This picture needs a title

The only one I have so far is:

* After months of catcalls from the others, Marvin and Andy finally do "get a room".

I showed this to Krystal, who expressed the hope that the shelf doesn't break under ~45 pounds of boycat.

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It's like they're in our house

This is exactly what Daphne loves to do, and informed consent is no issue--she bugs me with head-butts until I'll give in and play with her.

Around here, though, we call it "Sado-Masokitty", and Daphne the polydactyl cat gives it four thumbs up!

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RIP, William McClure

A good man.

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Spencer the cat

Spencer gave me a little bit of a scare. I've been so busy getting up and running this quarter (notably organic chem and biochem, but also nutrition and A&P, all in an abbreviated summer quarter), that I've kind of been letting anything that can run on autopilot do so.

Cats are good at taking care of themselves, as long as everything's going right, so outside of opening the window for him to look out of, Spencer and I hadn't had a lot of interaction this week. So when he was lying on the floor in front of me, looking emaciated, I had an awful jolt of concern that he was sick, augmented by guilt that I hadn't been paying him much attention this week.

My concerns were dispelled when I picked him up, however, and it turned out just to be a trick of the angle he was lying at. Carl Sagan famously declared "We are star stuff"; by all indications, Spencer, the little mesomorph, is neutron-star stuff.

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You win, Granny!

(Background: it is well-known in certain circles that, of the two of us, Mr thalarctos is the domesticated one, while I am totally feral [h/t George]).

While I believe there is no afterlife, I'm certainly prepared to admit there is a possibility that I am wrong, and such a thing, however unlikely, could conceivably exist.

Should there be such a thing, and should my mother's mother be able to see me now, she is, no doubt, laughing her ass off at the rebellious 8-year-old who refused to learn to make a bed properly, and insisted that, when she grew up, she'd never make another bed in her life.

On the other hand, I'm making so many beds nowadays that my mitred corners have become something to absolutely die for (not literally, no!).



(Image from: http://whohastimeforthis.blogspot.com/2007/12/hospital-corners.html)

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Mr thalarctos finds out the truth

I'm only faking it, because I love him.

End of a long week; he took his final exams, and I had a ton of deadlines this week as well. We finally get home after all the running around, and settle in for "Battlestar Galactica: The Last Frakkin' Special", and we find out we've run out of just about everything this week, including stuff for dinner, and those Mexican Cokes, the ones with the real sugar rather than the high-fructose corn syrup, that he likes to drink while watching BSG.

I offer to run up to the store which has the Cokes and get stuff for dinner as well, and that's when the truth came out.

He said, "But I don't want you to miss 'The Last Frakkin Special'! I know you really want to watch it."

Nope, not really. I just haven't really gotten into BSG, and I barely know who anyone is, or what their story consists of. I know I'm throwing away my geek cred by admitting it, but I don't think there's anything wrong with it; I've just been hoarding my time for other things. I think once the entire series is out on DVD, I'll probably get it and do a BSG-a-thon. And that will be the time when I get hooked, and I go online to follow the discussions, and debate the intricacies of plot and character. But usually now, when Mr thalarctos has it on, I fall asleep halfway through, anyway, because I just don't have the bandwidth at the moment.

He barely notices, as rapt as he is. But the truth will out, eventually, and it did this evening. I'm saving BSG for a near future in which I have time to get involved in a quality show, but--for now--it's just background noise for me.

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I'll keep the list, just in case...

Well, it's been over two weeks since Isadora bit me, and subsequently died. The vet invoked the rabies protocol, as she should have. However, King County did not feel it necessary to test Izzy for rabies, since she was current on her shots, had no signs of rabies, and there was a perfectly plausible explanation for her unexpected death. So we proceeded on the assumption that the risk did not justify the extreme measures, and so far, that operating assumption appears to be borne out.

I'm not showing any sign of rabies, and this far out from the bite, I probably will never do so, but--just in case--I'll won't recycle that list of people to bite quite yet</oldjoke-again>.

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Facultative rabies

(Facultative: capable of adapting to different environmental conditions)

Well, this past week can be taken out back and shot, as far as I'm concerned.

Isadora had been sick with kidney disease and an upper-respiratory infection for a little while, but we thought we had it under control. She was getting fluids intravenously, and we had a plan for when she resumed eating, and how we would manage her kidney disease--the prognosis seemed good.

