EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLARS?!!!!!!!

All right, nine hundred and sixty-five dollars, including the initial check-up.

Because the phone was out, the vet could not contact me to inform me that they would be extracting ELEVEN teeth from my cat's head. I figured when they told me her mouth was in nasty shape that they'd probably have to give her a shot or something, but eleven teeth? Dori's only four years old. My other cat Bubbette lived sixteen years and never had to have her teeth cleaned, so it never occurred to me that Dori was prone to hereditary mouth rot. Since the original estimate was about four hundred dollars, you can quite well imagine the shock of learning that it was more than double. They gave me a little pill bottle full of her teeth, which by the way were disgusting. I shook the teeth in the bottle. What was I supposed to do with her nasty teeth? Stick them under my pillow and hope the tooth fairy would bring me a check for eight hundred bucks? I was tempted, just slightly.

The time between picking up the cat from the vet and Ben coming home yesterday was a trifle tense. On the way home I muttered to myself about how Ben was going to have a cow.

Henry asked, "Is Daddy going to go to the farmer place and get a cow and put it in the back yard?"

No, Daddy's going to get really mad and probably yell a lot...

Ben met us at the Halloween carnival at church where I informed him of the damages. I'm glad we were at church as it limited all sorts of things he might have said in a less holy place. He took it a lot better than I thought he would.

I guess it worked out well for Dori. If the phone had been working she'd still have a mouth full of rotten teeth.

One good thing: the phone line I cut did absolutely nothing to damage the phone. A stupid chunk in the phone lines outside corroded. And the phone guy didn't charge us anything. Earlier I'd seen a phone company truck over at the neighbor's house, but didn't think anything of it. So this whole time I was stressing about being a huge idiot over a complete coincidence.

I ought to call the old lady at the phone company back and tell her that no, stupid genes do not run in my family, but then I'd have to explain why Ben went to eat at White Castle. Of course, he only did it on a personal dare (White Castle is mentioned in a Beastie Boys song), and he hated it. I laughed at him because he ate all four of the little turd-burgers but he insisted he did so out of principle because, after all, he paid for them.