Mommy...

I wanna go home and have a nap.

/whine

Okay. Lots of work to do today, and lots of other things. Errands to run, serials and plays to write... y'know, stuff.

I also have to call the vet and make an appointment for Gretzky, whose cold has taken a turn for the worse. Poor girl. I'm not looking forward to administering pills, lemme tell you.

There will be a real update later.

WTF?

Someone has replaced one of my icons with a random Christmas-themed one.

Is this a hack? Some sort of weird LJ joke?

Anyone know what this is?

I can't fix this until I get home. Gnarr.

Poor kitty

I am taking Gretzky to the vet this evening. I meant to take her toward the end of the week, but they had an opening tonight, so I'm taking it.

I got home today and she was sleeping so soundly that I actually had to physically pick her up before she awoke. I think that's probably a bad sign, so off to the vet we go. I was going to call anyway, but this has clinched the deal.

George actually appears to be getting better, so he's staying at home. Negotiating one cat through the snow is going to be plenty hard enough.

Before heading out to the vet

I had my first ASL class yesterday. (mellybean71, my teacher's name is Jo-Anne)

It was a really interesting time. For one, the entire class is silent. There is a strict "no voice" policy while class is in session. The idea, like most language classes, is to learn to think in ASL as opposed to think of it as a translation for English or French.

Jo-Anne is a beautiful black woman with a lovely smile. I don't interact with deaf people or the Deaf community much in my everyday life, so it was interesting for me to note that there is something of a "vocal" component to her language. I noticed it in other deaf people at the Centre while I was there. I'm not sure if the small sounds they make (kind of like "mm" noises, or "mm-hmm" or "unh," if you're looking for an onomatopoeia) come "naturally," in that they are brought to use their vocal chords as a automatic part of communicating, or if it's a cultural thing particular to the Deaf community, or if it's something else entirely. Something to find out later, I expect.

It was both difficult and easy. I have a lot of trouble making my fingers do some of the letters for fingerspelling ("R" was a bitch for me at first), and kept confusing some of the letters. Overall, though, I did okay. It was very frustrating not to be able to ask questions about the syntax. The teacher would often repeat the same signs to make sure we got the message, but while I understood the signs, I never did quite figure out in which order they should go.

For instance, I learned the signs for "practice" and "home," but she used them in sequence several times, so that I don't know which would go first in order to say "practice when [you] get home."

I also had trouble with some of the numbers. There is a lot of practice in my future. I'm already much more comfortable with the fingerspelling alphabet. I also need to get myself a clipboard for the handouts.

Okay. Time to pack Gretzky into her box and get going.

I know there are people who would love to have my problems...

My kitty is an expensive kitty.

The question, it appears, is not so much "What's wrong with Gretzky?" as "What's not wrong with Gretzky?"

Poor girl. She's not doing well at all. She's lost nearly two pounds since last summer, and is down to a svelte 10lbs. Okay, maybe not svelte, because her belly kind of hangs and is all wobbly, but she's thinner now.

She's running a slight fever, and definitely has something wrong with her upper respiratory system. The problem is that it's hard to identify exactly what it is. The symptoms could be indicative of something underlying that's much more serious. Thus far, the theories are:

- it's a simple cold that's turned into a bronchial infection
- it's a tooth infection that's settled into her sinuses
- it's the beginning of diabetes or another elderly cat illness that's making her susceptible to opportunistic infections

We did x-rays right then and there (sparing me another trip with the kitty), and the news is both good and bad.

Good: she has no fluid in or around the lungs, which would have been Very Bad Indeed™, and her tummy was full, which means that I have not been hallucinating her eating her kibble like a good girl.

Bad: she has either an inflammation in her bronchial tubes, or calcification due to age, and while the x-ray was of her chest, it looks like she might have kidney stones or something similar.

So we're on the lookout for diabetes, potential kidney failure or kidney stones, and maybe a UTI.

Blood was drawn (from the cat, not any of the humans, although she did bite me when the vet shoved a thermometer where the sun don't shine), and we will have the results tomorrow (see how much faster it is than with human doctors?).

The other good news is that they now have an antibiotic that's given ONCE and by injection, so no more fighting with the cat twice a day for two weeks. w00t!

*sigh*

Oh, and did I mention that she has fleas? Yessir, the day just kept getting better. I bought a topical flea killing thing (Advantage) and have dosed all four cats. DEATH TO THE FLEAS!


So, yeah. News you need about my cat. It was very, VERY expensive. I am feeling very poor right now. Let's just say this isn't a good time for me to have large extra expenses.