This is a book that reads essentially as a gardening textbook or list of tips. There’s a lot of good stuff in it, but I’m afraid I didn’t get much out of it. First, since I listened on audio, the information was overwhelming. A print copy would’ve been much better – especially an owned copy that I could refer back to many times. Second, the book is very UK-centric. Makes sense, as Monty Don is a UK gardener, but very little in the book could be applied to a south Texas garden. I was hoping for a bit more general gardening wisdom, rather than specific times/plants/weather conditions etc.
Still, that’s not to say this is a bad book, and it’s always a pleasure listening to Monty Don (who narrated this himself). (Fair warning to anyone who is turned off by mouth noises, though – there’s quite a bit of swallowing etc that wasn’t removed by the audio editors.) I loved watching him transform gardens in Big Dreams Small Spaces a few years back, and since the show is no longer available on the streaming platforms I subscribe to, it was nice to (kinda) revisit via audio.
PS – Near the beginning of the book, Don describes a dream he had when he was young, of putting his hands in the soil and his fingers growing deep into the earth like roots, and it was the most enthralling and gorgeous image!
June began in a blaze of glory. Finally out of May and the PTSD time of the year, I felt alive and awake for the first time in what felt like forever. I’m really glad I had that feeling, too, because I think that’s what got me through a month of really tough blows: the death of Dan from RLGS; the sudden rapid neurological decline of my best friend’s husband; a more-than-full-time job of caring for and socializing feral kittens; working to TNR feral cats with little** progress; and some serious injuries, illnesses, accidents, and allergic reactions. Not that there wasn’t good things, too – like Jason’s parents visiting near the end of the month, and the lovely moments as the kittens started to trust us. It was just mostly a month that felt determined to pound my family into the ground, and I’m really happy that I had some emotional and mental fortitude to weather it.
Reading and Watching
In books, June was pretty much consumed with the Murderbot series. I tried and culled quite a number of books from my to-investigate list as well, but the only ones I finished were Murderbot novels. I also saw a few new-to-me movies this month: Soul, Legally Blond, and Cruella – that last one in theatre!
Goals
These have changed. My body has been under assault for months now. I feel horrible. Sick, muddle-headed, in pain, hobbling, all the bad things. My goal for the rest of 2021 is to get myself out of this place, whether by medical intervention or weight loss or some combination of the two. All the rest needs to be set to the side. I’ve said it before: I’ve crossed the invisible line where my body can be obese and still able to move and function to one where I’m in pain and no longer functioning properly. So this is the only focus now: get away from this place!
Health It hasn’t been a great month for health! The good bit: I had my wrist surgery on the 3rd and it went smoothly. The wrist is still not entirely healed – I can’t fully bend it certain directions, the skin/tissue around the incision is very tight/bunched, and there’s still pain in some of the nearby bones. But given that it’s been a month, and the recovery is 6-8 weeks, I’m happy with how it’s gone. The other good bit: I’m now six months insomnia-free!
On the negative side: 1) I have a new surgery scheduled in July to take a biopsy of my small intestine; 2) I either broke or sprained a toe mid-month, giving me another injury to manage; 3) after a month on my new blood pressure meds, I had a severe reaction that almost sent me to the emergency room; and 4) my hands swelled up with hives likely related to the same reaction to the bp meds, and continued to itch and burn and swell through the rest of the month. Yes, I did get off the bp med! Honestly, I’m kinda glad to be off it anyway, because it gave me constant heartburn, made me super sleepy all the time (and muddle-headed!), and started interfering with my sleep patterns because of all the naps I was taking! Sleep has gone back to normal though the heartburn has remained (so far). So has the hive/eczema hands, and the horribly upset digestive system. Ugh.
House
We had to rip out the cabinet under our kitchen sink this month. We could smell but not see mildew, so we knew it had to be behind the cabinets. And it was. There was a small leak back there. Tbh, we kinda just cobbled together the kitchen after that. The closest under-sink cabinet we could find was still slightly bigger than the original, so the sink is now off-center to the window, and we had to get a new countertop. In the long run, we want to redo the full kitchen, so we got the cheapest countertop we could, and it looks like a 90s hotel bathroom. It also sticks out several inches longer than where we did the wood paneling earlier this year, and is missing backsplash at that point. Whatever. I’m so sick of house-repairs that I just don’t frickin’ care at this point! It’s ugly, but the kitchen was already ugly. Oh well. At least there’s no more mold.
(new countertop in progress)
Quarantine
Not much has happened since my last Diaries post. Morrigan had his second vaccine dose, yay! San Antonio announced that they’re seeing more Delta variant than any other, and I’ve heard conflicting reports on how effect Pfizer is against it. So we’re going to stay vigilant about masks in public indoor areas.
Favorite photos
I took hundreds and hundreds of photos this month, probably a third of them of the kittens and another third of various wildflowers in our garden. I also decided to participate in a photo-of-the-day challenge, using a half-dozen different sets of prompts to choose from each day. This led to a LOT of photos to pick favorites from, and honestly, other than a very select (3-4) of the below choices, I might change my mind about favorites in the coming months. As always, these photos are taken by me and aren’t always the best photography, just the pictures I liked most.
