Zenith/Nadir
Zenith: After Macki and I picked up thewronghands late at night Friday, we all slept in Saturday morning, had a late breakfast at Mallorca (a diner in an oasis of expensive tourist-oriented restaurants), and finally got on the road around 1. We got to El Yunque, billed as the only tropical rainforest in the National Parks system, enjoyed a waterfall and a vista point at the side of the road, and had a pleasant, not-too-difficult hike to another waterfall, where I got into the little pool and swam under the fall (wow forceful water). It was very crowded both in and out of the water, though, so we didn't hang out for too long. We walked back and spent awhile close to the head of the trail just listening to the birds, frogs, and other critters making noise amongst the trees. It was a little cooler, since El Yunque is on a mountain, and overall a lovely day for a hike, particularly since the tree canopy meant that the unforgiving Caribbean sun was filtered out and not burning our pale bodies.
After El Yunque, we drove to some roadside kiosks for unimpressive fried food. (We passed by PONYLANDIA on the way - just a horseback trip place, apparently, but we all thought it was a hoot.) Food seemed like a good idea. We were hungry, we'd be out on the water for a while, and we had a good long while before we were due at our next stop: the bioluminescent bay, Laguna Grande, at Fajardo. Or so I thought - I was estimating how long it'd take to get there based on last weekend's trip to another part of the Fajardo bay (to board a catamaran and go snorkeling). The bio bay part, it turned out, was much farther from the main highway. We might have been fine on time... except we'd gotten very poor, vague, and sometimes contradictory directions from the kayaking company guy, who continued to be unhelpful the multiple times we called him as we drove around lost. ("You're going to be late," he scolded me. And whose fault is that? Ass.) It was dark, we were really lost, unhelpful kayak guy was unhelpful, and I lost my temper, as I did every damn time I got in the car while Macki was here. (Poor Macki got a lot more exposure to the Behind-the-Wheel Dragon Lady than most people ever do, and the last several days were, weirdly, more stressful than most of my driving experiences have been; I've learned patience and been way less Dragon Lady while down here. Mostly.)
In the end, we were half an hour late, and everyone else had left when we got there. (Bonus of it being kayaks rather than a catamaran: other people can go on time, and you can still go without being left behind or making others late.) But a super-nice kayaking guide stayed behind to give us the personal tour; he put Macki and himself in one kayak and thewronghands and me in another, and off we went. We kayaked through mangroves, which I'd done before when I'd first gotten here, but luckily this time thewronghands was steering so we didn't hit the pointed branches and roots of the mangroves. (Hurrah, excellent steering. I suck at that.) Finally we emerged out of the mangrove channel and into the lagoon.
The bio bay is AWESOME. It is basically the Edward Cullen of ecosystems. Microscopic dinoflagellates emit light when their cells are pressured, so the cut of the kayak through the water, the sweep of the paddle, your hand, all create these bright swirls of sparkles in the dark water. I never got tired of it, and all too soon (well, even sooner since we had to go back at the same time as everyone else), we had to turn back. Nature is so cool. Boom de ah dah, boom de ah dah...
We got in the car and left Fajardo - making our way through a group of people standing outside a bar with a ton of horses tied up all around, for no readily visible reason - and got back to San Juan. We'd thought of going to a party a fellow clerk was having in another part of town, but I realized I was really tired. We went to an Indian fusion place, Tantra, for dinner, and it was amazing. Cute waiter, very nice owner, good decor, terrific food. Plus I got to order a salty lassi since they didn't just have mango, hurray. Got home and passed out, very very full.
Nadir: This morning I woke up and Natasha was missing. Oh no, not again. Last time this happened I spent half a day getting her out of the unoccupied building next door to mine. For a while after that, I'd locked both cats inside at night and while I was out, but had gradually started letting them go out again, and they had behaved themselves. I'm not sure what happened to Natasha this time (not that I know what she did last time): I didn't see her on the roof of that building, so I went down to the street to have a look. She yowled at me from where she was hiding under a car right in front of my door, and luckily she let me pull her out. She was hurt - she had a bloody nose and was limping, and she was plainly in pain. I called around, found out where the 24-hour emergency vet was, woke up thewronghands and told her the situation, and took off with scared Natasha, a little before 11 AM.
