Mad Times

This is actually the other half of #117. I saw it the day after I saw that one, just a little ways down the road, almost buried in leftover road sand. When the sweepers came by a few weeks later they left it like this.

Can’t tell they’re siblings, can you?

This is a decent representation of the current balance of power ;-)

Alice is doing very well. Well enough that I think you can assume that she’s doing well unless you hear differently.

Theo isn’t sure what to make of Alice’s return. When she comes near him he hisses. He’s all jumpy. When she gets attention he pouts (never mind that the attention she’s getting is being stuck with a needle and pumped full of fluid.) He’s started spraying the perimeter of the house again like he has done when we’ve had neighbor cats who liked to hang out right by the windows and taunt the poor indoor kitties. We’re trying to balance the attention so he’s cuddled and cooed at as much as Alice. This means that we’re spending almost every waking hour comforting and coaxing one kitty or another. Hopefully everyone will calm down as we get into a routine.

Alice is doing okay. She’s eating. She’s being patient with her fluids. She even drank a little bit in front of us today. She’s played and begged for brushing. All good signs in our book. She’s still spending most of her time in the cubby at the top of the cat tree, but we’re hoping that’s just a response to the trauma of her hospital stay. We’re taking one day at a time as so many people have counseled us.

Thanks to everyone who has sent a note or thought of us. It’s surprising how much those little things help.

Shot this back on Valentine’s Day, forgot to post it.

I took this picture last Saturday. On Tuesday night she was clearly not feeling well so we took her to the emergency vet. They told us that she was severely dehydrated. They did an x-ray and a blood test. They told us that her kidneys were in bad shape.

We left her there at the vet where they put her on i.v. fluids and started a low-protein diet. We’ve been visiting her daily. She has been much better each day. Most of that is just because she’s hydrated again.

On Saturday, they will do another blood test and we’ll get our first idea of how bad the kidney problem really is.

We were pretty devastated when we first heard the news. Alice is only 10 years old and we thought we had a while before we would have to deal with major health issues. We did some reading (primarily on http://www.felinecrf.com/) and have some idea what her ongoing care is likely to entail. We’re just doing the one-day-at-a-time thing and hoping for the best at this point.

I’m planning to start blogging the details here so our family and friends can check on her status and progress (and so I don’t have to spam them ;-). I’ve got some other backlog to get up so it won’t be all Alice all the time here at Mad Times, but the cat content is going to increase for a while.

These aren’t the greatest pictures ever, but they’ll give you a bit of an idea of how dynamic a speaker author Connie Willis was this evening at Richard Hugo House. She talked about and read a passage from her work in progress about the Blitz in England during WWII. and then did an extensive Q&A which included fascinating answers about her research methods and the nature of science fiction.

As has become my habit, I recorded the talk. If you’d like to hear the recording, leave a comment or drop me an email and I’ll send you a link.

I think I’d just woken the poor boy up by taking a bunch of pictures of the cuter pose he was in before this.

That monitor is flaking out and I’ve already bought the 22-inch widescreen ViewSonic LCD that will replace it. No room for kitties on that. Poor Alice.

All that sand is left over from the snow we had a few weeks ago. It’s starting to get annoying.