Our day started early yesterday so we could drop off Patches at the veterinarian to have her spayed before we headed down to Cinci to continue painting at Denny's dad's house.

By ten, Patches was waking up from the anesthesia and we were halfway through with our self-assigned painting tasks for the day. My primary purpose was to keep my father-in-law preoccupied so he wouldn't bug Denny by supervising what Denny was doing (scraping, puttying, painting). Because, you see, Denny is only 67 years old and doesn't know how to do it right. Heh. And 95 year old men have a tendency to repeat the same stories over and over, so I ran interference for Denny so he could get his work done. My secondary task was scraping, priming and painting the two garage doors which is mindless work so I provided the distraction for Denny's dad.

While we were in Cinci my cousin who had been in town for the Jehovah's Witness convention stopped by to visit my mother, so she decided to hang around until we returned so we could visit. She lives in Indianapolis and unfortunately we just don't cross the country in that direction very often so it was great to visit with her.

Since my cousin was there, Denny ran out to the vet to pick up Patches in the afternoon and immediately upon her return, Patches started to try to pull out her stitches. So back to the vet we went to get one of those cone-shaped collars to put on her to prevent her from reaching her belly. WELL! As soon as Patches saw the vet she turned into the cat from hell; biting, hissing, fighting and writhing all over the table. With four of us surrounding her there was no way she was going to allow us to put on the collar! We did manage to get it on but the vet wanted to observe her for a minute and take a look at her incision area to see if Patches had done any damage to the stitches and we all watched Patches fought until she got that nasty thing off from around her neck. Okay, we either adjust it down to the next tightness level which was close to choking her or we let her go--no brainer there as Patches was still acting the part of a demon cat. The vet said her rage was probably enhanced by the remaining portion of drugs in her system and that she should calm down. Well, Patches calmed down as soon as we stepped out of the vet's office. It will be interesting to see how she responds when we return next week to have the stitches removed.

Once we got home the four of us decided to have dinner at Tumbleweeds where the ribs are excellent. Good food, good conversation. Datha then had to leave for the long drive home to Indianapolis and we managed to stay awake for a couple more hours but then gave up the fight because it was a loooooong day. We'll be going back to Cinci again this morning after my physical therapy appointment for another round of painting. I think by now the truck could drive down there on autopilot.