My feline comedian; my mother's craft; report on the book

My hearty thanks to everybody who posted good wishes for my sick cat; and thank you especially to people told me that their cats have had pancreatitis and lived to tell the tale. I am very cautiously optimistic this morning. Ari was obviously under the weather yesterday evening, but there was a lot of purring. He lay on my chest, poking his nose into my face and completely disrupting my reading, as is his wont; then curled up at knee level, purred at Raphael, swiped with his paw at Raphael when he'd had enough petting, piled all his paws up, put his chin on them, and went to sleep, which is proper Stofflerian behavior. He purred at intervals during the night, though either the heat or his internal difficulties prevented the usual curling himself up under my chin. Since the paw-piling maneuver requires curling up too, perhaps it was just the heat.

He wouldn't eat this morning, so I gave him his painkiller, which I had been directed to use based on his behavior. I went off and had lunch with my mom, who is much engrossed in a new miniature project, a model of Bag End. elisem had given me, to pass on to her, a little bag of charms and other bits of potential jewellery, including stuff that was probably pendant backings but looked like little trays, or frames for portraits; also some beads that looked like tiny silver beer mugs. My mother had brought me some of her creations from this gift: a silver tray with beer mugs and some fancy silvery beads that were shaped like bloated diamonds, but she had cut off the bottoms and put two small beads on the other end to look like stoppers: voila, a tray with four silver mugs and two decanters. She had also taken some flat, round, ornate silvery things, broken toothpicks in half, painted them white except for the tips, which she painted black, and glued the broken ends of the toothpicks into the silvery things -- candles in holders. And she had put a flat golden charm in the shape of a horn on the front of the Red Book of Westmarch.

When I got home, I tried Ari on the weird cat food I'd bought, and he ate some, so that is a step in the right direction. He is not being easy to medicate, but Raphael is helping me.

In other news, the book is behaving much, much better. In a somewhat histrionic mood, I had described the middle to Eric and David as like one of those bridges, over a deep terrifying valley in the middle of a jungle, that you see in a lot of movies of a particular type that I didn't think I had watched much of until I started revising this novel. Plank bridges with ropes to hold onto, swaying a lot, generally on fire, often dangling into the depths, with people either hanging on desperately or falling into the abyss. But now the fire is out and you can shuffle along the bridge if you are careful. I am about to finish Chapter 17.

Thanks again for all the good wishes. I very much appreciate them.

P.