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inside Oscar the cat's mouth
Tuesday, January 10 2023
At noon today, I took the big electric chainsaw out to a shoulder on the landscape south of the Chamomile ravine and about two hundred feet east of the Stick Trail. There were a number of downed trees there that I bucked into stove-length pieces. This included some large fallen (or partially-fallen) chestnut oaks and small-diamter skeletonized white pine (which is ideal for getting fires started in the stove). I made a backpack load of two large pieces and some smaller pieces, but when I got it back home and split the big pieces up, they clearly contained more moisture than I would've preferred. Most of this will probably end up in the woodshed, though I might try to dry a few pieces on the stove for just-in-time use.
For years now, Oscar the Cat has had something wrong with his mouth giving a cloyingly nasty smell to his breath. He seemed content, though, so we never did anything about it. In recent days, though, the condition in his mouth seems to have worsened, with the smell getting a little worse and evidence of a purulent discharge occasionally on his lower lip. Gretchen is still angry with the Hurley vet after some bad customer service some weeks ago, so she scheduled an appointment with a veterinarian at PetSmart. The appointment was for this afternoon and I think it marked the first time Oscar had ever left our house in a vehicle since he first arrived back in 2014. (He famously escaped after his initial arrival, and lived for a month in the barn of our uphill neighbors, though that time he left on foot.) When Gretchen later returned with Oscar, she said that the veterinarian had been so horrified by the state of Oscar's mouth that she treated Gretchen rudely and condescendingly (though it's possible this is that veterinarian's default style of customer interaction). "But he never seemed uncomfortable and he always had a good appetite," Gretchen said. "Yeah, because he has to eat to survive," the veterinarian snipped. It turns out Oscar has multiple abscessing teeth in his mouth and it's possible the infection has spread further into his skull. The veterinarian prescribed a course of antibiotics and some doses of gabapentin as a pain reliever and said that Gretchen needs to schedule oral surgery so Oscar's many bad teeth can be extracted. "It'll be thousands of dollars," Gretchen sighed. Neither she nor I especially like Oscar and he's about fourteen years old, and that makes spending this kind of money on him especially painful. But what else are we going to do? He's our burden and we're not monsters.
Oscar was so upset after his visit to the vet that he hid in the place behind the laboratory bookshelf that he only goes to when I've expressed extreme annoyance with him. Later, though, he came out, and I managed to give him his first antibiotic pill by hiding it in a lump of wetfood (which he swallowed with apparently not much probing of its contents). I then gave him a little oral squirt of gabapentin, which didn't make him too happy.
Meanwhile, I'd had a great breakthrough in the remote workplace, figuring out how to effectively use regular expressions to perform front-end form validation in DevExpress entirely through configuration (as opposed to imperative code).
This evening Gretchen made a quiche, though, perhaps due to my in-born aversion to eggs, referred to it as a "pie." It contained mushrooms, artichokes, leftover rice, and (for some reason) bacon-flavored tempeh. It was a little weird, but for quiche it wasn't bad. I even had seconds.
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