Top: Father’s Day at the movies (first movie in theatre since the pandemic began!); a perfect paw print left on my leg (Atticus’s); an unusual breakfast. Bottom: Angus is a lap-kitty now!; gateway to an enchanted land, perhaps.
Clockwise from top left: Laurence listening to music; sweet fat kitten bellies; garden strawberry; Ghost looking for love (or perhaps food, ha!).
Highlights of June
My life has been pretty much taken up by medical issues and foster kittens this month, and while there’s been a lot of good in that – I can’t tell you how happy I was the first time each kitten began to purr, or the first time they climbed into my lap – it does mean that the rest of my time was very limited. I didn’t do or see much this month, barely left the house, and so my non-kitten highlights are spare.
having my brother over for dinner the night before surgery, getting to see him a third time before he returned home to Maryland
videos of foster kittens (both my sister’s and on Tiktok)
baby insects and spiders and gorgeous butterflies in my garden
brunch with Kristina –> (yay for returning to normal!)
my new RLGS shirt, which I bought prior to the news about Dan but received a week after the news
seeing a movie in theatre again!
visiting with the in-laws, plus getting to swim and go to several places we hadn’t been in ages!
we received a letter from TX A&M that our vet donated to the vet school there in Ash’s name, which is so incredibly sweet
watching some of the Olympic trials – I can’t wait for the Olympics!
Coming up in July
Hopefully things will be calmer. Of course, it’s our secondary birthday month – not quite as many of March’s insanity, but July still has quite a number of them. My next surgery is scheduled for the end of the month as well. Plus there’s the Olympics, and I love the Olympics!! The big thing I’d love is to get the kittens off to a shelter who will find them wonderful forever homes. Then I’d like to rest for a long, long time.
*****
**Re: the TNR stuff. As we’d had no luck with trapping, we spoke with SAFCC and they said to not feed the cats for three days beforehand. We coordinated with the neighbors who have been feeding the colony, but when we went to trap last Sunday evening, there was food out. We wrote to see if wires got crossed, and were ghosted. We wrote again a few times, until finally they told us that we were cruel to starve cats and that they were taking the TNR course and would do the work themselves. Which tbh is what they should have done from the beginning, but whatever. We offered to lend our traps and to give them the food we’d bought, and were told no, go donate our food somewhere else. Rude. Anyway, the ferals are now out of our hands.
A couple nights ago, I sat on the floor of the kitten room. I’ve been working hard to socialize these kittens, and each of them has reached a different level of comfort. On this particular night, Angus came right up and plonked himself into the crook of my leg, purring away. Reaper, not to be outdone, climbed onto my thigh, also purring away. Ghost and Gherkin are both a bit more scared. Ghost stood under a chair to my right, purring but too afraid to get closer for pets. Gherkin lay on the ground, just close enough for me to lean forward and reach her short pets. It was actually a milestone for her – the closest she’d ever willingly come to me for any prolonged period of time. I only have two hands, and I alternated between petting the four kittens. Reaper in particular didn’t like when I stopped, and she would stand up and try to sniff my face to get my attention whenever I leaned over to pet Gherkin.
Jason took this picture of me and my little cuddle puddle. It is not a flattering photo. There’s no hiding the fat anywhere. There’s no denying that I am very fat. It is what it is.
And I love this photo.
In this photo, I have a bunch of half-tamed feral kittens begging for love. They are looking at me for affection. They trust me at this moment. I’m showing them that humans can be safe and loving and warm. They don’t see “fat.” They see love. And I can’t look at this photo and see anything but love, either.
I won’t lie. I am not happy in my body right now. Ever since the medicine and injury debacle back in October, I’ve gained 25 lbs and am now the highest weight I’ve been in 12 years. Those 25 lbs have put me over a very specific line that, when crossed, causes mass chaos in my body. Everything hurts. I was plenty obese 25 lbs ago, but I was also fit and strong, and medically, all my numbers were fine. (Well, except for the inflammation markers that no one could figure out, but that was when I was thin, too.) None of those things are true anymore, not at this size, and coupled with two injuries and a surgical site, I’m left hardly able to move. My body is not a safe or comfortable place to be right now, and that doesn’t even go into any psychological barriers.
But this post isn’t about loving my body. I’ve become a bit jaded with body positivity, and have leaned more toward body neutrality and body functionality in the last year. A body is a body is a body. I can love myself completely separate from my body. And with that, I can also not love my body while still loving myself. I can want my body to change, while still appreciating it for the things it does for me. With body neutrality, there isn’t so much pressure to love my body while I’m actively in pain every single day. Nor is there that conflict of, “If you’re trying to lose weight, you must not love your body properly” that is so prevalent in the current BoPo movement. My body just is, fat and painful as well as functional and integral.
When “fat” is stripped off its connotations and just becomes a description, you can see the true story of a person. I can look at this picture of me and see, not fatness, but mutual love and newly-forming relationships and the hard work going into the building of trust. So yes, I love that photo, I love me in that photo, and I won’t hide that photo away because of an insignificant little word like “fat.”
A few months back, I decided to try out a few subscription boxes, with the first on my list being Cairn. Cairn is an outdoors-product box that cost $30 for my first two months, and then due to a price change that (I’m told) was entirely coincidental, was $35 for June. I’ll give my overall thoughts after the individual monthly box descriptions.
