An otherwise calm day with a lot of chores around the place - cleaning the bathroom, walking the dog, redoing my resume so I have something more professional-looking to give out than the thing I've been using almost since high school - was interrupted when I walked by the cellar stairs at one point and saw Panda sitting there with a lot of blood at his feet.

Yesterday I looked at him and I noticed that one side of his face (mouth? muzzle?) was pretty swollen. I pointed it out to my parents and we decided that it was probably an abscess. This morning he apparently didn't eat anything, which is very unusual for him. (We named him "Panda" just because of his coloration, but serendipitiously, it's a good desciption of his size.) So mom gave him a quarter of a penicillin pill and made an appointment to get him to the vet tomorrow morning. No biggie. Around noon my parents left to go to Burlington to do some shopping, and I stayed behind - to do those chores, but also just because I had nothing to do up in Burlington. An hour or two later I'm talking to a friend of the family who's called to congratulate me on graduating and I walk by the stairs and I see Panda sitting at the top of the basement stairs and at his feet, around the door frame, there's quite a bit of blood. So, after some Kleenex on the floor and a few rushed phone calls to a vet and to mom, we've learned that it's good that he cut it open to let the infection out, and to help I should just hold a hot compress on it for a while.

So I do that, and by the time mom and dad get home hours later he's still got an ugly wound, but there's no more swelling and he's eating and squeaking (he's talkative) about as much as ever. Dad was complaining tonight about the impending vet bill, but he wasn't doing that when Panda's face was badly swollen and later when he was bleeding all over the place, so I guess it's actually good.