Drafts of posts have been started. Photos collected in a folder labeled “Isis” on my desktop. It’s been four months now, and I’m finally coming back and pulling the halted sentences together into a post that I will publish.

After two months, it wasn’t as hard to write about Isis as it was after two days or even two weeks. Time has passed and allowed me distance from The Event. But it’s been weird and awkward to type out the words. Maybe I’ve been postponing it because of the finality of it all.

Isis, our sweet cat of ten years, passed away in our arms on May 8 under the grim lights of a veterinarian’s exam room. Her labored breathing ceased; she was there but no longer there; her long, baffling illness behind her in a peaceful moment that came too soon.

But her eyes did not close.

I’m reliving the moment to write about it, and it brings me great pain. I’d never before been with a person or animal at the moment of death.

We fought her decline for so long, and so acutely in the month before her death, that it seemed as though things had always been that way. We spent the last couple weeks hovering around her, clinging to every moment she showed a sign of potential recovery‚ however temporary it might be. We had fluid drained from her body cavity twice while trying to figure out an actual diagnosis from the conflicting test results. Antibiotics seemed to help, but then she caught a cold of some sort. I found myself at the drugstore on a Sunday morning purchasing a baby nasal bulb respirator and saline drops to help clear her sinuses so that she could get oxygen into whatever lung space was available.

Still floundering for a diagnosis—was it in fact a bacterial infection, or FIP, or was there a foreign object in her lungs?—I took her for a third opinion from another vet, this time a friend’s cousin. Isis was breathing a little better after the fluid drain, but was still lethargic. She showed no anxiety and didn’t flinch when she was given a shot of prednasone to help her breathing. The next day, another round of lab results came back. Advanced FIP positive and, to our horrified surprise, FIV positive as well.

Say your goodbyes and bring her in in the next day or two, he said to me gently over the phone.

The really hard thing was that the prednasone shot improved her breathing and her appetite. So over the next couple days as we coped with the impending loss and timing The Inevitable.

The thing is, even though we dreaded it and knew to logically expect that she was dying, we weren’t prepared. I know. She’s just a cat. Except that she wasn’t. She was part of our family for ten years. It was really hard to say goodbye.

So this is good. There are still unknowns, but bacteria can at least be smacked into submission for the short term. I really liked what my friend Amber said:

I know what it’s like to hope for one bad instead of another. “He could have been poisoned, which, in theory, might improve, or have chronic kidney disease…which will just keep getting worse.”

“Um….let’s hear it for the poison!?!”

Isis has been eating more and gaining her strength back. She also starts purring practically every time we look at her, which is not typical behavior for her, but will make the pending credit card statement a little easier to bear. She’s actually on my lap right now, awake but relaxed, with her head resting on my forearm and making typing an awkward task for me.

These are some photos from February 2009 since I’m really behind in uploading photos. I look forward to taking more of her in a happy and honor-my-every-whim mood after she regains her health yet again. I’m just a helpless puddle of amateur photographer when she starts posing like this in the sunlight.

The vet said to make sure she’s eating a very high protein diet, which given her history of digestive issues means that we’ve been giving her pure meat baby food out of a jar. And to improve her hydration, we’re forcing a spring water and Pedialyte solution down her throat a few times a day. I’m just hoping that the next step in her transformation to human infant will not require diapers.

Today has been a good recovery day for Isis. She ate only about a half ounce of baby food last night and refused any of her regular food. She still wasn’t really interested in food this morning, but by this afternoon she was meowing by the fridge and showing interest in her regular food after she finished off the jar of baby food. She’s been walking around more and using the extra litter box we begrudgingly put in the hall bathroom for her since she’s still not in stair-taking condition to use the one in the basement.

(I caught Phoebe peeing in the upstairs litter box and was all, THAT’S NOT YER TOILET, which caused a slapstick scene of her kicking litter everywhere as she lunged out of the box and skidded into a wall before racing off.)

The first lab results should come back from our regular vet tomorrow morning to hopefully give us more insight as to what caused all the fluid build-up. We will not be returning to that vet for follow-up treatment—especially after having a decent night’s sleep and analyzing the course of events in Isis’ recent illness.

