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Life Since the Return
Aug. 30th, 2021 02:49 pmI cannot believe that we returned from Oahu four days ago. The days have been long, though things seem to be calming down.
Kimberly. Fortunately, Kimberly seems to be recovering. She's still non-weight bearing on her foot for another week and a half and it'll be a few months, I think, before she's up to using it normally, but the pain seems to be ever-so-slowly receding and she's seemed much more energetic and herself while actually awake the last few days. So, yay.
Lucy. Unfortunately, the day after our return, Lucy started acting really funky again, trying to pee everywhere without success. I had a frustrating afternoon getting absolutely no support from Paradise Animal Clinic, which is supposed to be her vet, but then I talked to a very kind & helpful friend of a friend and she suggested urine analysis, which PAC failed to do when we took Lucy in last week; she also said she'd try to get us into a different clinic on Monday if I was unsuccessful with PAC, but that fortunately proved unnecessary.
Long story short, I was successful, I got Lucy in to KAP for urinalysis Saturday morning, and they kept her until almost noon when they close. They did tests ... and they show nothing. Ay.
They've given us an antibiotic, just in case, to add to the steroid that will maybe help with her weight loss. But this is all just such grotesque guesswork. Lucy's seemed fine since, and thus far I've been successful getting her both of her meds by disguising the pills in pill pockets and the liquid med in wet food. We'll see if that continues. Meanwhile maybe something thrown at the wall will stick?
I definitely want to get both Lucy and Callisto in for a checkup at the Puhi clinic after we have all of this dealt with, because I've lost almost all trust for Paradise. I mean, not letting us in to talk with the vet, not supporting urgent appointments, and pretty much guessing at what's going on, that's all pretty horrible, as much as I hate dragging our cats out 20 minutes away, rather than just down the hill.
Saturday. Saturday is usually my day to get a little R&R, typically by going for a hike or a bike ride, then sitting out somewhere with no internet connection and writing or editing. Clearly, that wasn't entirely happening this Saturday, with the need to interact with our crappy vet (and I also didn't want to go outside of cell range with Kimberly so early in her recovery), but I did have the afternoon free.
Kimberly has been interested for a while in having a bike shop look at the brakes on Nellie the Explosive Adventure Scooter. They're not very good and in my opinion they'd never worked right either. So she found a shop and in the afternoon on Saturday I took it in. They said that the brakes couldn't be replaced with something better, but that there was indeed something wrong with the locking lever, which was inconsistent about locking. So they ordered a new one, and said it might be as long as six months because global shipping and supply is a wreck right now.
(They also did not *)(@#ing wear masks in the shop, but I didn't really register that until we were well into the conversation, so any damage was done.)
As it happens, the bike shop was in Kapaa, which is where our great bike trail is, so after talking with the bike shop I took my own unnamed bike out for a ride along the trail, edited for a while out at Donkey Beach, and then headed back when it got late. I was swarmed by gnats on the way back, which is apparently the deficit of riding that trail later in the day. Still, it was a nice, if short, bit of R&R. (Still, I got close to four hours of relaxation, if you include the editing at the beach, and I do.)
The Doors. As I've written, my home improvement work has entirely tailed off due in large part to the sudden change of priorities with Kimberly's foot surgery.
Well, my dad was thoughtful enough this last week to suggest that he come over and help me with the spray painting of Kimberly's closet doors on Sunday, since we wouldn't be getting together at their place to play games, like we usually do. So, we did that, and he showed me his technique for spray painting, which he often uses for the cases of electronics that he's building. I think we did well on the doors, and even pulled down the doors that Kimberly and I had mostly completed, so that we could get the insides where they hinge open.
They probably still need one more coat, but we're now in striking distance, where before it was just a problem that I'd set to the side because I was no longer willing to try doing it on my own (and Kimberly was no longer up to helping).
Other Home Improvemnt Tasks. Obviously, my floor is the other big task, and there's a funny story there. I was ready to do the next step the Sunday before we headed to Oahu, which involved undercutting some of the closet framing so that the planking could slide under. Well, I spent an hour looking for the particular Dremel tool to do that work, which both my dad and I were sure I'd borrowed, but didn't turn it up. So I went over to his house that day for our last pre-surgery gaming ... and sure enough, we'd never sent that over.
So I now have the Dremel and perhaps sometime in the next week I can take that next step ... but we'll see because I've also been neglecting the yard during the busy and stressful last few weeks, so that'll be taking up a few hours of my housework time in the near future.
Work. My writing work was a mess in August because of the many interruptions. In fact, I barely touched it last week, other than a few RPGaDay prompts and some light work that I did to distract myself while waiting for Kimberly's surgery. I also took my first week off from Blockchain Commons since the holidays last year.
Despite that, I got my personal writing priorities for August almost done. I chose a short history for the month, on Schwalb Entertainment, and I'm finishing up the editing, I also drafted the last chapter of what should be my second TSR Codex (with a bit more work needed to close out the book itself, which I've scheduled for next month). I also managed 11k words on the RQ Elf Book, which at least is close to my goal (and overall I have at this point 90% of my original word count goal, though I think it's going to go a little long for all the planned content, but not a lot).
And then of course there was RPGaDay, which resulted in daily writing of short history articles, probably 250-500 words each. It was *not* a good month for that, but it got Designers & Dragons some strong attention and produced some interesting content that got me thinking.
