Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Petty moves from a petty man.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

You are here: Home / Pet Blogging / Cat Blogging / We Had A Good Day Here

We Had A Good Day Here

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This guy:

…is in remission and no longer needs any diabetes medication. It was a terrific surprise. Here he’s giving Maddie the once over as she wanders by.

I love my vet – Dr. Steve has an entire mobile van and is as reasonable as our old vet clinic – and today I had him not only do a routine check on Jake, but everyone else in the tribe (well not the ducks, but more on that later).  My credit card is still smoking, but everyone is healthy and happy and the whole visit was stress free. And of course the great Jake news made the whole day.

This was Bailey’s first full vet check since she came to live here (the rescue group vet did one before I adopted, so I didn’t see a reason to stress her anymore those first few months). And she is as beautiful as her photos would indicate. Dr. Steve says her bone and muscle structure are good and she doesn’t look like she’ll have any structural issues down the road.

Bixby is not so lucky – he broke a toe early on and it’s going to continue to give him issues going forward that we’ll address as needed. He also, because he’s so rough and tumble, has a continued strained muscle along his shoulder and rib cage. Not that any of this stops him from anything. Just things I’ll keep an eye on as he ages.

Emma, Mabel and Maddie (right to left)

Dr. Steve is on the hunt for a family to adopt the Ladies and I have to tell you I felt a twinge was we talked about it. But we’ll see what he comes up with before I go all to pieces about letting them go.

How is everyone else this evening?

Open thread

Reader Interactions

53Comments

  1. 1.

    MazeDancer

    What a sweet family you’ve gathered there. And how great you have a visiting vet. It ain’t going to be cheap if you go to the office with so many. And it will be way no fun.

    Used to live on a little patch of water, so two ducks would often come visit. Loved their waddle and quack. Named one Matilda. Something about ducks inspires naming. It will be hard to let them go. If the vet comes up with some farm with a big pond, you might be inspired, but, otherwise, maybe they’re yours.

  3. 3.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Love your entire menagerie! And such good news for Jake.

    Decades ago, my father had two ducks which he called Phenooken (sp?) and Jacoby, named after two TV detectives (“flat foots”) of the 1950s. At some point, they both surprised him with eggs — he had assumed they were males, but double wrong — and for years, P and J provided the family with all the eggs they needed for breakfast, coffee, and baking ingredients.

    ETA: They used to follow him every evening down the long driveway from house to mailbox, and then trot along behind
    him on the way back to the house. They roosted in a crawl space under the house, but spent most of their daylight hours in a stream in the back of his property.

  7. 7.

    jl

    Thanks for the pet and duckupdate. Ducks pix are nice. Ducks walking around in formation do lend a place a certain tone. Even just two are enough.
    OTOH, long ago I was duckmeister on one of the family farms, and a lot of the high tone in the pics is lost in the reality. Somehow. They are very ‘productive’ animals, if you get my drift.

    Edit: I shouldn’t say this, but sheep and ducks were the only animals that I didn’t feel kind of bad when they met that great processor at the end of the road. Pigs broke my heart. Chickens were sad. Cows, I felt pity for them damn poor cows. Who I thought sullen because they somehow sensed they were not heading towards a happy end. Except cows that liked to be milked seemed a little a happy, sometimes. Sheep and geese, well I just thought, hey pains in the ass, about time for the great circle of life for you dudes. Yes, I am a bad person.

  10. 10.

    TaMara (HFG)

    @Yarrow: No…and this is my second round of ducks and cats – a long time ago my first ducks/cats mix got along fine, too. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s a size thing. Bixby and Bailey have learned to be respectful…ducks generally don’t take crap from anyone.

  11. 11.

    jl

    @TaMara (HFG): I don’t remember any of the ‘outside the yard’ cats ever messing with the ducks. Don’t mess with the ducks. but then we had over half a dozen sometimes. No farm critters wanted to mess with a pack of ducks. We didn’t bother to cage them up, They’d swank around the place like a gang out of Westside Story.

  12. 12.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Y’all know that I love the Lord Peter Wimsey detective stories by Dorothy L. Sayers, and it will not surprise you that I have been, for years, an active member of various LPW/DLS online groups. One of the most prominent memes in those groups is a line from Gaudy Night, in which Peter and his lady friend Harriet Vane are punting along the Cherwell in Oxford and are confronted by “a massive continuity of ducks.”

    “Thank you, Harriet. Shall we now resume our interrupted holiday? …Oh, my lost youth. Here are the ducks coming up for the remains of our sandwiches. Twenty-three years ago I fed these identical ducks with these identical sandwiches.”

    “Ten years ago, I too fed them to bursting-point.”

    “And ten and twenty years hence the same ducks and the same undergraduates will share the same ritual feast, and the ducks will bite the undergraduates’ fingers as they have just bitten mine. How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks …Be off, cullies, that’s the lot.”

