Monthly Archives: August 2006

On Maggie

I’ve been having a remarkably blah run of days. I’d like it to stop. With a change for the feeling better, please.

I took Maggie into the vet yesterday to check for a UTI and unexpectedly ended up having to leave her overnight, which mildy traumatized me because the last two times I walked out of the vet without a cat it was for good. The vet called me a little while ago, and there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that she doesn’t have a UTI. The bad news is that the sample they took from one of her kidneys is showing an abnormally high level of some sort of enzyme, and they’re concerned it may be indicative of something not good. (Hey, it was a lot of technical jargon; I just know my cat’s sort of okay but maybe not, and it’s probably not fatal, and she’s old, and old cats just start to break down, and sometimes it can be fixed and sometimes it can’t, and sometimes it’s not worth fixing for the quality or length of life that will be left to them anyway.) So we’re putting her on a ten-day course of antibiotics to see if that helps, and if not, they want to take x-rays to see if there’s stones in her bladder.

Gah. The money for that I do not have, and I don’t know what to do if things don’t get better. I’m lucky I had the money to cover this first battery of tests. It means that the CD player for the car has to wait until mid-September when my cheques arrive, which sucks because we wanted it for the Labour Day drive out to Toronto, but I don’t think anyone will complain about where the money had to go instead. (And if you want to, allow me to direct you to my husband, the official Complaints Department of the house, and I’m sure he’ll handle your complaint with the sensitivity it deserves.)

The annoying thing is that according to the general check-up the vet did, Maggie is officially in remarkable health for a fifteen year old cat. Except for this odd kidney enzyme thing, and the urinating in places not-the-litterbox. If it ends up being a behavioural issue, again, I don’t know what we will do. I don’t particularly want to think about it right now. I’m going to focus on the antibiotics targeting the mystery problem instead. She’s been my best feline friend for fifteen years; heck, she’s been my best feline friend ever. She was the first cat I got when I moved out. Maggie has been with me through thick and thin, and after saying goodbye to two other cats in the past ten months, I’m just not ready to do it again. I don’t think I’ll ever be ready. But give me maybe three more years with her, and I’ll be more prepared.

Song For Cricket

As part of the August Writing project I’ve been writing poetry each day — some long, some short, some freestyle, some with personally chosen challenges like exactly ten syllables per line, and so forth. (And no, you won’t find them, because they’re all community-locked.) The past two days I have written deliberately bad haiku about Cricket being in heat and yearning for the boy cat love, because it amuses me.

The Baron has taken this and run with it. This is “a Cramps kinda stomper”, as he puts it, raw and raunchy, which incorporates some of the lines and phrases I wrote in the haiku. You can practically hear the grinding punk music thrashing away in your mind as you read the lyrics.

Friday Night

I love my boy, who has been going to bed awake after his night-time milk with a book and his bunny, and reading said book to said bunny till he falls asleep. It’s adorable to hear him.

His appetite’s diminished this past week. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not. It happened pretty suddenly, and I suspect it’s teething-associated. He was a voracious little guy, so this new lack of interest in food is a bit disconcerting. I just make sure he has a lot to snack on now and again. Maybe he’s simply too taken up with the whole walking thing. He’s spending fifty percent of his time walking, and the remaining fifty still crawling now. Every day he does a little more.

The heat’s back up, with humidex too, so naturally I’m making soup tonight. Leek and potato, all from the local farm produce we get in weekly baskets. Mmmm. As Scarlet mentioned we’re getting mostly odd lettuces and greeny things, which are okay but tend to not get used as much as the real veggies in these weekly food deliveries. I was hoping for more useful stuff. We just don’t eat enough lettuce-type stuff to make this worthwhile. We’ll see how things shift as the later harvests start kicking in; maybe it will be worth doing again next year.

Okay. I think it’s time for a glass of wine to toast Karine’s birthday in absentia. Our insurance agent ended up calling this afternoon to make an appointment for this evening, and since both HRH and I needed to sign the forms we couldn’t go out to Karine’s birthday pub night. And I have to go chop more leeks, and puree potatoes. (And I thought my pureeing days were over!)

ESTC Update

Total words, ESTC: 12,974
Total words today: 1,415

Zokutou word meterZokutou word meter
12,974 / 50,000
(25.9%)

And in the space of three thousand words, we go from being a fifth done to a quarter done.

Yay me. Now: chicken wings. Or laundry, then chicken wings. And book.

Breaking The Universe

I am fairly certain that I am confusing a goodly portion of the universe by ordering pregnancy books. In fact, more pregnancy books are due to arrive here over the next couple of weeks than I ordered when I was pregnant.

This amuses me.

In other news, when the postman rang the bell to hand me a parcel today, Cricket came a-running, warbling her hopes. “Did the boy cats I ordered arrive? Are those the boy cats? Please give me the boy cats!”

I petted her, told her that no, there were no boy cats, and she wandered sadly off to curl up in the laundry basket again. Every now and again she gives a mournful little mew, the kitten equivalent of a doleful sigh.

I am mildly bewildered as to the order in which these books are arriving, however. I ordered four from the same store, and the one that just got here was the last to be shipped out. In fact, when I placed the order it was out of stock, and I was warned that it take three to four weeks to be sent to me. And it’s here first. The books that were in stock that shipped the day before this one are nowhere to be seen yet; they probably won’t arrive till Monday. Everything ships from the same warehouse; everything is coming by the same method. I do not understand our postal system in the least.

Ah, well, I now have one of the books I needed for research, and I’m about a hundred words away from the daily quota, so I think I’ll heat up the chicken wings that are in the fridge and settle down with a highlighter and some sticky notes.

ESTC Update

Total words, ESTC: 11,553
Total words today: 1,565

Zokutou word meterZokutou word meter
11,553 / 50,000
(23.1%)

See? I just have to open a file, decide what topic I’m going to work on that isn’t research-dependent (tonight it was journaling), and go. Well, that and take The Tragically Hip out of my playlist rotation. And switch off the router so that I can’t go online, and so the whine cuts out. I never really notice how insidious the whine of the router is until I turn it off, and then I wonder how I can concentrate on anything with it going.

Just to make a point to myself, I worked out some numbers as I calculated this evening’s word count. Turns out I’m already ahead of this week’s must-be-at-this-total-by-the-end-of-Friday-to-be-on-schedule word count. Every little bit over the daily word quota helps. And my natural need to push the envelope to give myself breathing room means that I automatically artificially inflate the daily quota. I am so good at doing this that I have been firmly misremembering the daily quota as being 1,300 instead of 1,200. So with my (misremembered) daily quota being 1,300, I’ve been unofficially aiming for a minimum 1,500 each day in order to create a safety net. That’s 300 words over my actual quota. Three days of that and I’m almost 1K ahead of the game. And that’s assuming I don’t fly past my quota mark, which usually happens.

There’s a lot more going on than quantity, of course. What I’m writing is important. I don’t like to put it down unless it sounds decent. It’s just that publishers like tidy numbers when you hand everything in, and aiming for the general figure they’ve asked for or you’ve pitched helps you grasp how much room you have to fill and move around in. The wordmeter is an artifical judge of how complete a work is. But it shows you how many miles there are to go, even if it doesn’t show you how to get there. The earlier I finish the rough draft, the sooner I can polish it.