timill

First: The cat in question seems to be basically well.

So, cattitude has been worrying on and off that our cat Kaja was getting skinny. A few days agp. that got to the point of calling the vet and then taking the cat in for a check-up.

At the exam, the vet told Cattitude that Kaja has not lost weight; if anything, she has gained an ounce or two. What's going on is, the cat has lost some muscle mass, which has led to some redistribution of her weight, and what Cattitude noted was that her legs were thinner. The vet said it was probably arthritis, drew blood to test for some more serious problems, and sent her home.

We got the results this morning, and they are reassuring: Kaja's kidney function, liver function, and thyroid are all fine. So is her blood sugar.

The email said we could have them do X-rays to check for arthritis, but that would require sedating the cat.

Or, they can assume it's arthritis, and give her monthly injections of a pain-killer to treat that, and see how she's doing in a few months.

The third choice is to just monitor the cat's health for now, and give her omega-3 supplements. We need to discuss the choices, but it's Saturday, and none of them involves "so call the vet and set this up right away."

Books read in the last couple of months:

Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories:. This is odd and somewhat disjointed, set in the same secondary world as A Stranger in Olondria (which I read ages ago and remember very little about). The threads all come together at the end. I’d been displeased earlier because I thought we’d lost both the first narrative voice, which I liked, and the continuity of the narrator's story. The book does get back to her story, or at least her sister and cousin’s stories.

James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks: read aloud, because Adrian had never read it. Still delightful, a fairy tale set in a world where people have at least heard of fairy tales.

Lorraine Baston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By. Baston talks about rules as measuring devices, as sets of instructions, and as models, and various shifts in meaning over time. She talks about thick and thin rules, thick rules being ones with (more) examples and details, and which anticipate more exceptions. A about the change in how people learn/are taught all sorts of things, including math. I enjoyed this, and if that description sounds interesting you probably will too.

Edward Eager, The Time Garden: Children's magical adventures while spending the summer with a relative because their parents are in London, working on the premiere of a play. Another read-aloud, this one was new to me, and fun.

Helen Scales, What the Wild Sea Can Be: The state, as of 2023, and possible futures of the ocean and ocean life in the Anthropocene, according to an oceanographer. I asked the library for this because I liked the author's book about mollusks.