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I have here a few notes from YouTube-land for the benefit of worried uploaders.
First of all, there have been a lot of problems recently with some videos being corrupted, suddenly doubling in duration (often taking it past the 15-minute limit for non-partners) and/or suffering problems with the audio. These videos are now in the process of being fixed, although it’s going to take some time to get through them all.
Secondly, some people are apparently seeing an internal server error when trying to watch videos from their own “My videos” page. If you’re having this problem, don’t panic — your videos are still live and everyone can still see them. A fix for this bug is in the works, we’re told.
It can be worrying, having young creatures. Cats are especially worrying because they are ridiculously easy to poison by accident, and also because they are masters at hiding symptoms of illness. A cat can be ill for days before you notice.
So we were a bit concerned for Bonnie, who didn’t look too good this morning. She wasn’t hungry, and instead came at sat quietly on my lap. By mid-morning it was clear she wasn’t well at all: she was lethargic and her fur was dull and staring. Those symptoms could mean anything, from general under-the-weather-ness all the way to something horribly and swiftly fatal. And of course, she’d timed this perfectly for the weekend.
On the other hand, she didn’t have diarrhoea, her eyes looked fine, she wasn’t coughing or retching and she was breathing normally. Were we going to have a distressingly (and expensively) diseased cat on our hands, or was this a minor ailment?
Happily, it turned out to be a minor ailment. Just a few short hours later, Bonnie seems to have slept whatever it was off, and is now back to her normal, playful self; and has also had a good meal. Relief all around.
And the cats have been formally introduced to most of the rest of the house, so it’s been an exciting day for them for that reason too. At the moment, they’re still not used to everything and are still very careful, and they’re still not convinced that we’re not going to pick them up and shut them back in upstairs, but so far, so good. By this evening, I expect their confidence will be such that chaos will ensue, but let’s wait and see. For now, they’re exploring things, and Cylde in particular has proven himself to be very efficient at finding all those cobwebs we never knew existed.
This is UltraVioletMan1984. I’ll let the video speak for itself.
So, Bonnie and Clyde, now about eleven weeks old, went for their first visit to the vet. And survived.
It’s important to have pets immunized, and this first vaccination was for feline distemper, cat common cold, respiratory disease and chlamydophila felis. There’ll be boosters and other vaccinations later, but some of these diseases are nasty and need to be prevented. The harmless-sounding cat cold, or “feline viral rhinotracheitis” to give it its medical name, can, in young cats, damage the mucus membranes leaving the animal very susceptible to future infection. One form of respiratory disease (“virulent systemic feline calicivirus”) has a mortality rate of two in three.
So we took the poor, unsuspecting creatures to the vet, which is a ten-minute drive from here — an eternity when they're yelling their lungs out. And incidentally, here’s a tip: don’t put cats’ carrying boxes away when not in use. Leave them out, encourage your cats to see them as normal, and they won’t panic and hide every time you go looking for them.
It was easy enough to get them in their boxes, although it may not be quite so easy a second time. They were at first rather bemused as we carried them downstairs, outside and into the car, but as soon as we got going and things were noisy and bumpy and nothing very interesting was happening, the cat chorus began. But that’s something you have to live through, although you have to have a heart of stone not to be moved to pity by the wailing.
The wailing stopped when the car stopped, and Bonnie and Clyde looked on with nervous interest as new and unfamiliar sights paraded past their boxes. One at a time, Bonnie first, they were freed from their boxes, poked and prodded and then returned.
It wasn’t bad at first. Bonnie didn’t particularly enjoy having her ears peered into, but bore the indignity with fortitude. The thermometer, however, was a nasty surprise and she didn’t take that without a struggle. The actual injection went almost unnoticed.
While Bonnie had climbed out of her box alone to investigate her new surroundings (and then wished she hadn’t), Clyde had to be lifted out, but then submitted himself to medical examination with much more patience.
And suddenly it was all over, my wife was several euros poorer and we were back in the car, accompanied by variations on the theme of “meow”. Which again stopped when the car stopped, and we could pinpoint the exact moment they realised where they were. They emerged from their boxes purring, bore us no malice at all and went to sleep after all the excitement.
All in all, not a horrible experience.
There’s an online game I like to play so that my mind can freewheel. It’s not very challenging, and it really just amounts to matching up little coloured squares to collect stars and, therefore, points. Most of the time I play it pretty much on automatic, and still manage to whizz through twenty levels in the space of about fifteen minutes. If, by way of an analogy, we were to think of a game of chess to be the intellectual equivalent of Crime and Punishment, this game is Green Eggs and Ham. No disrespect to Dr Seuss, but there you are.
Like so many online games, it’s financed by advertising, and it’s sometimes rather entertaining — often more entertaining than the game itself — to see what’s being advertised just to the right of the board. And one advert that frequently pops up is for a very special kind of dating agency.
Unlike most dating agencies, which simply promise me the chance to meet sexually attractive people, this one promises me the chance to meet sexually attractive people from the upper middle classes — exactly the kind of people, in short, who would not be playing this game and probably wouldn’t want to meet people who do.
They are managers, doctors, architects and graphic designers. And surreally stereotypical. I can’t say that I am an expert on the upper middle classes, but I have met quite a few members of that particular group, and there are certain things I cannot imagine any of them doing or saying. Yet these really very attractive women and distinguished-looking men with hobbies like sailing smile at me from their little pictures accompanied by texts that say things like: “Good evening. I have two tickets for the theatre, and I was wondering if you would care to accompany me.” My favourite is the young lady offering me the chance to attend the opening of an art exhibition with her.
Each to his own, I suppose; but for my money, and as far as I know for everybody else’s money, anyone who thinks that standing around with glasses of cheap champagne looking at pictures and trying to chat with experts is the ideal way to a man’s heart is either a crashing bore, or mentally unstable. I can’t help but wonder what kind of people they really do have on their books. Probably not so much the kind of people they advertise, but the kind of people who would like to meet the kind of people they advertise but don’t move in the right circles. It’s a depressing thought.