The GirlAlive Blog

I got Homer in to the vet this morning.  They said his breathing doesn't sound too deadly bad.  Catching it quickly and giving him antibiotics right away might have saved his life.  We'll see.  They gave him an antibiotic injection so I don't have to force any more baytril into him today.

The instructions for the moment are to try to keep his boogey nose clean, force feed him if he isn't eating, and make sure he gets plenty of water.  I have to bring him back in tomorrow to get checked again, and maybe get another shot.  The vet and I are being fairly aggressive with it because even though it just looks like Homer has a cold, this kind of thing is deadly to wee little rodents.

So I have to feed him about every hour, and give him water even more often.  Husband is going to pick up some baby food to give him a little more variety in his force feeds.  Mushy guinea pig pellets are bound to get a little old. 

Alana 

Posted by Alana at 10:44 AM | Permalink

My favorite guinea pig Homer is sick again.  This time it's kind of bad.  He's been lethargic for a few days, just sitting in the corner with his fur all puffed out.  Last night he didn't even move when I put in the evening food.  He usually begs for treats and for the third night in a row he barely moved.  I picked him up and listened to his breathing.  His lungs are making a bad noise now.

Last night I woke up in the middle of the night in a complete panic.  I was sure that Homer was dead.  My husband had to go downstairs and check on him before I could get back to sleep.   We gave him some antibiotics we had left from a few months ago when he was sick.  Hopefully, he'll hang on until I can get him to the vet to get him some more medicine.  It's just a respiratory infection, but respiratory infections kill guinea pigs, and pretty quickly.

Poor little guy looks kinda miserable.  The good thing is that he's been eating okay.  If I get him to the vet tomorrow morning he's got a good chance of recovery.  It seems silly to ask you to pray for my guinea pig, but he's such a sweet little piggy.  I hate seeing him sick and I'd hate to lose him so young.  He isn't even three years old yet.

Alana 

Posted by Alana at 01:44 PM | Permalink

A while ago I bought myself a drop spindle.  It's a clever technology that been used for a few thousand years to make thread and yarn.  I also bought myself a big bag of random wool bits from Etsy.  After a large amount of spinning and pulling and plying, I now have a huge weird callous on my right index finger, and this bunch of yarn:

It's all squishy and pretty and crazy.  I'm not sure what I'm going to knit with it.  

Also, I went to a party last week and on the way home I saw a hedgehog on the sidewalk, just waddling along.  It was so cute!  I'd consider getting a hedgehog for a pet, but I don't like pets that eat meat.  They tend to have stinky poop.  I like my little vegetarian hamsters and vegan guinea pigs. 

Alana 

Posted by Alana at 09:16 AM | Permalink

I only have one grandfather left, of my four original grandparents.  I'd like to take a moment to remember all of them.  (I'm going to use first names because you don't need to know my maiden name or my mother's maiden name, thank you very much.)

Alden

Alden was my father's father.  He died when I was 11.  I miss him a bunch.  He was a smart, gentle and excited about everything and everyone.  He was one of the warmest and most welcoming men I've ever known.  If he were alive today, he'd be the only 92-year-old around with a computer, a DVD player, a cell phone, and possibly his own web site.  He loved learning new stuff and building new stuff.  He would have loved the internet and would have loved the man my brother grew up to be.  I still see Alden in my brother. 

Beulah

Beulah always hated her name.  She said it suited a cow better than a person.  She was Alden's wife.   She was a worrier.  For all the jumping-in-headfirst that Alden did, she was there to scream, "You're going to crack your head open!" from the sidelines.  I think she might have had some form of Asperger's syndrome, because she was incapable of understanding some forms of humor, like sarcasm.  She was also a bit of a racist.  But she loved her family more than anything and was absolutely devoted to her husband.  She was also very intelligent.  She was volunteering to do taxes for people who couldn't afford an accountant well into her 70's.  At a time when women were expected to be meek housewives, she worked full time and never really liked cooking or cleaning.  She lived without ever paying attention to stereotypes of what women were supposed to be.  She lived exactly how she wanted to live and didn't care what anyone thought.  It broke my heart when dementia took away her best mental gifts, and left her lingering with the full awareness of what she had lost. 

