life abides, death awaits

Tomorrow marks the tenth week since my personal cat Lucy passed, along with Max. I really don’t constantly dwell on the loss, but Lulu and Ellipse are constant reminders of Lucy, as are Ruby and Annie of Max. The weeks are busy enough and the weekends equally busy with house projects. But in the evening, usually the Sunday evening after a short but intense weekend, the memories all come back and line up in my mind’s eye.

Family Extant

I was born in Atlanta and moved to Orlando 30 some years ago. Most of my family still lives up there, such as my mom and dad. Mom was in the hospital late last week having about one-and-a-half liters of fluid drained from around her heart. Several weeks before she’d been stung by a hornet and had reacted badly to the sting. A doctor proscribed steroids to bring down the swelling. My mother, being 83, had her immune system suppressed and caught a bad case of pneumonia, which led to the trip to the hospital and the massive draining. She went home today to be looked after by the rest of my family.

Mom, as they say, managed to dodge the bullet this time. I think a trip up to Atlanta is called for in the not too distant future.

Closing

I’m in a much more retrospective frame of mind these days, far more so than I’ve ever been. Perhaps that’s the product of getting old, like the fear of death. It’s not just my death I think about but death all around touching all I love and care about, leaving its shadow over everything.

a doodle milestone

Annie is now between five and six months. We took her to the vet to get her fixed. As much as I love having a Doodle, I’m not the kind of person who should be breeding them. So we had Annie fixed. Annie has a sister from the litter who will be bred, but not until the sister is two years old.

On Annie’s first day she was wearing the typically stiff plastic cone to keep her from licking the incision. On day two of recovery we got her the more fashionable, and far more comfortable, inflatable blue collar you see her in. I photographed her on Thursday wearing it. By Friday it was fully deflated because Annie twisted the collar around and chewed off the inflation valve. By that time the incision was pretty much healed anyway. Annie was leaping and running around the back yard with Ruby in hot pursuit. I attribute Annie’s quick healing to the use of surgical adhesive rather than stitches. Unless you look very closely you can barely see the incision, and this is less than a week after the operation.

She looks better now anyway. Friday morning I gave her a bath with Furry Couture dog bubble bath, then gave her a good drying with a big, thick towel. She loved it.