Ash and Rosie appeared to be doing fine after they come home from surgery on Tuesday. They came home with pain meds that I squirt into their mouths and thankfully both cats don't try to gack it back up. Rosie sleeps more and doesn't play as much, but still plays. Ash ... Ash was immediately back to normal. Pouncing around, chasing things, chasing after me and cleaning stuff like mad.
Ash loves to clean people who are petting her. She loves to clean Rosie. She cleaned a stuffed penguin in my house before I got Rosie although Ash might still clean the penguin when I'm not looking.
She has now cleaned her incision site open. Oops. On Tuesday night it looked pink and raw. On Wednesday morning one of the incision areas had a yellowish covering too it, but it looked dried not oozing so I was hopeful when I left for work. Returning from work Wednesday afternoon three or four sites were oozing the same lovely yellow goo. Yuck. Poor kitty.
The vet's office called to check up on her, heard the situation and asked me to bring her back in. In we went and they stitched her back up (glued her back up, technically), gave me antibiotics and another bill. Oh, and the e-collar.
The cat funnel, or e-collar, has to stay on her for ten whole days! Ten days of a sad, disoriented kitten bumping into things and scraping her cone on walls and floors because she can't figure out how big it is. I've also had to redo her food and water dish so that she can get her head in it. The kibble is now in a porcelain tart pan because it has a lip to keep the kibble in, but the lip doesn't bump the funnel and prevent her from getting to the food. Poor, sad, hilarious cone-cat.
Workshop was last night. I. Went. Down. Hard.
The characters are flat, the narrator is underdeveloped, all the characters are underdeveloped, the slangy-patois style of narration is intriguing but way too overdone. It needs commas badly ... and that was the first five minutes.
How can one professor say all that and still make me feel hopeful and enlightened? I have no frickin idea how she did it but she did. She completely ripped the story a new one and yet I still feel all sorts of rosy about the prospect of rewriting it. Perhaps because she ripped the story not me. No ... come to think of it ... she ripped into me, my style, my choices, what I had done, not the story. And still it was the most pleasant beating I've ever taken.
It was great.
It was extremely enlightening as to what I was doing wrong that I hadn't been able to pin down. The professor is very different from the one I had last fall; she's much more hands on and prescriptive. She finds your problems and tackles them to the ground. And, oh baby, do I have problems. But I knew this. Among other things, I'm terribly excited that she's told me -- in front of the entire workshop -- that I am in desperate need of commas. Yes. I knew this; I just had no idea where to put the comma. I can punctuate formal writing well enough, but it's when I'm attempting to get a "flow" in a more casual, (hopefully) artistic piece that I lose all sense of right and wrong usage.
I wasn't terribly thrilled at students who decided to beat into the ground a fault already discovered, diagnosed and prescribed treatment. Not really a fan of that.
But the thing I was nervous about -- the inclusion of the real life violinist -- was completely cool with everyone. Apparently it's very "chic" now although it's not something anyone would have ever thought to do thirty years ago, or so my professor tells me.