April I received my first Cairn box on April 24th. I’ll admit, I was expecting more than what arrived based on what I’d seen online. But let me just go through the products one by one.
HydraPak 25-oz water bottle with carry-handle and twisting lid: Nice idea, poor execution. It’s not insulated, so lots of condensation/sweating. The leakproof lid leaks, and is difficult to use. Also, you know how when you’re drinking from a cup and suddenly the ice slide toward you, and you get water everywhere? That happened even with a tiny sipping hole. I got water on myself nearly every time. Save your money and buy a Hydroflask, they’re worth it. Plus you can put stickers on them. 1.5 stars.
GoToob travel tubes with loop attachments (3): Honestly, I was disappointed on seeing these because you can get travel tubes for a dollar at Walmart. But then I used them when I took that mini-vacation in May. I used one for shampoo and one for honey (because yes, they can be used for food/condiments, too!). They were the perfect size, texture, and flexibility. They had wide mouths for easy filling and cleaning. Best of all, you know how when you squirt a condiment, it always gets messy on the rim? These instead suctioned back in and left no mess! 5 stars.
Green Goo plant-based travel salves (4): The four salves included here were for pain relief, first aid, skin repair, and dry skin. Each of the salves had a pleasant, very-mild (almost undetectable) scent. I’ve used a few – one on my son’s eczema, one on mosquito bites. My son’s response to how his worked was “I don’t remember,” so there’s that, but the one I used on the mosquito bites was amazing! They immediately stopped itching and the effect lasted about 12 hours before I needed to reapply. I’ve put all four salves into my hiking pack. 5 stars.
May My second package came in on 5/22 and had more in it than I expected, given what I’d seen on my first package.
Skratch Labs energy chews: Too often, energy chews taste awful, but these were actually quite good, with no artificial tastes or aftertastes. They were also small/soft enough to use while exercising. I’ll definitely be on the look out for these for the future! 5 stars.
Skratch Labs hydration drink mix: I expected this to taste like less artificial, less sweet Gatorade. Well, it tasted more like a cross between watered-down jello and fruit-infused water. Not my fave, and by the end of the 16 oz of water I mixed it with, I had a weird aftertaste in my mouth and was unimpressed. I could see it working maybe in an exercise setting (I used it instead during an illness that caused dehydration), but honestly, I’d still prefer Gatorade. 2 stars.
Mazama insulated drink tube sleeve: This is meant to keep water from freezing inside your bladder hose in winter conditions. Unless I travel to wintery areas, this isn’t an item I can use. Looks useful for someone else, though! (not rated)
Mazama 2L universal-fit water bladder: I finally got to try this one out on 8/28. Pros: the fold-over clip closure was really great! Cons: I thought this was going to be easier to clean than traditional bladders, because the entire top opens, but it’s still pretty narrow and there’s a line down the middle so that you can’t dry all sides at once. Also, the mouthpiece leaks like crazy! Not while locked, but it fills up so that when you unlock it to drink, it spills a whole bunch. I have a bunch of Camelbak bladders already, plus the one that came with my generic RockRain bag, and I prefer them all to this one, at least for the drinking bit. 2 stars.
June My last package came in early in June (forgot to record the date) and also came with four products.
Aquamira multifunction water filter: So…I will add this to my hiking pack, but this seems like a product more useful for someone doing multi-day hikes or thru-hiking trails where a quick filter for water sources might be needed. I, personally, cannot imagine using it, but it seems a good thing to have in case of emergencies. (not rated)
UTS watertight fire kit: This also seems like a product intended for long-distance hikers or campers (aka not me). So again, into the emergency kit it goes, but I don’t foresee getting any use from it. (not rated)
Good to Go bar (double chocolate): When I saw that the packaging on this said “keto certified” and “1g sugars 8g fiber,” I knew it wasn’t for me. But in the interest of science, I opened and tried it. Yes, it did look like a poop log. Texture-wise, it was both mushy and fibrous, and personally that was the worst thing. The bar had almost no taste – a mild chocolate and almost no sweetness, but no bitterness either. I could see the bar working well for someone who was doing keto and wanted a bit of chocolatey taste without too much sugar. But nope. 1.5 stars.
Murphy’s Naturals mosquito repellent balm: I am a mosquito magnet, so I was most interested in this product! It’s deet-free and plant-based, with lemongrass, rosemary, peppermint, and cedarwood. The scent is mild and pleasant. In the container. So here’s the negative bit. It takes a lot of time to roll this balm all over your exposed skin. So yeah, maybe it’s better for someone wearing pants/long sleeves and who only needs to use it on face and neck! But I used it on a 100-degree day while trying to trap cats for TNR for an hour, at sunset, near a yard with standing water, so this stuff went over practically my entire body, and it took 15 mins to apply. The smell also became very overwhelming in that quantity! On the plus side, I only got two mosquito bites that night. (For contrast, two evenings later, I went for a hike where I was moving most of the time, and forgot bug repellant, and got about a dozen bites.) Time-wise, it’s easier for me to just use bug spray, but this little roller will join my hiking kit as well for reapplication on the trails. 3 stars.
