Pet Woes...

We have a pet labrat. He's a portly old sucker so I let one of my daughter's friends bring her two pet labrats over to play with him so he'll get some exercise one afternoon. A bit later he started getting sick, and we couldn't figure out why. After a month of fooling around with allergy tests and etc it turned out he had caught a rat-specific sort of mite from the others. It doesn't affect humans at all, and the stuff that kills lice does nothing to it.

Not only is he miserable and his skin a wreck, it knocked down his immune system so we're fighting an infection in the bones of his head from a tooth abcess that killed part of the skin of his face and required the vet to shave some bone off his upper jaw that was dying. The worst part is he had to be awake for it because when she tried to sedate him his heart stopped for a little bit -- he's too old.

The last three weeks have been vet visit after vet visit for the injections to kill the mites and twice daily antibiotics. Have you ever tried to wrestle a medicine syringe into a rodent's mouth? He only took it gracefully that first time. That evening and every one since it's Splinter-time and I'm a Foot grunt.

He's doing much better now, and he seems to forgive me for the medicine with little trouble. He's just not going to take it lying down. It probably tastes like crap even with their attempt to flavor it. Needless to say he's on a strict diet, we're looking for other forms of exercise, I've sterilized everything in his cage and the rest of the house as I can just because I can't cope with the concept, and he's not having any more play dates. Hopefully this round of the anti-biotics kill the infection because if they don't she'll have to pull that tooth and that means I get to add clipping his teeth to our usual routine of clipping his claws.

I better get Shredder's armor if that happens.

Disproportionately Funny....

Sometimes people say things that strike you as funnier than they probably should. There's no rhyme or reason to it; you just find yourself randomly chuckling about it for a couple days afterwards.

I ran into this exchange between two anonymous slashdot users today who were discussing modifying game hardware, and I nearly snarfed chai on two computers at once.

>"If you can't install Linux on it or otherwise do with it as you
>please, it's not anywhere near as useful as it should be."

I apply the same litmus test to all decisions in my life, including my choice of girlfriends and pets. That's why I masturbate a lot and have a hamster that runs Ubuntu.

I'm not going anywhere near the first part, but I want a hamster than runs Unbuntu.