Tomorrow Wuss goes to be boarded at the vet, I pick up a rental car and finish shopping for my stir fry ingredients. Oyster sauce, Hoisin sauce, cooking Sherry, red wine vinegar, sesame oil, light soy, mushroom soy and, I think, ginger, just in case they don't carry it in Oregon backwoods grocery stores. You never know. Need ginger. Need garlic. Garlic, I assume, is available everywhere in the world. Bought two bottles of good Champagne, one for Thanksgiving, one for Roseburg, a throwback to the my days in the wine business. A nice Veuve Clicquot Rosé. Also bought the dry cooking Sherry. I always use the good stuff when I'm cooking. Makes the time go more smoothly, one sip at a time.

I talked with an old friend in Napa about the cat pee and the carpets. He knows about carpets. Basically, once the carpets have been soaked, assuming they have been soaked, they need to be replaced, so I called the local Home Depot for prices. They were talking about $20 a yard installed for a decent carpet, but you could go up from there. Up from there. My old landlord was talking $50 a yard. Maybe he actually spent that kind of money when he had it installed, but we'll see. My thought is if the carpet is say, 10 or 20 years old, then I shouldn't have to pay for the entire thing. Yes. I'll call him tomorrow. I've been putting this off.

Going through this with the Home Depot carpet guy on the phone, I realized I could, if push should come to shove and Wuss can't be plugged (and we must live here together in rug pee forever), I could go to my current landlord and say, hey, my cat may ruin the carpet, so I'll put up money to re carpet the apartment when I leave. I mean, what the hell, money solves many problems. What's a little carpet between landlord and tenant? A new carpet amortized over the time I stay here is no big deal. So it solves the problem with Wuss, although I'm still going to implement little tricks like keeping him going out onto the balcony to eat and use the cat box (which means I have to teach him how to go out through the cat door as well as come in. He knows how to come in. (I could go into a riff here on cat brains or the lack thereof, as in how to operate a cat door - but I don't really want to touch the subject.)

My last deed of the day was to go by the dermatologist's and have the stitches removed from my back. I was sitting, waiting for him to come into the examining room, thinking, well, I've done some shopping, I've gone to lunch, I've picked up the two emergency prescriptions at Rite Aid downtown and I can take care of the rest of the stir fry stuff tomorrow, and then I thought, what a hell of a time to learn that one of the last two moles he'd removed was cancerous.

And then the doctor came in and said everything was fine, but boy did I like growing disturbing looking moles on my back, so I said, let's remove some more while I still have my health insurance and he said "OK" so we made another appointment in December. No fucking way I'm going to buy the farm because I didn't have some dumb looking moles removed from my back.