Steel Kitten

Happier animals

Poor Fleagle.

As if her bowl being empty for brief periods of time wasn't suffering enough ;-), this morning she was pounced on for a darn good groom.

Every other morning she gets a quick once over with a standard cat brush, but this week it was clear that the spring moult was underway for all of the cats and the brush wasn't cutting it and Fleagle, being long-haired, needed help. She has sprung so many mats over the last week despite the quick morning grooms that it was clear her normal brush, her Furminator and a shaver was needed to tackle her coat.

Fifteen minutes after Martin and I got hold of her, she was bereft of some of her undercoat, all of the mats on her back end were gone and she's had her back end fur washed. She may feel a little drafty, but it's better than being matty and smelly (and she does start to whiff come spring!).

So one animal here feels a little more comfortable now, but she hasn't had her underside done yet ;-)

I think there is another animal feeling a bit more comfortable than she was. Lulu has had all of her antibiotic jabs and her swelling has gone down slightly. Only slightly though. She's eating and her crop appears to be emptying properly so I'm very cautiously optimistic about her future, but until that swelling goes away I won't be 100% happy about her future.

Still on watch and wait with that one.

Just lost Georgia

Just lost my darling Georgia-belle. Towards the end she was so ill and this wasn't any kind of sour crop I've seen. It was like every scrap of fluid was seeping into her crop from her body tisssues and threatening to drown her. I kept drawing off the fluids from her crop with a tube and syringe and within 20 minutes of doing it the crop was filling up again. And it wasn't noxious smelly stuff. It was straw coloured syrupy fluid that had no smell. In the end I was down to subcutaneous injections of water where her wing joins her body, but it just got absorbed and went straight in her crop.

I can only think it was acites, which is the fluid left behind when the blood squeezes through blood membranes and the blood cells get left behind. This can happen as a result of congestive heart failure or liver failure. Her comb was gradually getting more and more blue as the days went by, and cyanosis is a symptoms of congestive heart failure and ascites syndrome.

We buried her in the middle of my vegetable bed in the sapce where yesterday I took out the pond, and tomorrow I will construct a rock memorial just like Bisto has.

But as if to break my heart even further, I went into the chicken pen today and noticed that Lulu, despite having had antibiotics last week, has now developed a penguin waddle and a swollen abdomen just like Georgia-belle. I've just given her a massive dose of antibiotic and she's still very lively, but then so was Georgia before she crashed out.

My vet is due back from holiday on Thursday so I will be asking for a blood test to determine which type of IB it is. The most infectious new strain, IB QX, only had a vaccine developed for it in 2010 so there's every possibility our girls were not vaccinated against the new strain, only the old which is only about 70% effective against IB QX.

I'm hoping against all hope that I'm not about to lose all of my chickens one by one.

Dispatches from the bedroom and sick room

The lowest point of the bedroom makeover for me - dodgy electrics, terrible plumbing above the floorboards instead of under, blown paster and rubble everywhere.

Well hello there. It's a bit of a misreable wet morning here and instead of lying in on one of the two days I'm not in the office I was up at 6am bleary-eyed supping tea.

The last few days of my life has only been about two topics - the impending wallpapering session due to commence in the back bedroom and Georgia-belle being hideously unwell again.

Let's talk about the nice stuff first.

Rather than do a load of freelance work over the next four days I have decided to get as much done on the back bedroom as I can. A couple of days ago I found six rolls of Graham and Brown Wall Doctor lining paper (specifically for walls that have minor plaster issues) stuffed in the back of a cupboard. I don't even remember buying it, but it must have been over five years ago as that was the last time we were wallpapering anything! I worked out the dimensions of the room and amazingly it needs 6.3 rolls. Now, I didn't bother subtracting the area of paper that covers the window and door, just factored in straight drops, so I may not have to buy any paper at all. If I do, it will be just the one roll. Wall Doctor paper is paste the wall, so that will speed up everything, and it's paintable.So a bit of a win for me.

All I have to do today is give the ceiling its second coat of paint, take off two more small pieces of skirting, knock holes in the plasterwork to recess the two plug sockets and I'm ready for papering.

Result!