She was boarded at the vet while we were out of town because she needs to be fed her special homemade food twice a day, and it’s just easier that way. It’s the third time she’s boarded there while the other two cats stay home with their automatic feeder and a friend checking in on them. When Ben picked her up on Tuesday, he noticed that she was breathing heavily. We honestly didn’t worry too much until Thursday, probably because it was getting worse. That night we took her to Pet Urgent Care where they took X-rays, gave her shots of cortisone and antibiotics, drew a sample of the massive fluid build-up in her chest cavity and recommended that we visit our regular vet first thing in the morning. The regular vet looked at the X-rays, said her liver was enlarged and possibly her heart, and sent the sample from Pet Urgent Care out to the lab. He waived the exam fee since we’d just been to urgent care and sent us home.

But that’s it. How could he look at my cat struggling to breathe because of the pressure around her lungs and just send me home with her until the lab results came back—which he knew would likely not be for three days? Why didn’t he even mention draining the fluid as an option? I’d only had a couple hours’ sleep, otherwise I would have asked. Instead, I sleepily trusted that he knew what was best for my cat. Why wouldn’t I?

Add to that the fact that Isis was exhibiting abnormal breathing when she was picked up from her boarding stay at the vet—where I’d had to sign a form allowing them to treat Isis should she need care during her stay. For how long did her breathing issues go unnoticed? Even giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming it didn’t start until just before Ben picked her up, shouldn’t the tech have noticed when she put her in the carrier?

It’s frustrating to think about. Isis would likely have already died of oxygen deprivation if we had just followed the first vet’s instructions and waited for the lab results before proceeding.

But. I am very glad to have this veterinary care frustration at a time when I am not also grieving the loss of my pet. Even if the final prognosis is Not Good, I did not have to watch my longtime feline companion suffer for several days before dying from a curable (at least temporarily) condition. This way, if we know what’s coming—short term or long term—we can better prepare ourselves and not just stand by as helpless victims of the unknown.

Thank you to all of my friends and family who have extended their love and support the last couple days. In some ways it seems trivial to have such serious emotions for a pet. I’m not one to say that my cats are my children because they’re not—they’re my pets. But goddammit if I don’t love them with all my heart.

I was up late again last night watching Isis, anxious and angry because I couldn’t do anything to relieve her labored breathing. My tiny kitty had lost interest in food and was increasingly lethargic.

I again called the county’s pet urgent care (which I’m thankful for—they’re open all evenings, weekends, and holidays) and spoke to the same assistant who had been there 24 hours earlier when I took Isis in. She said a different doctor was there that night, so I’d have to pay the full exam fee again just to bring her in. Which is double the cost of an exam fee at a regular vet, of course. And to drain the fluid in her lungs? Starting around $500-$1000 due to costs for oxygen, tube set-up, hospitalization, etc.

You’ve GOT to be kidding me, I said. Can’t you just stick a needle in and pull out a little but so she doesn’t suffocate before we can get her to the regular vet in the morning?!?

Ben and I had a rough and emotional discussion about what we should do. Of course we want her to live, but we still didn’t know what was wrong with her or even if draining the fluid would really help. We’d already dropped a few hundred bucks on the two vet visits for X-rays, lab tests, and medicine, but she’s going on 11 years old and what if it’s just her time? At what point do we draw the line when it comes to finances? It’s a really ugly question. How much are we willing to spend to save her?

Meanwhile, Isis shifted uncomfortably, her nostrils flaring as she failed to take in as much oxygen as she needed. I pictured the X-ray of her lungs compressed by fluid in her chest cavity.

Less than seven hours until the regular vet opened. We knew our vet had gone out of town Friday afternoon, but he would leave someone on call.

We decided to make her as comfortable as possible—on her blanket with water just a step away—and hope that she would hang on until morning. We prepared ourselves for the possibility that she would not make it and finally went to bed.

I woke up when it was still dark, not sure if I’d actually fallen asleep, and jolted out of bed when I saw the clock said 3:30. Heart pounding, oh-my-god-is-she-still-alive, fumbling for glasses, tumbling toward her sleeping spot… and yes, she was still alive. She turned to look at me, still breathing rapidly.

Somehow, the fact that she’d survived the what, hour and a half? of me not watching her every breath helped me sleep more soundly until my alarm went off at 7:45. Still alive. I called the vet a little before 8 (Saturday opening time) and left a message with the situation. Still exhausted, I reset my alarm in case they didn’t call back ASAP and slept again until 9. I sort of knew the vet tech who answered my second phone call, and we talked a couple times over the next hour while figuring out what to do.

