Author: James Amos

I'm a retired consult-liaison psychiatrist. I navigated the path in a phased retirement program through the hospital where I was employed. I was fully retired as of June 30, 2020. This blog chronicles my journey.

National Alliance on Mental Illness Walk May 6, 2023

There is a National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) walk scheduled for May 6, 2023 at Terry Trueblood Recreation Area. See the announcement here.

The Other Feral Tabby Catches Lunch

This is the companion to yesterday’s post about the gray Feral Tabby and its encounter with the whitetail deer.

This cat is orange and white and it might be a litter mate to the gray one, just a guess. It does a great job of hunting for mice.

And it caught one!

Feral Tabby Cats On The Prowl!

Yesterday, we saw a gray cat with black stripes (one broad black stripe down its back) in the outlet in back of our house. It was about the size of a large housecat. It definitely was not big enough to be one of the large cats which can be seen in Iowa. It wasn’t a lynx, bobcat, or mountain lion. I think it was hunting for rodents.

And today, believe it or not Sena alerted me to another cat in the same location, only it was brown and white. It looked identical otherwise.

I was stumped until I thought of tabby cats. I’m not a cat person so the only way I would know this is because I’ve heard the term before. I found out the tabby cat has a marking on its forehead that looks like the letter “M.” The markings are often striped or swirled. The term “tabby’ doesn’t refer to any particular breed of cat; it just refers to the markings. I think both cats have an “M” marking on their foreheads.

I think Sena saw a cat like this not that far from our back yard last year. It was surrounded by kittens.

I wonder if they’re feral. That led me to the internet. According to one web site, both stray and feral cats are called “community cats.” Strays usually are accustomed to being around humans and can be lost or abandoned. Feral cats are not used to being around humans and live wild.

So, I think these cats are feral tabbies and maybe they’re litter mates. Some say that a large percentage of feral cats are tabbies. I don’t know if they’re male or female—and you can’t pay me enough to check. I gather it’s tough to tell a cat’s gender just by looking at it. Males tend to have wider jowls, and tend to be bigger.

If you think I’m mistaken about what kind of cats these are based on the video, please let me know.

The other interesting thing about the gray feral tabby sighting was how whitetail deer reacted to the cat’s presence. We watched as a deer seemed to approach it warily, staring at it while stamping its hooves. We got the impression that the deer did not want the cat in what looks like its territory, judging from how often deer graze there—which is daily.

I found information on the internet suggesting that deer don’t get along with feral and stray cats. One YouTube video showed deer being aggressive to a stray cat. It makes sense that deer would hate cats. Deer are prey for large cats like mountain lions.

In general, all cats including feral cats can transmit a parasite, Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii), to both deer and humans. Infection with T. gondii is usually asymptomatic. You get it from eating undercooked meat or contact with cat feces. There are a few studies suggesting that there is a relationship between toxoplasmosis and schizophrenia, although it’s not clear what that connection is yet (Osman E, Mohammad Zahariluddin AS, Sharip S, Md Idris Z, Tan JK. Metabolomic Profiling Reveals Common Metabolic Alterations in Plasma of Patients with Toxoplasma Infection and Schizophrenia. Genes (Basel). 2022 Aug 19;13(8):1482. doi: 10.3390/genes13081482. PMID: 36011393; PMCID: PMC9408728.)

The gray cat left the area, although I’m not sure it was because it felt threatened by the deer or because it just wasn’t having any luck finding food.

Today, the sighting of the brown and white feral tabby was exciting because I caught video of it catching a mouse!

Juggling My Birthday Glow Balls

Hey, it’s my birthday and it turns out the juggling glow balls are my early gift. Sena decorated my cake, using cookie icing that sort of spread out.

You got to love the birthday card she got for me. “Selective Listening Ensures the Survival of Man.” Or at least this man.

Just for the occasion I juggled my glow balls. I can program the color changes, but it’s sort of a numbers game. You have to click the right number of times to make your selection. Sena likes the 1UP2UP trick.

