Best laid plans of mice and men

11 June 2021 writer at work 0 Likes 187 Views

Image by Please Don’t sell My Artwork AS IS from Pixabay

I had such plans to plough through the work before the poet got home from his work trip. And then the cat got ill.

She’d spent the night in the dog’s basket, which is really unusual. Then in the morning she nipped outside for a wee, came in for a quick bite to eat, and then went back to bed. In the dog’s basket again. She also had a bit of a cough.

Because of her age (I will have had her for 15 years come December), a vet appointment was booked straight away. I had a good hour to get ready. But I had to find the travel basket first, which was up in the loft over the garage.

I had time to do the first of the day’s chapters on Medium, and then I was ready in good time to go …

Then, when I came to put her in her basket, I couldn’t find the door that goes across the front of it. This would be okayish if I could find a parking space right outside the vet. But usually I have to park in a retail park on the other side of the road. A busy main road.

Then, the sat-nav wouldn’t connect to my car, and this is the first time I’ve had to cross town to get to the vet from this house. So that took up valuable minutes to sort.

Then, less than 5 minutes on the road, the level crossing gate came down and I had to wait for two trains. So I called the vet (hands-free) and told them I’d be a bit late.

Then, I couldn’t get a spot outside, so I had to call them again and see if they would lend me a carrier, which they did. But going to get that, taking it back to the car, putting Holly in it, and going back to the vet took even more time.

All masked up and socially distanced, they took her from me while I stood in a box marked on the floor with yellow tape where the vet was able to shout to me.

She has a temperature and a bit of a rattle on her left side. The vet gave her a steroid injection and an antibiotic and he wants to see her again today to see how she reacts.

We came home, and I must say that she did seem a lot happier in the cat carrier the vet loaned to me than she usually is in her travel basket. And when we got home, instead of going upstairs to get into the dog’s basket again, she resumed her usual spot on the windowsill in my office.

In all I lost about 2 hours, which I can ill afford, but at least getting her to the vet seems to have been the right decision. Normally I would have left her a day to see how she goes, but as she’s so old now, well … fingers crossed that the drugs do their thing.

Back at my desk, here is how the rest of the day went in the end:

epublished Chapter 9 of Night Crawler on Medium
wrote today’s blog post (753 words)
epublished Chapter 8 of Diary of a Scaredy Cat on Medium
shared links for the Medium stories on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook
made the link for Night Crawler free to Facebook friends
wrote 1,197 words for the ghostwriting gig (yay!)
went to fat club

Words written today = 1,950

Now that I’ve got going on the ghostwriting, it should come much easier. But with two runs out to the vet now, it looks like I’m working at the weekend.

Here is what Monday’s plan for the week looked like: