F Is For Feline Meditation

Funny, I had originally started posting this just as a bit of fun while I tried to think of the second F post for the Pagan Blog Project, as I had a bit of a block on it. But when I finished it I realized it was, after all, an entry for F. Well okay then.

This meditation requires a couple of willing participants. It will very much depend on the second of the two. The first being you, and the second being a happy cat who purrs loudly. You can see that this will depend on the cat. As it should.

But the next time you find yourself in close proximity to a happy cat give this a try. It works best if said happy cat is on your lap, but next to you within range of being touched is really all you need.

First, get that cat good and revved up and purring loud as a lawnmower. Then put your hand on the cat so that you can both feel and hear the purring. (You may need to keep patting the cat so it keeps up the loud purr).

Next, close your eyes and listen to that purr. Listen, really listen, to it. At the same time feel that purr. Feel it through your hand or wherever the cat is touching you, probably your lap.

Then, open yourself up and accept that purr into yourself. Let it fill your brain and your heart with joy.

Mind you, this is simply passively receiving what is freely offered to the air. You are most emphatically NOT pulling anything out of or from the cat; for one thing that would be rude, and for another this is a cat; seriously, don't be stupid: they will always out-witch you.

It works wonders as a mood lifter (well obviously) both in the moment and I think with more lasting effects, but it also works as practice in being in the here and now, in your body and grounded.

Give it a try!

Couple Updates

Yes, well, B is for Busy. B is for Behind. It's been a week o' kittens around here.

Ratty is doing well, though he really doesn't care for the Cone of Shame he has to wear so he doesn't yank out his stitches. Poor thing. Grooming is so hard-wired in the little cat mind that he's been attempting to lick, say, his shoulder, and ends up licking the inside of the cone. Over and over and over.

Ratty may not be the brightest bulb.

Also, Rory is staying. And there's a long story. I gave him up, with his brother, Wednesday morning. I was expecting I'd be sad to see them go—kittens are after all cute and sweet and all—I was not expecting that Wednesday night I'd find myself bawling my eyes out over Rory being gone. I wasn't sad; I was devastated.

Sometimes, I think, you just know. The look Rory gave me when I dropped him off and walked out of the shelter said it all—it wasn't one of Don't leave me! it was simply Where are you going? A little confused, but mostly calm, and very knowing. As if, he knows the story, and he knows how it ends, and that was not it.

I mean not like I need another cat. I really, really, don't. I can do it; the house is plenty big, and I've been feeding him anyway so I know I can afford it too. But...

The nearest I can figure is that he's meant to be my familiar. I mean the others are nice kitties and all, but they're not Rory. And it's not even that he's still a cute little kitten and they're getting towards full grown; honestly I'm kind of done with kittens after this last summer and I'd really like it if they could mellow out a little already. It's just that he's him. That's the best I know how to say it.

I mean, if you'd been stupid enough to give your familiar away, you'd feel about like you'd cut off your own arm, right?

So I more or less moved heaven and earth to get him back, which is apparently a huge, huge no-no with shelters. If you surrender a cat, damned straight you're not getting it back. I'm still not sure what the logic is, but they were nearly adamant. I thought for a while it just wasn't going to happen. But it did, and the powers-that-be softened, and let me have him. Well, I had to officially 'adopt' him, fee and all, though that included a neuter and lots of shots, so it's okay. Sure, I feel like an idiot, but I don't care. Because I've got Rory back.

It was a very long drive (Friday night Boston rush hour, oy), to the shelter, in of all places Salem, Mass; even without traffic, the drive back was like an hour and a half. He mewed a little here and there on the drive back, but was mostly quiet. Finally I pulled into the driveway and shut off the car.

And in the sudden quiet I heard something else, this low but loud thrumming.

It was Rory purring. He knew he was home.

Ratty Update

Got a call from the surgeon this afternoon; the surgery went just fine, all is well, Ratty'll be home tomorrow or maybe the next day. He also said that it looked like an old injury, judging by the damage surrounding it.

Ratty's only seven months old. How old can an injury be?

