to get two tickets! I even said, "I thought it was just one ticket per day?" and he said, "It's actually up to fifteen dollars." And, as Laney is wont to do whenever possible, we were seeing a pre-noon show at Pacific Place, and those are only $6.92 with tax per person! So, now Shobhit is all about unlimited access to weekend shows before noon. He even saw the trailer to Sherlock Gnomes and suggested we go to that. You would need to pay me to see that one, though, fuck that. There are other movies. And Shobhit still needs to see Black Panther.

The movie ended and we pretty much all three agreed that it just wasn't very good. Laney nearly fell asleep herself! "And I never, ever fall asleep at movies," she said. Well it happens to me all the time but, I don't know, maybe I have narcoleptic tendencies that I don't know about.

We were walking through the ground floor of Pacific Place, passing by the Il Fornaio coffee shop, and who do we see, but . . . Amy Miller!

Not the comedian, though. This is the Amy I used to know in the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Chorus. I hadn't seen her in ages. She just happens to have the same name as the comedian. Although we've had few online interactions, we've been Facebook friends since 2009. She gave Laney a hug and then gave me a hug as well. She was behind the bars that separate the Il Fornaio seating area from the rest of the open-plan ground floor atrium. She was there working with the Jewish Film Festival, it turns out -- in town for just a few weeks. She told us all about staying with her brother in the house where her mother lives in suburban Detroit, taking care of their 95-year-old mother in end stages of dementia. It was a sad scenario but Amy was surprisingly upbeat.

Anyway, when I tweeted about the comedian Amy Miller on Saturday night, I tagged her on Twitter, and didn't want it still to say "@amymiller" with no link on Facebook. I tried to link to the comedian by editing the post on Facebook but it wouldn't work on my phone; I did wonder how many of the Seattle Amy's and my mutual friends might have gotten a little confused by that.

And, since I had already told Laney about the comedian, Laney mentioned that to her. I cracked up when Amy said, "And there's also a porn star named Amy Miller, so, there's a lot of us around!"

I did wonder how much Shobhit was able to follow a lot of the stuff discussed when Amy said things like, the festival tends to have about one movie per year that's about gay people, and that's the only movie he tends to get any friends to come to. This clearly established her as part of the queer community, and surely there's the possibility of her being bisexual, when she mentioned Mitch -- I don't think they're actually together anymore, but they were longtime partners, and Amy talked a bit about the challenge of explaining: "She remembers Mitch from before, you know" -- but since Laney and I already had the shorthand, we both knew what "before" meant: when I first joined the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Chorus, Amy and Mitch were presenting as a lesbian couple. It was before Mitch transitioned; I can't even remember fore sure anymore what name Mitch was using before transitioning -- not that it really matters, since Mitch is who he's been the whole time anyway. I even remember once talking to Amy, years ago, about the challenge of identity as a lesbian being with a partner who is transitioning to be a man. They stayed together quite a while after that, though. In any case, I didn't think it was the best time to turn to Shobhit and explain all this right then and there, but if he reads this, then now he knows. Although in all likelihood he wasn't even thinking about it and probably couldn't care less one way or the other. Still, it felt sort of weird to me to have this conversation that might have made things seem different from how they really were.

We parted ways after leaving the mall. Laney was taking Light Rail, which I usually take with her, but because it costs Shobhit extra to use it, he and I walked there and back. We stopped at the Café Ladro on Pine and Eighth to use a 2-for-1 drink coupon from the Chinook Book app on my phone. I was up past 50 lbs again this morning and kept wondering why since I "skipped lunch" yesterday -- except I did have that bagel with eggs at the theatre; had a "jumbo" chai from Café Ladro (Shobhit's all about getting the biggest bang for the buck); had a pretty heavy dinner; and we even later went out for ice cream at Old School Frozen custard, where I ate half a brownie fudge sundae.

We walked the rest of the way home, he with his coffee and me with my chai, and I wrote about half the movie review.

-- चार हजार दो सौ और सत्तर --

And then we had to take the cats to the vet, for their annual exam. Not much to report there; both cats are basically in good health, although I did bring home a new bottle of medicine to give Guru for his regular vomiting. It's the same medication I had been giving both cats twice a day for several months, until Guru started puking again often enough even while on it that I just cut out the medication -- after which the puking dropped dramatically! Now it's kind of up again, though, and I had been pilling them every other day to save money before. Now I'm only going to pill Guru, and see how it goes with him taking it every day, which will amount to the same cost (I'll have to reconfigure my budget again). Hopefully it makes a difference.

The vet was not too concerned about their respective weights, although for the second year in a row Shanti has gained weight and Guru has lost weight. Guru is the male so he should weigh more, but Shanti is a little bully-bitch-pig with the food and so Guru just doesn't consume as much. He also isn't crazy about the canned food we get from Costco, but I stick with it because they reliably vomit more whenever I make a big change to their diet, and they puke less on this food than they ever did on the dry food I used to feed them before switching to canned around 2015.

As always, they both freaked out while on the way there, were super nervous in the exam room but Shanti in particular got curious after a while, and then they were much calmer on the way home, probably because they knew it was over and they were headed back. They were both right back to their normal, calm selves very soon after we got home and let them back out of the carrier. I had forgotten about this appointment when I did the budgeting for this paycheck, so I had to transfer from savings to cover it, but Shobhit should be happy to know that even after that, I'm still barely above a savings account balance of $30,000, which he is weirdly fixated on me maintaining.

(It won't be as much of a challenge once he finally gets a higher-paying, full-time job, which was the source of an argument on Saturday, after he complained again about not having the revenue of a renter -- and he got very defensive when I talked about how he needs to work harder at looking for a full-time job. I still maintain that the rent revenue is a completely unsustainable crutch, and he needs to look for work either way. It's possible I may break with enough persistence on his part, but I remain dead set against getting another new roommate. I don't think even he would deny how many of the benefits we've been enjoying, of having the place to ourselves again for once after eight years. I'm far more open to his tentative plan of having his mother come in July to visit for three months -- I'm not thrilled about that either, but I'll take it in an instant over bringing in another roommate. He's got another job far he's going to this evening, at least.)

We spent the rest of the evening watching a few episodes of TV, and I watched about half the documentary Call Me Lucky on Netflix back in the bedroom before realizing I had actually seen it in the theatre, and even posted an B+ review of it in 2015. Well anyway, it's an excellent film and it's streaming on Netflix.

[posted 12:21 pm]