I've decided that I'm going to buy a Farrow and Ball estate emulsion for the room, probably Parma Grey, in the hope that the chalky finish will help disguise any areas of imperfect plaster that the lining paper does not.

Source: Farrow and Ball

Now granted, it doesn't look like the most exciting colour in the world, but because I will be having red and green in the room I don't want a strong colour on the walls.

So that's where we are so far. I still have to source a curtain pole, the overbed lights, and the flooring, and do a makeover on a pine wardrobe, chest of drawers and blanket box for the end of the bed, but I'm really liking the way this is starting to come together. I can now see clearly how all that hard work, which seemed so thankless and boring over the last year, will produce a room that will look fantastic.

And which I will want to transfer to sleep in immediately!

Now, the chickens. I mentioned sickness again. This time Infectious Bronchitis. The chickens have managed to pick up Infectious Bronchitis (IB), presumably from wild birds as now new chickens have been added to my flock, and have gone off the lay. Georgia-belle in particular has suffered badly. She's swollen up to enormous proportions, possible from peritonitis or perhaps cysts on her oviducts, and has swung from having an impacted crop due to a huge volume of body fluid preventing anything going through her digestive system, to sour crop which is now poisening her.

IB is a virus that just has to sort of work it's way out, but in the meantime it can cause secondary infections so the chickens have had antibiotic injections all week to make sure. While Geogia has had hers - and a lot more than the others - she was quite far gone when we realised and went downhill quickly. However, she was still very bright, peeping a lot and showing interest. After a week in my bathroom on medication, the swollen abdomen is recceding but she's come down with sour crop. She's so sick, very weak, eyes closed all the time and is battling horribly.

I'm keeping her warm, getting as much of the fluid and rubbish out of her crop as possible without distressing her too much and getting some anti-fungal medication and nutrient solution into her. It's all I can do until she either recovers or it's clear I have to step in and stop the pain and euthanise her.

What lovely snuffles for an (almost) overhauled bedroom!

A double mid-green bedspread and double faux fur double throw!

It's been a good week for snuffles. I haven't had much chance lately, what with work and very strict financial budgets, but all work and no play makes Steel a dull girl so on the way home Thursday afternoon I dropped in on two charity shops.

And am I glad I did!

You know I'm doing this back bedroom up? Yes, I know still! Well the three snuffles I found fit with the colour scheme we've decided on so I was well chuffed.

First off, a double mid-green bedspread and a double faux fur throw, the fur throw being NEW! Obviously the latter is a massive cat magnet but I'll have to deal with that when the time comes. So out of one charity shop I struggled, with the two heavy large bedspreads shoved in the world's smallest bags, and into the next charity shop to discover this:

Yes, a brand new ceiling light for £6, so out of that shop I staggered with another huge bag to add to the previous two and my handbag. Amazingly straight across the road was my mind-reading husband who had a fancy what shop I'd be in and had parked across the way.

Anyway, the light is still in stock at the retailer, so I've tracked down the matching overbed lights now, and at the same time I found the curtains for the room half price in their sale!

In fact, apart from the overbed lights, some lining paper, a curtain pole and the carpet, everything else I've either bargain hunted for, re-used, been given or intend to refurbish.

Now you might remember originally I had grand plans for the decoration in the room. I think I posted before about planning to do the room in a masculine hotel chic style:

That hasn't quite worked out!

I sat down with Martin and went through all the different magazine features I've saved over the last eight years to see what appealed to him. I was fairly confident being a man he would appreciate hotel chic.I couldn't have been more wrong.

He gave all the various styles of bedrooms a score out of ten - and the one above only got five. Most got six, a few seven, but only one got eight, and it wasn't at all what I expected. It was this one:

This is a picture of the bedroom of natural paint retailer Georgina Barrow, which I saved from an Ideal Home magazine from September 2004. He loved the combination of colours - the red, green and pale blue with touches of brown in the furniture and cushions. Once I looked at it more closely, I started to really like it too, not just for the colours but for the vintage style it had. It's a vey forgiving style too - nothing too formal or matched, which in reality works well for us as nothing we own has ever matched anyway!