I am still completely baffled as to how he did it in the first place, though I do recall that his feral mother gave birth to her kittens on top of a pile of wood under one of those little high-up windows in my downstairs garage. And I also remember scooping kittens up off the floor and returning them to her (as well as trying to make it safer by rearranging the boards so there was at least a little bit of a wall in the front).

He certainly hadn't been limping any earlier than the middle of last week.

I really don't know.

Oh Ratty

Oh Ratty. Oh, oh Ratty. How on Earth did you manage this:



Let's get a bit of a close up:



Even a layperson such as myself can tell that that left hip-joint (his left, our right) is seriously out of whack. One of the vets I talked to today said she doesn't usually see something like that without some serious trauma—being hit by a car, falling out of a third storey window. Not that Ratty (or any of them) go outside, of course. Last week I did hear a loud crash coming from the cellar; when I got there though, not a single thing was out of place save an empty laundry basket, which was tipped on its side. All four of them just sat there looking at me with their heads tilted, wide-eyed, innocent, calm.

He'd been limping a little since about last Wednesday or Thursday, but he let me poke around and move his leg a bit. Silly me I didn't follow it up the rest of his leg until Saturday night, when I did finally notice that there was a big lump on the same side up by his hip (I couldn't really see it because of the fur; he's long-haired and fairly fluffy). And guess what—that turned out to be the head of his femur in a place it really shouldn't be, namely, completely out of the hip-socket by something like an inch and a half. Though otherwise he had seemed more than fine—despite the little bit of a limp he was running around, jumping up on things, frisking with his brothers like a crazy kitten, and purring up a storm as usual. Even today, when one of the vets (there were several) went to listen to his heartbeat, she had to put his heart rate down as 'purr'.

So Ratty gets to spend the next couple days in a cage, which he doesn't much like, keeping off it until he has his scheduled surgery on Thursday. Where they will, and this is completely counterintuitive, actually chop off the ball of the femur and just let the end of the bone rest in the socket. I know. I would have thought that putting it back in would be the right way round, but the vet said if they did that it would be prone to just popping out again. I guess something must be permanently damaged. Of course I was like well won't one of his legs be shorter than the other then? The vet said no, actually; he'll be pretty much completely normal, running around again in no time.

So that's all good, if don't-even-ask pricey. But there's nothing for it, of course; rest and home remedies aren't going to cure something like that.

Still, I'd like to know how he did it.

B Is For Bastet

So Bastet (or Bast) is the Cat Goddess of old Egypt. Those Egyptians, they had their priorities straight all right.

Her name means She of the bas, a bas being a type of ointment jar; in the exceptionally dry climate of Egypt moisturizer is an absolute necessity. I like to call Her Our Lady of the Salve.

Her cult center in Egypt was at the city of Per-Bastet ('the domain of Bastet' and now I'm totally cracking up at the I assume coincidental resemblance of Per to purr) up in the Delta; it was the capital of the 18th nome (administrative district; something like county, state, province) of Lower Egypt (lower of course meaning downstream in the case of the Nile, so that lower=northern, and upper=southern). It was famous for a particularly merry festival dedicated to Bastet, which involved lots of alcohol.

As you may well imagine, I've been petitioning Bastet left and right around here lately.

What? you say. Why is that?

All right; for those of you who have not been paying attention, I'll try to keep this brief.

Once upon a time at the start of last winter a little grey and white cat showed up on my doorstep, looking plaintively in at the glass door. That was Spot:



But of course she wasn't alone, oh no of course not. She had in tow three little kittens, who I reasonably enough named Splotch



Smudge



and Stripey



Crap, I thought. I could instantly tell that two of the three at least were female by the tortoiseshell color schemes. And I've been around the block a few times and so knew exactly which direction that was going to go in.

So I asked Bastet for help. I asked Her to make sure that they had someone to look after them, and to find them a good home with enough food to last them through the winter.

What do you think I am doing? She purred.

Crap, I thought.

So I fed them, because it was the beginning of winter in New England and knowing they were there I could not let them starve.

