So let’s go backward in time just a bit, and I’ll tell you a bit about how the Journey to Fall Quilt Market 2009 began. I started packing pretty early in hopes to be all organized and not running around like a crazy woman on Wednesday night before my travel day on Thursday, which meant that the suitcases were out on Monday. Here’s what Patches thought of that:(...)
Read the rest of Patchwork Times: Suitcases, stress and sleeping (469 words)

© Nadine for DreamWeaver's Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments
Post categories: Cats, Featured, Life, Quilting, Shows & Contests
Tags: Houston, Quilt Market

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Bear with me, I know you’re wondering where I’m going with this. After Shadow recovered, I wrote about this on my blog, as I often do when it’s something like this that I think people should know about. Over the next few months, I noticed that that blog post was receiving many hits from search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. People were searching for “cat reactions to vaccinations”, “severe cat reaction shots” and other similar phrases. I edited the post, and added the following in bold lettering at the top:

NOTE: If you have found this post through a search for “cat reactions to vaccinations” or something similar, STOP!

If your cat (or dog) is experiencing any of the following symptoms after a vaccination, take your pet back to the vet IMMEDIATELY:

* vomiting
* diarrhea
* whitish or pale gums in the mouth
* facial swelling or hives
* rapid or difficult breathing
* restlessness or difficulty settling down

The above symptoms may mean that your pet is going in to anaphylactic shock and needs IMMEDIATE medical attention to survive!

Severe reactions to vaccinations can be life threatening and are a medical emergency! Don’t wait and wonder, have your pet checked by a veterinarian ASAP!

I wanted people to have the most important information that they needed to save their pet’s life if necessary without having to read through my entire story of Shadow’s reaction. Even the few minutes it could take to read the whole post could make a difference to their pet. This morning, I received a comment on that blog post from Ann:(...)
Read the rest of Blogging, SEO, and Saving Lives (1,212 words)

© Nadine for DreamWeaver's Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog, 2009. | Permalink | 12 comments
Post categories: Cats, Featured, Life, Shows & Contests, Tips
Tags: AQS, blogging, Google, quilt shows, search engines, SEO, workshops

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

You see, it’s hard to get anything done with Fat Boy in my lap all the time. He’s just so big, and I have to move back from the keyboard so he’ll have space, and then it’s hard to type, not to mention having his tail right on the keyboard. What? You don’t believe he’s there all the time? Dangit. Well, it was worth the try anyway.

So what did happen that prevented that “substance” from appearing here? Life, and those “finishing touches” to the DreamWeaver’s Quilts Studio online shop that I mentioned before. I’ve been ordering stock, setting up accounts, planning promotions, and making sure everything will be ready to go on schedule.

So what types of products will be available at the DWQ Studio anyway? You’ll find many of the products that I use to make Inchies, some of which I’ve had a hard time finding myself. Two of the most notable items are (...)
Read the rest of Inchies: The Inside Story (370 words)

© Nadine for DreamWeaver's Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog, 2009. | Permalink | 6 comments
Post categories: Cats, Featured
Tags: DWQ Studio, Inchie Quilts, Inchies, InchieSee InchieDo

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

It’s not even like it’s that cold in here today, but he certainly thinks it is since he’s hugging “his” heater! And look at that tummy, all healed up and covered with fur again after his surgery in December. Life is good!

© Nadine for DreamWeaver's Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments
Post categories: Cats, Life
Tags: Shadow

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Before we could get on our way, I heard a cat meowing, and I knew it wasn’t either of ours considering they were being total slackers, soaking up the sun in the wintergarden. No spring fever for those two. I looked out the window in the room where I have my beading table, and I could see a cat on the very top of the house around the corner, coincidentally between our house and the bakery. The cat was wandering around up on the roof of the house, meowing his little heart out.

Pretty soon, he was joined by another cat, and they were both wandering around up on the roof. I thought it was rather odd, as this is a two story house with an attic, so I had to wonder how they got up there. LittleOne and I headed out for the bakery, and when we passed the house, the cats came down to the roof edge and meowed at us, kind of like they couldn’t figure out how to get down.

I could see there was a window in the roof on the front of the house that was open, and I wondered if someone forgot it was open and the cats got out, and then couldn’t figure out what else to do, cats being what they are. Figuring we should do our good deed for the day, we rang the bell, and told the owner that their cats were on the roof, and she said it was “normal.” Hmm. Interesting. So much for doing the good deed. We left the cats to their spring fever party, and went on down the road feeling a bit silly, but I did take some pictures when I got home since they were still up there meowing and having their little party:

Cat number one, right on the corner of the roof.

Cat number two, back by the chimney.

I’m just not sure I’d let my cats do that. *shrug* Different strokes. Time for my afternoon snack:

Mmmm…nothing like a real German Brezel. Is it spring today where you are?