So that's why the curtains I bought are red, the bedspread green and a faux fur throw brown. It's why I'm buying thick grade plain lining paper to paint pale blue and stripping back the varnish on some modern pine furniture we have in the loft so it looks softer and less jarring on the eye. The floorboards are in appalling condition and even painting them won't hide the problems, so carpet will have to be laid.

It's why I've spent evenings and weekend getting the bedroom doors looking like this:

60+ years of paint on both the doors and metal surrounds...

...not to mention the rim locks and handles

....to this...

The doors stripped, sanded and matt varnished to give them a deeper colour. The metal frames stripped and painted with Farrow and Ball paint leftover from doing the cupboards in the ktichen.

Stripped and polished, the rim locks and handles turn out to be brass (or perhaps bronze?) and copper, well worn on the handles

Who knew the house was hiding such great doors and door furniture? We didn't until we decided to strip them and see if they could be saved rather than turf them out as everyone has done before.

Suddenly the house has begun to acquire a personality.

Isn't it odd how the tiniest details can suddenly do that and bring everything together?

 

 

Have some daffodils...

Daffodils on my desk at work to brighten my day.

Sorry for my absence - between doing my course, being inundated with work at my job and having no  internet connection for a while (still don't), my life has been one dull round of nothingness that I'm not sure any of you wanted to read.

However, hopefully I will have a little more time on my hands now, because as of this week I am part time at work. We're trying a different way of working in the business - from an entirely government funded business - to a grant and project orientated company. For me it means I have a choice - I can stay part-time and be paid out of the company coffers or I can go out and find half of my salary and employment costs in project work on top of what the company will give me and be full time. Having been freelance for five years I figured I'd go for option B because of how much autonomy it grants me, although option A sounds soooooooo appealing on a permanent basis. Still, Martin and I  have goals to achieve so part-time working permanently is a dream for the future still. This month I am likely to remain part-time but I have two projects in the pipeline that will take me within spitting distance of what I need to go full time again by May.

Some of the others things that have happened around Steel Towers include:

• Georgia-belle fully recovered and is now back with the other chickens. Her and Oxo have become firm friends and between the two of them instigate camp breakouts on an almost daily basis.
• The combination of part-time working and Easter means I'm getting a whole 5 days off, an almost unheard of occurance in this place.
• My FIL's chemo is not working as quickly as it should be so he's sheduled for another six cycles (a cycle last for about 4-5 weeks)
• The boiler is on the fritz again so no hot water out of the taps, but this time we've got other means of washing dishes, clothes and ourselves. Our dishwasher, washing machine and shower heat up the water themselves so we're leaving having the boiler fixed until after the car is done and perhaps we may even opt to have it replaced.
• The car rebuild is going slowly at the moment as none of the bits Martin needs are in stock. Still on course for Silverstone though, with May and June destined to be the most expensive months of our lives so far bar the time when we bought the house.
• I'm half way through my Business Analysis course and had to stop due to sheer volume of work I had, but am aiming to go back to it next week.
• The internet is on the fritz. Still. One week and counting. A technician is coming out to fix it on Thursday hopefully.
• Did you know the average person spends 15 hours on the internet every week? Martin and I worked out that we're closer to about 25 each, and since it's gone down have spent an awful lot more time talking to one another and doing other things. We quite like it.
• I'm reading a hardback book!! Yes - hardback, not kindle!! I've taken time out every evening to go to bed at 9pm and read for an hour. Again, almost unheard of and not sure whether this is due to the internet outage. I'm reading John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids.
• I'm past the novelty of the kindle for now. I have actually found some audiobook resources on youtube and have been listening to those to give my eyes a rest. Have a listen to some classic books here.
• I have started planting seeds for the kitchen garden.
• I have found the most brilliant wallpaper for my computer desktop. You can find it here. To line up all your desktop files where you want them on the shelves, desk and pinboard, right click on your desktop, highlight 'Arrange Icons By' and take off the ticks against 'Autoarrange' and 'Arrange by grid'.

I think that's enough news for now. All little things that happened but not enough individually to justify a post each.

If I get my internet connection up on Thursday, I'll be around to visit you all from the comfort of my own armchair, rather than the hard seats of the local Holiday Inn.

TTFM

Steel