Craft Rage

Well, I've been promising a sewing post, but again, I've been a bit sidetracked. Finally, everything is coming together in a more or less positive way, so I can finally explain why.

Recently, my Grampa had a pretty bad heart attack. And more recently, one of our cats got sick.

My Grampa is an awesome guy. He's not perfect, (he's the first one to tell you that), but he's an excellent Grampa - he taught me how to fish, and how to dry deer meat, and how NOT to dig holes in the driveway for a swimming pool.

Anyway, after his heart attack, he developed pneumonia, as older folk are apparently wont to do, and they put him on this antibiotic that made him hallucinate. Long story short, he didn't hallucinate scary things - he hallucinated that he was James Bond, and had to escape the hospital. Apparently he made it to the parking lot twice - TWICE, ducking through hallways and creeping past the nurses' station.

I hope when I am in my late 70's, I am still spry enough to make two very creditable attempts to escape a hospital!

Now that Grampa's on the mend, my attention turned to Boobah.

Boobah's got a ton of personality, so when his behavior started to change, we noticed it right away.

Monday afternoon, Boobah started acting funny, hiding, not jumping up on the furniture, that sort of thing. You'd think I'd be happy about this turn of events, but really, when you're used to cuddling scolding the cat for jumping on stuff, and suddenly there's no scolding, usually it's a sign that either a) your cat has been abducted by aliens and replaced with a changeling, or b)something's wrong.

So last night, I...well, okay, I give my cat tummy rubs every night. And yes, when I give him tummy rubs, I talk to him like he's a baby. I suppose it's a pretty common behavior for cat owners, but I still feel kinda lame admitting it.

So anyway, I was giving him tummy rubs, and he felt...wrong. And when I rubbed the middle of his belly, he made a sort of startled growl/meow, and looked at me as though I'd just knifed him in the gut. Cue panic attack. I imagined that he'd eaten one of the innumerable furry catnip mice that reside all over the living room floor in a neat pile by the cat tree, and that we'd have surgery and a funeral, and we'd be sadly short one Spidercat.

Long story short - he's constipated. Just your garden variety "I-horcked-out-on-too-much-dry-cat-food-and-was-too-lazy-to-go-to-the-water-dish". Thank goodness. Our mutual punishment (he for being lazy and I for having opposable thumbs, I guess) is that I get to feed him medicine every eight hours. He doesn't like it much, but whatever.

I bought pet insurance for the whole cat-family on Saturday, and when Boobah got sick on Monday morning, a couple of hours after the coverage went into effect, I honestly felt just a little bit like I'd cursed him. And seriously, how do you explain that to the insurance broker? "I know he's only been covered for 12 hours, but could you please write me a cheque for $1800.00?"

On the upside, I got to see an X-ray of my cat - intestines are cool! And also, in protest of the X-ray, he "expressed his anal glands" which is the technical term for squirting stinky tuchus goo all over the table. Which means he doesn't need to have his anal glands manually expressed now! Way to save us $100.00, my friend!

Labels: crap sieve