Assorted animals and the weekend
Mar. 13th, 2007 03:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amethyst73Two on the gaming scene, and one in real life.
Gaming 1: The Game Developers' Conference (GDC) was held last week. There were a number of things that looked pretty darn cool (like Mario Galaxy, which looks like the first true 3D platformer, and LittleBigPlanet, in which players can design platformer levels for other online players to mess with - the game has been described as 'a big toybox'). But I have to say that the very neatest thing was the demo trailer on this page demonstrating one of the key concepts for the upcoming Fable 2 RPG for the (sigh) XBox 360. In this half-hour video (don't say I didn't warn you!) Peter Molyneux demonstrates the bit with the dog. The dog is a fantastic bit of AI that, well, acts very doglike. And he loves the player totally and unconditionally. It's a wonderfully cool-looking thing.
Gaming 2: In Zelda, I figured out the business of getting a fish to the cat! The solution struck me as a bit less straightforward than it really ought to have been; perhaps the game developers just really didn't want to let Link equip a fish. (Can't imagine why not. Maybe they're waiting for the Monty Python/Zelda crossover game.) Anyway, Link now has all kinds of neat toys as a result! He's got a half-full bottle of milk (the huz is jealous; in Ocarina, he's found a potion shop, but the shop will not sell stuff unless you have your very own bottle in which to store the potion), a slingshot (and *enemies* all of a sudden - convenient that none happened to be about till a weapon was acquired), a sword, and - woo woo - a lantern. Now Link can finally find out what the heck he's got in his basement. Surely the kid lost in the forest will be fine while Link goes home and finds this out, right?
Real-life: A kitty non-emergency
So as most of you folks know, we have cats. Several of them, at that. For the last four months or so, whenever someone asked us how many cats we owned, our standard answer was four and a half. How did that figure? Well, Tazz had come with the house, then Fluffy and his get Mouse and Callie had been born in our neighborhood and we'd basically adopted all them. That's four. The half was a little black kitty that started coming around our house the summer of the first year we lived here, almost five years ago. It was a sweet creature, very polite, very affectionate, and very intelligent, and we started feeding it with the other cats. From a neighbor, we found that its name was Billy, and that he was kind of a neighborhood cat. Nobody seemed to know who his real owner was.
For the last couple of months, Billy has been getting to spend time in the house and sleeping on the futon a lot - his campaign of becoming part of our household has clearly advanced. I'd known some time ago that if he ever turned up on our porch in medical distress, I'd take him to the vet myself. Sunday night I got the opportunity to confirm this.
He'd been in the house for much of the evening. I was petting him, and noticed an abrasion on his leg. It reminded me of what Tazz's leg looks like if he's been worrying at a flea in one spot for too long, so I got out a tube of Advantage and applied it. Billy didn't seem to particularly mind the application, so I figured all was well and that he'd be flea-free for a while.
About twenty minutes later, the huz noticed that Billy was moving around in that low-slung, slinky fashion that generally indicates discomfort of some sort - and that he was foaming at the mouth. We figured that he was having a bad reaction to the Advantage, so we packed him into a carrier and I took him to the local emergency vet. During the drive, several thoughts passed through my head: the gamut of tests that the emergency clinic was likely to need, the time and expense incurred thereby, how stupid I'd been to apply a medication to an animal whose medical history I didn't know, and the looks that I'd get when I told them that the cat wasn't ours and that we didn't even know the sex of the animal, let alone its vaccination history.
I learned a few things that night. First, Billy isn't a he; it's a she. Second, it turns out that if a Stupid Human (i.e. yours truly) applies Advantage in a place that a cat can lick, the cat will lick it - surprise! Happily, the worst that happens as a result is that the cat then briefly salivates like mad. And that's it, generally - no toxicity. With great relief, the two of us got back to the house at about 12:15AM Sunday/Monday.
The whole episode has suddenly increased the priority of figuring out whether Billie (new spelling to match the new sex identification) has an actual home or not. To that end, I'm picking up a photo of the kitty later today and will show it to everyone on the street who's been there longer than we have, and ask if they know who the kitty actually belongs to. I expect to come up empty-handed, at which point we will cheerfully adopt her. I'll keep you posted!
So as most of you folks know, we have cats. Several of them, at that. For the last four months or so, whenever someone asked us how many cats we owned, our standard answer was four and a half. How did that figure? Well, Tazz had come with the house, then Fluffy and his get Mouse and Callie had been born in our neighborhood and we'd basically adopted all them. That's four. The half was a little black kitty that started coming around our house the summer of the first year we lived here, almost five years ago. It was a sweet creature, very polite, very affectionate, and very intelligent, and we started feeding it with the other cats. From a neighbor, we found that its name was Billy, and that he was kind of a neighborhood cat. Nobody seemed to know who his real owner was.
For the last couple of months, Billy has been getting to spend time in the house and sleeping on the futon a lot - his campaign of becoming part of our household has clearly advanced. I'd known some time ago that if he ever turned up on our porch in medical distress, I'd take him to the vet myself. Sunday night I got the opportunity to confirm this.
He'd been in the house for much of the evening. I was petting him, and noticed an abrasion on his leg. It reminded me of what Tazz's leg looks like if he's been worrying at a flea in one spot for too long, so I got out a tube of Advantage and applied it. Billy didn't seem to particularly mind the application, so I figured all was well and that he'd be flea-free for a while.
About twenty minutes later, the huz noticed that Billy was moving around in that low-slung, slinky fashion that generally indicates discomfort of some sort - and that he was foaming at the mouth. We figured that he was having a bad reaction to the Advantage, so we packed him into a carrier and I took him to the local emergency vet. During the drive, several thoughts passed through my head: the gamut of tests that the emergency clinic was likely to need, the time and expense incurred thereby, how stupid I'd been to apply a medication to an animal whose medical history I didn't know, and the looks that I'd get when I told them that the cat wasn't ours and that we didn't even know the sex of the animal, let alone its vaccination history.
I learned a few things that night. First, Billy isn't a he; it's a she. Second, it turns out that if a Stupid Human (i.e. yours truly) applies Advantage in a place that a cat can lick, the cat will lick it - surprise! Happily, the worst that happens as a result is that the cat then briefly salivates like mad. And that's it, generally - no toxicity. With great relief, the two of us got back to the house at about 12:15AM Sunday/Monday.
The whole episode has suddenly increased the priority of figuring out whether Billie (new spelling to match the new sex identification) has an actual home or not. To that end, I'm picking up a photo of the kitty later today and will show it to everyone on the street who's been there longer than we have, and ask if they know who the kitty actually belongs to. I expect to come up empty-handed, at which point we will cheerfully adopt her. I'll keep you posted!
