tornado update

delinquent, remiss, absent. these might be applied to my life as well as my half-hearted blog.

on the other toe, some wonderful bits from the last few months–feeling at home in my work environment, meeting my new nephew (full head of fuzzy hair, constant squeaking, chubby cheeks) and being with my gramm for her 87th. also, looking at blue walls in the bedroom, some good active social time with friends, and some very lovely moments with my man.  

then, of course, there’s the busted oven, the entire lack of interest in knitting, a dying plant, a resurgence in joint/muscle pain, the painful slowness and difficulty in our turn the house into a home project.

layered over all of these is the simple and huge grief over the abrupt loss of fred, our senegal. knowing how delicately balanced birds’ systems are did nothing to prepare us. our very happy and healthy bird took less than 20 hours to die from dehydration–caused by vomiting–caused by a mystery. in our concern for the other three birds we even had them do a necropsy, which revealed no signs of obstruction, poisoning,  infection or organ failure. we fully expected to have fred with us well into middle age. to have him taken by a mystery, to have been helpless…

when i can talk about this without feeling the hurt in my stomach we are hoping to find others who have been affected by the lack of avian emergency care in this city and try to change things. the best (and only?) local animal emergency center is upenn–and they do not have avain specialists in on nights and weekends–not even on call. someone will come to pick up a patient at some point over the weekend if one has been admitted. at 8pm friday there was nobody to help us. by 8am saturday when we took him to a vet it was already too late.

 layered over everything and so very difficult to set aside. it doesn’t seem like there was anything else important to say.