Cats, Cardboard, And Carrollton

We got Terry’s cats, BeeBee and Mai Lyn, spayed a week ago today, and as I wrote in a blog afterward, Mai Lyn was fine after a couple of hours rest. BeeBee seemed to be having some kind of reaction to the medication and hissed and growled at the other critters for a couple of days before she settled back down.

Things seemed to be back to normal after that, but then Sunday night Terry noticed a bulge in BeeBee’s stomach near her incision. We thought it might be a hernia, so first thing Monday morning I called Western Alabama Animal Hospital and they said to bring her in. We took both cats, just to have them checked out, and after examining them Doctor Lowe said it wasn’t a hernia, just the result of the thin wall cats have in their abdomen puckering ans puffing out due to the tight stitches necessary for active cats. He said it is not uncommon and to keep an eye on it, but he was sure it would be okay and will shrink up fairly soon.

I wrote in a blog a week or so ago that we had a lot of cardboard and paper that needed to be recycled but couldn’t find a place to do it around here. I called the city hall of several of the small towns in the area and nobody seemed to have any suggestions, except for one lady, who told me to just burn it. I responded that there is a statewide burn ban in effect because of the drought, but her reply was, “Oh, don’t worry about that. Everybody does it.” Maybe so, but not me.

Fortunately, I discovered that Pickens County has a recycling center just south of Carrollton, which is where we had to go for the vet. So before we left, I loaded all the cardboard into the back of Terry’s van, and after we had the cats checked out we drove over there and dropped everything off. Now the cardboard can be recycled instead of going up in smoke, and I have a lot more room in the garage.

The weatherman had been predicting a storm front coming through the area Monday night and today, with the slight possibility of a tornado, and definitely lots of rain and high wind. When we got home we spent some time securing things, taking the chairs and fire pit off the deck, taking down Terry’s wind chimes, and putting anything else that might be blown about in the garage.

The last thing we did was move the Husqvarna riding lawn mower and Kawasaki Mule from the carport up near the house back to the barn. Instead of staying on the barn road walking back to the house, we came up through the back pasture. That’s when eagle eyed Terry found an arrow I had lost a couple of weeks ago. I couldn’t believe it because Terry and I have both been over that area several times, even taking my metal detector out there, with no luck. In fact, just an hour or so before that, when we got back from our trip to the vet and recycling center in Carrollton, I had taken Alli out of her outdoor kennel and we walked around the pasture for a while so she could get some exercise, and I had been looking for the arrow in the same place. It’s amazing how you can walk right over something and not know it’s there, and then suddenly it’s easy to spot. Easy for Terry, anyway.

With all of that done, I got to work again and knocked out another chapter in my new John Lee Quarrels book while Terry was editing and proofreading some previous chapters I had finished. After making her corrections, I sent them off to my other two proofreaders, Judy and Roberta.

And finally, here’s a chuckle to start your day from the collection of funny signs we see in our travels and that our readers share with us. It seems like you won’t get bored while washing you skivvies here.

Thought For The Day – Never judge a book by its movie.