Since our vet clinic is not an emergency facility, and no doctor is present on the weekend, I got a call from the vet Friday a week ago, suggesting I take her home and provide hands-on care Saturday and Sunday--syringe feeding and subcutaneous fluids--and then bring her in Monday to restart the IV. Sounded like a plan--I was going to attend the Western Washington Wildlife Rehabilitators conference at the UW Saturday, but I could be a little late to that, np--so that's how we proceeded. I picked up Izzy, subq-fluided her, and then left for the conference. When I got back that evening, we did the same routine plus a syringe feeding.

Sunday, same deal. That's when she decided she'd had enough of this crap, and bit me in the right index finger knuckle, HARD! I think I'm going to have a scar from it.

By Monday morning, it was red, hot, and so swollen it had that Botox look: no natural wrinkles anymore; half of the back of my hand was almost perfectly flat and fluid-filled. And it hurt like a bastard! We're uninsured at the moment, due to unemployment, so I don't routinely go to the doctor, but I wasn't about to let this infection go systemic, either, so it was off to the emergency room for me.

I dropped Izzy off at the vet's on the way to the ER, and warned them about her biting me. We actually have observed this behavior, called "The Cobra", in the past: when she feels bad and over-interfered with, she bites swiftly and hard, without warning, compared to the absolute lovecat she always is when she feels better. Since she gives no warning, I didn't want anyone else taken by surprise.

The visit to the Overlake ER was the best it could be, given the circumstances--it's an ER, after all, nobody's idea of a good time (I hope!). But the staff was competent and kind, and since no gunshot wounds or anything like that were coming in, I was able to be seen right away. The nurse practitioner who saw me was friendly and patient, and willing to answer questions. She thought it was a Bordetella infection, and although penicillin is the first line against that infection, the almost-fact that I am allergic to penicillin made doxycycline the recommended way to go.



Figure 1: Image of Bordetella bronchiseptica from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1d/Bordetella_bronchiseptica_02.jpg/240px-Bordetella_bronchiseptica_02.jpg



Figure 2: Doxycycline, related to tetracycline

With a sling to immobilize my dominant hand (to remind me not to use it anymore than necessary), and a container of antibiotics, I headed home. I had just gotten settled in when the phone rang. It was the vet, and she asked me some questions about the bite. Then she said she had some bad news, and I knew before she told me that Isadora had died.

We're all shocked--we thought she was getting over this upper respiratory thing, and would go on to have her kidney disease successfully managed. She thought so, I thought so, Iain thought so--but whatever it was she had, it was too much for her.

Well, that was bad enough. But wait, there's more!

It turns out that King County has a "rabies protocol" that automatically kicks in when an animal bites a human, and then dies shortly after. She had to report it to the public health department, and was waiting to hear back from them whether they needed to get Izzy's head to test the brain for rabies.

She did the right thing in invoking the protocol, even though I'm (almost) sure we're in the clear. I'm just neurotic enough to worry about the tiny possibility of it, even though we agree she showed no signs of rabies either here or at the clinic, and her staggering was plausibly due to her weakness in not eating for so long, rather than the neurological degeneration of rabies. Her "flu-like symptoms" are more consistent with an upper-respiratory-tract infection than the symptoms Wikipedia's entry on rabies describes, and the bite was far from unprovoked. I was bugging her with syringes and needles, and "The Cobra" goes back for years now.

It looks like the public health department is going to agree with us, and not insist on testing. So that's that, except for the next couple of years, in my more paranoid moments, I guess I'll be interpreting every little sneeze or shiver as the onset of my own personal rabies case.

I told a conservationist friend, and said that, just in case, I was preparing a list of people to bite </oldjoke>. "Facultative rabies", she proposed. I like that.

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Good kitty Isadora

Il pleure dans mon coeur
Comme il pleut sur la ville

(by Paul Verlaine)

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Cat nurse

Isadora is doing a little better. She came home for the weekend, since our vet is not a 24/7 emergency clinic, and the vet wanted her to get hands-on care Saturday and Sunday. She's been receiving intravenous fluids, which I'm not qualified to administer, but I can give her subcutaneous fluids twice a day for two days, as well as syringe-feeding her, before I take her back in Monday.

Yesterday, she was quite passive; today, as big a pain in the ass as it it, I'm glad to see her resisting the fluids and syringe, as it means she has more strength than she did have. I got 15cc of cat food slurry (warm A/D dissolved in water) down her yesterday, and 20cc this morning. Additionally, she had 300mL Ringer's lactate yesterday, 150mL this morning, and I'm planning another 150ml tonight and once again early in the morning before taking her back in to resume the IV.

