Update: various and sundry things

I stayed home completely on Tuesday and Wednesday with a high fever and general case of the yuck. Since Wednesday night, the fever went away, but I'm still coughing and have a sore throat. This will make the orchestra rehearsal for the Monday Bach concert interesting, but the conductor has already been warned I'm not at my best and wants me to give it a go anyway. I will bring along a thermos of throat coat tea. If I can get through my duet and aria without too much trouble, I may lay off of some of the choral parts to save my voice.Athena does have kidney disease, as I suspected earlier and is now confirmed by the blood work. We're giving her fluids and hope this will perk her up some. It's sad to see such a beloved cat in her decline, but I'd do just about anything to make her more comfortable.The kittens like to hover around Athena, which she tolerates. They are growing up into delightful companions. Narvi is a little brick of a kitten, thick and solid with a round head like a little teddy bear. He likes to play fetch with any number of cat toys and small stuffed animals we have around. Freya sometimes fetches, but is more likely to come up to one of us and meow for attention. I'm not always sure whether she wants to be cuddled or have someone to play with, but either one usually works. She's a petite little thing and likes to follow us around the house and get generally underfoot.The kittens did something funny last week, to the tune of $225. We had flooding in the basement I first assumed was caused by melting snow outside on the patio. Then we found it was a backed up floor drain. This is how we found out: I was mopping up water in the basement while Stephan and Emma were washing dishes upstairs. As soon as they emptied the sink, a bunch of foam came floating along in the basement swamp. As it turns out, once the roto rooter guy was finished, the drain hadn't really been that bad, except for a little blue foam ball. I knew exactly the cat toy he meant. Somebody was playing kitty golf. We tracked down the remaining foam balls and threw them out. Hopefully we won't have any more kitty golf in our drains!I had the first rehearsal for parts of "Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater" last night with the pianist/co-composer and two lead singers. I'm really excited that this will be extremely cool! Now I just have to finish up scene 3 and write the melodic material for scene 4 so I can pass it off to Meredith to harmonize.I'm off to practice Bach and make sure I'm at least singing all the right notes in orchestra rehearsal today even if many of them sound dreadful due to this cold.