Of course, of course, everything had to go tragicomically wrong, it wasn't bad enough that the cat needed to go to the emergency room. Of course there would be some hideous traffic jam in Old San Juan due to some kind of sporting event or event afterparty, a jam the likes of which I'd never seen (and OSJ regularly gets clogged up), so it took me half an hour just to get out of my neighborhood. Finally I got to the vet and spent the next several hours waiting, glad I'd brought a book. It started pouring, really hard (even for here), and didn't let up. Meanwhile, my guests were stuck at home. My plans to take them to Sunday brunch and walk around El Morro and the Castillo San Cristobal? Dashed. I thought maybe they'd be able to hang out without me, but the driving rain, which lasted several hours, prevented them from having fun on their own. I got Natasha back around 3, just after Macki and thewronghands had left the house and gotten soaked in the process of finding a taxi, since none would come pick them up. They headed to the airport, and I... got on the freeway going the wrong way, into a gridlock miles long, while it was still pouring.
When I finally managed to exit the freeway, I got gas (and nearly exploded at the kid who first asked if he could help me pump my gas, then simply asked me for a quarter - REALLY A BAD IDEA TO BUG ME RIGHT NOW), and picked up a muffin at the Walgreen's nearby, since I hadn't eaten since dinner the night before and I was about to pass out. Then I got back onto the gridlock going the other way, which was caused largely by the fact that the roads here are uniformly so poorly engineered that they flood - deeply - whenever there's a storm. WHICH IS EVERY COUPLE DAYS OR SO. At least the rain had let up by then. Really, with everything else going wrong, I figured I would probably get in a car accident in the rain with my injured cat in the car just to top things off.
Worst. Day. Ever.
Natasha has a cast that totally envelops her front foreleg, and she is really unhappy about it. She slept under the bed for several hours, then came out to try to find somewhere else comfortable to sleep, growling every time she wanted to put her leg in a position the cast wouldn't permit her to. However, she was weirdly compliant in letting me administer her antibiotics (might've just been the sedative), and she's able to get up and down from fairly low spots like the bed and the futon chair. In three weeks, we go back to the vet to see if the splint can come off yet.
And for the rest of our time here, the cats can't go outside anymore except under my direct supervision. She fell from the third story and only got a bloody nose and a broken leg. I don't need to see what will happen next time. Poor thing. She had a worse day than I did. But I probably will still take her picture and send it in to animalswithcasts.com.
After El Yunque, we drove to some roadside kiosks for unimpressive fried food. (We passed by PONYLANDIA on the way - just a horseback trip place, apparently, but we all thought it was a hoot.) Food seemed like a good idea. We were hungry, we'd be out on the water for a while, and we had a good long while before we were due at our next stop: the bioluminescent bay, Laguna Grande, at Fajardo. Or so I thought - I was estimating how long it'd take to get there based on last weekend's trip to another part of the Fajardo bay (to board a catamaran and go snorkeling). The bio bay part, it turned out, was much farther from the main highway. We might have been fine on time... except we'd gotten very poor, vague, and sometimes contradictory directions from the kayaking company guy, who continued to be unhelpful the multiple times we called him as we drove around lost. ("You're going to be late," he scolded me. And whose fault is that? Ass.) It was dark, we were really lost, unhelpful kayak guy was unhelpful, and I lost my temper, as I did every damn time I got in the car while Macki was here. (Poor Macki got a lot more exposure to the Behind-the-Wheel Dragon Lady than most people ever do, and the last several days were, weirdly, more stressful than most of my driving experiences have been; I've learned patience and been way less Dragon Lady while down here. Mostly.)
In the end, we were half an hour late, and everyone else had left when we got there. (Bonus of it being kayaks rather than a catamaran: other people can go on time, and you can still go without being left behind or making others late.) But a super-nice kayaking guide stayed behind to give us the personal tour; he put Macki and himself in one kayak and thewronghands and me in another, and off we went. We kayaked through mangroves, which I'd done before when I'd first gotten here, but luckily this time thewronghands was steering so we didn't hit the pointed branches and roots of the mangroves. (Hurrah, excellent steering. I suck at that.) Finally we emerged out of the mangrove channel and into the lagoon.