Her creatinine, while still sucky, is trending the right direction (down--it's now 3 times what it should be instead of 6 times); we think the BUN is probably doing so as well, but it's still so high it's out of range of the clinic's machine, so we can't know for sure. The vet thinks that if she can shake this upper-respiratory infection, then she's got a good prognosis for managing her kidney disease. We've got to get her through this crisis first, though, and while I do see a little progress, Isadora's still got a long way to go.

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One foot in front of the other

I'm kind of numb right now.

I need to go back and check the dates, but since about June 2008, we've been through the following feline emergencies:

• Isadora had her external ear (pinna or auricle) amputated, due to chronic infections.
  
  
• Cleo almost starved to death due to inability to eat; removing half her teeth gave her her life back.
  
  
• Simon (aka Caspian) got really skinny, which turned out to be due to kidney disease; we gained a few months by treating him, but lost him in November.
  
  
• Cleo lost her appetite again in January; this time, it turned out to be liver disease of some kind. Putting her through a liver biopsy to determine exactly what disease she had didn't seem indicated, given that she's such a poor surgical risk that we wouldn't operate anyway, so we treated her conservatively. I syringe-fed her, forced pills down her throat, and administered fluids subcutaneously through the skin on the back of her neck. That bought us a little time, but it ultimately wasn't enough; we lost her at the end of January.
  
  
• Isadora's had a cold for about a week now, but until yesterday, seemed pretty much herself, just sneezier. Yesterday morning, though, she was totally sacked out when we left in the morning, and when we returned in the afternoon, she hadn't moved. That's kind of odd for Isadora, who likes to strut around like she owns the place, and I picked her up to see if she's ok. While not skinny (and certainly no longer Isadora the Hutt of old), she definitely seems to have lost weight. We thought it might be due to our changing their kibble, so I got out some canned food as a treat to get her to eat. She was very interested in the food, but somehow couldn't or wouldn't manage to eat it, and as she walked away from it, she staggered. It looked very much like Cleo toward the end of her liver disease, so I got her into the vet first thing this morning.
  
  

We lost a human friend (a real mensch) very recently, too, but I don't feel ready to talk about that, and mixing it with a discussion of cat emergencies doesn't feel productive right now, so we can just stipulate that I've pretty much been mainlining cortisol for a few months now and leave it there.

Anyway, the vet called me, and I thought we were going to talk about the cold. It turns out Isadora is a lot sicker than I realized--it's her kidney disease, which has been kind of low-grade since March 2007, flaring up again with a vengeance. We don't know why--maybe the cold, or something else, got her to stop drinking water for a while, she got dehydrated, and then the other symptoms spiked up, hard and fast.

The good news is, she's not as sick as Simon was, and the doctor thinks she can be successfully treated for some time to come. What surprised me was that she asked me if I wanted to do so, having just gone through it with Simon (who, to be fair, HATED his treatment, and made it clear it was an ordeal to get fluids or pills).

I dread going through this routine again. But of course, I am going to do so; there is no question about it. The fact that Simon just went through it doesn't change anything; it's not like there's just one chance at life for a kidney cat in our household and it's Izzy's bad luck that Simon got there first.

I do appreciate her asking me that; it was considerate, and I know she loves Izzy and is an advocate for her. At the same time, I am sure that if Izzy had only a poor chance at some quality time, or were likely to suffer from treatment as much as Simon did, she would tell me so honestly. She's a good vet, and having access to her to care for our cats makes this, if not exactly good, way less sucky than it *could* be.

But at the same time, it is stressful as well. I was feeling like a real Angel of Death there for a while, and when Izzy got yesterday this morning, I was beating myself up about changing her food, about what in our house could, unbeknownst to us, be poisoning all our cats one by one, and so forth. As the vet and I talked, though, it became clear that this is just the statistical cluster from Hell, though--our cats are stratifying into two groups, the older/sick ones and the younger/robust ones.

None of the younger ones have been to the vet in at least two years, and none are showing any signs of any illness. We've just got two broad groups of cats, and the circle of life is being played out. The clustering, though, is stressing me out; I'm sure that if they did a CAT scan of my head right now, they'd see the outline of the skull, lined by a thin layer of gray and white matter, and most of the image would be one huge cortisol-induced ventricle right in the middle.

