They’re going to take a shot at another procedure tomorrow that might, if it works and he gets lucky, keep Chaplin from needing any more surgery.

I’ll refrain from spelling out the details to spare the delicate sensibilities of the gentlemen in the audience, but let’s just say that if this works, the outcome is far, far preferable to if it doesn’t.

Please, keep my poor, stoned little buddy in mind tomorrow. He could really use a break from all the complications and pain. Thank you.

I went to visit Chaplin tonight during the animal hospital’s visiting hours, and I’ve come back significantly reassured about how he’s doing. Especially after what happened last night.

After I posted last night, there were complications. While they were trying to cathetrize and manually unblock him, his urethra tore (cue all the guys reading this instinctively reaching for their crotches while sharply inhaling through their teeth).

They brought in a surgeon to give him emergency surgery, and while they did get a tube in to drain his bladder, they couldn’t repair the tear itself because he wasn’t stable enough.

So of course I was finding all this out over about two hour intervals over the course of the night, and I just completely flipped out. I barely slept last night, and I was really upset all day today.

But he seemed to be doing okay when I saw him. They basically have him stuffed into an oversized tube sock with little holes for his front paws to keep him from getting at the area where he had surgery last night. They had to shave a significant portion of his belly fur for the surgery, so that’s going to look pretty funny once he’s out of the sock.

And he is high as a kite. He basically had this look going:

So he was a little out of it, but he seemed much better than he did when I’d dropped him off last night. They told me he already ate an entire can of wet food and was well on his way to finishing a second when I came by.

He will need more surgery - depending on how his urethra does on its own, they’re debating which of two surgeries to do. But having spent an hour with him and listening to the doctors talk about how much he’s improved in the last day, I’m confident that whichever they have to do, it’s going to work.

The numbers they’re throwing around for how much this is all going to cost are just ridiculous, and I’m not even going to pretend that I won’t be going to the First National Bank of Dad for an advance on my inheritance to pay for this.

I prided myself on having been able to get through the last four years without having to take any loans from him, even when I was unemployed for four months of this year. Pride is out the window right now, though, in favor of getting Chaplin home.

The good news is that apparently my aunt’s doing a lot better. I’m trying to figure out a way to get to Hartford for a few days but come back significantly earlier than I was going to, but the way the airlines work it looks like I may have to go for the whole week or not go at all.

All in all, I’m not going to be completely okay until he’s been home for a few days, but I’m at least able to pry myself off the ceiling now. And frankly, that’s a huge improvement after last night.

I thought the earlier barfing incident was just Chap’s usual adventures in hairball-tasticness, but apparently not.

He got really listless and cranky tonight, and after puking IN his litterbox then barely being mobile and crying in pain, I took him to the vet. He’s got some sort of urinary blockage that they’re going to have to surgically remove.

The bill just to walk out the door tonight was $1800. The estimate on keeping him there 2-3 days, which is what they anticipate, is $3000.

As much as that upsets me, what upsets me a lot more is the dead silence in my apartment right now. And that’s why I’m paying the money.

He’s my little buddy. I can’t bear the thought of him not being here when I come home. Not trying to randomly bite my arm off. Not eating me out of house and home.

And frankly I feel bad about how bad I feel about Chaplin, because my aunt, my mother’s sister, is also in the hospital right now.

I haven’t really written about this much, but she had a major heart attack two weeks ago that led to a whole bunch of major surgery - triple heart bypass AND surgery on both carotid arteries. I found out this afternoon she’s probably going to be stuck in the hospital for Christmas.

And yet the thing that’s just destroying me right now is my cat. Physical distance is probably part of it - once I get to Connecticut and see my aunt it’ll probably hit me a lot harder.

But right now, just listening to the clacking of the keyboard and the cracking of the furnace, I miss the crunching of cat food and the yowling at the possum or the other cats that sneak onto the patio.

This is going to be a loooooooong week. Updates on all fronts as I have them.

One of my PAs who’s going to be in town for the holidays agreed to come by and feed Chaplin for a couple days (for a nominal fee, obviously) while I’m gone. In order to make sure he knows where I live and where everything is, I had him come by this morning.

So as I’m showing him around, Chaplin walks up, says hello, then immediately proceeds to the corner to go puke up a GIANT hairball along with a bunch of food. It was one of the more disgusting piles of puke I’ve encountered from him.

Of course this guy has never had cats, so he was like, “Uh, is that normal?”

Yeah. Yeah it is. Thanks, kitty!

What the fuck is going on with the weather out West? First it snows six inches in Antelope Valley (just north of Los Angeles) this morning, then I see this:

That’s the big fake Pharoah at the Luxor. In fucking LAS VEGAS. Yes, that’s right, folks, Las Vegas got six inches of snow today, too.

I first heard about this when Joel told me his trip had been cancelled because his co-workers got stranded in a snowstorm in Vegas. The Vegas airport owns neither a snowplow nor a de-icer, so they called him at O’Hare to say, “Yeah, don’t get on the plane.”

Seriously, this is just ridiculous. I’ve had one big shoot that keeps getting cancelled because of weather, and at the rate things are going with both that shoot and the overall weather, the next cancellation is going to be because it’s raining blood.

A day that was supposed to be a sixth day became a lazy day yesterday, and by doing so I actually managed to get shit done today.

By being a complete useless lump all day Saturday, I saved up the energy to do laundry, go grocery shopping, swim 3km in damn good time, dye my hair, and even remake the bed.

Well, technically not remake the bed yet, since Chaplin keeps sitting on the covers and getting all bitey as I try to make it, rendering any attempts to do so both useless and slightly perilous. God help me if I ever get a girlfriend who’s not a complete slob likes me and insists I make the bed every day rather than whenever I damn well feel like it.

