Posy In Distress

With three pets, there seems to always be something going on with one of them, health-wise, and this winter it is Posy’s turn in the spotlight.  For most of the past few months she has looked like this:

Or this:

Basically at the beginning of January I slowly noticed that Posy – who cleans herself constantly on a normal day – was paying way too much attention to cleaning the tip of her tail.  I felt it and could feel some bumps that I thought were scabs, and figured she must have a skin condition that she gets from time to time, which is scabby in nature and tends to go away relatively quickly.  But the slurping of the tail continued, and the next time I looked a few days later, it was all bloody, so off to the vet we went!

It was determined that perhaps in response to an injury, Posy had practically licked off the tip of her tail;  ick, I know – the wound wasn’t pretty.  We didn’t see our usual vet, and the guy we did see suggested I get a blow-up e-collar, that would allegedly be more comfortable than the usual e-collar.  I ordered one and when it came I realized it wouldn’t work for Posy, who is a tiny cat, but has a thick neck and very constricted airways.  So I tried a soft e-collar (the blue one in the picture above), but when I first put it on, she looked at me and commenced licking the tip of her tail with the e-collar on, all challenging-like.

I was taking Plum to the vet for a check-up, so brought Posy along for the ride, and our usual vet thought she could bandage the tail.  This was a Saturday morning and actually worked beautifully until Sunday night when Posy decided she had had enough of the bandage, thank you very much.  So I put the blue cone of shame back on, and this time Posy seemed to have forgotten that she could technically still reach her tail from it.

Since then, she’s worn the collar for five or so days, and then I’ve taken it off and she’s been fine for a few days, until the wound starts to itch again and she returns to licking and then I find pools of blood on the floor and the collar goes back on.  The wound is definitely healing – it’s about a third the size it was originally, but she has real problems leaving it alone.

The obvious solution is that I need to leave the collar on longer than five or so days, but she gets so dejected with it on!  And she follows me around and purrs and is all around very needy, poor thing.  The vet shaved the end of her tail, too, so it looks like a deflating balloon now. 

She is really such a sweet cat, on the whole.  She lets me put the collar on, and she is very, very tolerant with Owen, who gives her a little too much lovin’.  Owen will now imitate the voice I give Posy and will make her talk back to him, which makes me very proud, like my work here is done [brushes off hands].

Star Wars Valentines

Owen is all about Star Wars right now, so when I saw Star Wars valentines in the store a couple of weeks ago, I bought them without examining them too closely.  Yesterday we got them out so that he could address them to his friends, and I realized that they didn’t have envelopes, and the spot where he had to write the names was a relatively small circle. 

I talked him into not attempting to write his classmates’ names (they are up to letter Q in pre-K so he can mostly write A-Q, but a) not small and b) if he forgets how a letter goes he tends to just make it up with a few extra squiggles), and to just concentrate on writing O-W-E-N in the small “from” circle allotted.

Luckily we had a lot of extras so there was room for error.  He can write a respectable OWEN when he is in the mood, but this was the first time he had to write twenty Owens in a row.  He did a good job, despite all my nagging (he doesn’t yet understand that he really has to write the four letters in a particular order, and thus didn’t understand why O-E-N with a W fit in randomly underneath or on top or on the side might be a little cryptic to a beginning reader; he also likes to experiment with new ways of “holding” the pen.  Sigh.)

Here are some of the outtakes that didn't make the cut:

And then since we had extra, he wanted to write a valentine to his favorite cat, Posy.  He brought it upstairs and put it on her main bed on the sink, so that she could find it next time she settled there:

 

I’m sure Posy was pleased.

January 2018 Book Reviews

The Crossing Places and The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths.  My friend recommended Elly Griffith’s Ruth Galloway mysteries to me (thanks, Judith!) and I very much enjoyed the first two.  In fact, when I finished the first I went right on to the second, and was tempted to move on to the third as well; I’m going to see if my library has the rest.  Ruth is an archaeologist who specializes in bones and lives on the edge of a salt marsh in which she had her first successful dig.  She’s an academic who teaches at the nearby university in Norfolk.  In the first book, she is contacted by a detective, Harry Nelson, who has found some child’s bones in the saltmarsh and thinks they might be those of a child who went missing a few years ago.  When Ruth examines the bones, however, they are from the iron age – her area of expertise.  She and Nelson become friends of a sort, and she gets involved in his investigations, often sharing in his discoveries and in the danger.  They are quick reads – there’s not a huge amount of detail, but they are interesting and fun, and Ruth is refreshing.  She’s single and chubby and is happy to spend an evening with her books, her wine, and her cats.  It was also interesting to hear what Ruth explains about the iron age and the accompanying myths and ways of the area.

Under the Harrow by Flynn Berry.  This was a moody and sad read, yet was hard to put down.  The book begins with Nora taking the train out to the English countryside to visit her sister, Rachel, with whom she is very close.  When she gets there, she discovers Rachel’s gruesomely murdered body.  She stays in the town in a state of shock and works with the police to try to figure out who killed Rachel.  Soon some of the police begin to treat Nora herself as a suspect.  It’s a really moving exploration of grief and jealousy and the complex relationship between siblings.  I highly recommend it.

Shrill by Lindy West.  Lindy West started writing editorials for the New York Times a few months ago, and I’ve been very much enjoying what she has to say, so I thought I’d read her book of essays.  She is wonderful at conveying her viewpoint:  her arguments are always really impressive and clear and biting and funny.  I found that I’m more interested in her political topics than I am in the topics of this book, however, which were basically fat acceptance/pride, and misogyny in comedy.  The essays were also biographical, and that aspect I enjoyed.  She is appealingly witty.

The Dry by Jane Harper.  This was a good read; it’s a thriller/mystery that takes place somewhere in the country outside of Melbourne, Australia.  Aaron Falk returns to his hometown when his childhood best friend is thought to have killed his wife and son and then himself.  His friend’s parents don’t believe that he did this, and since Aaron works as a policeman with an expert in financial matters – and Luke, the friend, was having financial difficulties – his parents think Aaron might be able to discover the truth.  Aaron starts working off the record with the local policeman, who also suspects something is amiss.  There’s a lot of going back and forth from the past to the present.  It’s a very backwoods place, and Aaron and his father were driven out of the town due to the death of a friend of his when he was a teen, so a lot of people are upset that he is back.  It’s interesting, suspenseful, and well-conceived.

Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo.  I thought I had read this before, and was re-reading it so that I could go on to read the newer Everybody’s Fool, but as it turns out, this was my first time reading it.  I had gotten it mixed up with either Bridge of Sighs or Empire Falls.  At any rate, it’s a very “old-school” kind of novel about a small town in upstate New York that has fallen on hard times (in the eighties).  The main character is Sully, who was played by Paul Newman in the movie (which my sister tells me I saw with her, but I also have no memory of.  I think I need to start taking some gingko biloba).  Sully is a charismatic man in his sixties who lives hand to mouth and is both lovable and highly exasperating.  He rents some rooms from the elderly Beryl Peoples, a retired 8^thgrade teacher, with an acerbic wit.  It’s a very long book that takes place only over two or so weeks.  Sully goes about his days and we meet everyone he comes across.  I looked forward to reading my daily 25 or so pages and joining Sully in his world.  Now I’m on to Everybody’s Fool.