Tales from the Shark Tank

J. has a short vacation from school, which happily coincides with our favorite folk music convention, the Ohio Valley Filk Fest. (No, filk isn’t a typo, though I gather it was originally. It’s a general sub-genre of music.) So we are off to Columbus, Ohio as soon as all of us are showered and clothed for travel. We packed last night, so getting out would be easy. J. is so excited that he’s telling everything he encounters that we’re going to a hotel. I do mean everything; his stuffed Garfield, me, each of the fur-people, his trains, even his DVDs. I vetoed a few of the DVDs on the grounds that while they are fascinating to him, they are unlikely to be of any interest to the friends with whom we will be sharing the room. He doesn’t argue when it concerns people outside the family; it’s only if I give him my primary reason – that I want a break from the infinite repeating play loop – that he will beg, plead and otherwise try to wear me down.

And my beloved husband being done, it’s time for me to get on with the next stage of preparation for departure. Whee!!!

I went down to Indy to go with my folks for my dad’s post-surgical follow-up appointment this morning. He’s healing nicely, which is not a thing we can take for granted, since his diabetes slows his healing down to a pace that makes glaciers look like Formula 1 racers. The stitches came out, too, so he no longer looks quite so much like Frankenstein’s Grandpa.

Unfortunately, the cancer was well and truly into his lymph nodes, which automatically makes it stage 4. He gets to heal up some more, and then he’ll start 6 weeks of radiation. That won’t be easy for him, but really I suspect it will be harder on Mom. She was very glad to be done taking him for IV antibiotics daily, and now there’s this to anticipate. Not fun.

Even when it’s no great surprise, such news is scarcely welcome. But it is what it is. Now we find out what can be done about it. Whatever it is, I suspect it will involve more trips to Indy and back.

It’s a good thing I enjoy distance driving. It’s a better thing I have a new car.

Most of the subjects taught in high school now have remained essentially unchanged over the thirty-plus years since I was there . Computer technology was just getting started then, but otherwise it’s still Social Studies and Civics, Geometry and Algebra, Chemistry and Composition. Sure, these kids are learning things as “history” that I lived through, but that’s the nature of the subject, and it’s always interesting to see their reactions when you put something they consider to be “ancient history” into the context of your own life, standing there in front of them and obviously not so ancient as their conception of the events and people they’re reading about.

Some of the classes, however, have changed their names in ways that make me chuckle as I walk down the halls. In the Vocational Education” “Life Skills” department, there’s the “Clothing Lab” and the “Food Lab”, otherwise known as “Sewing” and “Cooking”, the two branches that made up “Home Ec.” Looking in through the doors, I see the same familiar equipment, cutting tables and sewing machines in one room, stoves and sinks and mixers in the other. And yesterday I subbed for the teacher in the “Industrial Skills Lab”.

When I took it, it was called “Shop”. There’s still only one girl in class, though.

The Neuter Scooter was in town yesterday, so I made the appropriate reservations and took my youngest fur-daughter in for the surgery necessary to assure we didn’t have any teen (or other) pregnancies to surprise us in the future. Yes, she’s a strictly indoor kitty-cat, but even indoor kitties can escape to the outside if they’re persistent, and there are plenty of feral toms around quite ready to initiate her or any other girl-kitten into the mysteries the precede procreation. These folks have a mobile veterinary clinic, and go around Indiana and a few other states providing feline birth control. The way this works is that you check your cat in in the morning, and pick it up roughly 12 hours later, appropriately modified and having had their shots. For this, they charge perhaps 20% of what the vet does for the same thing.

So Miss Cloud went in. She didn’t like the car at all, but was, as before, quite willing to curl up in my lap for the drive. Once there, she settled herself at the back of her carrier and just watched the world go by. She’s a sweet little girl and gave no one a bit of trouble, including me when I got her home. At pick-up, the vet had told everyone that our cats needed food, water, a litter box, warmth and minimal stimulus. “They’ll be very hungry and they won’t want to be touched” was the essence of the message.

Not my girl. Having had nothing to eat after 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday, per instructions, she didn’t take anything voluntarily again until 5:00 pm today, a matter of about 2 full days. I tried everything – familiar food, canned food (usually a great treat), canned kitten food, a bit of soft custard (another favorite), an egg, tuna – you name it, I tried it. So finally I went to the store and acquired a couple of jars of pureed baby chicken and lamb, and that’s done the trick. She hasn’t eaten much of it, but she took a few licks at the baby chicken. And the whole “don’t touch me” thing? Staggered out of her carrier and over to the couch, where she tried to jump with no balance until I put my hand under her backside and gave her a boost. Then she just let herself tilt sideways until my leg stopped her – and there she went promptly to sleep. She only woke up if I moved, and only moved if I left the room, trying to follow me. So since I didn’t want her to have to deal with Tornado chasing her when she’s feeling rotten, I simply stretched myself out (the couch is a futon), settled her against my side, and went to sleep myself.

How better to be sure to keep her warm enough to keep her body temperature up while she recovered from the anesthesia?

