So, not an excuse, but holy cow how are we already halfway through February?!

In the last month and a half since I wrote a blog post – my apologies by the way – I have participated in two write 10K in a day challenges, done a crap ton of resin (the photo), design & get to the printers the flyers for a festival I’m helping with, fix printers issues with said flyers because they couldn’t do things the correct way on the first go, talk to corporate about things because yes, corporate got involved, and also my cat ended up in an emergency visit to the vet that is still ongoing healing wise.

Let’s start with the 10K in a day challenges. So on Jan. 18th and Feb. 9th Mandi Lynn hosted a write 10,000 words in a day challenge. And, because I’ve been super lax on my words the last year or so, I decided to participate. I was able to pull off a win both times!

January’s day ended with a total of 10,771 – it’s a respectable start to a Horror short that I had originally planned to be about that length and who promptly told me ‘ha! I’m going to be longer!’. I’m estimating that it’s about half done because this one ended up needing to be a slower burn horror.

February’s day ended with a total of 10,556 – which I was able to finish my mermaid story, Treasure of the Deep, which if you didn’t know is my newest release.

So yeah, so far so good for getting writing done this year. I just need to continue writing between the 10K challenges, and also if possible continue to participate in said challenges.

As you can see in the picture above, I’ve also been playing with resin. I’ve found it super therapeutic to be able to play with it and create some fun magnets and keychains. I need to pick up some more though because I have maybe one more run of the molds before I am totally out of it.

The print job I’m not really wanting to go into much detail on, partially because I want to leave it in the past now that it’s over. The short of it is, I lost four days to this issue and had to go to the same store five different times, talk to corporate about it, before it was for the most part resolved, though after a small preliminary count it also looks like we were shorted 25 copies. And I’m just kind of done with it. Flip a table, let me break something done. Corporate kept saying they didn’t want to lose me as a customer, but I just can’t trust the company after this. So I’ll be trying a different company for next year, one that I’ve been working with through my 9-5 job that has great customer service and delivery so I don’t have to constantly run back and forth to a store.

And lastly, and most recently, my cat ended up with an emergency vet visit Tuesday night. Mom and I came home Tuesday night to find him not stable on his left front paw and his head tilted so his left eye was nearly on the ground when he stumble-walked. Naturally, I panicked and we found the closest emergency vet we could take him to. After they ran some preliminary tests on him the prognosis was ear infection which is why the dizzy and stumbly from him. The infection is pressing on his vestibular nerve, which controls balance in both humans and cats. Nothing that can’t be fixed with some meds. So that night, despite choking on the bill, mom and I went home with a sign of relief.

Dex stayed at the vet because the specialist wanted to take a look at him, the emergency vet had called her that night to get a recommendation on meds, so he stayed overnight and I was called Wednesday with the official prognosis. Basically, the infection was caused because he had build-up of wax and bacteria in his ear due to a mass in the canal that’s stopping it from self-cleaning itself the way it normally does. In 3 out of 4 cats, when masses appear in cats of his age (17) it’s usually aggressive (read cancer). Right now our focus is healing the infection and getting him better on that end because that’s faster fixable, just meds to heal him slowly.

The next step will be discussing where to go from here for the mass. Ideally, the simple but expensive route is removing it. But that involves putting him under to take a biopsy so they can 100% tell what it is and based on that how to deal with it. Then, putting him under again for the actual surgery. In a healthy cat, this would still be fairly stressful. But we’ve found he also has a heart complication because he has a heart murmur. This means we have to be careful about putting him under at all because it could be too much stress on his heart and if it’s too much of a risk then the surgery just isn’t worth it either. If the surgery isn’t worth it, it means that we’ll just triage his symptoms as we can for the duration of the rest of his life and make sure he’s the happiest, most spoiled lap snuggle cat he can be.

It’s been some hard news to take in, and because we’re only a few days into the meds he’s still walking like he just stumbled out of the nip’bar at 3am after a hot night with the girls, and while thinking of it that route makes me giggle a little it still makes me sad that he’s not as stable on his feet as he should be. He’s got a lot more energy since we got the meds for him and are keeping up with them, and even though he’s stumbling, he’s not letting it slow him down much so it helps to know that he’s feeling a lot better. I did notice that he’s not touching the dry food as much but will gobble the moist, so I’m going to have to pick up more moist for him. Normally the moist was a every so often treat, but if that’s what he’s happier eating, I want to make sure it’s now a daily meal for him. Right now it’s day by day as I try not to think about the more serious parts of his prognosis because right now it isn’t the focus for getting him better and honestly there’s nothing we can do about that part of it now.

That’s been my life the last month and a half. Hope yours has gone well! alk to you soon!