Only One Go Around

  Sweet Emily Tess and her fiance, Chase, flew down to SWFL on the heels of my final exams for the fall semester to celebrate an early Christmas the weekend of December 7th.    They left 20 degrees at 6am that morning, only to land 2.5 hours later in 80 degrees and pure sunshine- we went to the beach straight from the airport!  They needed to thaw out ❄ No danger in this guy thawing out! Taking a stroll to the Ft. Myers beach pier... One happy momma 💕 A Christmas tree, Florida style! That night we made pizzas for dinner; it was Friday night, pizza night, afterall. Then we got our holiday baking on with some cut out Christmas cookies 🎅 A couple of beers in, and Chase was game for decorating, too! Our Saturday morning was waylaid  with an emergency trip to the vet for Willis and what appears to be a nasty abscess from another snake bite 😿 The boys stayed home to launch the dinghy a...

If cats have nine lives, Willis has now burned through three of them. The first one was when he went overboard on Marquesa several years ago.  I think that mishap took years off my own life, and landed me with a broken toe in the ER. In my haste to 'save' him, I dove overboard but got my toe hung up on the life lines. Geesh. Last Christmas, he had an encounter with a cotton mouth, the day after I left for Japan to spend Christmas with Ellie.  That was a scary one...he was lucky he didn't burn through all the remaining eight lives with that one. Now, here we are again, at the vet with a nasty, oozing, abscess on his right side.  There is one puncture wound, not two.  Yet, the vet is certain it was something venomous that nailed him once more.  When I took him to the vet on Saturday to have his wound looked at, there was a distinctive lump, the skin was blackened, and you could see one puncture and an abrasion. On Saturday, he tried to behave him...