I learned to drive with a stick shift, it is mostly what I have always driven. I even drove my old Toyota stick shift in San Fransico , now that was an adventure.

oh and another thing, while we were trying to sleep at a hotel a couple of minutes from the critical hospital, I suddenly realized that it was my lousy, stinkin birthday. As in Happy Birthday Jeannie, your beloved cat is dying. yes, I am very bitter right now.

about 6 weeks age our Quiky (Quiksilver) was going to be having dental surgery. Since he was 7, our vet did some pre-surgery bloodwork and it showed that Quiky had diabeties . We have an older 13 year old cat that has diabeties that was caused by being overweight, his blood sugar is now under control at 1 unit and our vet thinks Ginger may be able to come off insulin soon. Anyway, they had no idea what caused Quiky to get diabeties as he is not overweight. I started giving him the insulin shots and our vet was checking him . At first his blood sugar went down, but then it started climbing and even increasing his dose several times, up to 5 units his blood sugar kept getting higher. Last Tues night, he did not eat his dinner, did not eat again on Wed morning. Took him to my vet and started force feeding him with a syringe, he kept getting worse. My vet sent us to our local emergency animal hospital. By then, Quiky was in shock. They had him on all kinds of iv and machines, including an insulin drip. After 2 days of improvement and then declining again, they said it was beyond what they could do so they sent us to a critical care animal hospital 1 1/2 hours away. They even said he might die on the ride there, He didn't and they hooked im up to machines and a insulin drip. They did all kinds of tests,which showed underlying heart disease and liver disease which was interferring with the insulin doing its job. They kept increasing his continous insulin drip to higher doses and his blood sugar kept getting higher, his body temp was going down and this blood pressure was also going down, They had him on 2 different blood pressure meds at the max. dose they can give. My dh, myself, our dd and her boyfriend stayed there at the hospital. We had not brought our son as he is special ed and could not have handled all of this. My dh's two sisters went to our house and stayed with our son and took care of our other cats. Finally, yesterday, Quiky's blood pressure had gone down to 40 and he was in a coma. My dd kept screaming, "Quiky, wake up, you have to wake up, you can't leave us". She had picked out Quiky at a rescue group 7 years ago when we had lost our previous favorite cat. He was her cat but we all loved him,he was the most sweet, gentle cat, only 7 years old. After dd went away to college last year, Quiky started sleeping next to me at night, he was the only one of the cats that sleep in our bed every night, the others would off and on. Quiky would pat my face at night. He was by far the favorite of everyone. The bill total for the er hospital and the critical hospital came to $8,000 which happened to be the amount that we had set aside for our first vacation in 4 years to Disney World but we all agreed to use that money for Quiky's care so now we have no trip to Disney , which we do not care about any longer but we also do not have our Quiky anymore. I just needed to write about all this as my heart is breaking now. Prior to Tues night, Quiky was active, doing his usual racing around the yard, running a few feet up a tree and then jumping down and the same to another tree. No one had any idea that he had any underlining heart disease, he was so active and seemed 100% healthy.

My very first kitten that was my own, as in I was an adult, she died during her spaying surgery. I have since gone on and had 5 more females spayed and 5 males neutered. I was terrified during each surgery but none of the rest ever had any problems.

Coral Reef in Epcot Future World has amazing atmosphere and great deserts. our favorite quick service are: Sunshine Seasons. Lots of different stations. ex. Asian station, sandwichs (huge and really good), 1/2 rotassaire chicken and pork chop area, salads, etc. really good food this is in Epcot where Soarin is. At Magic Kingdom, Columbia Harbor House . I love the tuna sandwich Animal Kingdom. People seem to really like Flame Tree Barbeque (I will be trying it on next visit) Hollywood Sudios, our favorite is Starring Rolls, good sandwichs (huge) and HUGE fantasic cupcakes, plan to share.

50's Prime Time Diner, we just love it. Last time we were there, a teen boy at another table was being "disrespectable" to his "cousin" the waiter so the waiter pushed the teen boy in his chair all the way across the restaurant to our table and made him eat with us. We have a beautiful teen girl so we don't think the teen boy minded too much. We just love the playfulness of the servers there as our "cousin" or "aunt" as they make us eat our veggies, take our elbows off the table. One time dh was there with his sister and the servers had everyone in the restaurant playing a game together to name all the one title Disney movies. Also one time we were there late and spent a lot of time with our waitress talking, it turned out she was a transplant from our area so anyway when we left the restaurant, there was a line of cast members (as all Disney employees are called) waiting for us. It turned out that we were the very last visitors in the entire park. They walked us out thru the park and there was a bus waiting for us to take us back to our resort. The bus driver told us that all the buses had stopped running for the night as it was so late but the park had called to have a bus come pick us up to take us to our resort. Of course we were the only ones on the bus. Thank goodness for Disney caring about us getting back to our resort.

perfect name for the little princess

Hopefully you have a good realtor that will inspect the house after showings and take care of any dirt, etc. tracked in. Kinda funny story about our realtor when we moved. We had to do the "have movers come and take everything, then wait till after settlement and take our stuff to new house". Well the day of settlement, our movers were very late and had only sent one truck and 2 movers to move a 2200 sq. feet, 3 bedroom house full of furniture. Our realtor came by about 2 hours before settlement, saw all the chaos, turned into a drill sqt. she called the moving company and really quickly another moving van and 3 more guys showed up. Realtor directed everyone what to do,had it so organised. Everyone was following her orders. We made it to settlement maybe 5 min. late. So my point is, a good realtor is worth gold.

with all the bad news happening lately, I love GOOD news. Welcome little princess.

I don't watch tv (except for dvd movies) so I have my home page on computer set to yahoo.news just so I know what all is going on in the world. After a long stretch of bad news, I was so happy to turn on computer to happy news. A new little princesss, I also loved the video of William taking George to meet his new sister and William gave George a nice kiss on his forehead after George was waving to the crowds.

Thanks everyone for the info.

surgery, eventually getting her masters and being a nurse anesthesia

We will be moving to Orlando, actually probably Winter Garden area (near Disney) when dd finishes up her nursing at Villanova University. Any nurses on here in the Orlando area? How is the job market? This is will be in about 2 years (maybe 3 at most). She will have her BSN.

what about rules limiting the number of cats you can have? When we were looking for a new house here in New Jersey (in our area there are only about 2 HOA developments) I was interested in a house that was in one but they had a rule that you could only have 1 pet of any kind. We have 8 cats. We are probably going to move to Florida in a couple of years and HOA communties seem to be the norm so of course I as wondering about cat rules.

I have been taking one of my cats in every week for an issue. Anyway there is a new office kitten there. She had been attacked by a hawk, somehow survived and someone brought her in to the office (she was a stray). Her entire back end had been torn up, she could not poop as the parts were not whole and attached. My vet did surgery on her, re-attached her back end but she will always have to have special care so he decided that she will have to always be there as a office cat (along with their 2 other office cats). Believe it or not, she has no fear, not even of the biggest dogs. She is so tiny (about 6 months old but tiny) and she is running the office. She comes into each room and supervises all visits. She is so sweet and friendly, especially considering what she went thru. My vet truely loves all animals and is not in it for the money as he , of course, did not receive any payment for the intensive surgery he had to do on this little kitten.