Summing up Cairn
After three months, my biggest conclusion is that this subscription box is more well-suited to someone who pursues a wider range of outdoor activities (or who visits a wider range of outdoor environments) than me. I did get a lot of things I could have on hand in case of emergencies while hiking, which was nice, but I also have a number of things that I’m not sure what to do with, and that seems wasteful. The price range, even with the increase, seemed reasonable given the quality and number of products I received. I don’t regret my decision to try the company out, and I do encourage outdoor enthusiasts to give Cairn a try.
We’ve had no luck trapping the adult cats in the nearby feral colony this week. Well, one night, the mother of these kittens did go into the trap, but somehow it didn’t go off! Ugh! We’re going to try again tonight, but we’ve already contacted the SAFCC to let them know the situation is particularly difficult given that it’s not our colony that we’re trying to trap. They’re looking for a specialized group to come help us, to go and talk to the people at the house directly.
Most of this post is about the kittens. It has been one crazy week since my last post. The kittens were not particularly well, and were waiting on the Tuesday vet visit to figure out where to go with them. Reaper was in the worst shape, as she wouldn’t eat anything. We were having to force-fed her both pedialyte and kitten replacement milk every couple hours, despite the fact that she was completely weaned and old enough to be on solid food. She was extremely sweet, purring every time we held her, and all she wanted was to be carried (for warmth, I’m sure!). She was skin and bones, weighing barely over a pound when she was supposed to be 2 lbs at her age.
The rest of the kittens had begun to perk up by Monday. The arrival of Gherkin really helped. Maybe it was just having the entire litter together again, or maybe it was the fact that Gherkin was seriously into food and wrestling, but everyone (except Reaper) began to eat and play a lot more. All the kittens began to gain weight pretty fast – they were all underweight – except of course Reaper. Even with the force-fed milk, she was losing. So on Monday, we began syringe-feeding her chicken baby food instead. She didn’t like that, and it got everywhere, but she needed the calories! And it worked. Tuesday morning, she began to eat baby food on her own, voraciously, as well as crunchy kitten food. It was like she’d gotten so hungry that she lost all hunger signals, but with enough force-fed food, she wanted to eat All The Things. She’s still a lot smaller than the other three, but she’s been gaining 50-100 grams a day, which is awesome!
The kittens saw the vet Tuesday morning. I was wrong before – all four of them went in together. They had physical exams, fecal tests (they all have roundworms, as expected), and Reaper had some bloodwork done. Sadly, this showed that the kittens are FeLV positive, which means probably the entire feral colony is as well. It’s devastating. We have to be extra careful not to expose the kittens to our adult cats. And feline leukemia is a particularly tricky virus – the vet didn’t expect Reaper to last through the end of the day, much less the end of the week, given her rapid decline. Then there’s the question of how we’re going to get homes for these babies – will a shelter take them? Will we be able to find someone who will give them love and care, rather than euthanizing them? We did finally find a shelter in Austin – Austin Pets Alive – that will take in FeLV+ kittens, and have been talking with them. Fingers crossed! Obviously, they can’t stay locked in the one room forever, but they also can’t join our house, or go back out into the feral colony!
Socializing is going well – slow and steady. In the beginning, the kittens let us pick them up and pet them. Now, they are less afraid of us, so more willing to run away or try to escape if we hold them. So begins Phase Two. We started opening up the playpen for them to run around the room, getting used to us being in the same room. They would play – they love the Cat Dancer – but if one of us moved or shifted or made an unexpected sound, they’d run to hide somewhere. I kept playing with the Cat Dancer, and holding my fingers out to let them sniff if they wanted, and eventually (Friday), Reaper and Angus were willing to come near my hand to sniff. If I tried to touch them, they’d run, but it was a start! We’ll keep working on this.
In the meantime, the kittens have made some great leaps forward. Angus and Reaper have started purring and coming to my hand in the playpen when they want food. Gherkin finally purred for the first time. Reaper has started playing with my fingers as if they’re toys. Angus and Reaper will sometimes let me pet them outside the pen if I go slow enough. Little things like that. They’re well on their way to being full socialized, non-feral, adoptable kittens, with that sad FeLV complication to think about. (Note: I don’t know very much about FeLV aside from what the vet gave us in info, but kittens can apparently fight off the virus, and while they tend to have somewhat compromised immune systems and live shorter lives than other cats, they can certainly live full, happy lives. They just need to be in a home that won’t risk spreading the virus to other cats!)
(Clockwise from top left: Ghost, Angus, Reaper, Gherkin)
I’m continuing on my summer semi-blog-break. This week, Jason’s parents came to visit for several days. Then on Friday morning, after a month on my bp meds, I had a sudden serious side effect that almost sent me into the hospital (bp dropped so low I nearly fainted, and my heart rate wouldn’t go above 51 bpm). That same evening, Jason got rear-ended (thankfully he and everyone else is fine). I still can’t walk on the foot with the maybe-broken toe, and I couldn’t even tell you when we were last able to clean the house. So yeah. Blog will continue to be on the back burner.
Not gonna lie – there’s not much going on in terms of quarantine any longer. Vaccinations are keeping things relatively under control. Which is awesome.
