Random Jottings
Feb. 5th, 2007 05:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pameladeanIt's the middle of the book. For my books, this means that the event that most people would begin with is not very far away, and that if you cock your head sideways and squint through a particular part of your glasses, you can see certain thematic threads assembling themselves. The part I don't care for is that even I can't keep all the new characters straight, so how is anybody else supposed to do so? But that is a matter for revision.
Apparently at this stage babbling on LJ is mandatory. There was no LJ the last time I was writing a novel in any kind of controlled fashion. I am not sure, on reflection, how controlled the fashion is in which I am writing this one, but it so far has started at the beginning and gone on to the middle.
In any case, random events I'd like to have tied to something vaguely resembling a timeline:
Six days before I was scheduled to fly out to California, Ari turned up limping severely on his left hind leg. Recalling unhappily how he ran around with a broken front paw for ten days because the vet didn't think he was in enough pain for broken bones, I appealed to Raphael, who drove us to the emergency vet at the University of Minnesota. Mercifully, they were not at all busy. There was a large dog who had eaten his leash and looked very sheepish about it, but nobody else in the waiting room. Ari pulled the classic move of walking normally when the vet was looking at him, but she said she could consistently localize back pain rather than leg pain. I let them do an X-ray. No arthritis and no broken bones or joint pain. They figured he had probably pulled a muscle in his back. So we went home again with a prescription for a controlled substance, a painkiller that you put under the cat's tongue (right), or at least somewhere it can leach into the membranes of the mouth. It's given to horses too, I gather. He didn't care for it much. He was also supposed not to jump or to run around the house. (Right.) I blocked off the access to his favorite high-rise sleeping place, a box of styrofoam peanuts atop an eight-foot-tall bookcase; and we kept him upstairs for two weeks. I was very nervy about leaving partway through this incarceration, but Raphael looked after him perfectly well, and he had no limp when I got home again.
I've never had such an accident-prone cat, although Sukey Tawdry used to get into fights and develop abscesses. Once she became an indoor cat, however, she did not break bones or pull muscles.
He is, however, the BEST cat.
P.
Apparently at this stage babbling on LJ is mandatory. There was no LJ the last time I was writing a novel in any kind of controlled fashion. I am not sure, on reflection, how controlled the fashion is in which I am writing this one, but it so far has started at the beginning and gone on to the middle.
In any case, random events I'd like to have tied to something vaguely resembling a timeline:
Six days before I was scheduled to fly out to California, Ari turned up limping severely on his left hind leg. Recalling unhappily how he ran around with a broken front paw for ten days because the vet didn't think he was in enough pain for broken bones, I appealed to Raphael, who drove us to the emergency vet at the University of Minnesota. Mercifully, they were not at all busy. There was a large dog who had eaten his leash and looked very sheepish about it, but nobody else in the waiting room. Ari pulled the classic move of walking normally when the vet was looking at him, but she said she could consistently localize back pain rather than leg pain. I let them do an X-ray. No arthritis and no broken bones or joint pain. They figured he had probably pulled a muscle in his back. So we went home again with a prescription for a controlled substance, a painkiller that you put under the cat's tongue (right), or at least somewhere it can leach into the membranes of the mouth. It's given to horses too, I gather. He didn't care for it much. He was also supposed not to jump or to run around the house. (Right.) I blocked off the access to his favorite high-rise sleeping place, a box of styrofoam peanuts atop an eight-foot-tall bookcase; and we kept him upstairs for two weeks. I was very nervy about leaving partway through this incarceration, but Raphael looked after him perfectly well, and he had no limp when I got home again.
I've never had such an accident-prone cat, although Sukey Tawdry used to get into fights and develop abscesses. Once she became an indoor cat, however, she did not break bones or pull muscles.
He is, however, the BEST cat.
P.
