sollers

What it is to be the cat parent of two disabled cats.

Poor Opal is going through misery at the moment, poor baby. She’s been biting her fur off her back for well over a year, and while it’s better than it was, it’s still not ideal as she still has bare patches where she’s been chewing. I took her to the vet last week for the vet to look her over before prescribing her Metacam again.

Trip to the vet (£16 in taxi fares) plus £210 in costs. Ouch. The doors of the poor house gape wide.

The vet took one look at the sore on her back, decided it was infected, and so prescribed a tube of steroid gel and an antibiotic. I have been trying to get her to allow me to put the gel on and eventually had to resort to a cat onesie to stop her licking it off. She also didn’t like the taste of the antibiotic in her food. She loathed the onesie I made her wear with the heat of 1000 blazing suns, and once it was on she wouldn’t move or eat. She threw off both attempts of giving her the cone of shame about 10 minutes after it was put on. I’ve been beside myself with worry. I love my cats, even Geraint who constantly misbehaves.

Second trip to the vet, £16 in taxi fares plus £50 in costs. The cost this time was for a wormer and flea treatment for Geraint.

The vet identified an ulcer on Opal’s gum, just next to her left front canine. Treatment: stop giving her Metacam for at least two days, and come back on Wednesday to get a steroid injection.

I took Opal back to the vets today (£16 in taxi fares, £39 in costs) and they gave her the steroid injection. I pleaded to be allowed to remove the onesie during the day and very reluctantly they said OK, if she has it on at night. I’m not completely impressed because she loathes having it put on and off even more than she hates wearing it.

Having said that, though, once it was off, she ate all her breakfast and licked the bowl clean. So, it achieved something. She’s now asleep on my desk. I’d say she was watching me type, but she’s spark out.

Current Location: Home (Bangor)
Current Music: Oasis, I can't remember the name of the song
Crossposts: https://lexin.insanejournal.com/334285.html

oursin

Happy birthday,

sister_luck!

oursin

Have just been reading a very odd book - sortes ereader, something it appears I bought when you could still convert Kindle books to Kobo epub, cannot recall if it was something someone had recommended or what.

LH Johnson, Tell Me of a Girl (2018) - independently published, a retelling of The Secret Garden.

I am not sure why. Because usually if people are doing a retelling they are remixing or shaking up in some way? Okay, this did do some kind of vaguely different backstory of Mary's relationship with her mother, but otherwise it followed the story pretty exactly though leaving stuff out, and much of what was actually in the original seemed terribly washed out.

Characters who are vivid presences in the original seemed muted (Martha, Ben Weatherstaff, Dickon, the robin) - and devoid of Yorkshire speech to boot.

One might have expected that maybe a retelling might do what that recent reworking of Katy did and be a bit more disability positive, but no.

Mary Lennox is already a stroppy young person who doesn't exactly need to grab more agency, hmmm?

It's also done in a rather annoying typographical style.

At the end the author indicates that it's not only in dialogue with Burnett's original but with a whole swathe of scholarship on Golden Age children's lit. Maybe it came out of the project for a course???

I could see it sort of working as the basis of a rather moody atmospheric movie version?

Has anyone else come across this? I'm really not sure what to make of it.

chickenfeet

https://operaramblings.blog/2026/03/03/paradise-lost/

oursin

Two reading groups - one in person, one online - on consecutive days - plus various assorted frazzlements - has left me not feeling like coming up with the wonted witty badinage and repartee to delight dr rdrz.

(Who said 'What witty badinage and repartee'???)

Moderately entertaining coincidence: RL book group was being hosted in a part of London in which (lightly disguised) work discussed in online group takes place (snarked at by the author). I suspect it has changed Quite A Lot since those days....

***

Talking of London: Square Mile strikes back: how the City of London is fighting disinformation about crime. I discover from that that we have a Lady Mayor of London, and upon further research, she is not even the first woman to hold the office but the first to take the style of Lady Mayor, go her.

***

Do we not find it annoying when academic publishers do not reveal, until you have actually made a purchase, that their ebooks can only be consumed via their walled-garden app? In this particular instance at least the work was open-access and I had not taken a loss except in the expenditure of time in the process. But really. If you are offering your product as a ebook, I think this should be made clear from the outset.