The Week in Boston

When I last posted, I mentioned that I was going to Boston for a week. I did hope I’d find some time to blog while I was out, but for some reason (that I figured out later and will get to at the end) it had become increasingly harder for me to focus enough to write a coherent post. I guess it doesn’t matter now, since I’m doing it from home, but I do wish that I was able to get on this sooner.

I’ve been to Boston before. Massachusetts is one of the original colonies, so there is a lot to see in the way of history, particularly relating to the Revolutionary War. Alas, I didn’t do any of the historical touristy stuff this time. I did, however, get around the city enough to photograph some of its character.

Let’s start with the hotel. We stayed in a boutique hotel, paid for by Michael’s work. It’s the same hotel we stayed in on the last trip to Boston, in fact. This hotel has a unique style.

Note the choice in bed covering – bold, no?

This is what they offered in the way of a bathrobe – wild.

The night we landed, Michael and I decided to visit a seafood restaurant we visited the last time we were in town. I still don’t like seafood, but I figured with the diet and all, it made sense to give the place another shot. The food was cooked well, I’m sure, but I still wasn’t able to really like it. I’m trying. Really.

While we were out, I noticed white horses and carriages everywhere. In fact, there were also quite a few younger, adult-like people wearing formal attire. I can only figure that it was prom season.

For the rest of the week I toured the city, but mostly with the search for local yarn shops in mind. I believe that the artistic mood of a yarn crawl helped me notice something I may not have otherwise – the architecture. Some of the buildings that were in use at the time of the Revolutionary War are still maintained and used for tourism purposes. Some of the older buildings are just moss-covered. What struck me the most, though, is the juxtaposition of the old and new buildings.

The reason I really wanted to go to Boston this time had nothing to do with Boston at all. It had everything to do with Sara. She and I met here, through my blog. I learned about nine months ago that she was expecting a new baby, so I set about making a baby blanket from wool I spun myself. The drive from Boston to Sara’s place wasn’t all that long, so we made the side trip to deliver the blanket.

Already, the little guy is wrapped up in my handiwork!

We played Dungeons and Dragons at Sara’s house the first night, then simply hung out with her the next day. I really wish I had her drive – she made efforts to clean her house when we were coming over, even though she just had the baby on the previous Monday. I insisted that she needn’t worry about us, but she did anyway. It was so very cool to meet someone who was a complete stranger to me before I started writing online. She’s just as wonderful as I hoped she would be. Yea, internet friends!

I also finished a little something from my long list of yarn craft WIPs:

The Razor Cami. I used Arucania Ranco Multy, in color 309. I bought the yarn at a point when I felt I needed to broaden the color variety in my yarn stash. I bought 2 skeins of the same dye lot at the same time, and yet they were very different. When you click on the picture, you can see that the top inch of the camisole and the arm straps are a slightly different color than the rest of the body. I can’t decide if this is an artifact of the fact that the yarn is hand-dyed, or if someone maybe switched a label at some point. The pattern called for a contrast color at the top anyway, but I wanted the thing to be a single color. Maybe I’ll get my wish on the next one. For what it’s worth, I chopped my head out of the picture here for the same reason I didn’t post a photograph of me with Sara – I look particularly terrible in all the pictures taken of me that week.

I think the reason I looked terrible is that I felt a little bad, health-wise. At the hotel’s steak restaurant, I told the waiter that I have a dairy allergy, and I assumed the fact that he went through the menu with me to show me what was dairy free meant he understood. I ate my steak and asparagus, and as I got back to my room, I had a swollen throat and an upset stomach. They didn’t take me seriously. It’s the first time this happened since I started the new diet, but honestly I’m shocked that it hasn’t happened more often, given the sheer amount of traveling we’ve been doing.

I also learned one more thing I am allergic to: my birth control pills. The reaction was identical to the reaction I had to dairy. I can directly connect the weeks that I felt bad, even those on the cleanse diet, with the times I was taking the pills. They made me feel inflamed, tired, and sore, and they left me unable to get rest while I slept. Another odd bit – they made it impossible to adapt my circadian rhythms to the  Eastern time zone. I was waking up at 8:00am in Mountain time, and 10:00am Eastern time, without fail. As soon as I got home and realized the pills were making me sick, I stopped taking them. Within three days of discontinuing the pills, all of the symptoms disappeared. I started waking up earlier – this morning I woke up at 5:15am, feeling great. Why couldn’t I have figured this out before I traveled? In a few weeks we’re going back to Eastern time (a long business and family visiting trip, which I will try to blog about now that I am healthy enough to do so), so I’ll see how I fare then. I am willing to bet that I adapt much better this time.

