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My much-loved orange cat is dead. He had had kidney disease since 2007, and would never eat the kidney-disease diet, but he did quite well, with occasional intervals of scaring us for the fun of it, until about a year ago. His severe decline began this summer, but he was still enjoying the sun and scritchings until this afternoon. The vet's best ( Read more... )

One mince pie, two vegan pumpkin pies, one pan of pear crisp for the pumpkin-allergic and mince-averse. I made an overflow small dish of the pear crisp and gave it to Raphael, so I have advance notice that the crisp is very good. I used red pears, and when I tasted a slice to see how sweet and how ripe they were or weren't, I regretted not ( Read more... )

Minicon looms, and I wanted to put down, however hastily, some matters that I will probably never commit to this medium if I wait until after the convention.

( New Cat )

The snowdrops came up all of a piece, leaves and drooping white flowers, three or four days ago. The purple snow crocuses are blooming in the front flower bed. The peony on the south side of the house is showing red shoots, as is the evil but beguiling Japanese knotweed. The bleeding-heart in the front flower bed has put up red-and-green shoots ( Read more... )

I don't know why I'm so thoroughly out of the habit of posting. One of the things I like about reading my friends-list is the combination of homely everyday detail and really chewy intellectual posts. I am not very good at making the latter -- I start them, revise them, get bogged down in some detail of nuance or research, and eventually lose ( Read more... )

Well, that was exciting, if all things to do with weather excites one ( Read more... )

Raphael and I have been on a number of lovely hikes that I haven't written up ( Read more... )

I suppose things could still go pear-shaped, but at the moment Aristophanes seems much better. I was in tears last night because he wouldn't eat; it wasn't just that, but he did that whisker-curling, turn-the-head-away thing of a nauseated cat, and I had a terrible flashback to lying on the hallway floor in our old house at five in the morning, ( Read more... )

Raphael and I came home from hiking yesterday evening, and there was no Aristophanes to greet us. I eventually found him curled under a chair in the hottest room of the house. We worried that we had not left enough air conditioning on for him. After dithering a while, we took him over to the University of Minnesota's Small Animal Clinic, where ( Read more... )