© Nadine for DreamWeaver's Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog, 2009. | Permalink | No comment
Post categories: Cats, Life, NOT Quilting, Quilting
Tags: German life

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

LittleOne’s 12th Birthday celebration, and

The Christmas take-down, despite the cats “helping”.

I did, however, finish up the last few quilts for The Book, and I mailed them to AQS yesterday.

WooHoo! Now that the manuscript is really finished, I can move on to some other related tasks: creating classes and workshops, programming the website that goes with the book, and programming my online shop so it can open by mid-May. Whew! Stage 2, comin’ up! Motivation, please come home…

© Nadine for DreamWeaver's Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments
Post categories: Cats, Quilting
Tags: AQS, birthday, Christmas, finishing, Patches, programming, shop, The Book, work

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

opening

eating

enjoying

smiling

napping

wishing

wondering

believing

From our family to you and yours,
Merry Christmas!

© Nadine for DreamWeaver's Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog, 2008. | Permalink | 7 comments
Post categories: Cats, Life, Quilting
Tags: Christmas, fun, holidays, kids

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Whew! What this all means is that I really did know exactly how long it would take me to finish all of this. I told the editor around the first of November that I could have everything done by the end of December, and that’s exactly how it’s turned out. I had it figured that there wasn’t a lot of time for anything but working on the manuscript and the quilts; no lunches with ITMan or friends, no breaks for casual shopping, not a lot of reading for pleasure (and I miss my reading!), none of those extracurriculars.

Other than that, it means that now I can take a small breath, try to catch up a bit and make Christmas as close to normal as it can be at this point. ITMan and I are going out shopping tomorrow and Monday to see what last minute small things we can pull together for each other and the kids, and get the food shopping for Christmas done. I might work in some Christmas baking on Sunday and Monday as well, and then I do have to make Christmas Tree Bread dough on Tuesday and shape the loaves on Wednesday, because it’s just NOT Christmas without it.

Foundation,
by Mercedes Lackey

Right now, I’m headed to bed early, to read the book that’s been on my bedside table since I bought it in Houston. It’s a new book about Valdemar by Mercedes Lackey, one of my favorite authors, and it’s been sitting there calling me since the end of October. I’m sure Shadow will join me there (he’s still doing well, and we’re all looking forward to Monday when he can have stitches removed and get rid of the collar), and Patches may even deign to share me and the bed with him for a bit. *sigh* It’s the little things.

Edit: And for any of you who have been reading since last year, I did (finally) update the Christmas Tree Bread recipe post with pictures of the bread, such as they are. Maybe I can remember to get even better pictures this year!

© Nadine for DreamWeaver's Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog, 2008. | Permalink | 6 comments
Post categories: Cats, Life, Quilting
Tags: kids, Patches, Shadow, shop, shopping, small things, The Book, work

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

At one week post-op, Shadow looks as if he’ll survive the whole ordeal. It was not an easy week mind you. Aside from the “normal” recovery issues like meds three times daily, almost constant observation, and little sleep for either one of us, Thursday night he woke me up from a sound sleep and tried to jump off the bed. I barely caught him before he went, since I thought jumping off of my rather high bed might be pushing it a bit on only day three after surgery. His flying leap turned into a somewhat controlled tumble with my help, and then he proceeded to throw up blood all over the bedroom floor. And I do mean all over.

I think I must have lost two years of my life right there. Just barely awake, all I could think of was that he was just one step away from death since he was vomiting huge amounts of blood, so I called the vet in a panic at 3 a.m. It turned out to be old blood, really dark in color, probably left over from the surgery. If I’d been a little more alert, I might have realized at least that much on my own and not panicked so badly. The vet said not to worry too much, if he was otherwise acting okay and didn’t continue vomiting. Um, was he okay? Heck, I didn’t even know at that point. I looked around, and sure enough, he was acting pretty darn fine considering the state I was in. He probably felt a lot better after getting all of that out of his stomach. On the other hand, I needed a drink. Or a Prozac.

I let the vet go back to bed, and cleaned up the mess. I’ve never been sooo glad not to have carpet in my life. He also managed not to hit anything important, like upholstered antique chairs, bedskirts and the like, and the only thing I had to wash was a throw rug, so the only casualty was a good night’s rest and my peace of mind. Oh, and the two years of my life that are now gone from the fright.

Even though the vet said he was probably not going to die any time soon, I took him back to the clinic on Friday since he hadn’t started eating yet after the surgery, and his wound was still leaking a bit of fluid as it had been all week. I thought it would be best to let the vet look him over before the weekend, in case there was anything else we needed to do. He still wouldn’t eat, and was terribly thin though he was acting normal otherwise, and he even started purring that morning while he was in my lap. I came home from the clinic with even more meds for this cat than I did right after the surgery.