Improvising

Last week was one in which things just didn’t go as planned. I thought everything was going well. I spun exactly one ton of yarn for the baby blanket I am knitting. I was on top of the infections the mommy cat and her kittens had. I started bottle feeding at the first sign of weight loss. I spiked the formula with Lysine and probiotics to help warn off the URI that mommy cat had. It all just… failed.

The blanket:

As I spun the yarn, I was pleased with the thought that I was making so much I could not possibly fall short of what I needed for a baby blanket. I mean, come on, baby blankets are small, and I spun pounds of yarn (I think maybe 2 pounds?). I began the pattern I selected on Ravelry, knitting happily away with the green yarn. I moved on to the blue, a little concerned about the amount I had of that color – I had to dispose of a significant amount of yarn due to a chewing incident that Serra and Duck perpetrated. No big deal, it was just one color, and maybe I could make it up with another color of yarn.

Then I got to the undyed yarn. I knit the first section using the suggested number of stitches and rows, thinking nothing about it. When I bound off, I noticed that the ball of yarn was a lot smaller than it should be. I weighed the yarn, and it turned out that I had used exactly half of what I had spun. Half?! Really? I had two more sections to do, and they were to be larger than the first. Oh, crap.

It was at this point that I decided two things. First, I decided that the pattern is just a suggestion. I would place the color blocks in the same places (roughly) that the pattern called for, but they might have fewer rows than suggested. Additionally, the blanket might turn out a little smaller than I intended. My friend Julie pointed out that the new blanket size would be absolutely perfect as a nursing cover up and as a place to just put the baby on the floor. Julie is a doula, so I believe anything she says about human babies. She could tell me they were born with horns and I would believe it. Not going to find out, myself. The second thing I decided is that I would spin more of the undyed fiber, since I have quite a bit of that.

I might also have to cook Serra and Duck for dinner. I keep threatening to eat them when they destroy my yarn.

The kittens:

At the beginning of the week, Charge finally started to feel better. I was able to stop giving her fluids, then I was able to stop hand-feeding her. The babies were still on the bottle, though, because their poor, sick mother dried up. The little ones also developed an eye infection – Quark in both eyes, Neutrino in just one.

I jumped on everything. I started the boys on the bottle at the first sign of weight loss. I started them on eye drops the moment the eyes got infected. I added Lysine and probiotics to their formula when Quark showed signs of their mother’s cold. I thought that if I stayed ahead of everything, it would all come out fine.

When the kittens’ eyes didn’t improve on the eye meds I had, I took them to the vet. They were given stronger meds and some Clavamox to fight the first signs of mommy’s cold. Two days later, it all went down hill. Quark couldn’t sleep because he couldn’t breathe. Around every 30 minutes, he woke up screaming. I offered him the bottle, but he lost the will to suckle. When I tried to give him fluids, he would panic and back into the needle causing himself to bleed. It all broke my heart. I spent two days holding Quark in the steam from the humidifier until his nose cleared enough to eat and sleep. He loved that – he would hang is head over my hand (I kept my hand in the steam to make sure it wasn’t too hot) to sniff the moist air. I fed him twice as often as his brother, but he still kept losing weight. On the last day, Michael and I took turns holding him, keeping him warm so he could sleep an hour at a time. We even offered Quark to Duck for the grooming his mother couldn’t give and I couldn’t manage because it would involve wetting and chilling him to dangerous levels.

Duck is such a good mommy for a baby boy-cat.

By the next morning, I knew Quark was finished. He clamped his jaw closed and refused his beloved bottle. He could not be consoled no matter what I did. Neutrino was gaining weight and getting chubby, and in comparison, Quark just looked so small. He was also cool to the touch. I called the shelter and asked that he be put down. I’ve gotten better with this. It’s such a bad feeling, wondering if you gave up too soon, but I have had that worry so many times at this stage and it never ends well. My opinion is always seconded by the vets at the shelter, so it’s not even a unilateral decision. I know I did the painful, but right thing. I have to keep reminding myself of this.

Within two days of Quark’s end, I noticed that Neutrino wasn’t taking the bottle so well for me. I also noticed that when I stimulated him to go to the bathroom, there was usually nothing coming out. I was concerned, until I reached under his mother and rubbed her tummy. Imagine my surprise when I discovered she was full of milk! Now that Charge was feeling better, she went right back to caring for her baby. By the end of that day, Charge was so full of milk that she sat in the kitten room howling with discomfort.

