which_chick | (no subject)

Lots of things for us today...

First, the pet peeve.

When you let someone do as he or she pleases, that's free rein. It's not free reign. It's not, heaven forfend, free rain. The term comes from horses. Reins are the straps that run from the bit (The part of a bridle that goes in a horse's mouth) to the rider's hands. Reins are used for steering and stopping horses when you're riding or driving them. Free rein means you let the reins loose so that the horse can go where he or she pleases. The next person who writes free reign is going to get slapped upside the head with a large trout.

Also, if you're telling someone to control an unruly subordinate? That'd be rein in. It's another horse world word having to do with those same strappy bits. If your horse is out there acting like a complete lunatic and leaping out from under you and so forth, you get a rather good hold on the reins and rein him in to get him back under control. I am not going to take up your valuable time explaining about the one-rein stop, but rest assured that I know how to rein in the lunatical horse so's neither of us die.

All clear? Right.

On to death. While I didn't go over the day-to-day details here because it seemed to be depressing people, the less-favored cat Tine suffered a roughly two-month decline wherein he became frailer and frailer and less and less able to manage the activities of daily living. (Yes, that is a technical term.) For Tine, the ADLs in question were sleeping, eating, drinking, using the litter box, ground-level mobility, jumping up on things (washer, dryer, table, dresser, bed, etc.), and getting into cupboards (he could open the doors himself and get into the under-the-sink cabinets). By the time he died, he couldn't do any of the ADLs with what I'd consider a reasonable amount of skill. He'd walk maybe five or six steps and then collapse on his side. He'd fall a couple of times trying to climb on the box by the window (only about a foot off the ground). He stopped trying to jump on the washer after missing three or four times. I wound up cleaning up after my incontinent cat and washing him off because he was lying in his own urine, unable to get up and move. He was pretty well shot, as far as managing his own ADLs. Let me state for the record that it's inconvenient to have a frail, dying cat in one's house. (It's depressing as hell, too, if you've not done it.)

The other reason, besides the depression thing, that I didn't discuss the cat extensively here was that I didn't have good answers for Why don't you just put him down? I still don't. The answer, such as it is, is that I do not particularly understand how my cat Tine is different from my grandmother. Probably this means that there is something horribly wrong with how I see the world, but I don't get it. If it's a kindness to put my cat down, why is it not a kindness to put my grandmother down? If the correct, humane, and appropriate course of action for my grandmother is to let her proceed toward death at her own speed, why is that not the correct, humane, and appropriate course of action for my cat? Put another way, if it was cruel to let my cat, who did not appear to be in pain, get around to dying in his own time, what is it to let my grandmother carry on while arthritis shreds her spine and her doctors refuse to hook her up with decent pain medication because they're afraid of the government's war on controlled substances? That's a kindness, is it?

I just don't get the euthanasia thing. I'm sorry. I've tried to understand it and I have not, for the most part, succeeded. For stuff that is unfixable (horses with broken legs, cats with broken backs, that sort of devastating injury), I can see euthanasia. For general debility and non-catastrophic death? I don't get it. I grant that death is inconvenient and messy and depressing. I don't know that inconvenient, messy, and depressing are sufficient reasons for skipping the process of dying.

Finally, I should be excused from phone calls if I know, before I take the call, the entire content of the discussion I'm about to have. If, for example, I am being called by Kerry on matters relating to business (that's all he'd tell the secretary) and I tell the secretary, before taking the call, that this is Kerry Smith calling on behalf of Pennswoods because Mark Stern heard I was shutting down the Saxton POP and he told Kerry to chat me up about buying out the Bedford location, then I should be allowed to hang up on the phone call as soon as it becomes apparent that I was right regarding the content of the phone call. *sigh* I did have the cherry-red satisfaction of being right, but that wasn't as satisfying as hanging up on Kerry would have been.

In the unlikely event that anyone of mine or theirs reads the damn blog: No, we're not selling the damn thing yet. Yes, I guess it is for sale, though not in an active sort of way. We aren't advertising it for sale, but people come along every so and when and inquire about the possibility of buying it. Nobody has laid enough money on the table yet to make me more than academically interested in the topic. In short, I'm just not that damn pressed about it and blah thousand dollars (my share of what it's likely to bring, pre-tax) doesn't make my panties real wet because my checking account currently *has* blah thousand dollars in it. It's not like I've never seen a pile of money that big, is what I'm saying.