Marilyn

Marilyn was my mother's mother.  She is the one who taught me to cook and play music and make stuff.  Not directly, but through my mom.  To the outside, she looked a lot like the opposite of my other grandmother.  She cooked like you wouldn't believe.  She knew how to embroider and play four or five musical instruments.  She was a talented artist, even if the only audience who saw it was her family.  She had six kids, and every one of them is some type of artist or musician.  As are many of her grandchildren.  She was never a weak and opinionless woman.  She didn't like an argument, but she did have her own thoughts and opinions.  She was stolen from the family by aggressive breast cancer when I was in college.  She was only 64.  She was far too young.  

Bill

Bill is the one who is still alive.  He's a tough strong man, with a creamy nougat center.  He loved my grandmother and they were best friends until the day she died.  I think his example is part of what made my parents good parents.  He had rules for his kids, and they had to follow them.  But they weren't unreasonable rules.  There was enough flexibility to allow for the kids to play all manner of musical instruments all over the house, and to account for a fantastic tarzan rope in the yard.   He always seems like a gruff bear of a man, but it's all show.  He likes to have fun and he loves his family.  After my grandmother died, he got a "girlfriend" who was really just a companion and close friend.  Her name was Jeanie.  She helped him through the loneliness of losing my grandmother and gave him someone to talk to.

Jeanie died a few days ago.  She was the second woman taken from my grandfather by breast cancer.  I'm going to miss her.  She was quick-witted and fun.  I only have one grandparent left, and his heart is broken right now.  And I'm thousands of miles away and unable to do anything about it. 

Next time you have an opportunity to donate to a cancer charity, maybe throw in a couple of dollars with my grandfather in mind.  He could also use prayers right now because he's in a lot of pain.

I hate cancer. 

Alana 

Posted by Alana at 12:58 PM | Permalink

I'm about to make a bunch of enemies among my friends and family.  But I don't care.  I just heard about the changes of the laws in California allowing gays to marry, and I'm happy about it.

I'm a Christian.  I believe in the Bible.  I believe that Jesus is the Son of God, who died for our sins.  Do I believe that homosexuality is wrong?  Who cares?  Some of the nicest, coolest people I've known in this world are gay.   And I believe that God loves them as much as He loves me.  The Bible tells me to love my neighbor as myself, and a lot of my neighbors are gay.  So I love them as much as I love any of my straight friends.

A lot of my Christian friends and family strongly believe that gays are part of some grand conspiracy to undermine Christianity.  I've known too many gay people to believe that.  My friends are not part of a political agenda.  They are real people with problems and pain and joy and happiness like anyone else.  

But that's not the main reason that I'm happy about the changes in California law.  The main reason is that I'm a strong supporter of the US Constitution.  The first line of the first amendment reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."  Why do people want gay marriage to be illegal?  Because "traditionally" marriage is a man and a woman.  Where did this tradition come from?  Judaism, Christianity, and later adopted into Islam.  Western society has believed that homosexuality is wrong for as long as it has been dominated by Christianity. 

American society is no longer just Christian European white people.  As the world becomes smaller and cultures interact, we must accept that religion-tied traditions are not the necessarily the norm of everyone in America.  Imagine that you are a devout Buddhist from a hypothetical Pacific island.  In Buddhist teachings, being faithful to your partner (regardless of sex) is a virtue, and you hope to follow the established rituals of your new country and get married.  But you find out that because you want to marry someone of the same sex, this is illegal.  If you asked around to find out why, it would always be because of Christianity.  But didn't the constitution say that there is no state religion in America?  Why is this hypothetical Buddhist being forced to remain single? 

