I’m registered to participate in one of the North End, Boston sections of the Second Annual WorldWide Photo Walk on July 18 this summer.  Anyone want to join me for an afternoon of photos, gabbing with photographers, and food in the North End?

So, about that truck in my last post.  It’s actually a U-Haul pickup truck that we split with some friends over the weekend so we could, well, haul some stuff.  Matt and I decided to use the long weekend to redo our bedroom.

The bedroom started out ok, although it’s rather small, (which is complicated by the fact that it has doors, windows, heaters, and protruding closets on all of the walls, which give it a difficult shape to work with.  The closet in question is also narrow, and built over a staircase, so it slants sharply inside.

This photo is from one of the tours we took before buying the house.  The seller had rented some tiny furniture in an attempt to make the room look bigger!

The other main issue we sought to rectify was that our bedroom still looked like a mishmash of dorm furniture and college apartment decor.  When we first moved in, we had purple sheets over the windows, a bedspread with a giant orange poppy on it, the free bed frame that came with my mattress, mis-matched dressers, and a couple of rickety nightstands.  The cat tower and other pet parephernalia also somehow made it into the room.

This was such an embarassing state of affairs that I don’t have any true “before” photos.  The best I’ve got is this photo, taken in January, where I was trying to show off our newly installed blinds.  As you can see, the bed linens had already been replaced with wedding gift linens, and the bedsheet curtains had been replaced by the new blinds.  Matt’s suggestion to get colored blinds that match our bed linens instead of neutral was a great one, and as you’ll see in a minute really help to pull the room together.

So, we set off at the beginning of the long weekend with our truck in search of storage and furniture that would be more permanent than our old apartment fixtures.

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The beginning of our Memorial Day Weekend.

Check back later in the weekend for the full story behind this rather uncharacteristic photo!

Claws and Tabi had their vet appointments yesterday.  They’re both quite healthy, although the vet would like us to brush their teeth with poultry flavored toothpaste as a preventative.  We have yet to see what the cats think of this.  Claws did get to have all of his stitches removed, and got his rabies vaccine (much to his dismay), so barring any unforseen illness we’re done with the vet until next year’s checkups!

Tabi still isn’t quite as friendly with Claws as she was before his surgery, but she’s stopped hissing and growling with him, and will deign to stay in his presence again, so that’s progress.

Claws is taking full advantage of his new distinguished look. All of the staff at the vet’s office had to come by to see the sweet with his adorable eye before he went home.  He was a little sleepy yesterday due to his vaccines, but he did let me take a couple photos of his nicely healing face.  Now we’re just waiting for his fur to grow back!

Claws is still doing really well.  He’s still much, much friendlier than he usually is (he’s usually only friendly first thing in the morning, and is then just sort of aloof but not unfriendly the rest of the day, but he’s been demanding to be held and cuddled a lot), but I’m not sure whether that’s because he’s still hopped up on drugs from his pain patch, or because he’s been locked away by himself for a couple days so he doesn’t get too excited. His swelling has gone down, though, and he’s getting more alert (and insistent on being let out of the bedroom) by the hour.

Tabi, on the other hand, is really put out.  She keeps hissing in Claws’ general direction, and is really mad at me for some reason.  She’s taken to hissing at me, growling when I pick her up, or swiping in my general direction when I get too close to her. This is a huge change, because she’s usually our sweetest cat, and wants to be held and cuddle and purr in my ears all the time.  I hope that she’s just jealous that Claws is getting a lot of attention, and nervous that he looks and smells funny, but I’m starting to get a little worried because this has lasted for several days now. She’s never really been interested in treats or human treats, so there’s not really anything I can give her as a special treat, so hopefully she’ll get happier soon. For now, Matt’s been playing with her because she’s willing to put up with him as long as I’m not around.

Here’s a photo of Claws’ “good” side, to show that he’s up and alert.  Be warned that the rest of the photos in this post do show his surgery site (not really graphically bloody or anything, just stitches), and there’s a bit more graphic description of what his surgery recovery has been like.

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I picked Claws up from the vet around 7:45 this evening. He was pretty groggy, but the vet told me that he did very well, and that he’s a very sweet and loving cat.  (Unlike the cat who arrived at the office to be boarded for a week while I was there.  He screeched menacingly at anyone who tried to take him out of his carrier to go in his boarding pen.)