The bio bay is AWESOME. It is basically the Edward Cullen of ecosystems. Microscopic dinoflagellates emit light when their cells are pressured, so the cut of the kayak through the water, the sweep of the paddle, your hand, all create these bright swirls of sparkles in the dark water. I never got tired of it, and all too soon (well, even sooner since we had to go back at the same time as everyone else), we had to turn back. Nature is so cool. Boom de ah dah, boom de ah dah...
We got in the car and left Fajardo - making our way through a group of people standing outside a bar with a ton of horses tied up all around, for no readily visible reason - and got back to San Juan. We'd thought of going to a party a fellow clerk was having in another part of town, but I realized I was really tired. We went to an Indian fusion place, Tantra, for dinner, and it was amazing. Cute waiter, very nice owner, good decor, terrific food. Plus I got to order a salty lassi since they didn't just have mango, hurray. Got home and passed out, very very full.
Nadir: This morning I woke up and Natasha was missing. Oh no, not again. Last time this happened I spent half a day getting her out of the unoccupied building next door to mine. For a while after that, I'd locked both cats inside at night and while I was out, but had gradually started letting them go out again, and they had behaved themselves. I'm not sure what happened to Natasha this time (not that I know what she did last time): I didn't see her on the roof of that building, so I went down to the street to have a look. She yowled at me from where she was hiding under a car right in front of my door, and luckily she let me pull her out. She was hurt - she had a bloody nose and was limping, and she was plainly in pain. I called around, found out where the 24-hour emergency vet was, woke up thewronghands and told her the situation, and took off with scared Natasha, a little before 11 AM.
Of course, of course, everything had to go tragicomically wrong, it wasn't bad enough that the cat needed to go to the emergency room. Of course there would be some hideous traffic jam in Old San Juan due to some kind of sporting event or event afterparty, a jam the likes of which I'd never seen (and OSJ regularly gets clogged up), so it took me half an hour just to get out of my neighborhood. Finally I got to the vet and spent the next several hours waiting, glad I'd brought a book. It started pouring, really hard (even for here), and didn't let up. Meanwhile, my guests were stuck at home. My plans to take them to Sunday brunch and walk around El Morro and the Castillo San Cristobal? Dashed. I thought maybe they'd be able to hang out without me, but the driving rain, which lasted several hours, prevented them from having fun on their own. I got Natasha back around 3, just after Macki and thewronghands had left the house and gotten soaked in the process of finding a taxi, since none would come pick them up. They headed to the airport, and I... got on the freeway going the wrong way, into a gridlock miles long, while it was still pouring.
When I finally managed to exit the freeway, I got gas (and nearly exploded at the kid who first asked if he could help me pump my gas, then simply asked me for a quarter - REALLY A BAD IDEA TO BUG ME RIGHT NOW), and picked up a muffin at the Walgreen's nearby, since I hadn't eaten since dinner the night before and I was about to pass out. Then I got back onto the gridlock going the other way, which was caused largely by the fact that the roads here are uniformly so poorly engineered that they flood - deeply - whenever there's a storm. WHICH IS EVERY COUPLE DAYS OR SO. At least the rain had let up by then. Really, with everything else going wrong, I figured I would probably get in a car accident in the rain with my injured cat in the car just to top things off.
Worst. Day. Ever.
Natasha has a cast that totally envelops her front foreleg, and she is really unhappy about it. She slept under the bed for several hours, then came out to try to find somewhere else comfortable to sleep, growling every time she wanted to put her leg in a position the cast wouldn't permit her to. However, she was weirdly compliant in letting me administer her antibiotics (might've just been the sedative), and she's able to get up and down from fairly low spots like the bed and the futon chair. In three weeks, we go back to the vet to see if the splint can come off yet.
And for the rest of our time here, the cats can't go outside anymore except under my direct supervision. She fell from the third story and only got a bloody nose and a broken leg. I don't need to see what will happen next time. Poor thing. She had a worse day than I did. But I probably will still take her picture and send it in to animalswithcasts.com.