113 posts from 2008

And now it's birthday stuff too.
Sheesh, enough already.

Here, we'll just put the candles on the the tree.

10017716~An-Angel-Lights-the-Candles-on-the-Christmas-Tree-Posters

There.
Make a wish.
Merry, happy, whatever.

(runs away quickly......   seriously, happy birfday, CP.)

I'm just not sure who.
Boe?
Maybe.
There is another candidate.

Boe is on huge antibiotics, big clavamox every 12 hours, on the assumption that the limp is a festering bite.
So he was due for a dose at 11pm, but couldn't be found.
I'd been trying to keep him in, what with the limp and all, but he shoved me out of the way and escaped.
And once he was out, there was no getting a hold on him, you just have to wait it out.
So I stay up, and it's midnight, it's 1am, 1:30, and he's still a no show.
Okay, sometimes he comes in around 4am and cuddles up in bed, so I put the pill in my PJ pocket and go to sleep.

8am, and no kitty.
So I get up and scour the neighborhood for nearly an hour, with special attention to crawl spaces and garages, calling in all directions.
No kitty.
I was actually on-line looking up the information for the Animal Shelter when they called.

Someone had "rescued" him.
A neighbor has evidently been feeding him for a while.
I had noticed he had become less diligent about showing up for meals, but assumed he was just being an obnoxious adolescent.
(And he was, but differently obnoxious.)
The neighbor assumed that because he ate her food he was an abandoned cat and needed it, rather than that he was being a brat and getting two dinners.

I gather this started pretty much as soon as Sisko and Molly moved in.
Maybe he was feeling a bit emotionally crowded by the new guys.
Or maybe, as a feral rescue, he thought the colony was getting crowded, and he should make sure there was enough food to go around.
Or maybe he is just plain a bratty cat.

The neighbor wasn't adopting him, only feeding him.
(Does the word opportunist come to mind? Bad kitty!)
The boy has severe trust issues, so he was in fact acting like a feral.
In any case, she noticed him limping, so she got a trap from Animal Services, caught him last night, and turned him in at the pound in the morning.
Which is why he wasn't coming home.

Being trained professionals at the shelter, they noticed the collar, the recently shaved belly, and the phone number, and deduced that perhaps he had a home.
They called us.
So the nice officer brought him back, with new chip in his shoulder, and a fresh lot of vaccines.

The boy is soooooo grounded.

After we finally got the beastie dealt with, got the tree more-or-less up, bought stuff for dinner on Christmas, and wrapped presents, we settled down for the evening, and put on the Christmas video (Death Defying Acts).
And Boe limped across the room.
Thanks boy.

So we went off to spend two hours at the Emergency Vet.
Hey, otherwise the poor man would be bored and lonely.
Now, two vet exams later, we still don't know exactly why the boy is limping.
The working hypothesis is that he got bitten on the quadriceps, and the bite is considering becoming an abscess, but isn't there yet.
He's on lots of antibiotics, and except for the limp, is just fine.

The fill-in vet was clearly a non-cat guy.
He put Boe down on the floor to watch him walk, and Boe - of course - dove under the chair and wouldn't come out.
"Here, boy," from across the room does not work on cats.
Is it T.S. Elliot who says a cat is not a dog?

As long as he was checking him out carefully, though, he discovered that the boy has one enlarged kidney, and one very little one.
It may just be the way he is put together.
Boe isn't even two yet, so it's a little early for kidney disease.
But we will be hearing from them when the radiologist gets back.

And all through the house, not a creature was...

Opps, well actually, there was this soft rustling noise coming from the (formerly) clean laundry in the bedroom, at about 3 am.
And finally a pink, decidedly non-feline, snout came out.

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2 comments

Images

I just heard that Alain Renoir died December 12th.
I'm so sad to hear this.

Renoir was the son/ grandson of the filmmaker/artist.
And an impressive person in his own right.
He trained as a cameraman with his father.
He fought in WWII ("the only person you'll ever meet who rode off to war on a horse, with a saber.")
And ended up coming to America and bumming around Big Sur, before going to study Old English at Harvard.
Which he always managed to make sound as if it had been done as some kind of lark.
He had the best laugh ever, and a great goofy accent.

He taught at UC Berkeley for years.
He founded the Comparative Literature Department there, the department I studied in, but left it in a snit shortly before I came.
But he was still over in the English Department, and you could take Chaucer, and Beowulf, and Old English Readings, and History of English, and MORE Old English Readings from him.
All of it worth taking, and great entertainment value at the same time.
Yes, as I remember someone saying, all the classes were basically just Alain on Alain.
But somehow you still ended up learning a heck of a lot.

I took the Chaucer class from him when I was working on campus, having dropped out of college a couple of years earlier.
It made me go start Latin.
And finish my B.A. (he wrote me a letter).
And go to graduate school (he wrote me a letter).
He was utterly supportive of his students, had the administrative savvy and connections to help them, and was completely generous with his time, attention, ideas, anything.
And at the same time he had enough distance on the whole academic game, and enough cynicism about it, that his advice was always based on the real world.

For example, the story I heard about why he walked out of Comp Lit was this:
Comp Lit had a horrendous system of exams.
The original old system was basically that everything was fair game, and you had no dictionary.
(For the Ph.D. that would be five day-long essays, including a translation of a hunk of text related to the question. Then an oral exam as well, where issues from the writtens would be addressed, as well as new material.)
He stood strongly for the no dictionary part of this, although there was strong student feeling on the subject.