  16. 16.

    zhena gogolia

    @TaMara (HFG):

    I used to have a Muscovy duck that wandered in and would just hang out with the cats. They’d sometimes give it a WTF look, but never tried to attack.

  20. 20.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Betty Cracker:

    I know! One of my all-time favourite passages.

    In one of those LPW groups, there is even a poster from Australia whose nym is MASSIVE CONTINUITY OF DUCKS. I’ve “known” Ducks, virtually, for close to 20 years.

  22. 22.

    Mayim

    @SiubhanDuinne:
    One of my (many!) favorite passages ;-)

    Hard to believe it’s been almost 20 years in that venue…. Had a library patron I introduced to Whose Body a couple days ago come back today, eager for the next book. Yeah!

  24. 24.

    Adam L Silverman

    We have (at least one) a coyote moving through the area. I saw it last night crossing the street. Just trotting along, happy as could be.

  28. 28.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Mayim:

    Hard to believe it’s been almost 20 years in that venue….

    Do we know each other from the old Yahoo LPW and/or Piffle groups, or their Facebook analogues? I go by “Dean Darling, You’re Being a Cat” aka DDYBAC or Diddyback.

  35. 35.

    Amir Khalid

    A request for guitar-gear advice: I’m starting to look at pedals, with a view to getting one a few months down the line. I’m drawn to cheap multi-effects processors like this one (as little as RM266 online, or about US$60). It won’t have quite the sound of discrete wah/distortion/etc. pedals, but all the reviews say it will do an acceptable job on many fronts at a far lesser cost. This model has a built-in tuner, and even a chord and scale “dictionary” for newbies like me. Would it, or something like it, be a good buy?

  44. 44.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Mayim:

    I remember you! What a joy to see you here at BJ! (There are one or two others that I know of, but I’m unwilling to dox them.)

  47. 47.

    jl

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: I expected to see moving pictures of a gang of ducks swanking around a broken down farm like a gang from Westside story, harassing the cows, intimidating the ‘outside the yard’ cats, confronting the pigs and staring them down. But all I get is some of that dang rock and roll music you dang kids these days get off my lawn, my wife is sick, I gotta get up early tomorrow for work

    You mislead me, Sir.
    Good day. I say, good day.

  49. 49.

    frosty

    @Amir Khalid: Sorry, I’m no help. I just bought my first pedal after playing for 40 years, a Boss BD-2 Blues Driver. I own one amp (no GAS attack), a silverface Deluxe Reverb with spring reverb and tremelo.

    Between those and overdrive I’ve never seen the need for anything else for what I play. Not to mention trying to keep hands and feet both coordinated. If I could do that I’d be a drummer!

  50. 50.

    No One You Know

    Dead thread, probably, but exhausted threader, so no loss.

    Yellow jacket attack over the weekend left me with one hand looking like a burned waffle. I’m off Benadryl for the first time since. At its worst, I finally looked up what’s in wasp venom (many things, and not all the same throughout the family). IIRC, there’s an enzyme acting as a coagulant to enable the acetylcholine to melt cells without getting diluted by the body’s responses. Yikes. Sounds like what happens to Cetagandan victims in a Miles Vorkosigan saga.

    Naturally, one corp. interview was Monday and the other today. I wonder how well I do on autopilot. Seemed to go all right, both times.

    I see it’s SSDD politically. I feel tired and sick of it all, even in my safe blue bubble.

    Her Highness the Duchess of Brunswick (aka “Brunswick”) is on a hunger strike as I keep trying to hide pills. I am a complete wuss about pilling. I’ve done it right…once…with the peanut butter trick. She’s wise to that. I’ll be putting my pride in my pocket and taking her to the vet to get pilled properly, as I do know how to get her into the carrier without drama…after she’s forgiven me for trying to get her to lick a ground-up pill in salmon oil off her hair.

  51. 51.

    frosty

    @No One You Know: Our dogs were suckers enough to fall for the peanut butter trick most of the time. But once they spat it out, no go. What fun it is prying a German Shepherd’s mouth open and forcing a pill down the back of her throat! And did you know their bite registers at 1,000 psi? It was a 2-person operation.

  52. 52.

    CaseyL

    I wonder if one reason most people like ducks so much is that they always look like they’re smiling. Or the way they waggle their rear ends. Or how the mated pairs look and act like old married couples. Or…

    TaMara – Dead thread though this is, I thought I’d mention: you might try to find a licensed masseuse for Bixby, for those strained muscles. Poor boy!

  53. 53.

    J R in WV

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    Went to giant concert at the Spectrum, back in the day of 1969 – headliners were the Kinks, first band was Spirit, then The Chambers Brothers, wow what a great show. Then the Kinks started playing, remember this was in Philly, the crowd just started leaving in drives.

    I dunno if anyone stayed for the Kinks to close out. I bet the place was like a tomb in another 45 minutes I was back to Rittenhouse Sq near home by the time they wound up. But the forst two bands were worth it …

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