Of course I am going to give Isadora her chance, and treat her kidney disease. But as to how to carry it out, I think it's not going to be conscious thought so much as just keeping going: one foot after the other....

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11/11/08

I was going to post something for Veterans Day, but it will have to be another time. Today was not a good day. I'll let Mr. thalarctos explain:

Simon, the black male kitty we got as a fill-in companion for Andy after Bear passed away, didn't make it. He was fine for a few months, but then something happened--we don't know what, possibly something kidney related, given the aberrant blood chemistry involved--and he just began spiralling down after that point. By the time we took him back to the vet today (after a sort of "hiding" incident last night), he was under 5 pounds. He would eat with gusto when he would eat, though usually not for very long at a time, and he seemed to have a great deal of energy--he certainly fought his saline treatments and pills well enough--but despite being a love kitty under normal circumstances it was clear that the ground was washing out below his surface, and eventually it would all just cave in rather abruptly. So we decided to let him go on a good day when he seemed to have a fair amount of energy and the ability to feel good enough to purr, once he'd calmed down from the drive to the vet. This just seems to get more tough every time, so it's likely we'll have no more replacements for a while--the last couple of adoptees have eaten far into my rather poor ability to live up to buddhist ideals of detachment from impermanence.

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Things are looking up, I hope

One of the kindest things I've witnessed is when someone deep in mourning for a pet nevertheless takes the time to reach out, and pass on that pet's unused food or medication for someone else in need to use. It takes compassion to get out of one's own pain and to think of others at such a difficult time, and I've always admired people who can reach out in that way.

Even by my own low baseline, I've sucked at blogging lately. I started listing the RL things that have happened in the past year, and had to stop because the list itself was so long, it became a stressor in its own right.

But things are calming down, I hope, I hope. While I'm sitting here writing a paper, and have my beloved crime shows on as background noise, and they just ran a commercial for a product called Little Allergies.

Which reminded me that back in June, I bought a similar product called Little Noses on my vet's recommendation, to use for Cleo. She was so sick, and needed surgery so badly, yet we couldn't get a handle on her upper respiratory symptoms long enough to feel confident to schedule surgery. We hoped that a combination of drugs plus manual decongestion with the saline solution would get her into shape for surgery, but it turned out to be too late for those measures. She needed surgery right away, and we didn't even have time to try the Little Noses because she had ceased eating.

I've never been much of a housekeeper at the best of times, but during the May-October extended cat emergency season this year, the place has gone even further to hell than is the norm. Now that events are ebbing a bit (I hope!) I've been cleaning up the place a bit. As I did so, I found Cleo's Little Noses, sitting unused right where I left it.

For once, it was a joy to pass on unused medication to the vet, who told me that yes, there are certainly people and animals who can use it. I am grateful that, this once, the medicine is being donated because Cleo is doing just fine without it. She's made a full recovery, and is returning to being the mesomorph she used to be.

So the tally since May: 3 emergencies, 3 good outcomes. With less than half her teeth remaining, Cleo has resumed her place on the warm pad and is watching the world go by. Isadora needs minor wound care for a little recurrent seepage at the site of her ear amputation, but otherwise doesn't miss the ear and the chronic infections a bit. Simon (Caspian) remains the most fragile, but he is trending the right way--his BUN and creatinine were so high when we took him in that the vet's instruments couldn't even read the values. They had been trending down, and currently are plateaued at very high, but readable values. The vet says with the values, he ought to be acting a lot sicker than he is--he is gaining weight, and approaching us affectionately, which encourages me that maybe--whatever is attacking his kidneys--he is fighting it off.

Speaking of fighting off, he is determinedly non-compliant about the fluids, pills, and hand-feeding I'm currently carrying out; I prefer to look at it as fighting back as an encouraging improvement, in addition to being a major pain in the ass.

So rather than tempt fate by promising a definite date when I'll be more diligent about blogging, I'll just mark that things are continuing to get better, and--despite the best efforts of RL to kick my ass--we have not given up!

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Raven plans, and God laughs

Originally, June was going to look very different. I had wanted to go to Evolution 2008, and today is a workshop on ontologies and evolutionary biology that I was especially interested in attending, as it ties tightly into the work I'm doing to continue my dissertation research.

Instead, I'm playing intensive-care cat nurse x 2: Isadora's amputated ear wound site is healing nicely, and Cleo is having surgery today. She has stopped eating on her own, so I've been hand- and syringe-feeding her. She's not so sick, though, that she can't fight back against the syringe-feeding; we both hate it.

