Nebraska - Day 28 - in the campground

Pawnee State Recreation Area, Lincoln

Friday, 28 October 2022

I thought this was a cute variation: Jimmy is holding Dexter's paw between his own.

I didn't even try to pick up an internet signal here.  Instead, I spent the day writing drafts of posts I still need to do from the 15th through the 20th of this month.  At David's instruction, I use my computer's word processing program for this.  Even with these drafts there's still a lot of work to do to get them in publishable form, but getting words on paper (so to speak) is usually the hardest part.  So getting 6 posts half done made me feel better about being half a month behind.

It was overcast most of the day and we had rain in the evening.  But Dext and I were able to get some decent walks in.  The thing with camping on a hilltop is that, no matter where we go, we always have to walk uphill to get back home.  But we both need the exercise.

Bucky harassed Lily all day long, beginning with getting her out of bed in the morning.  When it's chilly she likes to sleep with me so she can get under the covers.  I get up before she does and leave her buried there.  Today Bucky climbed on the bed and wandered around until he found her and got her up.

Then later, he climbed up to the top bunk several times and chased her out.  She's not a stand-your-ground kind of cat.  She'll hiss and swat once, and then she'll leave.  I keep telling her to teach him a lesson in the way only she can do, but she doesn't listen to me.

He followed her all over the cabin and attacked her at the water bowl.  He's just acting like a pill (as my momma used to say).

We were besieged by lady bugs.  And they can get into the cabin somehow that I haven't figured out yet.  I like lady bugs just fine in their place, which is a garden, but not at all in my place, which is the RV.  But I'm often able to catch them with my not-patented bug catcher (2 plastic glasses used as a trap) and let them loose outside.

All day I had a really bad pain in the lower left side of my back.  At times I had trouble moving at all from being so stiff and sore.  Eventually I remembered that years ago, I got pains in the right side of my back that I finally diagnosed as being a by-product of tension and stress.  I thought maybe this pain might be the same thing.

And I realized that this is what I do.  Life just got too easy (said my brain) what with having only one adult dog and one adult cat.  We were all used to each other and comfortable with what we were doing.  Too comfortable, apparently.  I still don't think I had much choice about whether to keep the kittens, because I'm certain with a deluge of kittens in Grand Island that Jimmy, with his messed-up eye, would have been euthanized.  They would have had too many healthy kittens to find homes for.  Nonetheless, my life had just gotten too easy, so I had to complicate it.  Standard Operating Procedure.

Knowing that did actually help the pain a bit, though it didn't go away for several days.