Me: HALP. Cat is barely breathing, needs fluid drained from increasingly lifeless body. Lab results back yet?
Tech: Okay, let me contact the vet on call. Nope, lab results probably not in until Monday.
Me: CRAP.
Tech: Vet says to wait until the lab results come in before doing anything.
Me: CAT NOT BREATHING, srsly, I’m about ready to stick a pin in her to relieve the pressure
Tech: Call one of the other vets nearby?
Me: Thanks for nothing. Get her X-rays ready for me to pick up.

So yeah, I called another veterinarian—the fifth vet office in the area I’ve now been to. (The first one was close and well-priced, but was no help during the height of Isis’ digestive issues; the second one called the vet techs “nurses” and was a nickel-and-diming nightmare; the third one was the Pet Urgent Care which I guess serves its purpose; and the fourth one we’ve been going to for over a year with moderate satisfaction until now. Also, I’m pretty sure their vet on call is over 100 years old—he administered vaccinations to Loki and Phoebe last year and it was a little scary.)

And I am happy to report that Dr. Dobson at the semi-holistic Riverwoods Pet Hospital in Provo treated Isis well and was the one to finally drain fluid from her chest. After hearing our story thus far, she was appropriately appalled that neither of the two vets we’d seen had drained her fluid right away. She has a very take-charge personality and it was borderline Primetime Hospital Drama as she ordered her staff to set up the oxygen box and prepare for the drainage procedure.

Right before they came into the room to get her, Isis really looked like she was dying. That was hard.

They hyper-oxygenated her for about 20 minutes before draining the fluid from her chest cavity to help her breathe during the process. I didn’t see it, but they placed her into a sealed box that was pumped full of oxygen. Upon learning that she would need oxygen, I’d initially pictured a cat getting oxygen through a mask like humans, but I guess I hadn’t really thought about the logistics of that. A box makes more sense for a vet to serve animals of all shapes and sizes.

Dr. Dobson came out after a while with a paper cup to show us how much liquid was coming out of Isis. It was kind of gross (Ben said it looked like raspberry tea at first glance, until he threw up a little in his mouth after realizing what it was). But the vet drained an impressive total of 8 ounces from Isis—who had weighed only 5.2 pounds beforehand. A tenth of her body weight, and that wasn’t even all of the fluid. She left some in there because otherwise it would really throw off her protein levels.

But hoo boy, were we happy to hear that she was still alive and breathing better!

They kept her in the oxygen box for another hour, so we left for a little while to grab our first meal of the day and to place our fearful bets on what the vet’s bill would be. Note that we split a $5 Subway footlong in preparation!

Happily, the total bill—including medication—was well under the starting cost I was quoted by the Pet Urgent Care. Even happier was seeing Isis alert—albeit weak—and back to breathing somewhat normally. We took her home and have been doing all we can to help her recover while we wait out the weekend.

She started purring again!

One of my cats, Isis, has been breathing somewhat heavily since we picked her up from the vet where she was being boarded while we were out of town. No other symptoms, but it got increasingly worrisome. I decided to google it, which of course you should never do because you will always fear the worst, and sure enough, that’s what I found. I took her to pet urgent care after midnight last night, fearing the worst but hoping that I would just pay the exam fee and come home with some ridicule for being a worrywart. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

She has fluid in her pleural space, which is more or less the cavity between her organs and her skin. (I was a biology major once, but have since filled that useful knowledge with less useful information.) The fluid is compressing her lungs so that they will not fully inflate, causing her to breathe more rapidly to get the oxygen she needs. The vet gave her a cortisone shot and a shot of anitbiotics, just in case they would help, but also took a fluid sample to send off to a pathologist.

The prognosis is not good. There’s no fluid in her lungs, so it’s not a simple respiratory infection. She’s been up to date on her vaccinations and is an indoor cat, so I doubt it’s feline leukemia. It might be FIP, cancer, or a heart problem. None of which mean she has a lot of time left.

I got home after 3am and took her to the regular vet as instructed at 9am. They sent the fluid sample off to the lab and we should have results Monday or possibly tomorrow morning. After all the digestive issues she’s suffered over the last couple of years (which may or may not have anything to do with what’s causing the fluid build-up now), it’s horrible to see her suffering more. Well, “suffering” is subjective. She’s taking shallow, rapid breaths and still eating some. I don’t know if she’s in pain. I don’t know how much longer she has. I don’t know. It’s been a long day. I’m probably going back to the vet tomorrow morning if there’s still no change to talk about options for relieving the pressure from the fluid.