It's not quite clear what's going on with her, but there's something wrong with her mouth--whether or not that's the whole story, we don't know at this point. We do know that she has bad teeth, and a lesion in her mouth. But she's so compromised at this point--and she went downhill so quickly from being fine at the end of May--that we've been putting off anesthetising her because of the risk.

Best-case scenario: the lesion in her mouth is just inflammation from bad teeth and gums, and the dental work will alleviate it, and she'll go back to eating on her own, once the dental surgery's in her rear-view mirror.

Worst-case scenario #1: the biopsy comes back malignant from pathology. In that case, we'll euthanize her--keeping her around while a facial tumor takes its toll is not doing her any favors. We lost our cat Momo to a facial tumor in 2002, and to this day, I am not quite sure that we didn't keep her around just a little too long for Momo's quality of life because we were reluctant to let her go. We won't do that to Cleo.

Worst-case scenario #2: the biopsy comes back benign, but Cleo continues to decline after the surgery, and we never figure out what the problem is.

Sad, but not worst-case, scenario: Cleo is a very poor anesthetic risk at this point, but it's clear that this is her only chance, and we're going to take it. She may well die under the anesthesia. If she does, we'll be sad, and we'll miss her, but we won't regret going forward with the surgery. If she has a chance for any future life with any degree of quality of life, this is it. But she's DNR (do not resuscitate) if she dies in surgery.

In her favor, we've temporarily gained a little ground with steroids and antibiotics--it's not a permanent gain, but we're hoping it's enough to get her safely through dental surgery this morning. She's alert, her eyes are clear, and she's looking around for the food I normally give her by hand in the morning (she's been NPO, or nothing by mouth, since midnight).

Carpe diem. I'll let you know how it turns out.

UPDATE, Friday AM: Leaving for the vet now. Cleo is awake, alert, and the talkiest I've seen her in weeks. I love you, Cleo, and we're hoping for the best. Whatever happens in surgery, I'll remember how your old self showed itself this morning.

UPDATE, Friday night: Cleo came through the surgery fine, much better than we were expecting. Yay, Cleo! I brought her home, and she headed right for the food bowl. I think we've found and fixed the problem! I didn't let her stuff herself, because she's had quite the shock to her system today, but clearly she wants to eat.

She had about half her teeth extracted, and the biopsy is sent out, but the vet thinks it's stomatitis, or inflammation of the mouth, rather than cancer. Her canines were abcessed, and their proximity to her sinuses may account for her chronic respiratory issues--so we just may have solved another problem in addition.

Good Cleo! I'm glad you came through so well.

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Izzy's home!

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Isadora update

Isadora's bloodwork is in, and the results are mostly good. The only exceptions are in the complete blood count (CBC): slightly-elevated white blood cells, and slight anemia (low red blood cell [RBC] count).

She tested negative on all the viruses she was tested for--feline leukemia, feline infectious peritonitis, and feline immunodeficiency virus.

Ruling out those viruses ruled out some of the potential causes behind the elevated WBCs--there still may be some inflammatory or infectious process going on that was not tested for, however. One thing that could have happened is that the ear infection has burst through the ear drum, and is now in the middle and inner ear. So we'll continue to treat her with systemic antibiotics, as well as topical, to address that--the cauliflower ear is so deformed and full of cysts that the vet cannot see down into it, and I can't get the eardrops in very far at all.

But even if that explains the elevated WBCs, it does not explain the anemia. The vet explained that anemias can be classified as regenerative or non-regenerative, referring to the presence of immature RBCs, indicating that the body is making up the anemia by creating new RBCs. Regenerative anemia causes include such things as acute blood loss, for example, which the body responds to by upping the production of new blood cells.

Isadora's anemia is non-regenerative, and for the moment, we do not know what's causing it. We hope that the X-rays Tuesday shed more light on what's going on in her abdomen--for example, is the liver behind both the anemia and suspected fluid in her abdomen?

I hope we have some info soon, but in the meantime, she is definitely feeling better after the antibiotic injection, the lysine for the weepy eyes, and the ear drops. She's talkier and more active, pretty much as soon as we got back from the vet. However, I dread the battle of wills that the twice-daily ear drops became last time, and now doubt will develop into again. Oh, well, as the human, I get to suck it up, because it clearly helps her feel better.