The vet was concerned that if he didn’t start eating soon his liver would shut down, and then he really would have big problems, so he gave us a liquid medicine to coat the stomach to cut down on irritation, as well as two different recovery diet type liquid food things, and instructions to force feed him those if he wouldn’t eat anything else. I was also to give him the anti-acid tablets again that he was on before the surgery.

He turned up his nose at both the liquid diets just like I knew he would, and still wouldn’t eat his regular canned food, though he might have eaten the normal dry food that he wasn’t allowed to have. I finally resorted to canned Albacore tuna mashed up with lots of water, which he ate pretty happily and then licked the bowl clean. The tuna was the turning point, though I did give him a couple of syringes full of each of the liquid diets since he was surely in need of the calories and nutrients at that point.

Shadow was much improved even by Saturday evening. He actually brought his favorite toy to me and wanted me to play fetch with him just like a normal day. I didn’t throw it very far, though he looked rather put out about that, like I wasn’t putting enough effort into the game. He looked pretty funny with his cone around his head and his toy in his mouth:

At this point, he’s eating normally and putting some weight back on already, and acting like his usual self mostly, except that he still has the collar around his neck and it’s driving him nuts not to be able to wash and scratch normally. The collar comes off on Monday when the stitches come out. I truly didn’t expect him to be so well recovered by now, and I don’t think the vet did either, since he told me it would be a week or two after the stitches were removed before he would be running around and jumping on furniture, but here he is, doing just that. He’s obviously not ready for the Kitty 500 just yet, but I doubt his convalescence will save my Christmas tree from harm this year.

© Nadine for DreamWeaver's Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog, 2008. | Permalink | 3 comments
Post categories: Cats, NOT Quilting, Quilting
Tags: just life, Shadow

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

He’d been vomiting since Saturday evening, and I took him in to the emergency vet on Sunday for meds. We’d been through this back in September, and the symptoms looked rather the same, so I really thought that it was time to do some more serious testing in the way of bloodwork and x-rays to try to figure out what is really wrong, instead of just calling it gastritis and moving on.

The vet didn’t want to do bloodwork and x-rays on a Sunday because she said it was so expensive, and that since he looked in very good health despite the vomiting, we should try medication first anyway. So after far too many hours in the clinic, an antibiotic shot and a shot to stop the vomiting, we head home with anti-acid tablets as well. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much improvement, if any at all, and he was still vomiting Monday morning.

Back we went to the vet clinic. This time, bloodwork and x-rays commenced right away, and the results weren’t pretty. The bloodwork was just fine, but the x-ray showed that he’d swallowed a needle, of all things, and it was somewhere in his digestive system, but the vet couldn’t really pinpoint where. Surgery was the only option at that point.

He had the surgery very late Monday afternoon, and was home Monday night. It seemed to take forever for the anesthesia to wear off, and I was really worried that he’d take a tumble down the stairs on top of everything else, so we were all on cat watch by turns while we tried to get dinner. He did finally settle down a bit, but after a while I figured that what he really wanted was his heater, so I took him upstairs and he crashed for about three hours, soaking up the heat.

His incision is 4-8″ long; I haven’t really had the heart to look too closely, but they did have to just go in and look around until they found the needle, so it’s got to be pretty big. They also found that the thread was still attached to the needle, and the thread was actually wrapped around the back of his tongue! Considering all that, it’s amazing that he’s lived over it.

I’m sure that the thread was the major part of the attraction for him, as he just has this “thing” for threads and strings and things like curling ribbon, and we’re always very careful to keep these things away from him, but obviously not careful enough this time. I know where he got the needle and thread; the needle was a beading needle with nylon bead thread attached so it had to come from my beading table in the back room. So I’m feeling the guilt about all this, that I wasn’t diligent enough, though ITMan was kind enough to say that if it hadn’t been a needle, it most assuredly would have been something else at some point, because that’s just how this cat is.

His recovery is likely to be long and demanding. Trying to sleep last night was no picnic for either of us, and he actually looks worse today than he did last night. I’m beginning to think that I should just plan on sleeping when he does really, so that I’m awake when he’s moving about, or trying to anyway. It will probably be quiet on the blog for a bit. He’s really not out of danger yet either, I suspect; after a major surgery like this, I know that there are so many things that could still go wrong, but I’m hoping for the best. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you to be diligent, and keep track of your needles and threads, right? Wish us luck, and keep us in your thoughts.

© Nadine for DreamWeaver's Quilts Quilt Epiphany Blog, 2008. | Permalink | 11 comments
Post categories: Cats, Quilting
Tags: just life, Shadow

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh