Florida - Day 35 - in the Starke campground

Starke/Gainesville NE KOA, Starke

Monday, 20 through Tuesday, 28 February 2023

The first morning, by 5:30 Bucky had vomited twice on the floor and once on the bedspread.  Jimmy had been such a pest that I was ready to throw him across the room I was so frustrated (but I refrained).

Having said that, this is going to sound like a revenge move, but I swear it's for their health: since I was going to be in town for a while, I decided to go ahead and get the kittens neutered.  They're 5½ months old, and vets have been telling me for more than a month that they were mature enough for it.  I found one here in Starke that was willing to take them this week, but it was going to cost a lot more money than I'd expected.  They insisted on a preliminary exam to be sure they were healthy enough to take the anesthetic, which they'd charge for, plus the operation and all its costs, times 2.  I've been paying for vet visits for them for shots and things all along, even though it was adding up to some real money, but I figured that's what I'd taken on when I chose to keep them.  But this - the projected total nearly stopped my heart.

In a panic I got in touch with my wonderful friends in Olympia, Kate and Bob, who'd offered financial help way back there when I first took in the kittens.  And boy did they come through for us.  I gave them the contact info for the vet and they sent some money that ended up covering almost all the costs.  It was such a wonderful gift, and such a relief.

So on Tuesday the 21st, I took in not only the kittens but also Lily - since we had to go there anyway I wanted to get the claws clipped on all of them (they'd been starting to shred me, as a reminder that it was time for a clip job).  And the vet folks agreed the kittens were roaringly healthy and should be able to come through the operation just fine.

We left the campground at 8:00 the next morning for their early appointment, and after dropping them off I went to do some errands.  One of those was to drive around Starke, which I hadn't really done on our first visit.  Starke was mostly started as a railroad town in the 1850s, and the local architecture shows that this is a historical community - lots of Queen Anne type houses.

I heard on the radio that there's heavy snow and ice across the US, even including southern California, but here it's up into the 80s.  In a way, being in Florida has felt a little like when I lived in Alaska: certainly part of the US but feeling remote from it.  Florida just seems to have its own culture and its own weather and its own focus (entirely on itself) and barely seems to notice the rest of the country.  Very odd.

At a business in town, I saw a Confederate flag flying, and on the flag was written: "Heritage Not Hate."  A nice sentiment, but I wonder if they understand just what that "heritage" consisted of - including insurrection, treason, and enslavement.

I'd just come out of the grocery store when the vet's office called saying the kittens were done.  I'd thought it would take much longer and had more errands planned that I'd wanted to do while I didn't have to babysit.

I went back to the campground and solved the problem of too much distance from my campsite by parking near the cleaning facilities, taking up a couple of the spaces meant for cars.  So I got my shower and my laundry done, and had just enough time to get back for the kittens before the vets' lunch break at 1:00.

I'd hoped for at least a 12-hour respite from kitty energy while they recovered, but I barely got a half hour.  The vet was clear that because their incisions had been glued back together, they shouldn't run or jump or wrestle for 2 weeks.  Two weeks!  I was almost in tears trying to explain how completely impossible that was with our living situation.  They said well, confine them to a single room.  My only "room" is the bathroom which has so little floor space they'd be certain to spend all their time jumping up and down from floor to toilet to countertop and back.  I finally decided all I could do was the best I could.  Here's what happened as soon as we were back in our campsite:

The next-to-highest point they could jump to.
Oh yeah, and they weren't supposed to lick the incisions either.

And by bedtime:

The Zombie Marauders

I tried - I really did try - to keep them from jumping and licking and all of that.  And I finally decided they were kittens and this is what kittens do, and if they come unglued (before I do) then I'll take them back and get them glued again.

One day Lily alerted me to a bluebird sitting on a decorative light at our campsite.  Always a welcome sight.

The azaleas are blooming like crazy, and it's really nice.  There are a bunch of azalea bushes near the office, and Dext and I walk by at least once a day.  So cheerful to see them.

One day I got the RV's waste tanks cleaned out.  An ad in the campground's brochure said this service was available, and I'd been thinking for some time that I should get that done.  So since I was going to be here and the service was here, I went ahead and called.  I didn't watch (though he suggested I pull up a lawn chair to see what he was doing), but when he was done he claimed the discharge from those waste tanks now looked like drinking water.