Anyway, I see the finish line at work - Maybe spilling over into a couple of shoot-free office days on Christmas week, but lord, we’re close.

Christmas won’t be quite the hibernation week in Connecticut I was expecting because of some family medical fun I won’t get into here, but it won’t be work. And at this point I need a simple break from work more than I need the hibernation I traditionally take this time of year.

Alllllllmost there.

In an update to my earlier post, now that I’ve tried it out….I am DEFINITELY never leaving the house again.

As someone working in scripted TV production…holy shit, this is bad news: NBC is replacing its entire 10pm hour with a nightly prime-time hour of Jay Leno.

If you look purely at the numbers, it absolutely makes sense for fourth-place NBC, whose ratings have completely tanked this year due to the fact that they put on some atrocious, atrocious television shows this fall, and who just completely gutted the ranks of their execs:

Though Mr. Leno will command an enormous salary, probably more than $30 million a year, the cost of his show will be a fraction of what a network pays for dramas at 10 p.m. Those average about $3 million an episode. That adds up to $15 million a week to fill the 10 p.m. hour. Mr. Leno’s show is expected to cost less than $2 million a week.

So let’s run some math here. Leno does about 46 weeks worth of shows, and at $2 mil a week that’s about $92 mil a year. Scripted shows do 22 episodes each, at 5 per week and $3 mil apiece that’s $330 mil a year. This change stands to save NBC Universal $238 million annually.

Let me repeat that: Paying Jay Leno $30 million a year will save NBC Universal almost a quarter billion dollars a year.

And for those of us on the scripted side of things, where network work has already been getting squeezed out by cheaper reality shows, this is a HUGE blow. Work has already been slowing because of the recession and the impending SAG strike.

For NBC to summarily declare they’re going to give up 5 hours a week is a brutal addition to the litany of problems facing everyone who works in scripted television. There are already too many people and not enough work to go around, and this is just going to make it infinitely worse.

I’m hopeful that cable’s going to continue to pick up the slack, but cable shows are, unfortunately, usually quite a bit less stable employment than network. Cable shows do 13-15 episodes in a normal season, or about 5-7 months worth of work. Networks shoot 22-24, or about 9-10 months worth of work.

Being on a good show on a network is almost like having a real job: If you’re in the office, you work almost year-round. If you’re in cable, you tend to bounce more from show to show, and it’s harder to form a team because everyone’s getting rotated into different schedules.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens. The common thread I’m finding in most commentary is that it’s a plan born of desperation on the part of NBC, but it brings to mind one of my favorite quotes from my favorite movie of all time, The Great Escape:

Now why didn’t anyone think of that before? It’s so stupid, it’s positively brilliant!

Many people assume that because I have a relative facility with technology, it does not randomly decide to hate on me the way it seems to with everyone else. To that, I counter with the events of this evening:

I fought with a writer’s crapware laden-computer for half an hour at the end of the night, ultimately forcing it to abandon its efforts to spit out all kinds of random pop-ups but not without going through several attempts at removal.

Massive problems with my phone (which randomly refuses to switch off roam, draning the battery pretty much immediately when it gets into that mode, thanks, Sprint!) have given way to coming home to no internets tonight.

Drove me crazy trying to figure out what it was, particularly after getting disconnected THRICE from Time Warner Cable’s lovely automated system which decided there were either “technical difficulties” or that my “call could not be completed at this time” at every turn.

However, I seem to have narrowed it down to a DNS issue - For the nerds in the house, I was pulling an IP address just fine but I couldn’t connect to squat, so I put in the OpenDNS.org DNS servers and it’s been smooth sailing from there.

Anyway, I have managed to fix (I think) two out of the three issues, but just because I usually have a half-wit idea on how to fix it doesn’t mean this shit doesn’t break on me.

Laz brought the extent of this situation to my attention, and the mind-boggling stupidity of it really floored me.

Sean Avery is a hockey player, something of a ladies’ man, and kind of a charming jackass, if that’s not a complete contradiction in terms. He said the following to some reporters before a game against Calgary:

I am really happy to be back in Calgary, I love Canada. I just want to comment on how it’s become like a common thing in the NHL for guys to fall in love with my sloppy seconds. I don’t know what that’s about. Enjoy the game tonight.

The “sloppy seconds” bit was a knock on either of a couple of actresses that Avery has dated (most suspicion is falling on Elisha Cuthbert of 24 fame, who’s currently dating a member of the Calgary Flames).

Now just reading that, you’d think the guy was being a bit of a smartass, trying to rile up his opponents. The NHL has reacted as if this were Victorian England and Avery had just impugned the chastity of the wives of the entire front office.

Avery actually got suspended for this comment. And what’s even worse, certain news outlets are bleeping or blanking out the phrase “sloppy seconds,” to my mind for no other purpose than to make his comment look way more offensive than it actually was.

When I heard about the suspension, I hadn’t seen his actual comments, so I thought he’d called her a cunt. Which is a significantly more offensive term to most women than “sloppy seconds.”

He’s not going to be winning himself any prizes other than Douche of the Week for publicly referring to his ex as “sloppy seconds.” I certainly wouldn’t like to be referred to as such, since I find the term obnoxious.

But to call it so offensive as to warrant a suspension is such a ridiculous stretch that I seriously can’t believe the NHL even considered it, let alone actually suspended the dumb guy.

I know there are a few other ovaried persons out there reading this, so I’ll throw it open to the comments: Do you find “sloppy seconds” to be offensive, obnoxious, both, or somewhere in between?