The bastard oven
Jan. 22nd, 2020 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
smokingbootThere have been great things: friends came up for the weekend, and it was as glorious and ridiculous as ever. It's nice having a house with room. But there was drama too, though thankfully it was over before they arrived.
The bastard oven is 10 years old. It recently started smoking in an ominous way, so R cleaned it once and I cleaned it twice after, trying to remove any residue of chemical crap that might be causing fumes.No good. Attempts to grill anything resulted in noxious James Herbert style fogs... And on Friday, it set off the smoke alarm, at which point our tom cat fell down. We don't know if he had a fit or not, only that we found him lying on his side with his mouth half open and his eyes vacant. He was breathing light and slow and his fur was cool. He got up eventually and was so wobbly, R scooped him up and took him to the vets where they couldn't hear anything along his right hand side, and wondered if he had been hit by a car, so R went on to their branch in Livingstone for all the blood works, X-rays etc. These are all clear. What our tom seems to have is a recently discovered syndrome called Feline Audiogenic Reflex Seizures, or Tom and Jerry Syndrome, in which high pitched sounds can trigger fits in cats. Onset often occurs at 15, our cat's age.
If CT scans and all the rest become necessary, we are suddenly looking at a bill for thousands, plus there's no point endlessly dicking around with an old oven which may have a dodgy filament. Best get a new one. There's insurance for the cat and the money's all right, but I can't leave him each day here by himself; he seems back to his old self now, though we need to keep an eye for a few weeks in case the problem becomes recurring, or he develops symptoms of heart attack/stroke. Unlikely but.
So there goes the Dark Skies festival. Very frustrating, but as we're headed for Tuscany in late Spring and Heidelberg(?) in July I can't really complain. Besides, there's an arts festival on the isle of Lewis in March, maybe I could get to that.
Even as I write this, exhaustion hits me. I freaked out more about this than I realised.
The bastard oven is 10 years old. It recently started smoking in an ominous way, so R cleaned it once and I cleaned it twice after, trying to remove any residue of chemical crap that might be causing fumes.No good. Attempts to grill anything resulted in noxious James Herbert style fogs... And on Friday, it set off the smoke alarm, at which point our tom cat fell down. We don't know if he had a fit or not, only that we found him lying on his side with his mouth half open and his eyes vacant. He was breathing light and slow and his fur was cool. He got up eventually and was so wobbly, R scooped him up and took him to the vets where they couldn't hear anything along his right hand side, and wondered if he had been hit by a car, so R went on to their branch in Livingstone for all the blood works, X-rays etc. These are all clear. What our tom seems to have is a recently discovered syndrome called Feline Audiogenic Reflex Seizures, or Tom and Jerry Syndrome, in which high pitched sounds can trigger fits in cats. Onset often occurs at 15, our cat's age.
If CT scans and all the rest become necessary, we are suddenly looking at a bill for thousands, plus there's no point endlessly dicking around with an old oven which may have a dodgy filament. Best get a new one. There's insurance for the cat and the money's all right, but I can't leave him each day here by himself; he seems back to his old self now, though we need to keep an eye for a few weeks in case the problem becomes recurring, or he develops symptoms of heart attack/stroke. Unlikely but.
So there goes the Dark Skies festival. Very frustrating, but as we're headed for Tuscany in late Spring and Heidelberg(?) in July I can't really complain. Besides, there's an arts festival on the isle of Lewis in March, maybe I could get to that.
Even as I write this, exhaustion hits me. I freaked out more about this than I realised.
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