Felidae Ryl

I thought it's high time for an update, especially in light of how Radar the fluffy cat has been lately.  A few weeks ago she stopped eating, had a temperature and yelped when her back was touched near the tail, so the vet put her on anti-biotics in case she'd been bitten.  A cat with an abcess is almost certainly doomed if it's not caught in time, but I get the feeling there may never have been a bite at all.  She reacts to anti-biotics at the best of times and didn't eat till they were finished, but she's back on the nosh again now and keeping it down to boot, after a short sojourn at the Royal Vet Hospital.  She was home on Christmas Eve and I'm hoping the snuffly sneeze isn't cause for too much concern.  The bendy legs are another matter (where the front legs bend to tuck under, they're now bending the other way a bit when she walks), but for now at least, she's doing well.

My IT course, wherein I'm training to be a technical support whatsit, is going well too.  I'm getting my back sorted thanks to some simple, but effective exercises from my new physiotherapist.  Now just need to say "Chocolate bad, carrots good!" or something like that to shed the extra pounds that aren't doing my overloaded hips any favours.

Santa baby slipped some cool gifts under the tree for me - among them the Avenue Q cast recording, a diary and address book in hot pink embroidered silk (love Paperchase), a book to help me unlock Harry Potter and a set of lipgloss in all the right colours that isn't sticky (my gloss bugbear, well done Marks & Spencer).

Just now catching up with things, emails and the like (they will be months late in some cases, but that's better than years, eh?)

I hope whoever may be reading is having a peaceful time.

How bizarre was this, months after signing up with a casting agency for extras I get called up and asked to be in a sketch as a homeless person.  So I'm there in a white jacket, holding a bowl of "soup" and pretending to be homeless.  I don't know which week it will be shown, but it's on Friday nights from 5th October till Christmas.  He seems like a nice bloke.

Your result for The LOLCAT Test...

classic lolcat

21 LOL, -21 FAIL, -18 EPICFAIL and 19 FTW!

Take The LOLCAT Test at HelloQuizzy

Originally posted on blogspot on 8th July 2008.

The cat we have can be a very loud cat. She, like her sister, has some Oriental blood in her. It was obvious in her sister Smokey Jo that, despite the black and white fur, she had the lithe figure, wedge-shaped head, pushy personality and loud voice of an Oriental cat. Radar, the tabby and white fluffball, looks far more British Shorthair, round cobby head and all. But the voice is still there especially when she brings something up the stairs and tells us all about it, or when she wants food at 3am.

Thankfully the first time she'd done this in a while, it turned out to be one of my mum's old shoulder pads that broke loose years ago and has been living wild in the hallways of our house for years. It gets caught by the cat every now and then, and brought to book upstairs where she shouts about it until we come to see what all the fuss is about.

The second time, though, what looked like a twig turned out to be a bird. It ended up in the bin, but we think she might have planned on eating it and my theory is that she's always gone and found her own extra food when she's been on a diet of crunchy biscuits. She's on them now not for her weight, but for her crystals in the you-know-where. They've helped and so have the hyperthyroid pills, but that meant that she'd put on half a kilo, so we've had to give her 30g less food a day to get it under control again. She'd already gone down from over 6kg to 5.5kg, but that's still with a belly shaped like a ball and an underhang of fur that swings from side to side whenever she runs. It's funny to watch.

Her sister had the same thyroid problem to start with, but although the pills worked, she also had T-Cell cancer which it took a few months for us and the Royal Veterinary College to discover. By then half her organs were enlarged and covered in nodules, and then there was pus beneath the entry wound from her feeding tube, so on 31st March we said goodbye and now she sits in a small green box on my desk, on my windowsill in a huge cat-shaped photoframe, and on my bookshelves too, on a couple of those little photoclips.

They got on so well as kittens, sleeping together and everything, then once Radar went to the vet alone and came back smelling different, there was lots of hissing. They still got on all right for a good few years, sleeping close and washing each others' faces, but in recent years they wouldn't go closer than a foot apart without one hissing at the other. They'd also had a huge stray ginger tomcat to contend with when he moved in, and he got Smokey's paw in his face whenever she had to pass by him (he just sat still and swayed backwards out of her way, but before we'd had him neutered he'd tried to jump her).

Radar's asleep on my parents bed at the moment. She meows fairly often these days, usually in a very plaintive tone of voice. She's looked unhappy for a while, perhaps since she's been given only dry nibbles to eat instead of Kit-e-Kat in jelly. A few days after we lost her sister she took a look under my bed, came out and meowed at me. That was funny because Smokey had only gone under there once; it used to be Radar's own hideout, but I guess she was looking for her.