It’s been 5 weeks now since I took her to another vet for a second opinion of her inexplicably failing health. He put the “food allergy” idea into my head, and that’s exactly what it was—though the “hypoallergenic” Hill’s Prescription Diet z/d cat food he recommended didn’t help. (You can find the full and lengthy story on my previous Obligate Carnivore post.)

I started researching feline food allergies on January 29 after coming home from the vet. She refused to eat the z/d food at first, but the vet sent me home with four of those $2.29 cans and I was not going to give in that easily.  I mixed them into the only food she would eat, and though she made it clear that she wasn’t thrilled with the new food, she transitioned in a couple of days. There was a slight improvement in her, um, deposits, but definitely not enough to convince us that it was the best treatment for her (especially considering the food’s price tag).

Meanwhile, I purchased a whole chicken from the grocery store and dusted off the meat grinder attachment for my (favorite!) KitchenAid stand mixer.

The idea of putting raw chicken into the pitifully unhealthy digestive tract of my little kitty made me tremble, so I cooked the chicken before grinding it up, with all the bones, twice. Isis has never refused scraps of meat, and happily gobbled up all of the chicken paste we put before her.

(It was a paste because the meat mixture also contained all of the water that we’d used to pressure cook the chicken. In retrospect, it was way too much water. We cut back on the second batch and it turned out much better.)

Though some people reported that their cats—also suffering from Irritable Bowel Syndrome from food allergies—healed overnight with the Miracle Chicken Diet, I would say that it took two full days for Isis to revitalize. She slept soundly during most of those first 48 hours when she wasn’t eating her chicken mash, though she did still have some lingering, er, toxins, to expel from her body.

I still haven’t decided which powdered vitamin supplement to order, but I understand that Isis shouldn’t go much longer without having at least a taurine additive. Because bad things will happen to cats without it. I went to PetSmart a couple weeks ago to see if they had any supplements and found something called “Cranberry & Papya Digestive Supplement” made by Pet Authority. This liquid has 50 mg of taurine per serving, plus vitamin A, vitamin C, and “billions of friendly Micro Organisms” like Lactobacillus Acidophilus and Lactobacillus Fermentum.

I was more disappointed than surprised that Isis didn’t handle her first dose well. She was sick for two days afterward, so the nearly-full bottle is stashed away in the fridge. I may try it again in a couple weeks with one teaspoon of liquid instead of two to see if she has a similar reaction. She really only needs the taurine—I doubt the cranberry and papaya serve more purpose than to attract health-conscious humans with buying power.

While I was at PetSmart, I spent some time looking at labels on cat food. Almost every single brand contained multiple grain products: corn, wheat, soy, oatmeal, barley, and rice. Yes, that includes the “good” foods like Iams and Hill’s Science Diet. Not to mention that Hill’s Hypoallergenic Prescription Diet has soy! A couple higher-end products, like Blue, had only brewer’s rice in them—which Isis MIGHT be able to handle, but right now I’m not taking any chances.

I found one brand of canned cat food that contains no grains: By Nature. One 6 oz. can of Organic Cat Food: Canned cost $1.59 plus tax, but contains only meat, liver, water, guar gum, and vitamin supplements. It actually cost less per ounce than Blue, which contains rice. I bought a couple cans to supplement Isis’ ground chicken diet until I obtain supplement powder, and she freakin’ loves the food. If cost were not a concern, I could easily feed her exclusively By Nature canned cat food. For right now, we feed her a can about every third/fourth day, and some extra cans are stashed in the cupboard in case of emergency.

How wonderfully is Isis doing on her new diet?

• She gained 1.5 pounds back
• Her coat is thick and she’s practically stopped shedding
• She sleeps more peacefully and takes longer naps
• She is more social with us and our other 2 cats
• She purrs more than she ever has before
• Her poop no longer requires immediate evacuation of the neighborhood

Seriously, on that last point: for over a year, we had to clean both litter boxes at least once a day. Her poop is now normal and we don’t think she even goes every day anymore. I’ve never been so happy to clean the litter!

Everybody in the house is enjoying life a little more these days.

