Vets, Birthdays, And $$$$

Happy Bitherday to me.... I mean Bitherday.... not Birthday..... so there is a bit of a story behind that one.... want me to tell it? Well, Ok.

Once upon a time there was a little girl who was in grade one and she really liked her teacher. One day the teacher assigned a project to the whole class. All the grade one students had to make a diary for art class and then write in it for a whole month. The little girl got down to it and pulled out all of her favorite coloured construction paper. She cut and she pasted and she stapeled and she glued and when she was finished she had used all of her creative energy on her diary. It looked really pretty, sort of like and red juicy apple with a green leaf and a worm sticking out. She got a really good mark on the art part of the diary.

But now she had to take her diary home and write in her diary every day for a whole month! The little girl was not a particularly good scholar and so each night she would look at her diary and write something about her day.... it wasn't much but the teacher had said that it needn't be any more than a sentence or two. When the month was over (the month of April) the little girl handed in her assignment and it was marked and passed back..... she had passed and that was that. Or so she thought....

Many years later, when the little girl had grown up and had finally finished school, her mother gave her a keepsake as a graduation gift.... It was a scrapbook of all the work the little girl had done over the years in school. The little girl smiled as she read through some of the projects her mother had kept.... until she came to the grade one section and there before her was the Apple shaped diary she had so lovingly made in grade one. She began to read it and it read something like this...

April 1
I saw a flower.
April 2
I saw a flower.
April 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14,
I saw a flower.
April 15
I piked a flower.
April 16,
I had a Bitherday
April 17
It rained.
April 18
I went to my Grandfather's house
April 19
My Dad's car broked down.
April 20
My grandfather gave us a ride back home.
April 21, 22,23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30
I saw a flower.

The little girl, who had now grown up, laughed and laughed until she fell off her chair and the tears rolled down her cheeks.

From that day forward, the little girl always called her Birthday not a Birthday but a Bitherday. So happy Bitherday to me!

Oozle the Knob gave me a present this morning.... yes he did, the little pain in the a--! It all began yesterday. Duff the big dog has been ailing all year off and on. She has had a harder and harder time keeping food down and when she does it usually manages to come out the other end with a resounding rush! This has worried me. This has been a source of consternation for all of us. Hubby and I have been trying to find a food that is not a problem with our big pooch. (Hang in there, I know this has nothing to do with Oozle's gift.... but it is coming I promise.) Recently she has really taken a serious turn for the worst. The day the alpacas were gelded the vet checked her out and felt that it was fairly serious what was happening with Duff. Her blue eye has turned green which is usually significant considering that she is probably got a serious amount of toxins in her system. The vet took some blood samples and has put her on prednisone to see if that will help, but in all honesty I don't think it is... in all honesty I think our good big dog is not going to see another year.... maybe not even a month. With all this on my mind I have not really been paying too much attention to our other pets. Tootsie the wonder chicken herder is chasing balls in every attempt to seek attention and stares pathetically at us to play with him. Midnight our old cat just quietly sneaks off into a corner and steels food from the other pets bowls knowing while my mind is otherwise occupied he'll get away with it. And Oozle the Knob disappeared for the spring testosterone high of the year.

Lunch time yesterday.... I got a call from the Animal Control guy in town.... he asked if we owned an orange tabby cat. I answered, "Yes unfortunately."

After paying $25.00 to get the sod out of jail, I had agreed to get the blighter neutered.... ( I think I will call this nard week.... or maybe nardless week... ) anyway, when the vet called with Duff's blood test results, I made an appointment for this morning to neuter Oozle. Gak! at 8:30 a.m. I woke early once again worrying about Duff and got up to discover that I had a very angry cat in my living room. He wanted out to go find his Juliet, femme chat, honey pot, etc... He had been bathed and readied for the vet this morning since he came home from jail smelling pungent to the extreme. I crated him in a box. tied a rope around it so that he wouldn't go nuts in the truck... I knew this from experience (cats don't like vehicles but that's another story for another time). He began yowling before I got out of the driveway... so how was I to know. With all that yowling I thought he just wanted to get out of the box. Hmm.... Just before I got to the vet's, which is an hour's drive away..... hmmm.... he couldn't hold it anymore and quickly the truck was permeated with a smell soooo foul my eyes were soon watering. I pulled over on the side of the highway. Hmm.... what to do now? I got him out of the box and a leash on him and got him tied on without too much incident..... but I had a box most foul to deal with.... hmm. I chucked it in the back of the truck where the open air could deal with it and thought when I got to the vet's there would be a dumpster.

I began to drive with the cat in the back seat tied to the seatbelt so he wouldn't latch onto my head in an effort to appease his terror. (You'd be scared too if you were about to be nardless!) The smell was divine..... hmmm... ok so that was serious sarcasm! But in less than 10 minutes I was at the vet's and the windows have never been wider open. I untied the leash and carried a now very p----d off cat into the lobby, filled out the forms as a very nice lady took the offending-on-the-olfactory creature into the back where he would be injected with anasthetic before his procedure..... I at that point was thinking that a cat in a stove pipe was not such a bad idea. (For those of you who don't know.... some of the cowboys around here will perform the nardless surgery on cats for free.... just put them in a stovepipe upside down where they can't claw you, hold their back lags open, snip snip and it is done.... but it is very primitive and not very ethical.) I dropped the stinking box into the dumpster on the way out and was relieved to be rid of the smell.

In the truck once again.... hmm... the stinky smell is still stronger than it should be..... hmm....
I stop and get out to have a look.... no poo... no pee that I can see. That's when I discovered it. A large streak of poo..... yes.... it was on me! Lovely!

I spent $1000.00 dollars for vetrinarian services this week.... All that $$$ and not one cent for me on my Bitherday! All I got was a wet wipe to remove the poo.... but to be honest.... that's all I wanted... well, that and Oozle to be nardless.

I wonder what the bugger has in store for me when I go later to fetch him home!!