Numbers
Early in the month, we crossed the 50% line of fully vaccinated residents in SA. At this point, we are up to a total of 959,040 full vaccinations in SA (58% of eligible folks), and 1,207,058 folks (73%) with at least one dose. Here’s how the rest of our numbers have fared over the last four weeks:
As you can see, things remain steady without much change – a positivity rate between 1 and 1.5%, and just over 100 for an average daily infection rate. It would be wonderful to see continued downward progress, but you can see that only 58% of eligible folks are fully vaccinated, and only 73% have gotten their first dose. That’s pretty low considering we have plenty to go around, and I’ve heard that there’s a problem with people not coming back for their second doses…sigh. But holding steady this low is better than spiking upwards again. I guess we’ll see how things progress in the future.
Local news
We reached a major milestone this month: our last nightly covid briefing was on 6/3. All the numbers above come from the city’s website, which is now updating every Wednesday. Vaccinations have been mostly sent out into pop-up clinics all over the city, including ones at Fiesta, which is going on this month. Many businesses are starting to move into post-covid mode. HEB, for instance, stopped requiring fully vaccinated workers or customers to wear masks. I’ve been there a few times since, and some folks (both customers and employees) are wearing them, but many aren’t, and it doesn’t feel as weird or scary as I expected it to. All the barriers and floor markers are still in place, but more and more, we’re seeing signs of “after,” and that’s honestly a relief!
On the home-front At home, life also moves more toward normal. We attended virtual graduation for my sister, and were thankful for that option, but also went maskless to her graduation party that same evening. We had a birthday party for my nephew at Chuck E Cheese, and half the folks wore masks (thankfully, my whole family did!). I’ve now been to several outdoor events and hikes and didn’t even bring a mask along with me (thank goodness, because the heat is unreal this year!). Our school district has let us know that next year, online school will not be offered at all because the state won’t fund it, so everyone will be back in person. Jason’s work, which previously said no one would be back in the office until 2022, might be sending him back in 2x/week in the very near future (possibly next week). My family actually went to see a movie in theatre for the first time since Feb 2020! My in-laws came to visit this last week, and we went around a lot of places, and actually didn’t wear masks at many, just like in ye olden days, and it felt strange and normal and new all at once.
On the other side of things, the hospital still required me to get a covid test the day before my surgery (that wasn’t pleasant – they did the all-the-way-up-your-nose test!), and most medical facilities are still requiring it. There was a funny conversation I overheard at the imaging center:
Receptionist to older man: Sir, do you have a mask?
Older man: A what?
R: A mask.
OM: The governor said we were 100% safe from all that and we didn’t need to wear those now.
R: Well, we still do at our facility, it’s our policy.
OM: (putting on mask they’ve given him) Gol-LY!
OM: (pulls mask below nose the second R looks away)
(And no, our governor may be stupid and horrible, but he never did say that people were 100% safe from covid. *eye roll*)
Moving forward
This will be my last time posting my quarantine diaries. (Unless, of course, something really crazy happens!) This series has really helped me a lot over the last 15 months, but as you can see, the last four weeks has really just been “starting to get back to normal” with a few other minor things sprinkled in. I might include a section in my normal monthly wrap-ups if anything larger happens, but as it is, I feel like locally at least, the pandemic is winding up. Sure, it would be great if the rest of the population would get vaccinated so we could keep variants from forming and spreading, and it would be great if we could NOT politicize medicine, etc etc, but that won’t happen any time soon, so there’s no need for me to be posting about it on a more regular basis here. Thank you all for reading!
When I read a bunch of series books back to back like this, I don’t like to do individual reviews for each one. I especially like to skip descriptions as that can cause inadvertent spoilers for earlier volumes. So after loving the first Murderbot book by Martha Wells, All Systems Red, I ordered the rest of the as-of-yet published series from the library, and will do mini-reviews below.
Artificial Condition
My favorite thing about this second volume of the Murderbot series is the focus on unconventional friendships. The narrator, who I’ll just refer to as Murderbot, is on a quest, but that quest keeps getting interrupted by folks (human and bot) who form unexpected attachments to Murderbot. And those attachments end up proving mutually beneficial. So in essence, we have this Construct that is, for the first time, entirely under its own directive, and in attempting to discover more about its past, it’s instead learning about friendships, attachments, and loyalty that isn’t enforced by contract. It’s a lovely book, even better than the first in the series, and I can’t wait to dive into book 3!
Rogue Protocol
Back again, and this time, the book is full-on action. I love that, so far at least, each of these books has been completely different in structure, not following the same arch or general story. Murderbot is still its antisocial self with the built-in urge to protect humans (though it’s not so sure the urge is technically built-in anymore), and it’s learning all about other forms of bot in addition to the infinite variety of humankind. Only now, there are betrayals and combat-bots and lots of danger and fighting, with almost no space to rest. Interesting note to the series: Murderbot doesn’t feel inclined to understand the whys of everything going on around it. This leaves a lot of gaps in the reader’s information, where a reader might question why these people did X, and why other people wouldn’t do Y, and what caused Z to happen in the drop in communication. Murderbot doesn’t care. Murderbot just moves on without examining the specifics, forcing the reader to do the same, which is a slightly uncomfortable but also interesting experience.
Exit Strategy
And now we’ve come full circle, with Murderbot returning to help the folks it first got involved with back in Book 1. There’s starting to be more background on some of the world-building and corporations involved. This was another high-action book, but not as much as the third. There was a good balance of introspection, world-building, and action – the most complete-feeling of the novellas so far. It seems as if Murderbot is starting to figure out who it is and what it wants, and beginning to see possibilities for its future. I’m loving the progress. Once again, I raced through this book, end the ending was just perfect. The full-length novel is next, and I can’t wait! There are some hints that other characters may be returning!