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Full circle

When I met Mr. thalarctos at a dinner party at the Center for Urban Horticulture lo so many years ago, we were studying at the same summer intensive language program--I was studying Khmer, and he was studying Vietnamese--so I remember making some throwaway joke about a supposed Vieto-Irish language connection (nerdy jokes that require a whole lot of specialized knowledge to be even mildly funny, if that much, my specialty: this particular pun hinged on the fact that the word for "cow" is "bó" in Irish Gaelic, and "bò" in Vietnamese). Then I proceeded to spill a glass of red wine all over the notes he was supposed to sing from with the gamelan later that night--the lyrics were in Sundanese, a language he does not know, so he needed his crib sheet for the performance. From lame humor to full adrenaline panic in less than 60 seconds.

After that inauspicious start, it's a wonder he would still speak to me, much less that we hit it off so well we've been together the 15 years since then. The Center for Urban Horticulture is no longer there in the same form, having been intentionally firebombed, burnt down, and rebuilt in the meantime. And I just learned of another unexpected British Isles-Southeast Asian linguistic parallelism--convergent evolution, rather than homology; in neither case am I positing some grand overarching language family or anything: just two interesting coincidences in how people thousands of miles away from each other arrived independently at similar constructions.

I learned the following from a commenter over at Pharyngula, Dan S.:

And amusingly, one reading of the name of that most famous wandering Geatish hero, Beowulf, has it as 'beo' (bee) + 'wulf' (wolf) - that is, bee-wolf, i.e. bear, in Old English.

"Bee-wolf" for bear: that's cool! I would expect that people would know what a bear was, but there is also a taboo about speaking the bear's name to avoid attracting the attention of such a dangerous animal. So in Finnish:

In the Kalevala are evident traces of arctolatry, bear-worship, once very common among the tribes of the north, Otso, the bear, according to Finnish mythology, was born on the shoulders of Otava, in the regions of the sun and moon, and "nursed by a goddess of the woodlands in a cradle swung by bands of gold between the bending branches of budding fir-trees." His nurse would not give him teeth and claws until he had promised never to engage in bloody strife, or deeds of violence. Otso, however, does not always keep his pledge, and accordingly the hunters of Finland find it comparatively easy to reconcile their consciences to his destruction. Otso is called in the runes by many endearing titles as "The Honey-Eater," "Golden Light-Foot," "The Forest-Apple," "Honey-Paw of the Mountains," "The Pride of the Thicket," "The Fur-robed Forest-Friend."

"Our word karhu (bear: describes a hairy fur of the bear, a shaggy creature) was not allowed to say out loud. That is why there are many euphemisms in Finnish language, which were used when one wanted to weaken or hide the fear towards the bear. Kontio (bruin) describes the way the bear walks. A certain stress was used when Se (it), Itse (self), Hän (he) was said. Metän elukka (beauty of the forest), Otso (the apple of the forest) etc. are usually appropriate code names. When one wanted to flatter one might say Jumalan mies (the man of God), Suuriherra (mighty master), Mesikämmen (lazy honey-pawed one), Mesikkäinen (honey-eater). Words like Kouki, Kouvo, Metsän- vaari (grandpa of forest), Tätinipoika (the son of my aunt) are reminders of the belief that a man and a bear are related to each other. When adults intimidated children by a bear it was called Pöppö, Mörkö (bugbear), Mönninkäinen or Kurko."

The Russian "медведь", "honey-eater"; our own "bruin". "the brown one"--these are also examples of the same naming taboo.

So is "bee-wolf" another example, or is it simply a very old attempt to describe one animal in terms of another, better-known, one? After all, if you want to avoid invoking dangerous animals by calling their names, you could do a lot worse than to start with striking "wolf" from your vocabulary, not that humans are always 100% consistent of course. I don't know whether "bee-wolf" is simply a first pass at description, or whether it's an example of name taboo, but I do know I've seen that construction before:

"bear" = some other familiar carnivore + honey aspect

In Old English, apparently, it's "bee-wolf" (at least, according to one reading); in Khmer, it's "honey tiger": klaa kmoom (I really need to get Cambodian up and running on this machine]. And the "honey tiger" most familiar in Southeast Asia is none other than our old friend, the sun bear:



(this is Fong, at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, sleeping in a position he likes.)

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Bearrings

(Emma, Ruth, if you're reading this, stop! Wait until your packages arrive this week before reading any further, 'k? :)



Finished my first pair of bear earrings ("bearrings") tonight. These are learning pieces, so I'll give them as gifts to friends.

