Happy New Year everyone! I know we are all hoping it’s a better one than 2020. I’m not holding my breath on that one, but hey, I’ll be more than happy if it is better. Today’s post picture is of Fennik (Fen Fen). I have no idea why I decided to buy this costume for him, other than it was a total whim. This picture wasn’t even taken around Halloween. I found the costume about a month ago when I was grocery shopping. I had to jet down the pet aisle for cat litter and there it was – a sombrero and poncho. It said for medium to large breed dogs. Let’s just say it barely fit Fen Fen. Anyways, he looked super cute. The sombrero kind of scrunched his eyes but he was a trooper and put up with the ten minutes or so of dress up. BTW, that’s me holding him. I’m in my work get up, which is far less than the work get up my sister has to wear (she’s a critical care nurse and takes care of COVID patients, amongst other medical conditions).
Veterinary work is still going strong, although it has let up a little. Winter is normally our slower time. We’ll see how this year goes considering how busy we were for most of this past year. I expect tomorrow will be packed, especially after all of the holiday breaks over the past couple of weeks. Last week I did have an interesting case, or maybe I should say finding. It was something I haven’t seen in the 18+ years I’ve been a practicing vet. I had a client bring in his little dog, a person and pet I’ve seen multiple times in the past. He had several issues he wanted me to look at, one of them being that her breath smelled worse than usual. Given that she’s a smaller breed, periodontal disease seemed most likely, especially given the fact she seemed to be feeling relatively well otherwise. I did my normal look inside the mouth and thought, “WTF is that?” Stuck between her upper right premolar 4 and molar one, kind of like a strange type of dental floss, were a couple of those plastic “I” shaped tag holders, the ones you have to cut off when you get them a new, stuffed (cloth) toy. I pulled them out, some foul smelling hair and a little blood coming along for the ride. I couldn’t believe she hadn’t been acting bothered by it. It looked to me like part of it was poking her inner cheek. I think it all came out all right. She was a good girl and let me do all of that without sedation or much of a flinch. Something like that stuck between my teeth would have driven me nutty bunnies. Lesson learned: make sure to get all the tags off plus their plastic bits and pieces!
As far as my other, hopefully burgeoning profession (writing), I got the first edit (content edit) back on book one of the Reaping Covetous series. So far I really like this editor. I appreciated her comments. She brought up things I never in a million years would have thought of. The editor I’ve hired thinks I need to have the first 3 books in the series written and ready to publish within a couple months of each other before putting the first one out there. I think she has a good point. The second book is done and should go out for its content editing in a week or two. I just started the third book. This is the first time writing has actually seemed like a job. I’m determined to get book 3 done by the first of April. That may seem like a lot of time, but for me it isn’t. I’m not the fastest writer. Working full time makes it tough to get days where I can sit down and write. I also have a big issue with my hands/fingers holding up with that much typing. I didn’t win out in the joint genetic lotto. This past week I’ve been on a mission, trying to prove to myself that I can do this. I’ve got about 25,000 words written for book 3 in one week. Normally, on a good week, I’d write about half that. My hands and wrists aren’t especially happy about the process. Frankly, it pisses me off. The mind is willing, the body not so much. I’d hoped to get book one published by the end of winter/first of spring. Now it looks like maybe summer at the earliest.
Not much else for now. I titled Fen Fen’s picture as all dressed up with nowhere to go because I bet that’s how a lot of us felt over the holidays. Fingers crossed that next year will be better and that we’ll get to mingle with our friends and family from closer than six feet and without the lovely addition of a mask. We’ll get there. I’m not exactly sure when, but we will. I’ll keep repeating that to myself until I believe it.
As always, take care and stay sane. For those of you visiting from the fanfiction world, I’ve almost got all of “Intervention, Thy Name is Bakusen’O” up on AO3. When it’s done, I’ll start work on transferring another Inuyasha/Sesshomaru story over.
MJ May
veterinarian and fiction writer 