Today started with a scream…from lager. A bit before the alarm would have gone off. I reached over and looked to see what was going on. He looked a bit off…
I went to the bathroom and he jumped down from the bed. I checked on him and he was in loaf position, but okay. Then he screamed again and pooed on the spot. He shakily walked way and loafed again.
I cleaned things up, checked the bed (whew, he didn’t go in the bed), and went to sit with him on the floor.
Scream, poo, stagger to the next spot, this time panting. Now I’m thinking ut oh, I’m going to end the year with a dead cat!
I look up the times for urgent care, 8am. It is 7am now, we have an hour. Lager is breathing better a cuddling up a bit. The panting stops. Whew. Then lager screams again. Another poo. These poos were very “peel the paint odourous”, and soft, but thankfully not liquid. More cleaning including the cat. He seemed to appreciate the cold wet cloth on his tush. (As most do when dealing with this type of gastric distress.)
After the third bout he started to rally and be more himself. Going back to his normal vocalizations and showed a bit of interest in his food dish.
This did not stop the urgent care visit, and he was put into the pram and away we went. He was good at the vet, which meant he was not totally himself. As he is 16 and in diabetic remission, tests were run, and the conclusion was that this was a blip. He was given fluids and probiotics.
What a way to end the year. As soon as we got home from the vet he went right to the food dish and ate his breakfast. He just went to his food dish for lunch. Still a bit off his usual lager self. And now a trip to the litter room.
Now that he is doing well, I will start tidying and cleaning. The floor needs a good mop after this morning’s excitement.
Tonight I will most likely be reading when midnight strikes, or possibly asleep. There will be eggnog, as I do enjoy eggnog.
Purplehorseshoe, it was the golden skillet, a fried chicken place. There are not many left now. We of course, called it yellow pan. Good fried chicken though. I was the third line person, first was counter, second was the meal prep and fries (this is the area where the rolls lived) third was chicken prep, fryer, and dishwashing.
By the end of the shift I was as close as a human could get to a piece of fried chicken. Dogs would follow me.
A blip? What does that mean?
The odious laundry chore is finished and the rent has been paid. Breakfast was a ham and swiss omelet with a toasted croissant on the side with jam. Looks like we are temporarily fog-free in MSP after a week of pea-soupers. All the snow is gone other than where the plows stockpiled it, and we’re on a downward slide temperature-wise. Hmm. . .three hyphenated modifiers in one post; this means. . . something. Wow, and two ellipses! I’m on a roll!
Just an intestinal upset. Nothing deeper, the tests were normal, not pancreatitis, although there was a heart murmur.
A very scary hour though. The last time I had a cat in intestinal distress, who started panting, she died not long after. Also at a dark hour of the morning, before the vet opened.
Lager is now snuggled in his favourite box sleeping.
Et somethin’ he shouldna?
That is the thinking.
He did have more treats than usual last night, as the treat bag ripped open. There followed a scramble betwix the 2 of us to get to them. That has happened before without this type of outcome. Who knows, tummys can be fickle.
I’m just glad he’s OK now.
Rocky, sorry you had to go through that with Lager. Sounds scary indeed. Here’s hoping he’s back to himself soonest.
Our NYE celebration will take place about 100 yards away from home. The across-the-street neighbors have invited us to dinner at 6:00, and we plan to toast at midnight eastern (9:00 here) and then go our separate ways. Mrs W and I will probably watch the local celebration on TV, fight to stay awake until midnight, and go to bed shortly thereafter. Very exciting. But no driving involved.
I learned a few important lessons that night, as well as reinforcement of some that still don’t seem to have stuck as well as they ought to.
The most important lessons from this misadventure seem to be…
- Even an “Easy” trail can be much more difficult and hazardous under snowy and/or muddy conditions. Don't assume that a trail that I could easily handle when it is dry, I can handle if it is snowy or muddy. (Really, that's how I ended up sinking the first Jeep, on a very short not-quite-a-road that I knew very well in dry condition, but not as well as I thought I knew it when it was muddy.)
- Don't go into a snowy or muddy area, unless I'm sure I can just keep going forward through it without having to make tight-multi-point turns to get back out.
- Don't go into any risky situation alone, without knowing that help is close by should I get into trouble.