I will admit I hemmed and hawed about the next part of it, though, because I could see what was coming and how much work it was going to be if I chose to do it. I mean it doesn't take the Sight to know what will happen when three (at least) unspayed female cats show up on your doorstep.

So I started looking around on the internet. But it took a while. For one thing, with the crap economy charities have very few resources nowadays. One particular cat charity, just last year, would come to your house, trap the feral cats, take them away to be neutered, deal with the aftercare and then bring them back to be released (as trapping, neutering, and releasing feral cats is really the best bet at population control, plus, you know, it avoids killing them); this year though they couldn't be arsed to even call me back, never mind lend me a trap or two. And it's true, I procrastinated a bit, because I knew it was a big job and it simply took time to get my brain around it. But in the end, yeah, it was my responsibility.

In the meantime, the Stripey kitten went missing. We found one by the road a few days later; maybe it was that one, maybe not. It had been there a little while and I honestly couldn't tell. We buried it.

So what with the hemming and hawing and lack of help with the traps (which I simply cannot afford to buy myself), and tracking down someone who would spay feral cats on the cheap, never mind psyching myself up to trap what is essentially a wild animal (I am, I suppose I should admit, a rank coward in more than a few ways), by the time early spring came around Spot had reproduced again, giving us this guy:



This one I managed to socialize, as his personality was fairly open to it (Splotch and Smudge were really skittish from the start). Plus the weather was nicer; it's hard to have much patience standing out there in January trying trying trying to coax a shy kitten to let itself get anywhere near you. So I ended up adopting him myself and now he's my Aleister Meowley, Frater Purrdurabo, the Lesser Beast (333). I've been calling him by his Chinese name lately, Miao Li (apparent younger brother to this Lady). I also sing him this song:

Well I hear you're just a kitten now
And I can see your pretty whiskers getting
in the tuna fish
You've got me right in your paws
Yes I'll put more in your dish

Aleister
I know this world is thrilling you
Oh Aleister
Meow meow meow mew

Then of course before I knew it it was Splotch's turn, and she had these four, named after the place she gave birth to them, an old MG in the downstairs garage.

There was Austin



Healey (you can see she inherited her grandmother's spot)



Spridget



and Morris Minor



By this time I'd been talking to the local cat shelter and knew I had to bring them inside. But before I could rearrange the dining room to accommodate them Morris Minor was killed, probably by a coyote. The bastard pretty much tore him in half and just left him there. So I buried him. Nature, sure. Child of the Goddess, sure. Still a bastard in my book.

So I got the other three inside, and socialized them. They all got adopted out, eventually.

Not, however, before it was Smudge's turn. She also had four, though one of them died at three weeks as it just didn't thrive (something like one out of four kittens don't make it for whatever reason). I buried that one too.

The other three, though, were Maurice (named after Morris Minor)



Danny Lyon



and of course, Ratty.



Oh, Ratty. That's the one I bottle-fed. And after all that work, he had to stick around too.

Then there was Danny and the long saga of him, which I haven't shared before and which is frankly rather a nasty story, involving a mother who insisted that she could handle taking care of him while I was away for a couple weeks; but one day I called to check up on them and was told that six-week-old Danny had 'broken his neck.'

Of course he hadn't; he was, instead, really, really, sick.

And my mother didn't see any reason to take him to the vet. She just sort of threw up her hands and said, O how sad! How terrible that nothing can be done!

It is a long story; basically I had to frankly bully my own mother from six hundred miles away into calling a goddamned cab to get that kitten to the emergency vet. She didn't want to. But she did. I swore a lot, and for some reason that worked.

When I later picked Danny up (after cutting my vacation short) the vet there said he was '95% dead' when he was brought in. They were, frankly, amazed that he recovered at all; one of the vet techs said she almost had a heart attack when she saw him trying to sit up the next day. A couple of weeks ago I stopped by the emergency vet to give them an update. The lady there said they don't usually remember animals since they come and go so quickly through there, but she sure remembered Danny.

One of the first things I did when I got home from my vacation was make an appointment with my lawyer, to make sure that, should something happen to me, my mother, specifically, is absolutely NOT to be the one making decisions for me.

I did say my family was dysfunctional. Yeah.