Isis is now about 9 years old and has been with us since she was between 6 and 12 months old. She was a gaunt and dirty stray when we took her off the mean apartment complex streets. We soon discovered that she had worms… and was pregnant. But we took good care of her, eventually found good homes for her 5 kittens, and she became our little darling.

Our lives were content as a two-cat family. Isis is a tiny cat who at her fattest weighed 7.5 pounds—a contrast to Loki’s bumbling 20-pound average. Except for an occasional can of cat food or licking leftover milk out of a cereal bowl, both cats have eaten standard dry cat food their whole lives. We tried some “light” food for Loki at one point, but that didn’t seem to do much good for his weight (or mood) and we always ended up back at budget-friendly Purina Cat Chow in the blue bag.

When Phoebe joined the family in the summer 2007, Isis made it known that she was not happy with our little addition. She started shedding more and eating less. We figured she needed more time to adjust. In November that year, we discovered a lump on her belly. I flipped my shit a little worrying that it was cancer, but it turned out to just be a hernia. We opted for surgery, which went fine, and the scar healed nicely.

But she basically stopped eating.

She started hanging around the kitchen—crying every time we opened the fridge and gladly eating a scrap of chicken or licking out a bowl of human food—so we knew she was hungry. She went back to the vet in January 2008 for her annual shots, and he told us that older cats will sometimes start to become picky eaters for no apparent reason.

We tried some different dry food brands and types—sensitive stomach, senior cat, indoor formula, etc.—and she turned her nose up at it all. Though we were reluctant to give her canned food, mostly because of its much higher price point, we eventually gave in because she was just so skinny. Even worse than the gaunt state she had been in as a pregnant stray with worms.

She wolfed down any canned food we gave her. “Great!” we thought, until she started puking it up. This is where the story gets gross. I’ve never smelled anything more disgusting than freshly-horked canned cat food puke. My nose and mouth are twitching just thinking about it. And sometimes, the barf was more than just a pile of half-digested muck; it was a projectile vomit spray that almost impressed us more than it gave us a gag reflex. And what she managed to keep down had an odor that made the paint peel when it came out into the litter box.

It was at this point that we purchased a Hoover steam cleaner. It is probably one of the best household decisions we’ve ever made.

We tried feeding her in smaller increments with the logic that she was eating too fast. That just made her barf smaller amounts and cry more often from hunger. We took her to the vet, who did a blood panel and stool screening and found nothing wrong, and whose only suggestion was to try different types of food. In the summer of 2008, shortly after being laid off from my job, I thought she was going to die of starvation or whatever undetectable disease she had. I spent a lot of time cuddling with her, listening to the horrifyingly loud gurgles that came from her bowels, and wishing that there was a way for me to make it all better.

Maybe it was the full-time attention I was giving her that made me notice something about her reaction to food. We were buying 24-packs of Friskies canned food, which came in four flavors: Salmon, Ocean Whitefish, Chicken, and Mixed Grill. One day I suddenly realized that she was puking her food up within a half hour when she ate the salmon flavor, but keeping the other flavors down.

We banned salmon from her diet, and suddenly we were cleaning up less puke. A couple weeks later, I experimented with banning all fish products from her diet. She still had some major gurgling sounds in her belly, but she nearly stopped vomiting all together; it was like a Get Out of Hurl-Jail Free card.

Except we also needed a Get Out of Diarrhea-Jail Free Card.

Okay, everyone knows that poop stinks. Ingesting different foods creates varying levels of smell and consistency in mammals’ excrement. But Ben and I were still dealing with some major “EVERYONE OUT OF THE ROOM, NOW!” situations after Isis visited the litter box and dropped a pile of mud (thankfully she always used the litter box!).

Now imagine that you’ve lived in a pleasantly lavender-filled area your whole life, and then someone suddenly hits you over the head and shoves you into a wormhole that dumps you into an open cesspit swamp, and the fumes are entering your pores and making you cry and you can’t scream because if you do you’ll simply become a part of the toxic slurry.

That’s essentially what happened to us every day, sometimes twice a day, after Isis came bolting out of the pet door into the family room from the Fumigation Area.

But you know what? Constant diarrhea was still better than having to clean up puke and that crap every day. (And I should let everyone know that Ben cleaned the litter box 99% of the time because he is my HERO.) (Also, our friend Laura cleaned the litter box while we were out of town a couple times, and I don’t know what you’ve done for your friends lately but she never complained once and is basically the most selfless person ever.)