By prohibiting gay marriage at the governmental level, we are forcing a single religious belief on all people, regardless of their personal religious beliefs.  And that is not a very American thing to do.

Back in the 1500's the Bible was first being printed in "normal" languages instead of just in Latin.  Normal Christians could start to read it and determine for themselves what was right.  A group of them decided that it was more Biblical to baptise adults rather than infants.  So they baptised each other as adults, and the Catholic church hunted them down and killed them because Catholicism was the official state religion, and they broke the religious rules.  Christians today do the same thing when they try to mandate Christian moral law into American statutory law. 

If a church or a minister wants to refuse to marry gays, I don't have a problem with that at all.  Churches are there to interpret scripture.  That is not the purpose of the US government.   

My own pastor wouldn't perform my wedding because I was marrying a non-Christian.  I don't have a problem with that pastor's decision.  He was only following his personal moral beliefs, and I hold no grudge against him for it.  But if the state of Minnesota had refused me a marriage license because I was marrying a non-Christian, I would have been just as hurt and annoyed as my gay friends who are just trying to live their lives like everyone else.

Alana 

Posted by Alana at 06:40 PM | Permalink

I want to quit now.  I've had enough.  Don't want to be here anymore.  And by "here" I pretty much mean earth.  But more specifically, Scotland.  I'd like to go back about five years and not leave Seattle.

I'm still dealing with unspeakable crap from work.  I'm stressed out and angry and tired and frustrated.  Then my tooth broke.  I was just trying to eat breakfast and my tooth fell apart.  Don't even know where it went.  Must have swallowed it.  The remaining bit of tooth keeps poking my tongue.  I expect it to start hurting soon.

So my coming week already featured three meetings I didn't really want to do, and now I get to add a dentist to that list.  Anyone want to give me a rectal probe or a pelvic exam to make my week complete?

Alana 

Posted by Alana at 03:05 PM | Permalink

I've been complaining to my husband a lot lately about how there are no mid-range restaurants here.  So we found some. 

Generally in the UK, there are two categories of restaurants.  There's the fancy Gordon Ramsay-type three course meal that costs a fortune kind of places.  Then there's the take-out places.  And not much in between.  Now, let me be clear that this isn't necessarily a bad thing.  In the US, it's easy to find a place to have an affordable dinner for four, but that place will inevitably be a franchise like Applebees or Perkins.  It's all very homogenized and frankly mediocre.  When restaurants cost a lot, you tend to cook your own food more and that is healthier.  But sometimes I want someone else to cook a meal for me and bring it to a table where I can sit and eat at my leisure.

So we've found some cafes.  They don't serve dinner.  You have to make it lunch or breakfast.  But it is food that someone else cooked.  And it's cheap and good.  

The first place we tried was called Joyce's Cafe, and it is in the Penicuik town center just between Farmfoods and the newsagent.  It's the perfect place to get a full fried breakfast, with an egg, sausage and toast and beans and black pudding (which I shift to my husband's plate).  And all of that for about 3 pounds.  And that includes tea.  We've been there twice, and it's been great both times.  It's brightly-lit and the people who work there are friendly and nice.  But nothing there is healthy, so it's just kind of a treat every once in a while.

The other place we tried was the Gallery Cafe, which is just off the high street, next to the inexplicable Belgian consulate in the Penicuik town center.  It's run by the Penicuik Community Arts Association and there is a vegetarian cafe downstairs with a craft shop upstairs.  It's lovely.  I had a toasted cheese sandwich and my husband had the soup of the day (a very good split pea and pepper soup, according to him).  The shop upstairs had knitted stuff, jewellery and pottery by local artists.  And lunch for both of us cost less than 5 pounds.  Much healthier than the fried breakfast place too.

So we've found two nice little cafes less than ten minutes away.  I'd highly recommend either of them, depending on whether you are in a carnivorous mood or not.

Alana 

Posted by Alana at 06:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)