I generally managed to dive back into this all today, so I'm hoping September will also be kinder to this all, going forward ...
Kimberly. Fortunately, Kimberly seems to be recovering. She's still non-weight bearing on her foot for another week and a half and it'll be a few months, I think, before she's up to using it normally, but the pain seems to be ever-so-slowly receding and she's seemed much more energetic and herself while actually awake the last few days. So, yay.
Lucy. Unfortunately, the day after our return, Lucy started acting really funky again, trying to pee everywhere without success. I had a frustrating afternoon getting absolutely no support from Paradise Animal Clinic, which is supposed to be her vet, but then I talked to a very kind & helpful friend of a friend and she suggested urine analysis, which PAC failed to do when we took Lucy in last week; she also said she'd try to get us into a different clinic on Monday if I was unsuccessful with PAC, but that fortunately proved unnecessary.
Long story short, I was successful, I got Lucy in to KAP for urinalysis Saturday morning, and they kept her until almost noon when they close. They did tests ... and they show nothing. Ay.
They've given us an antibiotic, just in case, to add to the steroid that will maybe help with her weight loss. But this is all just such grotesque guesswork. Lucy's seemed fine since, and thus far I've been successful getting her both of her meds by disguising the pills in pill pockets and the liquid med in wet food. We'll see if that continues. Meanwhile maybe something thrown at the wall will stick?
I definitely want to get both Lucy and Callisto in for a checkup at the Puhi clinic after we have all of this dealt with, because I've lost almost all trust for Paradise. I mean, not letting us in to talk with the vet, not supporting urgent appointments, and pretty much guessing at what's going on, that's all pretty horrible, as much as I hate dragging our cats out 20 minutes away, rather than just down the hill.
Saturday. Saturday is usually my day to get a little R&R, typically by going for a hike or a bike ride, then sitting out somewhere with no internet connection and writing or editing. Clearly, that wasn't entirely happening this Saturday, with the need to interact with our crappy vet (and I also didn't want to go outside of cell range with Kimberly so early in her recovery), but I did have the afternoon free.
Kimberly has been interested for a while in having a bike shop look at the brakes on Nellie the Explosive Adventure Scooter. They're not very good and in my opinion they'd never worked right either. So she found a shop and in the afternoon on Saturday I took it in. They said that the brakes couldn't be replaced with something better, but that there was indeed something wrong with the locking lever, which was inconsistent about locking. So they ordered a new one, and said it might be as long as six months because global shipping and supply is a wreck right now.
(They also did not *)(@#ing wear masks in the shop, but I didn't really register that until we were well into the conversation, so any damage was done.)
As it happens, the bike shop was in Kapaa, which is where our great bike trail is, so after talking with the bike shop I took my own unnamed bike out for a ride along the trail, edited for a while out at Donkey Beach, and then headed back when it got late. I was swarmed by gnats on the way back, which is apparently the deficit of riding that trail later in the day. Still, it was a nice, if short, bit of R&R. (Still, I got close to four hours of relaxation, if you include the editing at the beach, and I do.)
The Doors. As I've written, my home improvement work has entirely tailed off due in large part to the sudden change of priorities with Kimberly's foot surgery.
Well, my dad was thoughtful enough this last week to suggest that he come over and help me with the spray painting of Kimberly's closet doors on Sunday, since we wouldn't be getting together at their place to play games, like we usually do. So, we did that, and he showed me his technique for spray painting, which he often uses for the cases of electronics that he's building. I think we did well on the doors, and even pulled down the doors that Kimberly and I had mostly completed, so that we could get the insides where they hinge open.
They probably still need one more coat, but we're now in striking distance, where before it was just a problem that I'd set to the side because I was no longer willing to try doing it on my own (and Kimberly was no longer up to helping).
Other Home Improvemnt Tasks. Obviously, my floor is the other big task, and there's a funny story there. I was ready to do the next step the Sunday before we headed to Oahu, which involved undercutting some of the closet framing so that the planking could slide under. Well, I spent an hour looking for the particular Dremel tool to do that work, which both my dad and I were sure I'd borrowed, but didn't turn it up. So I went over to his house that day for our last pre-surgery gaming ... and sure enough, we'd never sent that over.
So I now have the Dremel and perhaps sometime in the next week I can take that next step ... but we'll see because I've also been neglecting the yard during the busy and stressful last few weeks, so that'll be taking up a few hours of my housework time in the near future.
Work. My writing work was a mess in August because of the many interruptions. In fact, I barely touched it last week, other than a few RPGaDay prompts and some light work that I did to distract myself while waiting for Kimberly's surgery. I also took my first week off from Blockchain Commons since the holidays last year.
Despite that, I got my personal writing priorities for August almost done. I chose a short history for the month, on Schwalb Entertainment, and I'm finishing up the editing, I also drafted the last chapter of what should be my second TSR Codex (with a bit more work needed to close out the book itself, which I've scheduled for next month). I also managed 11k words on the RQ Elf Book, which at least is close to my goal (and overall I have at this point 90% of my original word count goal, though I think it's going to go a little long for all the planned content, but not a lot).
And then of course there was RPGaDay, which resulted in daily writing of short history articles, probably 250-500 words each. It was *not* a good month for that, but it got Designers & Dragons some strong attention and produced some interesting content that got me thinking.
I generally managed to dive back into this all today, so I'm hoping September will also be kinder to this all, going forward ...