Red Star Morning
Yesterday, I replaced the sad, sagging paper snowflakes I’ve had hanging over my desk with this beautiful, blazing star lantern. Which came to me largely through my inability to make a decision when faced with too many attractive choices. Like the bookstore. Or tattoos.
I have been drooling over the vast array of patterns and colors of these lanterns for years now, and last December I made a comment to this effect on one of Rose’s photos. Who then made the decision for me and sent this all the way from Germany.
Hanging Tough
Almost as soon as I hit the “publish” button on my last update about Algie’s Battle with Something Strange, his little body took one look at me and said “Out of the woods? I. Don’t. THINK SO.”
We were slowly weaning him off his steriod medicine at that point, which appears to have been the most wrong thing we could have done. He went from closer-to-fine to closer-to-worse in a span of just four days.
The last three weeks have been a frustrating exercise in pills, shots, alternating pills and shots, x-rays, cat yogurt, semi-solid-to-lakes of waste and a daily trail of kitty litter that tracks his path through the house up one side and down the other.
Good news is, I’m getting really good at giving him shots. Bad news is, they’re no longer working. So, our vet’s next brilliant idea has been to refer him to a fairly expensive Critical Care Clinic – that can’t see him until Tuesday.
(This may just be me, but I always thought “Critical Care” meant “Shit Just Got Serious Drop Everything Deal With It NOW”. Am I wrong?)
Instead we have to wait. FIVE days. And hope. And continue to give him shots that don’t work. Because no medicine at all means getting sicker faster. (Even with medicine known to cause intestinal ruptures. The thing giving him problems in the first place. Bonus!)
There are about FIFTEEN different kinds of less risky steriod pills that might work if his intestines weren’t so inflammed. But since they are, he has to have shots. Of which there is only ONE kind.
If I seem frustrated, I am. I just want my cat better. It’s all I’ve wanted since February, when our vet office continually blew me off call after call, visit after visit. It wasn’t until we walked in one evening and flatly TOLD them an actual VET will be seeing our cat, RIGHT THE HELL NOW, that they even started trying to figure out what was really going on.
It may be the easy and unfair thing to blame our vet (I know – they can only do so much). But if they proved anything throughout this whole episode, it’s that nothing counts as ‘urgent’ unless you’ve been hit by a damn car. And all I can wonder is, would he be in this jam if they’d treated him sooner?
PROBABLY NOT.
Illustrator Fun, Part 9,481
Holy cow, I’m almost too embarrassed to admit this project took me about 20 hours. Almost.
(I had a lot of trouble with the manteling. As in, I could NOT decide how to deal with the shaded spots)
(Seriously. It was a mess. The above? Was me giving up and saying, screw it, good enough.)
(And then, this next one? This is me saying, fuck it, FINE, I’ll spend five hours scouring the internet for free clip art and then ANOTHER FIVE redrawing and vectorizing it, BECAUSE HOLY HELL, I’M AN ADAMS. I CAN’T LIVE WITH HALF-ASSED MANTELING.)
Update: Dear Blogdesk image uploader POS, if I’m willing to spend ten hours just on foofy background flourishes because the mere suggestion of second-rate work makes my left eye twitch uncontrolably…what makes you think I’m ok with you squashing my gif?! Let’s try that one again, thanks.)
