cooks and chooks and family - oh my!

[tielan]

The vet we usually take to see Honey is on medical leave (spinal surgery) which means we had to go a little further to the Small Animal Specialist Hospital. There, the vet decided that she does indeed have a swollen abdomen and was a little thin - loss of appetite.

She stayed overnight to get nutrients and got scheduled in for a scan this morning to determine what is actually wrong and how to deal with it - if anything.

Looks like peritonitis (or whatever). But she's apparently really skinny now that they've taken the fluid out of her, and they'll keep her overnight and put an implant in her today so she won't ovulate. It should fix the core issue, the question is what kind of damage the inflammation has caused in the meantime.

We do need to start thinking about end-of-life options for the chooks, though. At what point is it too expensive? And when do we terminate? Also: how?

Euthanasia is expensive.

I don't think we're particularly squeamish about shedding blood, or taking animal life, so long as it's for a purpose, fast/painless (preferably both), and not a big mess to clean up after.

There are ways to do it at home that are fast and reasonably neat. Easy? That's another matter entirely.

Pets are indeed expensive. Even working pets such as chickens.

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Stepbrother 2 got married off. He managed to get a head-tilt to his dad and my mum in his speech (the very last of the speeches, with about an hour to go - just dessert and dancing in the end). It's more than nothing but still hard on stepdad. SB2 and SIL2 have now gone - either off to their honeymoon or north to where SIL2 is starting her career as a small-town doctor.

They had a very Christian wedding. I know, most weddings are very Christian to anyone not nominally Christian, but this was very Christian according to an Overheard At The Wedding my sister submitted on the way home from the reception. She didn't think it was said in a bad way.

The three of us (B1, B2, & myself) all agreed that the thing that we liked most was the sermon - the traditional Ephesians 6 "clobber passage" for male headship got nicely upended, when the "husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave his life for her" included the examples of "giving up your job to follow her to somewhere she can grow her career" and "settling the baby so she can have a good night's sleep". Which...yes, these things may be implied in our modern setting, but there's no harm in having it explicitly described and reframed: "give up your life" may not mean life in the sense of the opposite of death but may instead mean life in the sense of time, energy, focus, opportunity. And in our society that holds all the echoes of 'a woman's life should revolve around her family/husband', it was a refreshing reframe.

So, good job, sermon giver! The sermon-giver was in Tasmania because he and his family weren't able to spare the fortnight for quarantine on their return. It was read out by another friend at the wedding.

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In the menatime, SB1 and SIL1 are in town for the next week. We're seeing them at dinner tonight with the parentals, and they're going to come around sometime to see the garden.

I better check if SB1 has plans for cake/dessertness tonight, or if mum is covering that.

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Now for the day's work.

...Oh, I have another cookbook_challenge to post, don't I?

Comments

[minoanmiss]

*sends all healing possible to your pet*