Busy reading weekend if not a particularly remarkable week, otherwise. The highlight was taking the cat to the vet to find out if there's a medical reason he's "leaking" all over the place. Turns out kitty has an infection of the urinary tract - and how the vet took the urine sample I do not want to know. All I can say is when they brought him back to the exam room he was so freaked out he attempted to hide in one of those tiny pull-out keyboard trays - the kind that's about a foot long by three inches high. He launched himself up like a rocket, compacting his body into the tray, haunches and tail hanging out. It took two of us to pull him out the first time.
THEN HE DID IT AGAIN.
The physics involved, my friends... I can't even go there. This is not a small cat. This is a 14 pound, spoiled rotten cat who pees in the house like a damn lawn sprinkler.
WTF?
All this - plus cat hair up my nose, down my throat and blowing across the floor like tumbleweeds - to hear Oliver needs a tiny bottle of antibiotic liquid, the cost of which is roughly equivalent to the price of gold per ounce. "The dose is small", the vet told me. "I'll have the tech come in and show you how to do it."
Okay. She shows me the syringe and tells me to fill it to one ounce. She doesn't do it for me, mind. She just shows me how, handing the box and syringe to me before bolting out the door. I pony up the $ 140, shove the cat back in his carrier, and it's on my merry way I am.
I got home and it seemed as good a time as any to go ahead and give the cat his medicine. After he's just had a nervous breakdown and all. What could go wrong? I filled the syringe to one, picked up the cat, cradling him like a baby and tried to stick the syringe in his mouth. After I wiped up my blood and found the cat again, it was round two: Oliver 1, Lisa o. This time, in the blur of flying hair and drops of blood, he opened his mouth all the way and I squirted that medicine in for all I was worth. Good thing the family was home to tie a tourniquet around my bleeding stub of an arm. But hey, the cat's on the mend. I mixed this morning's dose in with some tuna.
CAT, YOU ARE THE SUPERIOR BEING.
If all this doesn't work (and why would it, really?) the next thing it could be is "kitty stress," exhibited, apparently, via his preference for lying around the house on his back, like a bear rug, directly in the path of my Point A to Point B. I have to stop short rather than trample him, momentum taking me up and over, like a cross between a rag doll and a ballerina, landing when some part of my body encounters something sharp or otherwise unforgiving. Then I curl into a ball while I bleed and cry simultaneously. Looking on, the cat licks his crotch and leaves. I have spoiled his solitude. No doubt his having to drag ass out of the room contributes to his tension.
Thankfully, there's a cure for kitty stress, too. It doesn't even require a feline psychologist. It's a little something they call kitty phermones, phermones that promote kitty relaxation. Kitty weed, in other words. It's sprayable, or you can buy the sort you put in a warming thing in the electric outlet. Hell, if this works I'll be snorting the crap.
I was going to go on to talk about books after I quickly caught you up to date on Oliver but now, to tell you the truth, I don't even feel like it. I've exhausted myself. I was up late, hopped up on the rusty smell of blood. I didn't sleep much.
So I'm going to take a nap. Screw it.