But anyway so then of course Danny stayed (you should see that vet bill, hoo boy).

I was going to put Maurice up for adoption, I really was. But he has this sort of chronicish respiratory condition which is well under control but still there, and I didn't know how adoptable he was going to be. Plus, he absolutely worships his Uncle Aleister. You should see it. He follows him around, rubs himself against him, gets in his path to head butt him, the whole thing. I suspect Aleister is a little annoyed with it all, honestly, but he tolerates it. So he stayed too.

Now, through all this summer of course there were eye infections going around, and no one could leave here until everyone got the all clear. Which meant putting this nasty ointment (why there's that word again) in their eyes. Plus there were some antibiotics in there for Maurice, never mind all the stuff Danny had to have, and honestly it's all kind of a haze now. It sure as fuck was a lot of work.

I did eventually scare up some traps, though I had to go pretty far afield (Boston, actually, which is not particularly local). And I caught all three of the mommy-cats, though I had to let Spot go the first time because she was obviously still nursing yet another batch of kittens. Now those are:

Rory (named after the marvellous Rory Pond, of course)



Flufius Maximus (that's Latin don't you know)



and their really quite exceptionally shy sister, Mademoiselle Zéphirine Chattonne-Gris.



(That's the best picture I have of her so far). All three of those are now in my dining room. Rory and Floof have been good to go for ages; they socialized fairly easily, though Floof took a little longer. But they are still here, because their sister is really very, very, very shy; I'm only just at the point where I can pet her a little while she eats without her freaking out. The two boys are a help with her; when she sees them come out and climb all over me purring I can see the wheels turning in her little cat head, that maybe, just maybe, I'm okay. So for now they're here.

And in the meantime Spot has been spayed. Which means all three of the mommy-cats are missing the tips of their left ears, as well as their reproductive organs and man I can tell you that makes me so very happy. Because this last batch is it.

Well, so much for brevity. But that's been my life lately. It's a lot of work. Oh sure, I know, sounds awful, doesn't it, hanging out with kittens and making sure they get enough cuddles and playtime; but, really, what I've been doing is transforming eleven wild animals into eleven tame animals. Holy fuck is this a lot of work, especially given my lack of mothering proclivities.

So I've been, like I said, bending Bastet's ear a bit this past year. And She has come through. I've always (eventually) gotten help when I needed it.

But I've been too busy to make any proper offerings. The most I'd done was offer some incense, and keep Her statue on my altar dusted.

Yes, well.

That's not actually how it works, is it. I have been making offerings. I have been making sacrifices to Her. All this, all this work I've done, this Work I've done, this real-life hard slog feed the kittens medicate the kittens drive the kittens to the vet, the shelter, the place to be neutered, trap the mothers, but no let that one go because she has very young kittens and she can't be away from them that long yet, trap her again later, get them all spayed and release them and keep feeding them and trap Zéphirine before it's too late and socialize them and tame them and pay attention to them first because they need to eat now and I want to go to bed but I have to clean the litterboxes first—all of it, is all an offering. It's all many offerings, over and over again, to Bastet, to the Goddess of the Cats.

I know this is true, and I know it is what She wants. Because when I look at Her now, all She does is purr.

The Mother

I have never wanted to be a mother; that is just how I am. I have enough to do in attempting to see to my own needs, never mind those of a dependent child. I am furthermore so introverted that the mere presence of an ordinary dog will drive me up the wall because of its constant expectation of attention.

So when I think about the Maiden-Mother-Crone archetype that middle bit, for me, is just sort of a blank. Even as a little girl I was uninterested in baby dolls. Dolls that looked like little girls, like friends, like me, sure, but ones that were like babies? I just didn't see the point.

So I've never much understood the Mother archetype. Oh I've been able to sublimate it when say thinking about my artwork, or the way I have nurtured aspects of my life. But the direct, hands-on experience of having actual children? No, and no thank you.

Now. You may have heard there is a kitten 'situation' in my yard at present. Without going into too many details (as it's all a long convoluted story) let me just say there are already some Plans in the works involving the local trap-neuter-release people. Because the phrase 'spiralling out of control' does come to mind.