I finally took Isis to a different vet a few weeks ago for a second opinion. He did a really thorough exam, and discovered that she has an unknown lump in her belly or a pendular kidney. Probably a pendular kidney, since she looks (somehow! still!) healthy otherwise. I started to feel like he thought I was just an over-reactive cat owner (“my cat’s shit stinks! make it stop!”) until, in a very out-of-character move, Isis took a steaming dump in her carrier as soon as she was put back in. The vet was able to get a fresh stool sample… and I nearly vomited right there in that little exam room as he scooped it into the vial.

The vet cleaned out the carrier for me and thus greatly endeared himself to me. He talked about the possible tests that could be done to find out what’s wrong with Isis, and the probability of finding nothing. He brought up Irritable Bowel Syndrome, something I’d heard of in humans but never in animals.

“It basically means we don’t know what the heck is wrong,” the vet said.

I told him about the fish sensitivity I thought Isis had, and the he suggested that I try feeding her some Science Diet prescription-only hypoallergenic cat food and see if that worked for her.

I came home with the seed of “Hey, it could be food allergies!” in my head. Isis wouldn’t touch the $2.19/can prescription food at first, but on the second day she ate it when mixed with some Friskies, and then the third day she ate it by itself. I looked at the label to see what made the food “hypoallergenic” and was surprised to see corn and soy in the top three ingredients. Soy? WTF? That’s a documented allergen in some human mammals I know.

We didn’t notice a change in Isis’s poop with the “hypoallergenic” food, but by then I had done some internet research on feline-specific irritable bowel syndrome and found two great resources: The Basics of Feline Nutrition by veterinarian Lisa A. Pierson and CatNutrition.org. If you own a cat—even one without Feline IBS—I highly recommend that you visit those two websites.

In summary, cats are obligate carnivores. This means that in the wild a cat’s diet consists nearly entirely of meat, and it is really not surprising that cats can develop problems with digestion and even skin allergies from all the crap that’s in commercial pet foods, like grains and other unnecessary carbohydrates. Dogs can still develop sensitivities to grains, but their systems are much more capable of handling them (and other non-foods like aluminum foil and other dogs’ poop).

I took some suggestions from those two websites and bought a whole chicken (about 5 pounds for $5), which I cooked and ground up with the bones in all. I used the meat grinder attachment for my KitchenAid stand mixer for the first time since receiving it as a wedding gift in 2004. It worked wonderfully!

We fed that double-ground chicken carcass to Isis for two days. And the diarrhea stopped.

GONE.

No more gurgling sounds in her belly and no puking. Isis slept for most of those first two days, probably getting the first restful sleep she’s had in over a year. She’s already gained half a pound and is now inching closer to a healthy 6 pound weight. Her fur seems thicker and she seems happy.

So today, on Valentine’s Day, Ben and I expressed our love for Isis by spending an hour or so cooking some more chicken, then grinding it all up and portioning it into containers to freeze. She has enough food for a couple weeks now. I’m not quite ready to give her raw meat, so I hope that whatever enzymes she loses from the cooking won’t affect her too seriously. I mean, putting things into perspective, she’s a lot better off than she was just a couple weeks ago.

And so are we.

I’m taking Isis back to the vet next week to double check that lump in her belly and have blood drawn to rule out thyroid problems, just in case. I’m taking with me the Open Letter to Veterinary Professionals, written by Anne of CatNutrition.org, with hopes that my vet will not recommend carbohydrate-filled pet food to other pet owners who are experiencing the same heartbreaking and vomit-inducing troubles that we’ve been through.

Obligate carnivore. It’s part of my vocabulary now.

Cute as we look there, the rest of the night was spent fighting for control of our band’s tour schedule.

Phoebe had a hard time with our new arrival since it took attention away from her. We would have let her participate, if only she’d had opposable thumbs or a less whiny singing voice.

Loki would rather watch us play Rock Band than participate. Also, can you get him another beer while you’re up?

While in Colorado last week, my Aunt Jeanette lovingly donated her hair stylin’ services to me after hours. She liked the way the color was turning out.

Did I mention that the color was purple? The demi-permanent color streaks have sadly washed out quite a bit already. Next time, I going for more purple and more permanent!

And finally, here’s my sister as she watches the transformation. Not only is she smarter than me, but she’s also a much better dresser. (Geekiness, though? I win, hands down.)