Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Yesterday we were expecting guys to finish our mud room roof and siding, plus drywall tapers and texturers to finish both the mud room and the sun room.  Exactly none of these showed up.  Sheesh...

One of our cats (Kama) has been having a rather mysterious set of health problems for the past several months.  Most worrying: he dropped about 30% of his body weight, and we're having a lot of trouble keeping it stable, much less getting him back up to normal weight.  We've been working with our vet to try to figure out what the heck was wrong with him, and most frustratingly test-after-test came back saying he was in great shape.  We're glad to know there's no cancer, no horrible infection, etc., but then why was he losing weight?  Yesterday we may have found out, and it's weird but not so bad.

Last week our vet proposed sending a blood sample out to a specialized lab in Colorado to test for allergies.  It was admittedly a sort of last-ditch, low-probability effort – but we'd exhausted every other possibility he could think of.  It was a bit pricey, but we did it anyway – and the results came back yesterday: he's allergic to quite a wide variety of things, including: chicken, turkey, and rice (in food), and dust mites, fescue grass, and (of all things!) box elder trees in the environment.  He's an indoor cat, and lives in a cattery with an excellent allergen filter, so we're not too worried about the environmental allergies.  But all the many varieties of cat food we have on hand contain one of those food allergens.  Dang! 

So we've ordered some specifically recommended food that's free of anything he's allergic to, and we'll be feeding him only that stuff.  The vet had samples of one of them, and he's already eating that (with gusto, Debbie reports).  As therapies go, this is amongst the easiest and least expensive; if it actually cures his problems that will be very good news.  But it makes us feel bad for the poor guy that we didn't figure this out earlier...

Night before last the weatherman predicted 0.15" of rain.  We got 1.1"!  It's wet around here.  But we're supposed to be clear, with temperatures in the low 60s, for the next ten days.  Beautiful walking and working weather!