As part of that long story (and if you would like more details I have also written about it at Tetanus Burger), one of the feral kittens out there looked to have been wounded. So I took her to the vet, where it turned out it wasn't a wound after all (which is good, because in my state the rabies laws will kick in if you don't know where a wound came from); instead it was these horrible things called cuterebra.

I know. The Goddess cares for all Her children. All of them. That includes both kittens and parasites. That in fact even includes parasites that squick me right the fuck out. You can google that word above if you're brave, but ai yi watch out for the pictures.

But the vet cleared it all up and got rid of the nasty things; and he gave me some antibiotics and instructions to keep her wounds clean. Said wounds are however rather deep and will take some time to heal, most likely.

So here's the thing. This kitten is just over three weeks old. She is still suckling, and is not weaned. But I'm pretty close to positive that if I just put the kitten back with her mother that one, she'll move them some place I can't find them, and two, that place will inevitably be down in the dirt and rust, which means the wound will never stay clean. And given what that kitten's been through already it seemed counter-productive to just put her back outside.

So I decided to bottle feed her. At three weeks old it's not nearly as much work as it could be; newborn kittens require feeding at three-hour intervals. Still, at three weeks she needs feeding something like five or six times a day.

Any of you who are mothers, does this sound familiar?

Now I know it's not like a human baby, not really. For one thing this stage will not last very long at all and in two weeks or less the little thing will be on solid food.

But still. It's amazing, and crazy. I have to get up at six to feed it, and so there I am measuring formula into a bottle, taking the chill off it by putting the bottle in a bowl of warm water, then measuring the temperature by putting a drop on my wrist. My mother laughed when she saw the bottle standing in the bowl; just like a baby, she said. Well, how else are you going to do it?

I've also started going through towels very quickly. There seems to be an awful lot of laundry all of a sudden. How does that work? It's a kitten, for crying out loud; she's not soiling any nappies, or drooling on her onesies!

It is remarkable how much of this Mother energy, this Mother archetype, is about the very basics. Yesterday I made a chart so I could keep track of how much she is taking in at each feeding, since she needs to eat a certain amount by weight. I bought myself a little food scale so I could see how much she weighed (ten ounces yesterday; eleven today). That chart of course also has a space for what comes out the other end, because that is very important too.

Young kittens can't eliminate waste on their own; in nature the mother will lick the kitten to stimulate it. This means that I've had to gently rub the kitten's butt with a warm damp paper towel until something comes out.

This morning when I looked in the carrier where I've been keeping her, I was happy, yes, actually happy to see a proper turd in there—that means that the kitten is able now to do that on her own. So I was all like, OMG milestone!

Holy cow.

Though I'm not sure I'll be winning any Mother of the Year awards. The poor thing is rather a hot mess, honestly, what with the gruesome-looking wounds on her neck and the fact that she's pretty much completely coated in sticky formula because there's just no neat way to do it. I've tried to clean it off as best I can but she does wiggle. Because despite the wounds she is very much alive: she's talkative, strong, fat, and gaining weight, which is good, very good.

And she has learned to purr. Yesterday it came in little fits and starts; today she's got a nice steady rumbling going. She's also started to play, a little, I think, though it's hard to tell; she's pretty uncoordinated yet.

And even though I have no desire to be a mother, here is this kitten on my lap, so small she fits into my curled hand, purring and looking up at me with those big dark eyes. She does, it is true, look a little confused: What's wrong with my ears? Why don't I have fur? Why am I so freakin' huge? But none of that really matters to her, I guess, because I am her mother now.

Here is a picture. It's rather blurry, but you can see how small she is:



Goodness.

Kitten!

It has occurred to me that after all that talk of the kitten 'round these parts it was a terrible oversight—nay, downright cruel of me—to not have posted a picture of the little guy. I do apologize.

Here he is today, hanging out in Celsiana the damask rose:



He has a name, too. Like Sir Isaac Mewton, he has been named for another great Englishman: Aleister Meowley.

