Monday But Not A Poem In Sight

Poetry Monday is on hiatus for a month while our fearless leader Diane is taking a break. I am too lazy to think up a topic for myself so I'm taking a poetry break, too. The magic will resume in February :)

For today I'm just going to do a bit of a catch up post.

We've just had our eighth, or ninth, or tenth (I'm losing track) snowstorm here. The trees are beautiful, all coated in white.

There's not much snow built up on the ground, though, because in between the snowstorms we've either had rain or mild weather that has melted most of the snow.

At other times it has been very cold. I feel sorry for the birds and animals, especially when the weather is wet and then turns bitterly cold.

The deer are still coming to our back yard. A couple of weeks ago, this young buck spent a few hours browsing, then chewing his cud, then resting.

Can you see the knobby little horns just sprouting on his forehead?

Resting

 It was a rainy day, and when he finally got up to leave, he shook like a dog to get the water out of his coat.

A few weeks before that (I'm working backward in my picture file), this smaller deer was nibbling at the shrubs right outside the basement window.

He or she hardly looks real, more like a stuffed version, but I can assure you -- as can one of our cats who happened to be on the other side of the window -- that he/she was very real. And also very comfortable with me and my camera.

Speaking of cats, our fierce cat (the one who has bitten me hard, twice; once requiring antibiotics) now requires two kinds of medication in pill form. Everything was fine when she was able to get her meds in shot form, but pills provide a steadier dosage as her asthma and nasal congestion get worse.

Now, I bet you can guess that a cat who will bite the hand that feeds it will not take kindly to being given a pill by mouth. I didn't even try, to be honest. I've pilled our other cats, three of them on a long-term basis, and am reasonably proficient doing it. I didn't like my odds with this cat, though.

So I resorted to hiding the pills in tuna (worked for awhile), then in Pill Pockets (a product sold in pet stores; it worked for awhile), then in Pill Pockets rolled in crushed cat treats (it worked for a lesser while); and once in a piece of turkey left over from Christmas dinner. I am running out of ideas. She doesn't like cheese or sardines, and I can't think of any other food that is sturdy enough that she has to eat it whole (i.e., not lick at it), yet soft enough to insert the pill, and not require much, if any, chewing. This is what happens when you try to be responsible and only feed your pet the recommended food and no table scraps -- they don't develop much of a taste for human food! If anyone has any suggestions, I'll gladly take them.


The guilty party . . .

Notice that all of her pointy bits are strategically placed in between the rest of her body and horrible me.

And it's been awhile since you've seen our other furry girl.

It may look like she's hiding from the camera, but she was just washing her face while sunbathing. The rest of the dozen shots I took were blurry because she kept moving. How rude not to pose for my blog!!

That's it for today. I see I have a lot of other photos to choose from for another post, so that will happen soon.

Wishing you a good week, all!