I then got a brilliant idea. I called the shelter in the morning to give them the status update on my kitty family. I also suggested that if they had kittens who needed a surrogate mother, Charge might be a good candidate. It turns out that I couldn’t have called at a better time. Another mom cat came in to the shelter with six newborn kittens. The problem is, the mom was very defensive of her kittens, and the babies had nasty eye infections. The shelter staff couldn’t get enough access to the babies to give them regular treatment to clean up the eyes. I brought Charge to the shelter to see if she would take in some new kittens. It could not have gone better – the first thing Charge did when she saw one of the new guys was bathe, then potty him. I gave her the 3 sickest kittens (one had so much pus coming out of his eye that I thought the eye had exploded) and took them home. By that evening, the babies had gained weight, so I knew mommy was caring for them. Charge just seemed so happy, so relived to have more babies to care for.

Meet Butterscotch, Fudge, and Marmalade. Yes, the umbilical cord is still attached to these kittens.

Neutrino is great with the new siblings. The day after they arrived, he started eating wet food like a big boy, so he isn’t really competing for milk. He snuggles the babies as if they were his litter mates, despite the disparity in size. The only problem is that Neutrino’s eye didn’t heal all that well – he probably got an ulcer – and he seems to have bad vision in that eye (he falls down a lot, always the same way, on the side with the bad eye). The little guys’ eyes are clear, but it was just too tough for Neutrino.

(I know I look rough here – I’ve been a little unwell, but I’ve started getting tested for everything). Neutrino’s right eye might be like this permanently. It’s just so cloudy and misshapen. If you compare him to the kittens above, you can see he doesn’t fit in my hand as well anymore. He’s big, and getting bigger every day! I feel good about his future, despite the eye.

So, the whole kitten thing may not have gone as well as I had hoped. On the other hand, if I hadn’t lost Quark, I may not have been able to save these other babies. I do still have Neutrino, and I’ve given his mother another chance to be the great mother she started out being. While nothing this week has gone like I planned, with a little improvisation, I still managed to get something good.

Nebula

Every year I fall madly in love with one or two foster kittens or mother cats. I can’t help it – it’s in the nature of my job. I have to care enough to keep them alive despite crying, vomiting, diarrhea and other nasty things that happen to kittens. I can’t watch a human being puke without retching a little bit myself, but if a kitten barfs I just pet him until it all comes out. As you might imagine, my feelings for the kittens necessarily turn into love.

On Tuesday I met my first major kitten crush of the year - Nebula! Isn’t he handsome? He is just learning to eat kitten food and use the litter box. He’s catching on fast, but he’s not there yet. He is really soft and almost felted. We think he’s going to be the long-haired matting sort.

Little Nebby is living with the Constellation Kittens. If you were keeping count, Nebula makes 8. He is right in between the Star Kittens and the Constellations in every way. Thankfully, Lyra and Orion really step up to the plate and keep him company. In the morning one of them is always snuggling with the little fellow. Argo was a little afraid of Nebula at first, but when he discovered that Nebby gets milk in his wet food, Argo decided to make friends (because friends share, right?). Leo doesn’t really notice the newcomer.

Nebula has proven incredibly easy to wean. He wasn’t really interested in the bottle when I first took him in. I offered him a mixture of KMR and wet food fed through a syringe, and he gobbled it like his first meal. At the next feeding we syringe fed him and lowered the syringe to the food to get his focus downward, A few more of those sessions and he started looking downward right away. Lucky for Argo, Nebula eats best when he has a partner. I don’t think it will be long before Nebula starts eating with the big kittens. He still gets a little confused, though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swDrv3r1EW4

Orion is the smallest Constellation, so Nebula views him as a playmate. He actually tried to jump on Orion from behind! His reflexes just weren’t quite there yet.

I still can’t get enough of pictures of cats with their tongues out.

The Stars are still hanging in there. They are putting on a great deal of weight – they grew nearly 20% their first day. All of the umbilical cords fell off as of yesterday. They have gotten colicky lately. They can scream for hours and nothing I can do will console them. It just serves to remind me why I never wanted a baby of my own in the first place. I got a tip from searching the internet about putting Gripe Water in their bottles. I am not sure if that is what did it, but I haven’t heard as much screaming since I started adding it in.

This is not the most in-focus picture, but this is how I generally saw the kittens before today. This would be why I am now dubbing them the “screamin’ demons.” I still love them, but man are they loud!