Bad Kitty Mommy Redux

I got home just a little bit ago to start in on the changes to the Octopus, and called the vet. Puff is ok; "she's resting right now," and she's on IV fluids and antibiotics. I'm going to call them back and warn them not to break out the crash cart if she goes into a Roadkill Kitty position, that she might just be relaxing.

It turns out it was a bladder infection, a really bad one, that she's apparently had for a few days. I still can't believe I was so oblivious as to not have noticed she was acting weird. Every other time I've ever had a cat with a bladder infection, they've announced it by peeing on something out in the open. How could I not have seen that? I'm now left wondering what in the house I'm not seeing that Puff has peed all over. The vet said she crawled back up under the TV console to die, so the other cats wouldn't hurt her since she was getting too weak to defend herself.

Yeah. Thanks for the guilt trip, Bubbelah.

But I don't understand that, since my cats all get along with each other; they don't fight, and they even cuddle sometimes. So I guess it's instinctual, or something. Not that I would have thought Puff *had* any instincts, but...

Well, she's a little...ummm...defective. I mean, I love her, but, well... I got Puff from a guy I used to date--one of his friends walked out one morning, and on his front doorstep was a teensy little Puff. Howling. No other cats in sight. He took Puff in, and looked for a litter somewhere, but nothing. Puff was a practically almost newborn, her points hadn't even grown in yet--just a little black tip on her nose, and a cream-coloured body. I volunteered to take her before I knew she was (at least part) Siamese, because I felt sorry for the little kitty that some Momcat had kicked out of the nest.

Turns out Momcat might have had an idea of what she was doing.

Without assistance, Puff would not have made it this far, or continue to make it. That's just reality, and it's coming from me, the person who loves her. It might have been a little more than Momcat was willing to take responsibility for. She's...special. Or, you can look at it like my sister does, who points out that Puff is "too stupid to know to eat".

Ok, so Puff has difficulty with some things. Ok, so eating is one of them.

Once I figured out what Puff's preferences were (I still am clueless as to what her problem was, but we found a way around it), I put a bowl of food up away from the other cats, where Puff can pick out bits of food, one at a time, and pick it up with her paw--claws out--and eat it. This is how she eats most of the time, unless she has something other than cat food to eat, and even then she'll pick it up, put it in her mouth, and then go down in meatloaf position and eat it like normal. Her favourite is spiral-cut, honey-baked ham.

Why I was surprised when I found this out, I don't know. Weirdness is pretty much par for Puff.

But she is interactive--she'll talk to you for hours--and any time you say "Puff!" she says "Yip!" And she looks cute when she curls up and goes to sleep. She can't help it if she's mildly defective, and likes to smoosh her head up against things and go to sleep. I think it comes from missing her Mom. And she can't help it that she likes to relax around the house in what my sister and I call "Roadkill Kitty" poses. Usually flat on her back, with her legs sticking this way and that. Why it's appealing, I don't know...but it means something to Puff. My sister says it's 'cos her ambition in life is to be roadkill. I think maybe lying upside down makes something in her brain connect that doesn't otherwise. The liking (I think it's liking) to hear "Sleigh Ride" whistled (I found this out by accident when she was about a year or so old)... She can't help being weird. I'm glad she wandered into my life, 'cos I think someone else might have not tried to help Puff ummm...be all she can be.

"That's a damn weird cat, Babe." Says my 13-yo.

I'm glad that Puff will be ok. I would have missed the silly girl.

The bulk of my changes to Magnificent Octopus are what a lady I go to school with calls "happy-to-glad" changes. At least I think they are. I have pages and pages of corrections like changing "x will also be y" to "x also will be y".

I think this means the same thing. I think "will also" sounds better.

But, on the other hand, I don't "get" a lot of things about English. I'm ok with it, I can usually pick the "wrong" sentence on silly tests that ask one to pick the "wrong" sentences, and so forth. But I don't actually understand all the grammar rules. Math rules I'm ok with, but grammar and spelling rules I'm not; I play it by ear. Unlike Math rules, they seem to me to be pretty arbitrary. It also doesn't help that in the general area in which Ancodias come from, you can see color/colour/couleur, and it all means the same thing. It's not a big deal, until you're charged with spelling off the top of your head for something, like writing on the board. Add to that the fact that, if you throw a second language in there (from 1/2 of my parentage), there's letter confusion to deal with also. Add to *that* the fact that I disagree with some things personally, plus MS Word's spelling and grammar check isn't correct sometimes, and you have a freaking mess. I've tried to add as little to Word's dictionary as possible, to try to get a "clean catch" when I write, but I've made mistakes and ok'd words that I guess are technically misspelt; on MO's corrections are a few of those (e.g., changing "conceptualise" to "conceptualize"), changes I hit "Add to Dictionary" on, assuming it should be in there but wasn't. Argh. And I *hate* seeing those red squiggly lines all over a paper.

My father was, well...let's say an ardent supporter of speaking properly, probably because his parents were so obsessive about speaking proper English (contrary to the way it seems a lot of immigrants are these days, it seems to me that many Eastern European immigrants made learning English a major priority--a point of pride, really). As a result, I'm aware that it's ok to dangle participles, but in general it should be avoided (if I remember correctly) as an issue of clarity. But I couldn't *tell* you what a participle is if my life depended on it, and I only remember terms like "dangling participle" and "comma splice" because my sister and other people I admire use terminology like that. And I then have to ask them to remind me what those are. :-) I've had people (especially here) tell me that I sound uncomfortably formal sometimes, or words to that effect.

But I think another contributing factor is that it was tantamount to a sin to do things like leave off a terminal g, and say something like "twenny" instead of "twenTy". And I know I do these things, and I also know that I can't justify them other than by saying that learning them was the only way to be allowed to finish a sentence in my household. And I know that I'm far from perfect about it (geez...*very* bad, actually), but I've developed a heuristic that has enabled me to survive the gauntlet in which I was raised. :-) And I also know that Dave Matthews' primary Redeeming Feature is his enunciation; it's really pretty good. :-) In that respect I'm a weirdo, because I notice these things (how can it be that no one around me noticed that?). So I know I sound stilted some of the time, as does my sister. My father sounds stilted most of the time. *His* parents sounded stilted ALL of the time. My brother completely comes off as a stiff, formal peckerhead.

But that's 'cos he is. :-) Let's not go there.

But whereas everyone else in my family (including my pain-in-the-ass Canadian Mommy) can do cool things like diagramming sentences, identifying the subject, object, and predicate (is that how it goes? Case in point: I'm not sure), and so forth, I can't. That part of my brain didn't bake long enough in the womb, I think. In school, when we were doing that sort of thing, I zoned out. I wrote a play. The protagonists were an archaeologist, Dr Alwayzn Pastense; his wife, Hortense Pastense; their son, Gerund Attila Pastense, and a few peripheral characters.

How I made a B remains a mystery to this day. I think it was because, come test time, there were enough practical (or applied?) questions that I could fake it, at least in a by-the-skin-of-my-teeth sense.

So now I have one hundred pages of Octopus, full of corrections that seem to me to be a lot of "happy-to-glad" changes. Or they may be crucial grammatical errors; I'm ill-equipped to know the difference. So I am going to decide if I want to pacify her and say "also will". Sigh.