Chickens and Unschooling

Woke up in the middle of the night with a headache, for no god damn good reason.

Woke up with hubby's alarm, still with a headache. Contemplated taking pain killers, but the thought of this maybe being a migraine gave me pause.

Instead, I refilled my ice-water and grabbed a couple inches of my husband's morning coffee, just in case the pain was caffeine related.

It only took one sip of the coffee to confirm that migraine.

Five hours of splitting headache, interspersed with vomiting, later, and things finally calmed down a bit.

Bright lights are still painful, but my stomach is settled enough that I may be able to enjoy a little of the potato curry the boy is making for dinner.

Though both kittens were very disturbed by the vomiting noises coming from their human, Fireball ended up spending most of the day with me. I think he was pleased his human mostly stayed put in bed and didn't go wandering off per usual.


ETA: Now Fireball is nowhere to be found, and Magic Missile is cuddling with me. I think they are taking shifts keeping an eye on me.

ETA2: Shadow has entered the chat.

He survived the surgery.

There was a screwup with an IV, and his arm got dosed directly with Valium. It's expected to be okay, but I have to watch for swelling and excessive pain.

Worst case scenario, according to the surgical Vet, necrotic die off of some tissue. Yay.

He doesn't actually expect the worst case to happen, but we won't know if we're out of the woods for a couple of days.

Since he had the specialized anesthesia, he has already been cleared for chill normal activity, and access to food and water.

So far, in less than 10 minutes of being home, he has managed to eat, drink, poop, and pee. As long as he doesn't follow this up with puking, we're probably in good shape. *fingers crossed*

Let's hope the trickiest part of his recovery is keeping his brother from sniffing his incision.

With babies and sick/injured animals, your whole world narrows to keeping track of bodily funtions; did they eat, drink, pee, poop, sleep?

On that basis, Firball is doing fine. His lacerations appear improved from yesterday, thank goodness. His cone of shame (borrowed from H) may be largely responsible for this.

Twitter Image

It's been a week. But right now, while I'm lying under the covers, the kittens are play on me, using my knee as a lauch pad for their shenanigans. It doesn't get much better than this.

We lost our big, fluffy, grey cat, Ghost a few months back. I was wrecked.

He was one of the 2 kittens we got in the summer of 2020. We often say he and his brother were the only good things to come out of 2020. He loved his brushies, and would sometimes wait till I got up to eagerly lead me to the box with his brushes. He had the loudest purr as a kitten, and it seemed like he grew into it as he got bigger. He always purred enthusiastically during brushies.

He was a quarter Maine Coon on his father's side, with gorgeous eyes he got from his mother. We decided they must be from his mother, because his brother, Shadow, a short haired black cat, has the exact same eyes.

We got the kittens from my daughter's ex-roomate's brother's ex-roomate. That always amuses me to say.

We called him our proximity cat, because he often preferred to hang out a foot or two away from the humans. But, he was almost always in the room with us, unless he was sacked out on the bed or guarding the hallway.

I was his favorite, though, so he'd often sit near enough to me to get vigorous scritchies. One time, I was laying in bed, and while M was in the shower, Ghost climbed onto me and settled down for pets and purrs. He stayed for the length of the shower. As soon as the water turned off he got down, as if he didn't want any witnesses to his unusual display of affection.

A couple of weeks after Ghost died, we got two new kittens. They were the other daughter's co-worker's porch kittens.

I never thought anything could fill the void left by Ghost, and there is likely to always be a sadness there for the decade of time we never had together, but Magic Missile and Fireball are doing a damn good job.

My cat is old, skinny, and picky about what she eats, but thank goodness she has an iron stomach.

To pamper her in her old age, and to try to get a little more weight on her, I tried buying her canned catfood. This was a colossal waste of time and money. She doesn't like canned food.

She much prefers human food.

She learned that if she sits at the refrigerator, turns on the puss-n-boots eyes, she can get the humans to find something in that magical box to plaese her.

Luckily she's part of the 30% of cats who are not lactose intolerant.

She's also a huge fan of my shredded chicken. Just tonight, I resorted to making her a special batch and I am trying out freezing it into sigle servings in a spare icecube tray.

While I may not be turning into my Mother, I have to admit, thanks to Newkie, I've definitely taken a few steps down the path in her direction.

Last night I learned two things:

1. Scorpion season has begun.

2. The cats have earned their kibble for the year.

The intensity with which the boys focused on a random paper bag on the floor last night caught my attention. I inspected it, found nothing, assumed they were merely entertained by the crinkling sound.

I still half watched, though, and this turned out to be fortuitous. If I had not, I'd have missed the rather large scorpion executing his escape.

Hubby handed me a stick, then a hammer; the beggars are a little harder to smash on carpet.

It is dead now.

As it should be.

Good kitties.

Prompt: Empty.

Empty food bowl.

Twitter link.

I have a small goal, inspired by the great toilet paper shortage of 2020, to always have a very large supply of toilet paper in the house. We've taken to calling it the toilet paper tower. I fully expect to inspire one of those scenes someday, after my death, of younger family members wondering why crazy old Grandma would do such a thing* and what to do about my room full of TP.

In the meantime, my cat thinks I've done this all for her.


*It is my most fervent wish that our country gets it's head out of it's ass before my future generations can relate to the fear inspired by grocery store shortages.

No surprise, Ghost seems as fascinated by the ducklings as he was by the chicks we raised in the house last year.

Cat TV.