jimsjournal
| Almost half past May -- 05/14/02 |
May is just zipping by and all of my time is just dashing with it... whoosh... it will be June if I blink twice...
There were a couple half begun entries... I'll never catch up... just incorporate a few bits in here...
A week ago this past Sunday (what would that have been, May 5th?) Jennifer and I took Tiger for an emergency veterinarian visit... He had seemed to be a healthy (although a bit overweight) house cat... but then Sunday afternoon, just a few minutes after I would have sworn that he was fine, Jennifer called out from the dining room "Something's the matter with Tiger" and I hurried to see what she meant. He was lying on the floor under the table, but not lying on his stomach the way he usually does, nor on his back the way he does once in a while... he was lying on his side and panting... I picked him up and he seemed to have a raspy, bronchial sound, not with every breath, but a definite sound. She was very worried and thought we should take him to see a vet right away. The vets in our town were all closed but their answering machine messages suggested a relatively new veterinary clinic in East Greenwich, near Warwick (about half an hour drive from here)... so we phoned them and then set off.
This was Tiger's first car ride since we moved into this house in February of 1996... Jennifer went into the garage and found the cat carrier that we had used for the several hours drive from upstate New York in December of 1995... As soon as Tiger saw it he ran and hid behind the living room sofa.... So he got to ride sitting on Jennifer's lap. He was not really happy about the ride, but at times he would sit up and look out the window at other cars and the passing scenery, then lie back down again.
Ocean State Veterinary Clinic occupied a new, fairly large building (they have six examining rooms) that really looks like a small hospital... after a short wait we saw an assistant (in a doctor's office I would have called her a nurse, don't know what the veterinary equivalent might be) who weighed him (fourteen pounds, three ounces) and took his temperature (he was not pleased)... then the veterinary doctor came in... a very small woman, perhaps late twenties, very pleasant... The diagnosis: feline asthma. (Apparently this is not all that uncommon.) However, she did suggest a chest x-ray just to be sure. Okay. She took Tiger away... after a seemingly interminable wait (maybe 25 or 30 minutes, tops) she came back. Chest x-ray was fine, just asthma. Take these pills (Terbutaline), give him half a tablet in the morning and half a tablet at night. Take him to see his regular vet in two or three weeks for follow up. $211.65.
I've succeeded in getting his medicine into him most of the time... it works best when I can hide the pill in his morning wet food... in the evening I try to poke it inside a Pounce and very often the Pounce cracks and crumbles and he leaves the pill behind.
Other than that... well, I've just been insanely busy with work... and stuff around the house and family events -- this is mid-birthday month -- Jennifer's 20th birthday was Friday and Sean's 17th birthday will be on Thursday.
We did our family celebration for Jennifer on her birthday -- per birthday girl request I made chicken pot pie for dinner and Nancy baked a marble cake birthday cake. She had a party for her friends on Saturday -- she did the planning, bought Dragon Ball-Z (it's a Japanese Anime tv show) paper plates and napkins... she also bought an alligator pinata, which she stuffed with little boxes of candy (Nerds, etc.)... Nancy baked another cake and I fixed veggies and dip, bought various flavor chips, 12 packs of soda, bottles of Snapple juice drinks. Her party began around three in the afternoon -- she had around ten or twelve friends over -- and they all eventually took off around nine at to drive up to Warwick to go to an arcade that has Dance Dance Revolution. Nancy and I went over to her mother's house for an early Mother's Day dinner visit (we brought salad and wine)... Nancy's sister Karen and Karen's daughter (a year or two out of college) were visiting... and Nancy's sister Janet (who lives on the same street as their mother) was there with one of her teenage daughters and her mid-20-ish son and his girlfriend. A very pleasant dinner, lively conversation.
And Sunday was Mother's Day. Jennifer had found a container of feminist tea bags (seriously, the tag on each bag has quotations from noted women)... Other gifts included two plants, a Jade Deveraux novel and a tennis book called Inner Tennis.
I had fifteen cubic yards of topsoil delivered on Friday (remember, I roto-tilled up my entire front lawn a couple of weeks ago) but we have had no time to do anything about it -- and it rained Sunday and Monday, quite heavy at times... Providence got more than an inch and a half of rain yesterday... We had been in serious drought conditions a month or two ago, but we have had a lot of rain since then and the rain this week may be enough to end those worries. Today cleared up but although I've been working at home today I've just been too busy working to do anything with the yard... I didn't even get in a run. Oh, okay, I admit that not going for a run was not connected with the work I was doing today; I feel as if I'm fighting a cold and have the idea that a good workout would either make me feel better or would tip me over the edge into being sick and I'm not willing to take a chance -- I don't have time to be sick, especially not now that winter is over...
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