…And, of course, the one that I keep failing to observe…
@Seanette and I actually started out with a group, stayed with them as far as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I think the original plan was to continue from there to some of the roads beyond, but most of the group decided, instead to tackle the Signal Peak trail; a trail which @Seanette and I had tried once before, in much better weather, and gave up on after half a mile. Now, with a somewhat more capable vehicle than we had before, we •MIGHT• be able to take on that trail under very good conditions, but not under the conditions of that day.
We stayed with the group, to the trailhead, took some pictures there, and while they continued to that trail, @Seanette and I went off looking for much easier trails. As we separated, one of the group members gave us her phone number, and said to call if we got in trouble.
First, we took on a very easy, rather artificial trail. Out past Truckee, there’s exit 190 off of the I-80 has a big sign proclaiming “OVERLAND TRAIL”.
We’d been over that once before, not very long after we got the first Jeep, under dry conditions. This time, it was snowy and muddy, but still pretty easy. Kind of a nice, basic exercise in how the present Jeep handles itself in show and mud. not sure how @Seanette was feeling about it at the time, but I was having fun, but it left me wanting more.
So, I brought up OnX to look for a the nearest Easy” rated trail, and picked Crystal Peak Mine Loop. Like Overland Trail, it was muddy and snowy, somewhat more so. The Jeep handled itself well as long as we kept going forward, but it’s a long trail, and it we were running out of daylight, so about three miles in, we decided that perhaps it was time to turn back. That’s when we got in trouble. My big lesson for this trip is that even though this Jeep (and even its somewhat less-capable predecessor) handle snow and mud just fine, as long as you just keep going, trying to get turned around in a tight space, where you have to do a lot of backing and forwarding in such conditions, has a very good chance of getting it stuck.
It turns out that the rest of the group never made it up Signal Peak. More experienced drivers in more capable vehicles ended up taking turns pulling each other’s vehicles out of places they got stuck along the way, before they gave up. I guess in the snow, that trail turned out to be much harder than they anticipated. And then, as they are fighting their way back down that trail, the nice lady that gave us her phone number received a distressed call from me, stuck on a different trail, thirty miles away from where they were.
After roughly an hour or so after that call, four Wranglers showed up to rescue us. In no time at all, they had us pointed the right direction, with our wheels on solid ground so that we could proceed out. One of our rescuers managed to get stuck in almost the same exact way we had, but the rest of the group had little trouble getting him unstuck as well.
So, even for a much more capable vehicle than mine, with a much more skilled driver, trying to turn around that way in snow turns out to be much more hazardous and difficult than I previously would have expected it to be.
In wondering why I didn’t get stuck on my Texas Hill Road adventure, wherein I drove through about twenty or twenty-five miles of thicker snow than on this misadventure, without any problems, in a slightly-less capable vehicle; I think I realized it was because the only place I pulled off the trail was a nice big field where I had plenty of time to make a wide, gentle loop, to get off the road and into a position for my “This is what a Jeep is for.” picture, and then make another nice wide loop to get back on the road, without having to attempt any of the sort of maneuvers that got me stuck on this later occasion.
Whew. So glad to hear that. I’ve been there before with a pup and it was not pretty.
A friend of mine on fb posted a picture of their pork and sauerkraut. And what can I say, it spoke to me, so I had to, uh, personalize it a little bit!
Did you ever notice how much ‘excitement’ looks like excrement?
Context is everything they say.
Glad I’m getting cataract surgery in January. I dearly hope it will improve my eyesight and reading. Sadly, I doubt it will improve my execrable sense of humor.
Indeed it does. One could cause the other at times.
That’s the worst part of it. 90 minutes each way on two trains. When there are delays it sucks even more. Next time I have to move house I’ll find somewhere closer, but until then I am reluctant to uproot, so I’ll just suffer through it.
Went for a walk earlier and nearly froze my pickle balls off. Just enough of a breeze to make the 28F temps feel like teens. I lasted about 20 minutes total, but part of it was uphill, so a bit of cardio. I took a bag of unsalted peanuts with me and scattered them in the park for the birds and rodents.
An early dinner of doctored Bush’s baked beans and a couple of Polish sausages.
Sadie has become quite the living room cat after all this time holing up under the bed. She is presently ensconced on the ottoman in front of my chair, and sometimes will perch on the arm of the chair for scritches. Still won’t be a lap cat, but that’s probably best anyway.
