Fly-by update

I've been browsing my friends list from time to time, but every time I think I'll post, I look at my watch and realize something like, "Argh! I've got to get out the door in three minutes!" Such is the end of the semester/holiday singing season.First, the good news. Athena's kidneys, according to the blood tests, are doing fine. She's on two different medicines for her stomach to see if anything helps her eat and put on some weight, because she hasn't got much more she can lose without becoming skeleton-cat. We're debating what to do with her over the holidays:a) take her with us on a 8+ hour car trip each way to North Carolina, which will stress her out but at least we can give her food whenever she will eat it and give her her meds, and she will have abundant laps to sit on and purrb) leave her at home and have our cat-sitting friends look in twice a day as opposed to the once a day they would for the kittens, keep the kittens confined to the guest bedroom and bath so they can leave out food for Athena in the hopes that she (and not the kittens) will finish it after they leave, and don't worry about the meds for a few daysc) board her at the Vet's, where she will get food and meds but will be confined to a little cage and probably lonelyI'm expecting a call from the Vet with her input on what options might be best at this point.On the writing front, I've been doing pretty much nothing. The end of the semester has hit me like a truck and I've got a gazillion things to do. However, I've been doing a lot of thinking about my novel and how to go about revising it, particularly with how to set up my bad guy. I've managed to scribble a few pages of notes about this. I really do want to go back to the novel, but I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm not very good at revisions. Oh, my second, third, etc. drafts always improve, but it seems there are always more things to fix, and it takes me a while to let all of this percolate through the "leaf mold" of my mind and decide which suggestions I've gotten in critique groups will help me the most, and which may just not work for what I want to write.I'd still like to revise my novelette "For the Love of Trees" first and then go back to the novel, but I've got a couple of cool short story ideas niggling the back of my mind. I had a short short, "The Mouths" that I wrote last summer and sort of decided I hated, critiqued at my writers' group today, and they gave me some good feedback that I hope will help me turn it into a real story and not just an interesting concept piece. So even in my writing, I've got lots of different projects crying for attention and I'm having trouble prioritizing. Oh well, it could be worse I suppose.Ack! Gotta run!