Although, last night I thought of another great name, after yet another Englishman: Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Mewart. I imagine I'm the only one who'll get that reference, though.

It's either the Beast or the Brigadier. Hmmm.

Attention, Part Two

I don't have a lot to say lately, it's true; I am still feeling very blocked artistically, though there is a pressure behind it, I think. I wish I could figure out how to open it up, a little. I fear an explosion if left long enough.

There is a little kitten living in my downstairs garage now. His mother is feral, or semi-feral, and in her wisdom (or Bastet's) she has left the kitten in my care. I have been feeding him, and playing with him, and handling him, and he is as tame as any proper house-cat I've known. That is, in fact the plan; the two house-cats are both over ten years old now, and I like to overlap cats, so it's about the right time for me to get another.

He's met Maude already, several times; she will hiss at him if he gets too close, but otherwise she's content to just sit there with him a couple feet away. She's mellow, though, and has encountered a kitten before (Sir Isaac Mewton). Mewton himself is the one I'm worried about since he can get a little odd. So I'm taking the introductions slowly, and letting the kitten stay in the garage for now, with supervised forays into the cellar and kitchen to get his scent in the house a little, and no contact with Mewton just yet. I've introduced him to ham, vanilla ice cream, and the little plastic ring you pull off the gallon milk bottle-cap; I imagine he thinks it a very fine thing indeed to have me as a friend.

I've been out there playing with him, a lot. He will follow me around out into the back garden, though he definitely has a comfort zone of about fifteen feet from me, and if he gets spooked or uncomfortable he comes running back to sit between my feet.

So that means I've been spending a lot of time out in the back garden, just being there, sitting on the steps to the herb garden, watching the kitten weave in and out of the overflowing damask rose, jumping up on the stone wall, stalking the cricket hiding in the thyme who always stops chirping when he gets about six inches away. And I've seen the ruby-throated hummingbird attend to the kitchen sage in its unexpected bloom, and I've seen the tiger swallowtail on the malva, and the stone wall speckled with bright red spider mites; and it has become a meditation, of sorts, a way of paying attention to what is growing, blooming, changing in my back yard.

I stood there today in the downstairs garage, holding him in my hands against me, while we watched the rain fall. Just quiet, watching, for more than half an hour. He is at his absolute pinnacle of playfulness right now, about six or seven weeks, but he just sat there, looking, unafraid of the lightning and thunder, though it was really quite intense for a time.

A movement caught my eye, down on the floor, though the kitten didn't see it. It was a little brown toad which had hopped out from behind something. I was still enough, and had been for long enough, that he didn't see me. I watched him a moment later as he hopped out into the rain. I imagine it felt good on his skin, and that an amphibian must always be called back to the water, even as an adult.

And I thought: Well I'm a Witch, aren't I? Here with a quiet little kitten and a toad, watching the rain fall.

Pussycat Update

Well we took Sir Isaac Mewton in for an ultrasound very early yesterday morning in the freezing cold. Now who was it was talking about Mercury going into retrograde? That's when improbable disasters all pile up on top of each other with excruciatingly perfect bad timing, right? Because part of the way there the car decided to overheat. It's an old and familiar problem, with that car; it goes through coolant really quickly for some reason, though as far as we've ever been able to tell it doesn't leak. And, you know, with the cat being sick and all I forgot to check. Nevermind that I don't use that car all that often (being self-employed at home, so generally commute-less) and the thing had only had water put in it last time, not proper antifreeze.

But luckily I have a sibling who is good with cars; and miraculously enough when I called him he was awake and even more miraculously he agreed to bring some antifreeze. And he got there quickly and poured a bunch of stuff in and then he hopped in my car to keep an eye on things and I hopped in his car and we kept on going straight to the animal hospital.

When I got in his car there was a CD in the player. It was the Black Crowes. The song was Remedy. I nearly cried.

But when we got there the sibling told me that there was no heat in my car, which foretold bad things for the state of the heater core, like water had gotten in there and frozen the thing solid; as far as the cat went though we weren't even late, since the appointment was for 'between seven and eight am' and we'd gotten an early start; and Mewton was good and non-freaking out and the vet was very kindly. And as luck would have it there was a slot for the ultrasound right while we were there (they had originally planned to keep him there for a half day, which would have been an issue with a blinky car).