Terry brought the golden bears back from the bead show in Arizona a few weeks ago. I'm using the colors pink, blue, and yellow because of what they mean in reproductive cycle cytology--pink is acidophilic cells, blue is basophilic cells, and yellow is keratinized.

Also, since we want baby bears, not to lock them into rigid sex roles or anything, but pink and blue are well-established baby colors, too. So the colors of the beads in these bearrings have a lot of symbolism.

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Blast from the past

This post at Home of the Brave took me back in a very unexpected way:

The spectacle of Siegelman, whom I briefly met about 40 years ago in Huntsville, Alabama, being in federal prison on this bogus case is nothing short of overwhelming. And the obtuseness, if not hostility with which the district judge and the Eleventh Circuit have met his requests for bail pending appeal sets some kind of high water mark for politically motivated vindictiveness. This is the kind of judicial hostility I encountered all too often during the civil rights era. It is utterly shocking to see that kind of callousness resurrected for Siegelman.

It's about the imprisonment of a former Alabama Democratic governor, and, as an example of the vindictive dealings of the Bush government, shocking, although not especially surprising. But that's not what struck me the most about this post.

When I read this:

All too ironical and upsetting is that the conviction was in the Middle District of Alabama, a court formerly presided over by Hon. Frank M. Johnson, one of America’s great jurists of the mid-twentieth century.

I was suddenly taken back to many a fractious dinner-time conversation with my family. Judge Frank Johnson was my mother's sworn enemy, or rather, she was his. I doubt he even knew her, although I suppose it is possible.

In many ways, I am very proud of my mother. In a day when women, especially in Alabama, didn't usually go to medical school, she struggled against the culture, and insisted on becoming a doctor. She had to fight ingrained sexism to do so, and she had at least one professor who refused to teach her because she was a woman. I am very proud of the obstacles she surmounted to get to her dream--it was harder than it was for many other people, and she persevered.

Here's the thing, though--somewhere along the line, in her struggles, she lost empathy with others in theirs. She was unbudging in her opposition to the civil rights movement, for example. One of my deepest fears is that when I am old, and my mind is waning, all the work and study and growth I did on these issues will be for nothing, and I'll just be babbling out the poison that was poured in my ear when I was too young to know any better. I hope that is not my fate, but it is definitely my fear.

Her emnity to Judge Johnson was, I think, related--what I remember made his name a swear word around our dinner table was his ruling that patients could no longer be involuntarily committed to a mental institution just on the physician's authority. My mother was a psychiatrist, and she had worked hard to get where she was--fair enough. But somewhere, she took on the mantle of authority that had traditionally been part of the psychiatrists' practice at that time and place, and she deeply resented the erosion of her authority that Judge Johnson represented.

As I said, I am proud of what my mother did to go to school against all the social pressure to dissuade her from it. But I can't defend all her attitudes and her politics, and I don't know how much of that struggle hardened her and her positions to what they became.

And I haven't thought about any of this for a very, very long while, and I don't know when I would have again, except for that mention of Frank Johnson as one of America's great jurists. Now, it makes me curious to do a little bit more reading about him. But the name was such a highly-charged epithet in the home I grew up in, that I wanted to get my thoughts down first, to avoid Heisenberging them by reading other accounts.

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A living national treasure

So now that Dad's retired, he's got more time to pursue his craft of making wooden bowls.



He's learned from many sources, and one of them is actually a living national treasure---William McClure makes Appalachian bowls, and has one in the Smithsonian.

Dad took me and Mom out to meet him and his wife. They're a sweet old couple, with a house full of crafts. I think they said he's 82 years old; I'll verify that when I get home. They were very welcoming, even though we had dropped in on them with no warning--they are very hospitable, and seemed to enjoy the company.

Dad played a little practical joke when he introduced me--he said he'd brought his city-girl daughter-in-law over to meet him, "because she didn't believe there were any Democrats in this county". He laughed delightedly, sprang over to a nearby table, and snatched up a photograph to show me. Laughing and wheezing through his emphysema, he showed me a picture of Bill Clinton shaking his hand at a reception, and said, "Two...Slick Willies!".

This is Dad and Mr. McClure, Mrs. McClure, and Mom:



Then we moved outside, and he and Dad swapped stories for a while.



More later; I've got to get ready to go to the airport now. In the meantime, here are some of Dad's bowls.

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