Jaydium - Chapter 30 is up!

Jaydium - Chapter 30

Eril's first impulse was to laugh in Brianna=s face. No one but his sister Avery could rant in such an operatic mode, and he thought Brianna would fare well in the comparison. But one look at Kithri's face convinced him that she, for one, was taking Brianna seriously.

"Calm down, Bri," he said as diplomatically as he could. "There's nothing to be gained by blaming one another. If there was a mistake, it was my mistake, not Kithri's."

"I don't blame her and I am quite calm already." Brianna began gathering the sheets of seaweed-film into meticulous piles, as if to underscore her rationality. "After all, she's had no more education than a herd-beast. Not a shred of decent methodological training. It isn't her fault--"

Kithri had started toward her own cubicle, but now she froze and turned slowly back. Her face flooded with color and her old nose break stood out as a chalky brand. She strode to the table and swept the entire contents--all of Brianna's notes, styluses, and specimens--to the floor. Still without a word, she shoved one fist a hairsbreadth from Brianna=s nose and made an emphatic gesture. Then she spun around and marched out the door.

Brianna looked at Eril, her eyes innocently wide. "What--what did she--"

"Never mind." Eril bent to pick up a pile of films. "You don't want to know what that meant."

Passages...

Two of our four animals are geriatric, and we are walking through the-beginning-of-the-end with them, one faster than the other.

Here's Cleo, the gray tortoiseshell who is also perched on my shoulder in the icon.


She's almost 20 and is the last of the cats I brought from Los Angeles. She's been hyperthyroid almost her entire adult life, and now at last she's shutting down. One of the challenges of managing hyperthyroidism is that if you lower the thyroid hormone too much, the cat goes into kidney failure. We suspect that's what has happened, but we're not going to stick her with needles to be sure. She's had a long, happy life, a life full of Tortoiseshell Attitude, and she absolutely hates blood draws.

She's pretty much stopped eating in the last day, although she curls up on her heating pad, looking out over the garden, and nestled next to me in bed last night, purring. She's so thin, I don't expect her to have more than a few days left. With any luck, she'll go to sleep in one of her happy places and just not wake up.( Read more... )