Another Cat Injury

Why do we take in cats? We just have too many. My favorite little Rip was on the bed snoozing with us and an hour later he was snoozing in the porch area with some blood on his leg. He is a friendly one (quite lovey) so I went to him to take a closer look. What I saw was a chicken leg! His skin was sliced and I was looking at muscle. What the @#&$ happened? I immediately put him in a crate and headed off to the Cabo Rojo Animal Hospital. Rip plays a lot with the other cats and plays rough so I thought maybe it was a play/fight gone wild. Just before I found him I heard something (not yowling though) and found a large palm leaf had fallen. Could he have gotten freaked out, jumped off the balcony onto the palm and dislodged a leaf? Maybe, but how did he get cut? Another cat? My suspicion is barbed wire. It looked like a puncture and then slice similar to what Princess had 3 years ago under her arm. Whatever it was I did not want it to get infected and it needed to be closed up so off we went. The vet took a look and figured it was play fighting - they peck at eat other and a tooth may have gotten caught and torn the skin...yes it can slice it cleanly. I wanted it cleaned up and then wanted to see it before they did anything (actually I prefer to watch the surgeries but they don't allow that). He put Rip under sedation and took a closer look. He called me in and I could see the puncture and then some little slices in the muscle too. Not really deep. He thought it had to be cyclone fencing...it wasn't a cat peck. This isn't far fetched...maybe he was chased by an unknown cat or dog and dipped under the fence and snagged his leg but kept running! The vet had to sew up the muscle tears, sew up the skin on the inside and I had him do some "insurance" stitches on the outside since he races around and jumps and climbs and plays a lot. So here he is fixed up.

In the states when your pet has surgery you don't get them back until they are conscious and have eaten, crapped and pissed. In Puerto Rico nothing is hidden....everything is how it is. Furniture has all its packaging, food is all wrapped up in cellophane and styrofoam and your pet looks dead in its carrier and stays that way for hours. He was conscious in around 3 hours and the trick now was to keep him calm.


He was snoozing in his carrier and the other cats came around and hissed or smelled. Stripes put out a paw and pushed Rip's leg and was freaked when he didn't move. I don't know if they have enough smarts to wonder about whether he is dead or not. We kept him inside (and the others out in the porch area only - they didn't like the change of routine) and he pretty quickly was running around as if nothing had happened. After 2 1/2 days I couldn't stand his wanting out, and I wanted to open the shutters and get the breezes through the house so I let him out. I knew he'd be hanging around and I'd be able to give him his antibiotics. So for 98 bucks I've got a healthy cat again. Why do we have them? Joy. There is joy in that sack of guts and a lot of personality too. Here's another subject. Raw food. I got a ring mold and made lunch in it. I took the ring and stacked avocado from the yard (we have more than we need), a cashew "cheese," roma tomatoes from the yard, more cheese, sun dried tomatoes (from a jar) and more avocado topped with Dulse (seaweed). It was very yummy and pretty healthy I believe!

The Best Thing About St. Croix (besides new friends) - Raw Food!!!!!

As a reader of this blog you have heard me whine about food quite a bit - especially the lack of choices here in Puerto Rico. I have never been a big fan of meat, especially beef, and beef is the only decent meat here. All other meats (unless it is frozen chicken breasts) have bones and tendons and sinew and skin and tattoos and other gross things attached. Fresh fish? Nope. So going to St. Croix was an opportunity to have a few more choices than Puerto Rico although having been there before I was not expecting much. I was, however, elated to find a Raw/Live Vegetarian Food Restaurant called Lalita! This was a true find and I had a juice drink there one day and had two dinners there which were both superb. I had met a couple local vegetarian people at the airport (one was the nice gal distributing the free rum samples) and they had told me about it.

One of the appetizers was a "pizza." First I have to add a little about "raw" food. Raw food is not cooked. They use a lot of nut pastes made by soaking nuts and macerating them in the food processor and they make a lot of cookies and "baked" goods by dehydrating components that are held together by sugars (agave nectar, honey etc). I think some things at this restaurant were cooked - the bread and tortillas used for sandwiches and maybe this wafer for the pizza? When I suggested the restaurant the people I suggested it to were great sports...but didn't realize it was a raw food restaurant, they thought it was just vegetarian! One of the guys, "Kellog" (his code name) was a little disappointed when I told him his lasagna wouldn't have melted cheese and noodles! He was a great sport and ate there AGAIN, and then AGAIN when his wife joined him on the last day of class! So this "pizza" had a wonton-like crust with basil pesto, Parmesan cheese, tomato, spices and bell pepper puree. It was alright but not my favorite of our choices.

Another thing we tried was the Pad Thai. Since rice noodles are only soaked it counts as raw I suppose but I don't even care about raw or cooked really. I was ecstatic to have yummy, flavorful, and beautiful food! This is the most excited I have been about food in a long time! The white ribbon on top is made of young coconut meat - something we have LOTS of in the yard. The baby greens and reds are things I want to grow hydroponically and I don't know what the sauce was but I figure it is fish sauce, hot peppers, sugar, lime juice and other typical Thai spices.

CJ ordered the watermelon gazpacho which was really yummy and beautiful. There was mango, watermelon, tomato, onion, cilantro and I don't know what else but very flavorful.

I had the beet ravioli. They used a mandolin I suppose to slice the beets. I don't know if they were raw or not - maybe they were tender because of the thinness? Inside was a cashew paste and the sauces were pureed bell pepper. There was pistachio dust on top. Very tasty.

Greg had this spinach soup that had Dr. Seuss-like swirls of pureed bell pepper. Very tasty flavorings.

This is the lasagna and side salad. The "noodles" are shaved zucchini and there was corn, ricotta, some kind of green (spinach?), sun dried tomatoes and other stuff. Kind of a deconstructed lasagna really.

Another appetizer we had were these rolls that had seaweed, avocado, carrot, other veggies and instead of rice - grated jicama! I love the crunch of jicama! Like I said, this was the most excited I have been about food in a long time. For dessert we shared a few things - mango cheesecake, a silky chocolate torte that was killer (very very rich), cookies-n-cream (non dairy non-soy ice cream and a broken up cookie (dehydrated nuts, sugars, and other stuff). All were amazingly delicious!

Besides the raw place I went with Ricardo and Stephen to a sushi sashimi place called Dashi. It was very good and had some nice combinations besides the normal yellow tail (can't get enough of it) and smoked eel (gotta have it). It was Ricardo's first time eating sushi/sashimi and he enjoyed it with only a teeny tiny bit of wasabi.  So I managed to corrupt a few people and get them to try new things with great success. Now I am super excited about getting a raw food cookbook so I can start trying to eat like this at least once a week. I know I can get nuts here and possibly some of the other main ingredients. Instead of growing veggies with fish I will probably go hydroponic and look forward to designing a covered area for that and possibly a few special chickens?