And according to someone who wrote the book, “Age is just a number and mine’s unlisted.”—Manya Nogg. OK, so you probably first heard it like I did, from the lady on the Boost High Protein Nutritional Drink commercial.

I don’t really feel my age, and nor do I act it. I do not drink Boost—yet.

Palm Sunday

Today is Palm Sunday, the beginning of Jesus’ last week on earth. The palm tree reminds me of the time we spent in Hawaii. We saw a lot of coconut palms. The featured image is from 1997, when we were there.

I remember seeing a picture in a storybook of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. The road was strewn with palm leaves. I was just a child.

Palm Sunday is a day to get along with others.

The Easter Lily is already beginning to open.

Juggling Shower Practice Hits and Misses

I’m still working on the 3-ball juggling shower practice. I’m up to the toss and catch. It has taken me a couple of weeks to get beyond just dropping balls all over the place.

There are a couple of methods I’m trying. One of them is to start the toss and catch by tossing up the 2 balls in my dominant hand right away, one after the other (which I’ll call Method A). The other is to toss just one ball up (Method B).

Method A is illustrated using an animated stick figure and circles on a website called the Library of Juggling. It’s also recommended by some jugglers. Method B is demonstrated on the website Taylor Tries.

I thought Method A would be the only one I could hope to master, but I can’t seem to work my way up to tossing the second ball up high enough to work my way into the actual shower pattern—which is very fast, in my opinion.

But I couldn’t manage to do Method B at all until today. I would consistently drop all the balls. I’m not sure what made the difference today, but that’s been the usual way I progress. I get stuck and somehow, I get unstuck if I just keep practicing.

Where I’m at today is usually where I have trouble working into the juggle pattern. I had the same problem working into the 3-ball cascade (which Sena is working her way up to now). I have trouble letting go of the ball I need to toss in order to start the actual pattern.

I’ll be working on trying to sneak extra throws into the toss and catch for now. I need to let go.

Eyes of a Child

Sena wonders if I’m ever going to use Patsy Cline’s tune “If I Could See the World (Through the Eyes of a Child) in a blog post. She also brought home a potted plant she bought, an Easter Lily, ahead of Easter Sunday on April 9th next week. I thought of a couple of things, and of course one is a quote from Men in Black 3:

Agent O: “Agent K is dead!”

Agent J: “Well, I just talked to him last night!”

Agent O: “You are imagining things.”

Agent J: “I’m not imagining anything. Aqua Velva after shave! I didn’t imagine that. Where every stakeout, endless hours of cowboy music.”

Agent J and I have a few things in common. One of them is a mild dislike for country western (cowboy by extension) music. I can’t help it OK; the Patsy Cline tune is one of those.

I’m the first to admit I’m not a Bible scholar, but I’m going to talk a little bit about the apparent contradictions between being childish and childlike in the Bible. The reason is that the lyrics in “If I Could See the World” is either an obvious or accidental reference to the seeming contradiction between being like a child in one sense and in another sense, growing up and putting away childish things.

There’s no contradiction if you remember the scripture quotes are in different contexts. In childhood, we’re innocent, trusting, and open. Being open to the kingdom of heaven is the context for that. On the other hand, another context is when we grow up and recognize the duplicity in other people and the inevitable push to learn how to lie. If you don’t tell Aunt Clara that you love her gift of fruitcake at Christmas, you will be grounded for a week.

OK, so that’s the extent of my Bible scholarship.

I’m not a credible music critic either. But it’s easy to see the connection of the Patsy Cline song “If I Could See the World (Through the Eyes of a Child) to the book of Matthew. At the same time, the lyrics ignore the book of Corinthians, which tells how important it is to give up being childish. You need to lie to get by sometimes, although Agent J has trouble telling just where and when to stop lying. Much of MIB 3 is about the conflict over telling the truth and lying.

Come to think of it, that conflict could be much of what life is about.