His explanation was that the program needed this to have credibility in the job market, where - for example - a student doing French as a main language (out of three) would be competing against students from the French Department.
And that it would be doing the students no favors to weaken the exams only to make them then seem less strong candidates to potential interviewers.
And if there were issues about the difficulty of the exam process, the impossible amount of material to be covered and
all that, they would be ironed out between the students and their committees.
And then, while he was away on break, the faculty - people he had recruited - voted to allow dictionaries despite his known opposition.
Which he considered to have been done behind his back.
Which I suppose it was

And he went off to the English Department.

Then when he retired from UC, he uprooted himself entirely.
He walked away from his marriage, moved out of town, and basically had nothing else to do with the university.
I was busy having a baby at the time, and never really manged to connect with him after that.
I saw him briefly at Ralph Rader's funeral, but that was the last time I spoke with him.
Some people I know dropped in on him up in Dixon, but I never quite managed to track him down in his new incarnation out in the countryside.
I gather there was a pet duck, and space, and quiet.

I hope his passing was gentle.

Plague_demon_01

5 comments

You have to imagine as well a huge pile of tissues
Or here, perhap, if the guy was in a spiffy blue British Airways uniform.

Europe_a_prophecy_plague-400

You know when you travel and there's this awful person coughing and spewing germs all over and you want to kill them?
Well, that was us this time.

sorry.sorry.sorry.sorry.sorry.sorry.sorry.sorry.sorry.sorry.sorry.sorry.sorry.sorry.

I hope we didn't give the crud to a whole plane-load of people.
We tried not to.
We did medicate ourselves to the edge of safety.
And sit together at the back of the plane in our own two-person row, coughing on each other mostly.
And we brought lots of tissues, and a bag to stash them in.
Still, I hope we didn't infect the masses.

I can say that a ten+ hour flight with cramps (Sair), migraine (me) and galloping crud (both of us),  is pretty icky.
I can also say that British Airways people are very sweet - lots of tea and orange juice.
And what with a round trip, and a choice of lots of individually-played movies, I have now seen everything on their list that I can imagine sitting through.
(X-Files movie very unfortunate. Hellboy II, surprisingly okay. Dark Knight lovely. Mrs Pettigrew's One Day Holiday, nice. Bottle Shock very good - though I missed the end, and the dad guy was almost too annoying. Ghost Town, enjoyable, a surprise. Brideshead Revisited, well I wanted to like it, but just didn't, and it was skipping. 2001, not a movie to watch wen running a fever. And BBC news, and the map with the gigantoid plane image crawling across the map  -- Did I mention these were long flights?)

Finally home again, and still doing cat census.
Motley, met us at the door.
Silmi, on the couch.
Sisko, came running.
Molly, greeted me at the top of the stairs, wanting a pat and apparently believing she is my cat (yay).
The Wolf, snuck in at 9:30 this morning, but was thrilled to be picked up and patted. Is now shut in and being tame and purry. (When I don't lock him in, he runs off and sits outside in his fort and pretending to be feral.)
Boe was seen coming in for food at 3am by Sair. ("He gave me a look and went to eat.")
I want him to come in and get patted, and admit that he lives here before I count him.

Tom is staying in London a few more days, because he came out later.
Which is good, since almost as soon as he got there he came down with the crud.
The same night that Sair did - the synchronized sniffling and coughing was amazing to watch.
So I spent three days plying them both with tea and watching them sleep.
We did stumble out to the National Gallery one afternoon, and got a few errands done.
But mostly everyone else was just really sick.
So, assuming he is a bit better, Tom at least gets a few days to tourist about on his own.

Sair and I left the B&B in London at 7:30 with too much luggage (moving out of the dorm), took the Tube out to Heathrow.
We got home at 5pm here (1am London time).
I ran off and got her two veggie tacos with guac and an array of fresh salsas.
Then she had first go at the bath, and was unconscious on the couch before I got out of the tub at about 8pm (well, London time that's 4am).
So I got her a blanket and left her (Silmi on her feet, Motley at her head, and Sisko on the chair next to her).

Today is laundry, cleaning, and then off to see The Nutcracker at her ballet school here tonight.
Hey, more people to cough on!

And all of a sudden it's Dancing Bear's birfday!!!!!

Wishing you many bacony goodness treats, and a generally swell day.....
So glad you're around the 'hood.

I finally got Statcounter to install.
(Quit snickering....it isn't intuitive.)
Maybe if I just stop by here, a lot, it will count me.
I forget what I set it to count, anyway.
This should be depressing.

(At least this time it actually did install, so it notices if I come by.
Last time I tried it ignored me.)

Ah, and now I've sorta embedded a kitty widget.
Except that his box doesn't quite fit.
Oh well, he's just very cat like, and won't stay on my vox.

is a recipe I learned from a friend years ago.
and utterly simple.
I guess this is a little late for Thanksgiving this year....
but I make it at Christmas too.
And sometimes just to have it around any old time.

Cranberry Citrus Sauce.
(yummy)

You need:

Apricot jam, a small jar (a jar of Bonne Maman is good)
 a bag of fresh cranberries
three or four seedless tangerines, very fresh, and rinsed
a small packet of slivered almonds

Pick through the cranberries, and rinse them.
Toast the almonds by tossing them dry in a frying pan until they just begin to brown.
Quarter the tangerines, and remove the tough stem end.
Now liquify the entire tangerines, peels and all, in a blender, or with a hand blender, until they are reduced to a thick paste.

Empty the jam into a saucepan, and bring to a boil.
Add cranberries and the tangerine paste to the jam, and cook them lightly.
You don't want to overcook this and make the berries go all mushy, so watch carefully at this stage.
The cranberries will make little popping noises as they heat up.
When most of the cranberries are popping, add the toasted almonds, and remove from the heat.

In addition to being really good (some people around here are known to swipe it out of the fridge and eat it plain), it is also really, really pretty.
You can pour it into jelly jars and take it to pot lucks.