The tiny toy kitten I brought home for J. has turned out to have attractions for someone else as well. Cloud loves it. The kitten has a toy kitten. She carries it around in her mouth, but she doesn’t bat it around like her other toys. Oh, no. She “bathes” it. She cuddles it. She squirms to get out of my arms to pick it up when I’m holding her and she drops it, then wraps her front paws around it when I get it and give it back. She looks like nothing so much as a preschooler with an arm wrapped around a doll. She is absolutely adorable.

I realized the extent of her attachment to it last night. She’d been jumping on and off our bed at a great rate, and while she wasn’t exactly assaulting our feet, her take-offs and landings were making sleep rather difficult. So I picked her up to take to the attic, where she could play pounce in peace. When I got her into my arms, I realized that she had grabbed the toy kitten off the bed as I lifted her and was taking it with her. That’s how we went upstairs – me carrying Cloud, and she carrying her kitten. This morning when my husband let her out, it came downstairs with her.

Right now? J. has custody of the toy, and is making it mew and telling it to be quiet. I’m fairly certain that will have changed by morning, though, and that I will find that the youngest feline has reclaimed her “baby”.

Dad had his surgery yesterday afternoon. The surgeon came out and told us it had gone well, then went on to say he’d found a whole lot more of the Alien than he’d anticipated. He’d said the visible extent wasn’t worrisome because it would all be surface, then found it wasn’t. So instead of the 5% of his tongue and a couple of lymph nodes for sampling, by the time he went up to ICU, he was down between a fourth and a third of his tongue and either all or most of the lymph nodes on that side. The doc says he thinks he got it all, but of course now we get to hold our breath until the final pathology report comes in, a matter of about a week. That’s not terribly long, but I’m feeling very much as if I’ve spent most of this year waiting for assorted medical results for someone.

So meanwhile, he’s still in the hospital, healing up from the surgery. He was incomprehensible to anyone but Mom for about 24 hours; I swear the only way she could have understood him is the telepathy inherent in 54 years of marriage. But he’s gotten to the point that the nurses can understand him, even if he does sound like he’s talking around a balloon. I’m home again, with my husband and kid and cats. I brought my son a small toy cat that meows when squeezed, realistically enough that it has to be a recording of a live cat. Black with a white face and white paws, it looks very much like my friends’ cat Minx, a resemblance J. remarked upon right away. He spent the time between its presentation and bed gleefully confusing his kitten and driving his dad a bit nuts with the sound. And now he’s taken the toy to bed. I think he likes it.

I missed hearing about his first overnight adventure, a two day “camp” that the local school takes all the 4th graders to in the fall. I was in Indy when he was at Brookston. But I can ask him questions tomorrow. Tonight? I’m just glad to be home. And after a brief pause, the curtain will go up on the next act…whatever it turns out to be.

The gathering on Saturday evening was as much fun as anticipated and then some. It’s been literally years since I’ve done that much singing. We kept going until something like 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. I’d brought a few instruments along – a couple of recorders and a small drum – but the recorders never came out and the drum really is more suited to being a wall decoration than a playable instrument. That’s ok; my best “instrument” is the one that requires no packing and only minimal “tuning”. I love being a soprano!

It did get kind of loud. The man with the guitar is accustomed to performing publicly, and projects accordingly. Singing with someone like that, so do I. (If you know me well enough to have heard me sing, that’s scary.) The problem there is that if I’m not careful, my voice is, shall we say, penetrating? (I’ve been told it could be used to drill through walls…..) Add two more strong voices in a normal sized living room, and the roof is in danger of attaining lift-off.

Lots of memorable mental snapshots in an evening like that, and one spectacularly good quote, the source of which I don’t remember.

“Build a man a fire and he stays warm for a night. Set a man on fire and he stays warm for the rest of his life.”

To which I would add “if not longer”.

I’m still on the planet, I just haven’t had a whole lot to talk about. I’ve been getting a lot of calls to substitute teach, which both pleases me and keeps me quite busy. And I must be doing something right here, because the high school has taken to asking me about dates a month out. I wish I could just turn this into a teaching certificate, but no such luck. That’s ok. This way I have lots of flexibility, and given the way things tend to go in my life, that’s a very good thing indeed.

So most recently, I’ve been at the high school a lot. I never did that last year, and it’s been quite the eye-opener. It’s also been quite a lot of fun. So far I’ve convinced a poetry class that an assignment wasn’t impossible by doing it myself, writing 15 lines on the board on less than 3 minutes of thought. Unrhymed verse is so simple it’s almost seems like cheating – or else it’s so close to my normal cadence I don’t notice. But I enjoyed the look on their faces, and much enjoyed taking away their excuses.

And my son has invented an absolutely perfect word for our now 3 month old kitten’s habit of tossing things off of surfaces just to see them fall. (Not that human babies do such things, oh, no…..) When he comes in and finds the computer speakers on the floor (again), or his sunglasses being dragged across the room by one temple bar, he says they’ve been “kittenized”. My husband and I laughed ourselves silly the first time he said it, and have adopted it. I’m waiting to see if it will spread among our friends. It wouldn’t be the first time we’d done such a thing. That’s just fun.

Tonight I’m going to have dinner with friends. K.’s husband decided he wanted to put on a frontier feast for friends, with, among other things at table, bison, antelope sausage, pheasant and alligator. (I’m not eating the alligator. It’s not kosher. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.) And then the instruments get pulled out, and music just might break out. I’m quite looking forward to it.