Not dying, but dyeing!

Thanks for all the well-wishes to The Fuzz!  I’m very pleased to say that he is doing well now and the vet expects to send him home with us sometime tomorrow.  She thinks it was straight-up dehydration from the cold he had last week – she’s still got him on an IV drip, but she thinks we can switch him over to at-home administration of subcutaneous fluids tomorrow.  I’m ecstatic – I hadn’t really expected him to make it, but the Grand Old Man seems to have beaten the odds again.  I know it’s just staving off the inevitable, but isn’t that what life is all about?  After all, in the long run, we’re all dead.  It’s what we do with the time in between that counts.  And I plan to enjoy every minute we have The Fuzz.  He’s a wonderful cat, and I’ll be very pleased to have him at home again.  I know he won’t live forever, but every second counts.

Meanwhile, I have been at work in the dyepots.  I wove up about two feet of cloth – twelve inches in 2/2 twill and twelve inches in 8-shaft block twills – and dyed a bunch of samples with them.  The results were interesting!  The acid dyes, as expected, had little effect on the cotton – though I did have to wash them in really really hot water with soap to get the dye stains out of the cotton.  (Soaking for several hours in soapy water seems to have done it, too.)  However, the fiber-reactive dyes with soda ash were quite variable – some only lightly stained the alpaca and some dyed the alpaca to the same intensity as the cotton!  This explains some of the variable results I got earlier.  I’ll take photos tomorrow.

But for tonight, I’ll just be happy that The Fuzz is improving.  We visited him in the hospital twice today, and he was noticeably better both times.  I hope to have him back with us soon.