So the cat got his ultrasound; my brother left my car running to try to thaw the heater out, and he said he'd bring it back to his heated garage and drain the system out properly so he could put in all antifreeze.

So I'm trying to keep all these things in my head and then the vet comes out. Sir Isaac Mewton, it turns out, has pancreatitis, an inflamed pancreas, which is not necessarily good; however it is not a tumor, which is good. So it's his poor swollen pancreas which is crowding his bile ducts, not anything wrong with the ducts or his liver per se.

Now, the vet said most of the time they don't know what causes pancreatitis in cats; she said about a third of the time it's bacterial, though, so she gave me some antibiotics. And, she said, since he is still eating (though he's lost a little weight his appetite is still pretty good), she said we could bring him home, but that we would need to keep a very close eye on him. Any sign of going downhill and we are to bring him into the local vet's office quickly.

So. I am grateful: for siblings who know about Volvos and who don't grumble when called at 7:15am, though I know his schedule is about as vampiric as mine; for the fact that it turned out the car was okay and the heater core thawed and works fine now; for the fact that it is not a tumor; for the fact Mewton is eating well and looks perky enough; and I am absurdly grateful for Remedy, honestly. And I am very grateful to all of you for the kind thoughts and good energies sent his way. And to Bastet, Lady of the Salve.

So, here's a picture or two of Sir Isaac Mewton. In this one, without the flash, you can see he looks perfectly bright-eyed and decently healthy:

In the second one, though, with the flash on, you can get a better look at the clear-cut swath they had to shave so they could give him the ultrasound. Poor guy. It's kind of scary, though; the skin of a black cat is usually this nice sort of silvery grey. But though the color in the picture isn't exactly perfect, you can still see that his skin is a bit on the yellow side, because he has jaundice.

Silly Meme, Cat Edition

Because it's way funnier when you type in The Cat's name for this particular Google-game; though you can try it yourself with your own name if you like. The basics: type in your/the cat's/the gerbil's name with the word needs into the Google search engine, and see what comes up.

First, to establish the mood, here is Maude seated on an old chair in the piano room (which is full of furniture that doesn't usually live there as I'm refinishing another room in the house; it looks rather like an old, cluttered antique store, doesn't it?) that makes her look right royal indeed. I like how the velvet matches her eyes, though I do apologize for the photo being a little blurry. She moved. Well, one can't expect the Queen to wait around all day, can one?

Okay, then, what does Her Royal Highness need?

Maude needs people, you know, not squirrels. (I don't know about that; she is a cat, after all.)

Maude needs no encouragement. (Well no, true enough.)

Maude needs recognition and appears to be replaying some hurts from the past. (Oh no! That's terrible. We all need recognition!)

Maude needs to be more of a hard ass. (Now, burying past hurts is not the way to deal with them; it only hurts more in the long run. It's okay to cry. Really!)

Maude needs to learn that respect is earned. (Fair enough.)

Maude needs the mystery to be solved before she can finish her book. (She's writing a book? She can type?)

Maude needs to perform some additional rewrites. (This is ever the way with writing, yes.)

Maude needs a science project to fill up the spare time between being a Cosmo advice columnist. (I had no idea. What else has she neglected to tell me? And what's that book about?)

Maude needs to go back to graduate school. (Wait. Back? And who's paying for this?)

Maude needs a real job. (Oh. Good. 'Cause I'm still paying off my own student loans.)

Maude needs some marijuana from her nephew, Jeff. (Ah, yes. Grad school.)

Hmmm. I think perhaps it's time Maude and I had a little talk.

Saturday Cat-Goddess Blogging

After looking up the Sekhmet entry in The Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt (edited by Helen Strudwick), as research for this week's Goddess of the Week column, I flipped to the next page, that of the Cat-Goddess Bastet, Who is associated with Sekhmet, I assume by way of Them both being cats.

And not a moment later, the inevitable:



We humans are never to forget that cats were once worshiped as Gods.