Network Effect
This is the only (so far) full-blown Murderbot novel, and as such, could go into much greater detail on a lot of things (from characters to world-building, as well as thematic elements such as philosophy toward construct creations like programmed bots that also have organic neural tissue). It took me a bit longer to get through the book as I had quite a bit of Life Stuff happen shortly after I began it, but that in no way decreased my enjoyment. I found myself grinning every time Murderbot says something like, “Ugh, emotions,” because really, UGH, emotions, right?? I’m really sad not to have the (current) last book in the series out right now, but it only released at the end of April, so there’s a much longer hold line at the library. I’ll be diving into it as soon as it arrives, though. Still, I felt like this book could have ended the series quite nicely, with pretty much the past all closed up, and the future only hinted at as a possibility rather than a cliffhanger. But luckily for all us Murderbot fans, the series goes on, and I’ve heard it’s been signed on for another so-many books after #6, woohoo!
Last Sunday, I posted about the feral cat colony that no one has been taking care of at the house four doors down from me. (I also posted about other things, but consider that post Part 1 of the Feral series.) In the week since, I’ve learned a few things, and there’s been a lot of continued activity. I’ll break this into parts.
The House: First, I want to apologize. I made an assumption in last week’s post that I’ve found out since was wrong. I said that we suspected the man who lives at the junk-house is a hoarder, and that given the things I’ve heard him say (refer to original post), he’s also a horrible man. In talking with a neighbor this week, I learned that indeed the man who lives there is a hoarder – in fact, he was actually on Hoarders in 2012. I’ve never actually watched the show, but I sought it out to see what sort of situation we might be dealing with…and I discovered that the man I’ve seen at the house is NOT the owner. So the hoarder and the a$$hole are actually two different people. I’m not sure who the guy is that I’ve seen – it could be a relative or friend or just a handyman who helps out, because I always see him trying to fix the cars or board up windows etc.
But it’s not the owner as I assumed, and the owner/hoarder actually seems like a nice man, and I feel really bad for him. Hoarding is a devastating mental health problem. The reason I don’t watch shows like Hoarders because they feel exploitative. And hoarding clean-ups like that don’t just have happily ever afters. It’s clear the man has gone back to at least some of his habits in the nine years since his episode. So hopefully we can trap these ferals and TNR them and have at least one less thing he needs to worry about.
The Ferals: Ferals are hard to trap. They’re smart, and pregnant/nursing mothers are especially smart and wary. Here’s what we know of the colony. There are two Siamese female cats, one of whom is the mom of four kittens, one of whom is pregnant. The first is also injured, so we’ve been calling her Injured Mama. The second, we thought may have had her kittens, but we don’t believe so now as she continues to get bigger and her nipples are getting larger. The neighbor we’ve been working with also believes she’s pregnant. She’s the one we’ve had eating in our backyard. The two Siamese moms are a bonded pair, and they both look after the kittens. Then, there’s a large grey tabby who is likely the father of all the kittens.
(“Do you think I’m stupid?” // This was taken from across the street, very far away, and she’s still giving us that look.)
Lastly, there appears to be a slightly older kitten (maybe 12 weeks, but he might not be quite old enough for TNR) who is a grey tuxedo cat. He is not the sharpest hammer in the dishwasher, as Jason likes to say, and has gotten trapped four times. We originally thought that, as a kitten, we could try to socialize him too. He was on the edge of the social window, but we would try. Unfortunately, we moved him to the playpen we were using for the kittens after his first trapping, and he immediately escaped into our garage. We had to open the garage and let him go before he hurt himself. The second time he got trapped, we let him go, only to immediately have him set off the trap again, this time with one of the other kittens inside! We had to use a barrier to separate the two and then let him go so that we could capture the kitten! The third night, he got himself trapped again…like I said, not the sharpest of cats! Unfortunately, the others have watched this guy get trapped multiple times, and are staying away from the enticing food smells.
We’re currently taking a trapping break for a few days before we start again, to give them time to be less wary, to to let them have a few days of normal feedings again. I think we’re going to need to request the larger trap for the tabby and possibly Pregnant Mama too.
The Kittens: There are four grey/beige tabby kittens in the new litter, roughly 7-8 weeks old. We caught one last week and he didn’t do well, so after 24 hrs, we returned him to his litter. We waited a few days before going out to trap kittens again. On Monday, we caught Reaper and Ancho, whose name seems to have morphed into Angus over the week. On Tuesday, we caught Ghost. Ironically, the only one we didn’t catch was the one from last week! And his mom knew Jason was the cat-napper, because she kept getting between the two of the whenever he tried to catch him. But yesterday morning, the neighbor we’ve been working with (next door to the hoarder) caught the last kitten and we brought him home to the litter. His name is Gherkin, and all four siblings are reunited.
I’ve been posting the kittens’ stories on my Instagram, because a lot has happened since we caught the first two six days ago. As a brief summary:
They are all underweight and dehydrated. There’s been a lot of vomiting/diarrhea, and we’ve been giving them probiotics with their food as well as Pedialyte supplements and (in Reaper’s case) force-fed syringe feedings of kitten replacement milk. (They are all weaned and can eat wet food without an issue, but their stomachs are used to whatever they can catch plus garbage scraps in the yard.
