The other day, as I was getting ready to go to an SCA performance and early music workshop, I noticed that Miss Cloud had cut her back foot rather badly. It was a case of “anything I can get loose is a cat toy.” In this case, she’d knocked my husband’s razor into the bathroom sink and then stepped on it. So I called, and then popped the little fluff-brain into her carrier and took her off to the vet. We weighed her (eight pounds, 7 1/2 months old and still growing), and then the vet came in, and I had the dubious privilege of holding her mostly still while the doc messed with that hurt paw. She blotted at it with cotton, but it was bleeding too heavily for her to get a good look at the injury itself. After about 4 unsuccessful attempts to at least slow it down, she was getting frustrated, and muttered “Damn. That’s bleeding like a son-of-a-b****.” Then she glanced up and apologized to me, looking genuinely abashed.
My generation is one that cussed in high school and college as an expression of individuality, and when you come right down to it I am not terribly offended by such language. If I had been, practicing family law would have cured it. I’ve even been known to use four letter words myself upon occasion. (I’m sure you’re simply shocked.) It always amuses me that people consistently apologize to me when they use such colorful language in my presence. So when the young vet did so I told my oldest friend about it and asked if I had “Lady” floating above my head like a neon hologram or something.
“Of course you do” she said. “You always have.”
Ed. note: Cloud is fine. The vet closed the cut with surgical glue, put antibiotic powder on it, and bandaged it the way they do when a cat gets declawed. She wandered around for a few days using the bandage to thump on assorted surfaces as if they were drums, and then my girl-friend and I held her still and cut the thing off her fur. She hasn’t learned a thing, though. I caught her this afternoon, trying to paw the offending razor out of the basket my husband had put it in. Now it’s in the medicine cabinet. She’ll need opposable thumbs to open that, and I don’t think she’ll evolve one any time soon.
I wouldn’t count on that. My furballs have been craftier than I thought them capable of. Give Cloud get well hugs from me.
Even Magnus knows that the world is his cat toy…
Sounds about right.
Cameline discovered that it is possible to fit through the openings underneath the dresser, at least going one way. And she did this on one of my weak days, so me moving the dresser was going to be an interesting thing. Got it moved, got her out. She ran in and ate, had a drink….
And yes, you guessed it, right back under the dresser. Little snot.
At that point I’d let her find her own way out! (This from the woman who retrieved a black kitten from the roof multiple times a day for awhile there….)