This particular entry has a dual purpose. First the obvious.

It’s Halloween today. Apparently, this is the time of the year when the veil between the land of the living and the spirit world is at its lowest, and when the souls of the dearly departed are the most likely to make contact with us (or vice-versa I’d assume). All of this comes from the Celtic festival of “Samhain” which took place on November 1st. October 31st was the end of the previous “season of the sun”, with the next day being the first of the new year. (I’ll leap to an assumption here that some of the festivities and ceremonies were originally intended as a way of warding off the possession of evil spirits – as much as some may have been a way of celebrating the good ones.)

Mixed into that, was at least one other celebration – the Roman Catholics “Pamona Day” festivities (notice the similarity betwen the Celtic and Roman names, obviously the latter drawing on the former, changing a few letters, and claiming it for their own). The Romans called November “All Saints Day” and October 31st became “All Hallows Eve” – which is now just “Halloween”.

(In all of this, the celebration of November 1st itself seems to have oddly disappeared, leaving us with just the “night before” festivities.)

The second part of this entry has to do with our cat, who’s named “Boo”, and who we’ve just found out has diabetes. She’s back from the vet now and we’re giving her low doses of insulin once a day. She’s already noticeably more energetic than she has been recently. Hopefully we can wean her off of the drug and control her blood sugar levels via diet only after a few weeks. (The fact that she only seems to need such a small level of insulin is a good sign.) We take her back to the vet next week to see how things have been going.

One strange thing about diabetes in cats is that they develop a funny way of walking on their back toes. This is due to some muscular degeneration in that area that makes it difficult for them to maintain hind leg control. Some cats recover from this after proper diagnosis and treatment, others don’t. (If I knew before what I know now, I would have made sure she got to a vet immediately after noticing her funny walk rather than waiting a while to see if things improved or not.) Obviously, we’re hoping to see some improvement in our cat in the next couple of months where that’s concerned, but if it doesn’t happen I doubt that it will make her any less happy, which is the main thing.

Our only real problem at this point is trying to figure out how to dispose of the needles, which aren’t supposed to go out in the regular trash. (A consideration somewhat along the same lines of trying to figure out how to dispose of all of those AOL CDs that always show up in your mailbox…)