Scene from the campground:

When we were here before, I'd noticed signs pointing to a "nature trail" and this time I decided to take Dext to check it out.  Unfortunately, recent rains had made parts of the trail impassible without rubber boots, which of course I hadn't worn.  Thinking the first soggy section was the only one, I led Dext through the woods to get around it.  That worked fine - until the 2nd soggy section, where we couldn't go through the underbrush but were able to get around it using grassy ground at the edge of the trail.  That worked fine - until the 3rd soggy section where we couldn't get through the underbrush and there was no edge to the trail.  Luckily, the 3rd section had the least amount of water - it was only really really muddy - so we squished our way through it.  Later I mentioned to the camp staff that they might want to post a warning sign to folks to wear rubber boots before trying the trail; apparently none of them had been down the trail recently and didn't know it was in that kind of shape.

My knee is still pretty swollen, but at least it's not quite as painful as it was.  Of course, now my left knee is feeling some pain too, likely from having to take up the slack.

One day the kittens tore up the edging around the back window.  Like this:

This is the left side,
showing what it's supposed
to look like.

This is what the right side
looks like now.

a closer view of those staples sticking out

For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what on earth to do now.  The exposed staples weren't safe for any of the cats - or for me, since they're sticking out near where my pillows go at night.  My knee was still hurting enough to keep me from being able to kneel on a protracted basis.  This decoration sits not much more than an inch or so from the window, so I could barely get my hand back there.

When in doubt, consult Anna - so I sent her these photos via email and then called her and said what do I do?  Unfortunately, I couldn't follow any of her suggestions.  I didn't have any glue at all, let alone the kind that she thought would do a quick fix on it.  I tried to find the staple holes with my fingers, as she suggested, to stick the staples back in, but I couldn't feel them and that 1" clearance kept my eyes from swiveling far enough around to see them.  I tried to just wrench that dark brown piece all the way out, but it turned out to be firmly attached all the way at the top behind the window shade that this stuff hides.  Finally I used clear packing tape (it was that or duct tape, which I didn't want to look at on a constant basis) to tape it mostly back in place.  An inexpert job but the best I could figure out to make it safe.  Crummy cats.

Speaking of which, I've been wondering how the kittens learned to speak cat language.  They were only with their mom for the first month; Lily almost never says anything.  So how did they learn it?  I mean, maybe they've just made up their own language that only the 2 of them can understand, but they've clearly got a language going on between them.  I can't tell if Lily understands them or not, since she mostly acts like she'd rather they didn't exist.

One camper here had a bumper sticker showing an odd shape colored like the US flag and the phrase: "American by choice - Yooper by the Grace of God."  That made no sense to me until I saw the Michigan license plates and, suddenly, I remembered my time on the Upper Peninsula.  Yoopers, they call themselves (for UP - Upper Peninsula).  And I realized that odd shape was the UP.

Another family here is traveling with a very sweet Bassett Hound named Beatrice (I swear) and a pig about the size of Beatrice.  They keep the pig in a large dog crate that they kept partly covered with a rug.  I didn't ask what the pig's name was.  We stopped by their campsite because Beatrice was very excited about seeing Dexter and wanted to bounce around with him.  Which Dext was fine with, but then he could smell the pig.  The people said the pig was friendly, so I took Dext over to meet it.  And Dext and the pig sniffed each other through the grills on the dog crate - and then one of them started growling - and I truly don't know which one.  It was a little weird and I couldn't tell what Dext was going to do, so I dragged him away from there.  And from then on, all he wanted to do was go see the pig again.  If we were anywhere in the vicinity he tried to drag me over there.  He couldn't even walk straight because he kept looking back over his shoulder and trying to get back there.  It was just weird.

We did get to move into one of the sites I'd wanted on Saturday - not too many days before the end of our stay, but still it was enough to make trips for cleanliness much easier.

While I was here in the campground, I wrote and posted entries for 11 days in Florida.  I still have 17 more posts to do for the time I spent here, and this situation is because once I got on the road last month, I didn't post at all the whole time I was here.  This is clearly not a good way to handle this situation.  I'll have to find some cheap campground in Georgia to spend extra time playing catch-up.

The day before we left, I did a bunch of chores: drove back past Waldo to dump my recycling; stopped to get groceries; stopped to fill up with propane.  I dumped the trash, dumped the waste tanks, filled the water tank.  I cleaned the bathroom, swept the whole RV, aired the dog beds, cleaned the filters on the AC, did laundry, put clean sheets on the bed, and took a shower.  I was plumb tuckered out (as we say down here in the Deep South) after all that.

That day started out cool and cloudy but ended quite warm.  It was when I noticed that all the critters were lying in front of one fan or another that I finally turned on the AC, and everybody relaxed.  A bunch of delicate flowers I'm raising here.

But they're sweet.  Here's one of the kittens' calm moments:

Jimmy on the left, Bucky on the right