The sick kitty I love Process, as it has worked out best over time.

Coffee time in the morning, or 8 AM maybe: She gets a Lickable Treat with a full daily dose of the liquid that is supposed to keep her from vomiting.

An hour later, she gets another lickable treat with half the actual thyroid meds. Then I wait and pray that she keeps it down.

Generally speaking at this point I hide away the normal bowl of dry food for the day, unless the other cats are acting skinny and starved.

At dinnertime, say 4 pm, those two steps are repeated, except that the dose of anti-puke is not full. Maybe a third the size. Extra insurance.

If she holds that all down for an hour, then I start carefully feeding her home-cooked turkey, which she really likes. As much of it as I dare, without stuffing her too full and risking an upchuck. At this point all the medications are in her, and I’m just trying to put a little meat on her thin tiny bones.

This can go on throughout the night, depending on if I’m up, depending on how much she seems to want. The trend is in the direction of More, More Please.

The process is going good. The amount of spitting up is less than its been for a long time, following the regimen strictly now for many days in a row.

Sometimes she’s listless and immobile. Other times she’s bright and frisky. Sometimes she approaches, demanding my love. Other times she hides herself away.

There isn’t any way yet to tell if all this prestidigitation will cure her or even return her to a fat and happy maintenance mode. I hope so and I fear not.

Time will tell.

***

Meanwhile, having put the rest of the house back into an organized mode, again, at least on the surface, and having blasted away at most all of the November bills, I am trying to be out in the sun while its powers of warming are still undiminished.

Out on the patio, the strays and I inspected the shell carefully. What would it really take to get it installed on the truck, and have a serious bed away from home? I came up with a process for that too.

The hardest trickiest part is the first step. One of the plexi windows toward the rear is cracked and partially missing, and I need to replace it, preferably but not necessarily with uncracked plexi of the same kind, cut to the same shape.

Two: Paint the whole thing inside and out. In my head this gets done with the ‘paint’ used for lining the bed of a pickup. I’ve seen whole jeeps painted with this stuff. It looks really cool and it seems really practical for driving around in the scratchy bush.

Three: toward the front, there are the holes of two overhead windows and a theoretical door into the truck cab, all needing to be sealed up somehow. I don’t care as much about these replacements, aesthetically. Plywood and insulation might be good enough. The important part is sealing it well enough to heat and cool the habitable interior of the shell cheaply and well, and without asphyxiation.

Four: Once that’s all done I can put the shell where it belongs. And in a perfect world, be able to remove it and re-install it with a minimum of fuss if that becomes necessary.

Which it might or might not. Anyway, that’s just about potential future flexibility and doesn’t concern me deeply. The first three and a half steps are enough to get me to what I … need? Crave.

***

The cat thing is an urgent and presumably temporary process.

The shell thing is not.

Both are embedded in a tangle of other processes, some of them Daily and some of them unique Projects.

The development of processes is itself a process, and maybe the one that fascinates me most consistently.

This is the nature of my being. Sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.

Either way it’s okay I wake up with myself.