Evening all. Long time no write.
It’s blowing a gale up here in the Northern wilds, though the snow they threatened has been downgraded into a bit of rain. All the big events have cancelled, but thankfully my NYE plans of staying in and going to bed early have so far been unaffected. Some of the local lunatics are setting off fireworks despite the wind and the rain and the fact that it’s still only 10pm so I may wind up still awake reading a book or something, if I’m feeling crazy.
I never bother with resolutions, as the only one I’d be inclined to stick with at this time of year would be to sleep more; my new year starts in spring, when there’s more than 6.5 hours of daylight. That’s when I attempt any new stuff, though I don’t think I have any free time for much new anyway this year.
Still, here’s hoping for a better 2025 all round!
Started Typing: 4:39 PM ET
Clicked Reply: 5:24 PM ET
Happy New Year’s Eve, all! 
I just logged off work, and it’s bizarre to realize that it will be 2025 when I log in again. Heck, it’s bizarre to realize that it will be 2025 in less than 8 hours!
Like many other Mumpers, I’m not a resolutions person. 
Yesterday’s posting time was lost to needing to get my car inspected. Virginia requires annual safety inspections, and mine had been expiring today: normally I don’t wait so late in the month (which means longer lines), but (a) mid-December snuck up on me and (b) then I got sick. I’d planned to do it the day after Christmas, but didn’t feel up to leaving the house. Yesterday’s weather was freakishly nice, and work was slow enough in the afternoon, so I went to a service station 1 mile away: I sat in line for 90 minutes, but got the $20 inspection done. I know the wait would have been even longer today; next year I’ll do better about paying attention to the little sticker in my windshield.
This cold is in a weird stage: in some ways I’m definitely starting to feel better, but I’m also definitely still sick. Meh. Including being too sick to see my BFFs tomorrow; now we’re aiming for the weekend. 
My plans tonight would likely be the same even if I weren’t sick: I’ll hang out with the doggy and largely ignore that it’s NYE, except that I’ll stay up later than usual and at 11:55pm I’ll switch to live TV just long enough to watch the ball drop. For the first few years after my mom died I couldn’t face being awake when a new year started without her, but now I can watch countdowns again (though it’ll always be a little bittersweet when there’s no text from her at midnight). But NYE has never been a big deal to me: if I had the kinds of friends who threw small-ish NYE parties I’d probably go to one, but I’m happy to skip the bars and the “big” parties and the general madness. I’ll indulge in some fleeting melancholy about my mom and about not having anyone to kiss at midnight, but it’ll pass – especially the latter, which doesn’t bother me enough to do anything about it – and then I’ll go to bed and enjoy not having to set an alarm. 
My nod to the holiday will be DoorDashing tonight’s dinner. The nearest Texas Roadhouse is 14 miles away, but Panera will do just fine: half a ciabatta cheesesteak with a fruit cup side, plus some macaroons and a brownie, should be here before 6pm! 
(But, ugh, it just started raining…pretty hard…and now there’s thunder. I typically don’t order delivery in bad weather, but I completely forgot about the forecast. 
I always tip more than the default/suggested amount, so hopefully that will help make up for it. Still…ugh.)
That actually sounds pretty cool! I’m glad things with BB are going well enough for such planning.
!!
OMG… 
I’d never seen that emoji before! HA!
Thank goodness!
Don’t you dare touch your excrement!
(Wait…I mean…um…you know what I mean!!)
Welcome back.
I will be able to see the fireworks at midnight from my windows. In bed or in my chair I can see them should I be awake.
I remember them from the 3 years we lived in King George - back when they only cost $10 and took maybe 10 minutes?? I always viewed them as a revenue-raising joke - they just seemed to look for the ridiculously obvious things like “Hey, your headlight is burned out!” Or maybe it was just the garage where we took our cars.
Hey, Nut! Good to see ya! How goes everything? Apart from the icky weather, that is.
We just finished a tasty, if early, supper. Poke loin slices cooked sous vide, the last of the russets cubed and fried with a big ol’ onion (chunked), and some fresh (not canned) pineapple chunks. There’s punkin pie for later. Till then, I’ll be plopped in my recliner, tablet in hand. Good times!
The 6 pm fireworks just went off for those who have a bedtime or don’t want to wait for midnight. Really big chrysanthemum bursts.