Sick [and Expensive] Cat

Posted October 18, 2009, 4:07 p.m.

Vincent, our youngest of two cats, has always had occasional . . . digestive issues. Nothing too serious, but sometimes he gets a little backed up and his rear end gets sore for a day or two. This seemed to be happening again, but it didn’t clear up after a couple days and was really bothering him so we took him to the emergency vet yesterday afternoon.

Long story short, he’s doing okay now. They had to keep him overnight and do a procedure (complete with anesthetic) to clear out his system. We picked him, his stool softener, his pain medicine, and his butt cream up this morning. The poor guy was glad to be home. And oh boy, does he love his medicine (sarcasm).

Of course, the $800 it took to cover all of this could have gone to other use . . . but that’s just part of pet ownership, I guess. Got to love those large, unexpected expenses, especially right around the time we’re buying a house! Maybe next week one of our cars will break down, now that mine is a few hundred miles out of warranty!

Scott Bradford has been putting his opinions on his website since 1995—before most people knew what a website was. He has been a professional web developer in the public- and private-sector for over twenty years. He is an independent constitutional conservative who believes in human rights and limited government, and a Catholic Christian whose beliefs are summarized in the Nicene Creed. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration from George Mason University. He loves Pink Floyd and can play the bass guitar . . . sort-of. He’s a husband, pet lover, amateur radio operator, and classic AMC/Jeep enthusiast.

Quotes

By . . . false politeness, sincerity is sacrificed, and truth violated . . .

Nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

Accept disgrace willingly. Accept misfortune as the human condition.

Much harm may result from bad company, and we are inclined by nature to follow what is worse than what is better.

A hammer is good only if you stop pounding after the nail is all the way in. Keep pounding and you break the wood.

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.

There is an implicit but astonishing arrogance in the idea that all the apostles, all the church fathers[,] and all the millions of ordinary Christians were fundamentally mistaken about Christ for nineteen centuries, and only a few theologians, sitting at their desks, in a very different culture, nineteen centuries later, finally understood him.

We are all born brave, trusting, and greedy, and most of us manage to remain greedy.

Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy for superstition.

Behind many contemporary affirmations of the freedom of love is a false rationalization, for although love involves freedom, not all freedom involves love.

I often wonder whether the politicians of the future, who are responsible for maintaining the prestige and effectiveness of their party, will not endeavor to train politicians who are at the same time propagandists.

The word love is, perhaps, the most misunderstood common word in the English language because in the popular understanding it is defined by feelings and attraction. Authentic love, in contrast, is an act of the will.

Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?

When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism.

For creation without the Creator fades into nothingness.

Play is, at bottom, growth, and at the top of the intellectual scale it is the eternal type of research from sheer love of truth.

Nothing is easier than to falsify the past. Lifeless instruction will do it. If you rob it of vitality, stiffen it with pedantry, sophisticate it with argument, chill it with unsympathetic comment, you render it as dead as any academic exercise.

Normally, thought precedes word; it seeks and formulates the word. But praying the Psalms and liturgical prayer in general is exactly the other way round: The word, the voice, goes ahead of us, and our mind must adapt to it.

The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus [and] the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms.