(no subject)

A terrorist attack in Nice (84 people dead, gawd almighty!), an attempted military coup in Turkey, that 5 year old who went missing in Calgary has been found....dead, would the world PLEASE stop giving me nightmares? It's 6 am and I'm eating Haagen-Dazs for breakfast because I woke up early on a Saturday. The world sucks.

After I finish my bowl of ice cream, I think I'm going to read some Dorothy L. Sayers. That should be calming.

Daesh, Turkey, Nice, the cat, my mother's old dog, my mother's current dog

I simply must go to the bank and pick up my new cheques. They've been sitting there for over a week now.

That damn cat's eye infection seems to be finally starting to clear up as of this morning. We see the veterinary ophthalmologist on Monday, so this is just bloody typical. She's probably going to think I'm a weirdo who takes the cat to the vet for no reason. I'm pretty sure it's the same veterinary ophthalmologist who removed Tiny Attack Dog's eye many years ago. There can't be that many female veterinary ophthalmologists in New Westminster.

I still miss TAD. My mother's new dog, Venus Fly Trap, is delightful in his own quiet way, but TAD had oodles of personality. Like when Mum fell down the icy front steps of her old house (before she downsized to the apartment), and TAD, a fluffy little Shih Tzu, held off the paramedics with ferocious growls and lunges. They ended up calling a second ambulance crew to distract the dog so they could load my poor mum into the first ambulance. And TAD wasn't scared of Brother, which VFT is. Poor VFT was a rescue, and he's scared of men. It demoralizes Brother, who is fond of animals, and doesn't like seeing the dog cringe when he comes near.

On the bright side, re: Young Miss Weaver, I called the insurance people and they said if she had to have residential treatment (i.e. stay at the animal hospital while the vet techs medicated her eyes a few times a day), they would very likely reimburse me 80% of the cost. I have just had absolutely no luck getting the damn antibiotics in her eyes. But at the same time, i would miss her, and she'd be miserable stuck there. Well, we'll see what the V.O. says.

I always used to think of Nice as the setting for Agatha Christie's "Murder on the Blue Train". Well, technically the murder took place on a train between Calais and Nice, but most of the action and Hercule Poirot's investigation took place in Nice. Now I'm thinking of it as the place where at least 84 people (the death toll is likely to rise, apparently) met a senseless end for the high crime of going out and watching a fireworks display on a national holiday. Daesh has claimed responsibility, but it sounds like an opportunistic claiming of responsibility, given that the murderer's neighbours say he didn't even attend a mosque. I don't like calling them ISIS. Mainly because I know a preteen girl whose name is Isis, and the poor kid is probably going to end up changing her name as a teenager.

And the coup in Turkey seems to have fizzled out. I can't STAND President Erdogan (who is a power-hungry autocrat), but I suspect a successful military coup might well have made things even worse. Look at what's happened in Egypt the past few years. Erdogan will likely take bloody revenge on the plotters and use this as an excuse to stifle dissent even more.