That is one adorable kitty! Nice that he protects his family!
My Five (it's still Friday here):
1) Looking for a recipe for a nice apricot preserve, if anyone has one. Something without much added sugar.
2) On Tuesday we were working in the garden, which is still doing ok. There's a small, disused space that gets very wet when it rains - water seeps downhill and likes to puddle there. I had a goodly pile of straw on it. It was useless for much other than sopping up the water, so on Tuesday I raked most of it out and put it in a large bin bag. The Daughter held the bag open so I could shovel it in there. Some I forked into the soil. After about 10 minutes I literally could not breathe except in gasps. Daughter went and got the car and drove it down for me, and once we were back on the road I started feeling a bit better so aborted the trip to Urgent Care.
Within a couple of hours I started having fever and chills, and the fever finally plateaued at 102F and stayed there all night. I was a bit better in the morning. The Daughter also was running a lower fever, and felt badly. She was due into the doctors on Wednesday morning for a recheck on suspected earlier walking pneumonia and a UTI, both of which were still bothering her. So we just stuck it out until she could go in. They, of course, did a blood draw and a "pee-in-a-cup" and sent her on her way with nothing more than an inhaler. Probably just a touch of bronchitis, they said. (Nothing for the UTI, which they just kind of ignored.)
Very early yesterday morning (Thursday) we got a somewhat frantic phone call from the docs saying she needed to go to the ER right away. Her white blood cell count was ~extremely~ high. They scared the heck out of her - her face turned really white while she was talking to the doc on the phone. There was the usual multi-hour wait in the crowded room, then they drew blood and had her pee in a cup. Four hours later she was on a gurney in triage and asked to pee in a cup again. So she toodles off to the toilet and while gone the nurse brings up "potential lymphoma" to me. Not good. (I knew someone who had died of it.) And they were getting a hematologist involved ASAP.
More time passed. Next set of labs came back and the WBC was down by 1/3 so they decided it probably isn't blood cancer. After several more hours of me sitting there trying to not remember what lymphoma was and trying to keep the Daughter calm.Which wasn't easy, as she has an absolute horror of IVs and they'd put one in, and of hospitals. And trying to be sure to not mention "Lymphoma" as she also knew what that meant. Finally they had another specialist come through and I brought up the potential for "Farmer's Lung" (which I knew about because I once had a similar illness) and they agreed it could be that as it ticked all the boxes. They didn't know what else it could have been. And that she had a UTI, by the way. Sent us home after 16 hours with a prescription for antibiotics. The pharmacies were all closed by then, so we picked it up this morning. It cost (seriously) $0.67 for the bottle. She's doing well today, aside from a light case of PTSD. I'm filching her inhaler now and then, because there's really not a lot else to do for Farmer's Lung. I don't think the Daughter will ever voluntarily go into another ER - she'd have to be carried in unconscious. Definitely was traumatic for her.
3) After all that, we came home to find one of the places she'd applied for work to had phoned, asking her to call back. She did that today but got voicemail - we think it's because today has suddenly become a national holiday and it was a government office. (Juneteenth is now a Fed holiday). Fingers are crossed, as it's not far from where we live. I imagine they'll phone back on Monday.
4) I found a new kind of flour here that performs like normal wheat bread flour, but it has all the components of whole wheat in it, pulverized so that you get a nice light loaf that's nutritionally as good for you as whole wheat. There's one just about finished baking out in the kitchen right now. Looking forward to a nice slice of it with some butter. I assume I will calm down about the hospital thing in a day or two. Right now I'm just still twitching a bit and going through household motions to stay calm. (Like baking bread.)
5) I just walked all the way across the apartment complex (maybe 3/4ths of a mile) to the office to reload the plastic card that runs the communal washer and dryer. Only to find out I'd brought the credit card, but not the W/D plastic card so I could not charge it up with more money. ~Sigh~ Well, I'll walk over again tomorrow. At least it was a lovely evening out - lots of bird and bug noises, a pleasant 78F, and just the start of a warm drizzle of rain on the way home. Seriously, I'm having so many senior moments these days.....
I hope everybody's week was better than ours.
