Fifteen Thousand

This is a view I don’t get that often, surprisingly.  Usually she is keeping an eye on what I am doing, but this time I was trying to entice her onto a little item I brought out for them to sleep on.  As soon as I want to get a picture of them on it, it becomes anathema.

It was backwards day in another sense – usually I am trying to get the subject to look at me, but this time I wanted her to face away.  So she kept messing it up by turning and looking at me.

Today the blog did pass the milestone that I was waiting for.  Just after midnight it got its 15000th hit.  I was hoping to get there before the end of the first year, and it made it with a bit more than a week to spare.

By chance and the little ‘flags of the world’ feature of WordPress, I even know who it was, at least in a general sense.  It was our faithful reader(s) from Burundi in Central Africa!

I’ve been doing the pills with Gus for a while now, and it is going pretty smoothly. He is pretty resigned to the process, and tends to stare at the milk in his little dish and purr while I get the pill out and prepare for the insertion.  Some days I’ll use the squirt bottle to give him a little water to wash it down.  There’s no sign of any rash forming on the ears with the oral medication, thankfully.

There was a little bit of a change this morning, though. I was carrying him down and saw a change to the back of his neck – a gap in the fur.  Looking closer, there was a hairless patch about the size of a quarter there.  In the patch were two red dots, maybe a finger width apart.

Vampires?

Since this gap almost certainly was less than 12 hours old, I soon found an explanation that fits.  When Julie came inside, Gus did his common ‘lick and bite’ thing to him.  I wasn’t paying a lot of attention but it seemed that Gus bit not on the shoulders but further back which had two effects – it hurt Julie to be bit away from the thick fur and skin of the neck and the position allowed Julie to squirm around and get a bite back. In the ensuing tussle the tuft Julie bit got pulled most or all of the way out, leaving a hole.

The tooth marks are more bruises than punctures, and there is no swelling or infection that I can feel.  There’s no pain when I touch it.

I remember that a couple of months ago I stepped on Julie on the stairs and he somehow turned about and bit a toenail so hard I can still feel a crease across it as the nail grows out.  He’s a tit for tat kind of cat.