Reaper, Ghost, and Angus have all begun purring, especially Reaper. They all let us cuddle them now. Gherkin lets us hold him but mostly because he’s very scared.
Reaper is female, the others are all male. [Note: This is incorrect. After better inspection, we discovered Gherkin is also female. Vet confirms: two female, two male.]
They’re just barely learning how to play. Play isn’t really part of feral life. Reaper is trying to show us she can play by biting/wrestling shirt collars when we hold her, ha!
We have a vet appointment for one of them set up on Tuesday, at which point whatever worm/etc treatments the one gets, they’ll all get.
Hopefully this week, we’ll have some improved health for the kittens, more play, purrs from Gherkin, and weight gain from everyone. Hopefully we’ll also trap the other ferals and get them TNRed. I might post here, I might not. There’s quite a bit of other things going on right now – I either broke or severely sprained a pinky toe two nights ago (yes, I’m a walking catastrophe at the moment) and it’s solid purple, and I have a friend whose husband is going through a devastating medical situation. The kittens will also take up a huge chunk of my time. I have a few posts half-written that I plan to finish and post, but I think I’m going to continue on semi-break for now while things are really crazy here.
I’m supposed to get my stitches out this morning, yay! It’s been 13 days since my surgery, and let’s just take a moment to discuss the medical situation over the last less-than-two-weeks.
First, I went home from surgery. No problem. Yay.
Second, I had a follow up appointment with my primary care provider (PCP), five days after surgery. Good news: My blood pressure was awesome after only a week on the new meds. Bad news: We needed to order more bloodwork now.
Third, and this isn’t really date specific, can I just mention how awful it is to have one wrist wrapped in bandaging and a very black angry bruise on the other arm? (That photo is only the beginning. That entire area turned solid black a few days after I took this.) I’ve had to start answering people’s questions with, “I had a cyst removed from the wrist, and look how awful, they missed on their first try with the IV, isn’t this a horrible bruise?” Too many folks were taking me aside to ask if I felt safe at home. I mean, glad they’re asking – if I was actually unsafe at home, it would be good to have people looking out for me – but also I kinda wish it was long-sleeves weather.
Fourth and fifth, more rounds of imaging! I had an ultrasound of my left leg (confirmed: ultrasound wands pressed on the tendons of your inner thigh and groin are extremely ticklish in a horrible way) and a CT scan of my abdomen. Results to follow on my next f/u appoint with my PCP in July.
Sixth: Chiropractor. At least that was all just maintenance.
Seventh: Gastro specialist yesterday, who scheduled an endoscopy and small intestine biopsy in July. Guess who has to go under anesthesia and have another IV and surgery? *raises hand* Sigh.
Y’all I’m so sick of medical procedures now. Really, really sick of medical procedures. Send help. SOS. Heh. Really, though, I think I just need my own medical drama series, because it feels like that kind of soap opera at this point. I just have to keep telling myself, maybe one day all of this will matter, someone will find something, it won’t just be pointless, maybe we can figure out what’s wrong…
Y’all. This week was just…like being sucker-punched over and over. It was a rough week. My thoughts are chaotic and not quite together, so forgive me if I ramble a bit.
I suppose I should start with Tuesday, the night that I saw the kittens. Backstory: there’s a house four doors down from us that is a typical run-down, probably-a-hoarder kind of house, with boarded windows and junk everywhere on an overgrown lawn. The man who lives there is an a$$hole, and every time I’ve seen him, he’s been spouting horrible stuff like “you have to slap your b!tch to keep her in line.” Last August, a litter of Siamese-tabby cats was born there, and we didn’t know if they were feral or outdoor pets. I mean, how often do you see a litter of feral Siamese cats, right? Plus there were rusted metal cages all around the yard, and water/food bowls that…well, they had leaf litter in them instead of food, but maybe the guy was just gone? He wasn’t answering his door anyway… Jason and I didn’t think there was anything we could do. We’ve seen several of the Siamese cats in our yard since then – 10 months old and technically adults now – and it’s become clear that these aren’t pets. Especially once another batch of kittens showed up.
(two on the porch and one in the grass the night I first saw them)
We’ve talked to a lot of the neighbors since then. No, the man doesn’t take care of or feed the cats, and regards them as “not his problem” even though the feral colony seems to like his junk-yard as their home base. We all agree something needs to be done. One of the cats is injured and has an infected leg. There is feces all over the yard and the kittens are covered in bugs. It’s a horrible situation. We tried reaching out to Animal Care Services, and they can’t do anything, so they sent us to the SA Feral Cat Coalition. They think it’s great that we want to TNR the cats, but unfortunately, the colony lives four doors down. We have to try to move it closer. And that starts with feeding times.
Which leads us to Thursday. We put out food for the first time that morning. If y’all are on Tiktok, you’ll know the Oh No song. That song immediately popped into my head:
That is one heavily pregnant kitty. We think, anyway? Sigh. But it was a good sign that she came to eat here – she’ll know where there’s food, and hopefully figure out the eating schedule, and maybe we can trap/spay her before there’s another litter of kittens born!