Agent J after finally telling young Agent K that Boris the Animal will kill him when he goes to Florida to stop Boris, and that’s what Agent J wants to prevent: “I know I told you everything but…”

Young Agent K punches him in the nose: “That’s for lying to me! He punches Agent J again and says, “And that’s for telling me the truth!”

The Patsy Cline song is about seeing all of the good and none of the bad, all of the right and none of the wrong—and how wonderful that would be. Could it be ironic? On the other hand, in the real world of grownups, maybe Griffin has the idea:

Griffin: “The bitterest truth is better than the sweetest lie.” Well, sometimes.

Do You Really Need to Replace That Ceiling Light?

Sena and I just had a very challenging time installing a ceiling light to replace an old fan. I just want to point out that I would always rather hire a handyman to do this because I’m not real comfortable with electrical components. I can replace outlets and switches OK, but the ceiling fan…well, all I can say is we got the job done.

You always want to cut the power off at the circuit breaker before tackling a job like this, of course. And there are the usual problems with hooking up the right wires to each other between the ceiling light fixture (or whatever) and the electrical box in the ceiling.

The model of ceiling light we got had a fairly heavy base, which is the thing that has all the wires and the fluffy insulation and covers whatever mistakes you made in the electrical box. Just kidding.

This was a 2-person job for us and involved jockeying around on a tall ladder, taking turns hanging on to the heavy base while the other did the magic of making wiring connections. If the base had been lighter, we could have hooked up the ground wire in the ceiling with the ground wire in the fixture and just let it hang.

Sena found helpful YouTube videos about how to manage this installation. There were different perspectives on grounding, even on whether you need to do it given that some experts said the electrical box is already grounded so another grounding contact is unnecessary.

We grounded generously and even wrapped wire nuts with electrician’s tape.

Making the wire connections was hard enough, but we thought the most frustrating part was fishing for those two mounting screws through all that fluffy insulation on the base. I thought we’d never get that done.

If you ever have to do a thing like this, you might want to consider hiring the job out to someone who has a lot of experience with it.

Crank the volume on the video to hear my voice over comments.

Whitetail Deer Think Your Lawn is a Salad Bar

We have a small herd of whitetail deer who regularly visit our lawn because they think it’s a salad bar. They’re all over the neighborhood because the city apparently doesn’t have a consistent deer population management plan. I don’t know anything about the animals, other than what I care to look up on the internet.

We saw several bucks the yesterday. One of them was missing an antler. It might have been lost in a fight with another buck.

As far as we could tell, most of the deer seemed pretty healthy, although I guess you can’t really tell which ones might have chronic wasting disease just by looking at them.

One animal looked like it might have suffered an injury, possibly from a buck. The lesions looked like they might be healing.

I guess this time of year, they would be molting. That probably explains why some of them look scraggly.

Sena taps on the windows and orders them off the property. That doesn’t work. Sometimes they look up at you like they know you’re staring at them—but they usually ignore you and go back to munching on your lawn.

I wonder if I’d feel differently about culling the whitetail deer if I watched hunters actually cull them—or kill them. The word “culling” actually sounds like a nicer version of “killing.” The definition of culling is the reduction in the population of wild animals by “selective slaughtering.”

The origin of the word “cull” is interesting. It comes from the Latin verb colligere, meaning “to gather.” In general, it means to collect a group of animals into separate groups: one to keep and one to kill. Usually, it’s about killing the weak and sick ones.

On the other hand, the origin of the word “kill” seems to be obscure. Of course, it means to strike, hit, put to death. It might derive from an Old English word, “cwellan,” which means to murder, or execute.

Cwellan, cull, kill. I think it’s a coincidence they sound similar. None of them sound like “Bambi.” When me and my brother were little, we had a toy record player that played a simplified version of the Disney classic movie, Bambi. It had either a little storybook that came with it or a little slide show. It got a lot of use. One slide showed a shadowy image of a big stag. Eventually the record got stuck on a place that cried over and over, “Man!”

Maybe that’s why the city doesn’t have a whitetail deer culling plan.