Wednesday, August 15, 2007, 05:19
Upside-Down
Things have really been out of whack here around Rural Route 2 for the last couple of days.
It started Monday morning when I called the vet clinic about my kitty cat, Guinevere. She's the one the vet thinks has sinus cancer. I have noticed that when I put Guinevere on an antibiotic, in a few days, she is feeling better and eating better and acting more like herself. When the course of antibiotic is finished, she slowly goes downhill, and a week later, she's back to not eating and stays curled up somewhere most of the day. I took Snowflake in last week for her vaccinations, and while I was there, I talked to the other vet about Guinevere and what I could do for her for long-term antibiotic treatment.
The other vet is wondering if Guinevere could have a fungal infection. He gave me an antibiotic to try that he said would be somewhat diagnostic because it encourages fungus to grow. If she got worse on the antibiotic, I should take her off it and call him right away. Over the weekend, Guinevere went downhill again. So I called Monday morning. The vet who suggested I try a different antibiotic wasn't in, so I talked to the first vet who thinks Guinevere has a sinus tumor. She said I should bring Guinevere in so they could do a blood test for the fungal infection. She also said I should put Guinny back on the first antibiotic I had been giving her.
I waited an hour and a half after we got home to give Guinevere some more antibiotic. She promptly threw it up. So I had to wait until evening to give her another dose.
After that I went outside to check on the horse water and to take Charlie around the hayfield. When I got back by the garden, I saw one of the barn kittens lying under the pumpkin vines. I thought he was asleep.
He wasn't asleep. He was dead.
I have no idea what happened to him. It was one of the black kittens. A very friendly little tom who would have made a good pet for someone. I couldn't find a mark on him. And he hadn't been sick. Whatever happened to him, I think he was trying to get back to the barn.
I knew I had to bury him. I couldn't just leave him there in the garden. The ground is rock hard, and it took some doing with the shovel and the post-hole digger to make any headway. Of course, I cried the whole time I was digging the hole and wrapping him in an old towel and covering him with dirt.
I was sort of shot for the rest of the day after that, except I had newspaper stories to write and I had to cover the school board Monday night.
Right after I got home from the school board meeting, it began to storm. Randy and I decided we should unplug the computer. At 10:30 p.m., the electricity went out. So much for working on my school board story.
It stormed and rained for quite a while. Lots of lightning. And the electricity stayed off. In fact, it didn't come back on until about 4:30 a.m.
I got up at 6 a.m. to start writing my newspaper stories. I had to wait on a couple of them until I could call the school board president (several big issues concerning the district administrator). In the meantime, Randy tried to restore Internet access to our computers, but he concluded the Internet was down all together.
As it turned out, the electricity was out in town and the newspaper office was out of electricity. It was supposed to be back up by 9 a.m., but in fact, it was closer to mid-afternoon before the electricity came back on at the office. Menomonie got hit pretty hard by the storm.
All day, I kept checking to see if the Internet was back up, not that it would do any good until the office had electricity, mind you. At times, the Internet was up. At other times it was down.
Then, as it turned out, I had to call all of the police chiefs in the area for a "storm story."
By the time I finished my school board stories and storm story and got them sent, it was 4 p.m. Tuesday evening I had to drive 60 miles round trip to cover a meeting in one of the townships.
When I arrived home, I discovered that my poor Guinevere now has a bloody-pus discharge from one eye. I don't know what that means, but I do know my poor kitty doesn't feel very well.
So much for Monday and Tuesday. Is this week never going to end?
LeAnn R. Ralph
Monday, August 13, 2007, 06:59
County Fair
I spent all weekend at the county fair. Well, not really. It only seems that way, mostly because it was so hot.
I went Saturday night to take pictures of the Grand Champion and Reserve Grand Champion meat animals after the meat animal auction. It was so hot in the auction barn that I was drenched with sweat. It was 85 degrees outside with a dewpoint of around 80. Absolutely sweltering. The sale took a long time because they had 99 steers, pigs and sheep to auction off. The biggest steer was something over 1,300 pounds. Randy went with me, and we both felt like limp dishrags by the time we got home.
There was thunder and lightning after we got home as well. We only a tenth of an inch of rain, though. The Twin Cities got 2 inches out of it. But we only got a tenth of an inch. As my dad used to say, "I guess it just *can't* rain, can it."
Then I had to go back to the fair on Sunday to get pictures of the small animal sale -- ducks, chickens, roosters, geese, rabbits. There was one goat, too. He sold for $30. And a guinea pig -- he sold for $3. There was also a Rhode Island Red chicken that sold for $22.50 (and it was just a little chicken!). It was still fairly hot on Sunday, so again, by the time I got home mid-afternoon, I felt like a limp dishrag.
Sunday evening, Randy and I went picking blackberries. We managed to get 5 quarts. Hard picking, though, because the blackberries are scarce and kind of small, for the most part. When we arrived home, I made some blackberry jam. We got 8 pints out of it, so that was a good thing. As Randy says, by the time he is eating blackberry jam on his toast during a blizzard next winter, the scratches ought to be all healed up.
God willing that we will have a blizzard or blizzards next winter, that is. We could certainly use the snow to recharge the subsoil moisture and the ground water.
LeAnn R. Ralph