That day, I just felt off all day. Partly, I’m still adjusting to a new medication, and most afternoons, I get so sleepy that I take a nap. On Thursday, while lying down, I suddenly had the image in my head from when Ash passed away two weeks ago, and it was like being hit in the stomach. I know it was because we’d heard from the vet that his ashes and memorials were ready to be picked up, but I’ve tried my best to fill my head with other images since then, so it really was a sucker-punch. Then in the evening, Pregnant Mama didn’t show up for food, and while that’s not unusual – we’ve only started putting it out – it felt like an ominous omen. Then Jason caught one of the kittens.
The goal was to catch all four kittens and rehabilitate them to make them adoptable while TNRing the adult cats. The kittens looked to be 6-8 weeks old. They were eating solid food, had their adult eye color, were steady on their feet, etc. They were likely weaned and safe to be separated from their mother. After Jason caught the first, the others wouldn’t come near him Thursday night. So we spent some time setting the baby up in a safe environment. He – I’ll just call him “he” for ease, though we couldn’t pick him up to check – didn’t hiss at us or anything, and let us pet him, but he was obviously terrified and lonely and didn’t understand what was happening to him. Jason had gone out to buy some additional supplies while I tried to calm the kitten and adjust him to his new situation (covering the enclosure, making sure the temp was comfortable, getting him food/water, etc, all without touching him at this point). We were up quite late, well past when I normally sleep, and when I did finally sleep, I spent six hours in broken dreams of horrific things happening to the kitten in the hours he was alone.
Then I woke up to the news that the male half of the Real Life Ghost Stories Podcast, Dan, had passed away suddenly due to an underlying health issue (most likely his congenital heart issue, though the part in parentheses is my speculation).
Talk about sucker-punch.
(posted to the FB group from a fellow mourner)
I mean, I wasn’t a friend of Dan’s. We chatted on Instagram sometimes, and had been on a RLGS Zoom together a year ago with a half-dozen other podcast fans, and sometimes commented on posts, etc. We weren’t friends. But I’ve spent hours and hours and hours listening, watching, and reading his and Emma’s content over the last 15 months or so. He was 36. He was posting on Instagram stories the day before. The news was shocking and horrific, and your brain does all the things brains do to try to make sense of the nonsensical, and then the outpouring of love and grief from fans all over the world…
Again, Dan wasn’t my friend. My grief is real, but it’s distant. It’s not nearly the grief that Emma and his family and his friends are going through. And in no way do I want to make this about me, and my feelings, and my grief. But I’m also not going to pretend that the entire day wasn’t disoriented and uneasy and filled with moments where I broke down and cried, because it was. I’ve dealt with death before, but not sudden death, not since I was a kid in sixth grade with a classmate who was accidentally killed while playing with what he thought was an unloaded gun. My brain struggled – is still struggling – to cope with the sudden absence of a person.
Then on top of that, things continued to get crazier. Mama Cat didn’t show up again on Friday morning. She showed up at noon, her belly now smaller and sagging. (Or another Siamese cat with similar markings showed up? It’s unlikely, though, since she went straight over to the place she’d gotten food the day before, even though there was no food out during that time.) So either she wasn’t pregnant, or there’s another batch of kitten-worms out there and we weren’t nearly fast enough to TNR before it was too late.
(left: Injured Mama in the junk-yard; right: comfort nursing)
And on top of that, when Jason went out to try to trap more kittens that night, he discovered that Injured Cat was also these kittens’ mother, and while they’re not nursing for food, they’re still comfort-nursing at the end of a solid-food meal. The baby in our care was not doing well. He’d eaten plenty, and he’d explored a bit of his enclosure, but he hadn’t pooped at all in a 24 hour period and he was still clearly distraught. After some debate, we decided to return him to his litter until we could get the proper trapping equipment to get the whole batch. (They were all delighted to see each other, crying for each other and then grooming each other, including Mom.) We plan to try to trap the four kittens, plus their mom, toward the end of this week. In the meantime, we’ll work on getting them to trust us in the evenings. Injured Cat lets Jason get within a foot of her without running, which is good.
All in all, Friday was NOT a good day, and this week has been chaotic and messy and painful. Yesterday wasn’t much better. Pregnant Mama showed up for breakfast, and now looks like she may or may not ever have been pregnant, and we just can’t tell. We don’t know if it’s safe to trap her or not. And Jason has now seen that she IS one of the two Siamese cats that hangs out in the front of the junk-yard, so she’s bonded with Injured Cat (which at least means one less adult we need to trap). We keep going back and forth about whether to try to trap the kittens first, or the adults, and when to do it…we’re so new to this, and have no guidance other than a how-to video on when to feed and how to use the traps. Sigh. It feels very much like their lives are all in our hands and that’s not a comfortable feeling.
I woke up very late this morning, after several short, troubled nights of sleep, with the above song/video in my head. I first saw this video and heard the song back in 2006/2007-ish, and it has helped me to process grief many times over the years. So I’ll leave this here, in this post, which is a bit of an “in memorandum” post even though the person I’m mourning is only a distant acquaintance who nevertheless had a major impact on my life.
Sorry if this post is disorganized and chaotic. My brain is still not okay.
I have reviewed many books over the years, and some reviews have been more interesting or fun to write than others. The below list were my favorites to write.
Subtitled: Gardening Wisdom
The Zen Leaf 