Good and bad

Good:

B and I saw Star Trek on Tuesday. It was freakin' awesome. I think I would have been deeply conflicted about what it did to Trek canon when I was 16, but that was before my affection for Star Trek was stomped on, ground into tiny pieces and fed to crocodiles by the never-ending parade of mediocre series that followed over the next decade. I think any loyalty I had to Star Trek canon ended at about the third episode of Voyager, because if canon is going to include that? By all means, feel free to change it.*

What I cared about was that it was very well-cast with actors who did a great job recreating the classic characters, it was exciting and it was interesting. Some of the action scenes towards the end were a bit overbright and choppy for my taste (although I'm a bit oversensitive to that sort of thing) and the implausibility of the science was migraine-inducing, even by Star Trek standards, but I went in with my brain mostly turned off anyway and I didn't care. It was fun to watch and I would gladly see what J.J. Abrams would do with a sequel.

*I remember the precise moment I was really, truly Over Star Trek. It was when I was in grad school watching tv in the middle of the day and over the credits, I heard an announcer say, "Tonight on Star Trek Voyager : a transporter accident turns Neelix and Tuvok into one creature - Tuvix!" It took me several minutes to decide I hadn't hallucinated hearing that.

Bad:

Lily is currently at the vet, recovering from surgery to remove a string she swallowed that got hooked around her tongue but managed to make its way down to her colon, cutting up her small intestines in the process. Ack. Poor little kitty. They sewed her up as best they could and she seems to be doing fairly well. We got a call this morning saying that she had a bit of a fever, but cats usually get fevers after this sort of abdominal surgery and they haven't called since, so she presumably hasn't taken any major turns for the worse.

I'm trying not to obsess too much about how hideously expensive this is going to be. Because of course this is exactly what we needed only a month before we have a baby and I stop working for two months, cutting our income by a third: emptying our savings account! For the cat! I mean, I really believe that getting a pet involves being willing to pay for reasonable health care (I wouldn't pay for cancer treatments, but I do feel things that are quite treatable and within our means should be done and this qualifies), but I have to admit, when B took the call from the vet this morning, while most of me was concerned about Lily's health, there was a little part of me that kept thinking, "She had better make it, because if there's anything worse than paying all that money, it's paying all that money for a dead cat."

Sigh. This is going to make life difficult. There are only three things we still need for the baby: diapers, car seat and bouncy seat, and we should be able to still afford them if we're frugal in other areas. But I had been trying to figure out what to do with K over the summer, since we were concerned about the effects of giving her a baby brother and yanking her out of her routine and away from her friends all at the same time. But I don't see how we can afford to continue to send her to her current preschool if I'm not working without dipping into savings, savings we no longer have. Argh.