Claws came home with a goody bag full of painkillers, emergency information, the paperwork for his new microchip (since they were knocking him out anyway, we had them go ahead and put one in), a certificate of bravery with his name on it, and a toy mouse “for when he’s feeling better.”  He also has an Elizabethan cone collar that we need to put on if he starts rubbing at his eye, but the vet said that so far he’d been really good and was leaving it alone.

For the moment, he’s pretty sorry looking.  He’s got a Frankenstein-like suture site up the side of his face, and half his face has been shaved bald.  I’ll spare everyone the rest of the gory details and photos for now (I’ll probably post some eventually for other people who google this procedure and want to know what to expect, but I’ll put big warnings on that post so the squeamish will know not to look!).  He’s very groggy, and just wanted to stay in his carrier for the first hour or so he was home.  He did purr very loudly when I reached in to pet his side (because it was the only place I figured I could pet him safely without hurting him), and seemed to be glad to see me.

He’s also really mad about the pain patch on his hind leg.  They bound it up with sticky bandage tape so he couldn’t pull off the medicated patch, but he keeps shaking his foot, gnawing on the tape, or sitting indignantly with that leg jutting out like he can’t bend it (which isn’t true, because the tape doesn’t cover the joint.  I think he’s just being melodramatic about that part!)

He rested quietly until 9:00 when I had to give him his evening medicine.  That took the better part of an hour of him leaping away, hiding under the bed, and me saying, “the vet said you’re supposed to rest!  Settle down!”  Luckily, one of the meds he had to take was an opiate, so he’s calmed down again nicely since then and is back to snoozing on the bed.

He’ll need to go back to the vet in 5 days to have the pain patch removed, and again in 10-14 to have the sutures taken out.  Hopefully we can be crafty and combine one of those trips with Tabi’s annual checkup.  Don’t tell her, but she’s due for one!

I’m really relieved to have Claws back at home where I can see that he’s more or less ok, and still feels well enough to purr when I pet him or to fight back when I try to give him medicine.  From what I understand, the healing time should be pretty quick for a young cat like Claws.  I’ll be working from home tomorrow to keep an eye on him, so hopefully we’ll be able to let Tabi start having supervised visits with him soon so that they can be less lonely again.  Mostly, she will really want to play and wrestle with him, and he’s not quite up to that yet!

Please think some good thoughts for Claws today.  I dropped him off this morning for surgery at the cat hospital near our house.  He’s healthy and robust, but he’s going in for some preventative work. More details inside the post, and updates when I have them. My blog will probably be pretty Claws-centric for a couple days.

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Our yard is pretty typical for our area - small and mostly driveway - but we can still see signs of spring popping up all over the place. This winter seemed (and was, I’ve been told) particularly difficult. I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy to see buds and tiny leaves pressing up through the soil and popping out all over our trees and bushes.

My cooking (little of it that there’s been) as of late has had a decidedly springy air.  As I commented to Matt last night, lately he seems to do a majority of the cooking for meals, while I supplement randomly with baked goods.

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We caught our bus down the mountain, and were dropped off at the same bus depot we’d started at.  Setting off in the general direction of our hotel, we crossed a couple bridges and headed through densely populated city streets that turned into densely vegetated walking paths.  We saw an unlabeled entrance to something that looked like an extremely luxurious compound, and wondered if we were anywhere near the right place.  Surely this couldn’t be our hotel…or could it?  We walked a little further in, hoping that we weren’t trespassing.

After a few moments, we located the reception desk and learned that we were indeed in the right place.  The Inkaterra Lodge at Machu Picchu - Wow!  Most of the check-in process was in Spanish, as the receptionist updated Matt on the status of our room and I looked over a map of the lodge’s grounds while half-listening to the check-in discussion.  I caught that our stay included complimentary dinner that night, as well as breakfast and lunch the next day, and that our room had been upgraded, and I thought I heard that we’d been moved to villa number 84.  I looked over the map, and thought to myself, “Villa number 84 is the largest square on the entire map!  I must have mis-translated the Spanish; I’ve never been good at numbers higher than ten…”

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