As you can see there's a whole lot of stuff to do before school starts this fall

[austin_dern]

So. After we got back from Kennywood and the Women's International Pinball Tournament I went back to work. bunnyhugger took Roger to the vet to try to understand some problems he was having with his hop. It was lower than it should be, clumsier. He had been rather inactive at bunnyhugger's parents over the weekend, moping and disinterested in eating even longer than he usually was, but we thought that was just his dislike in having things be different. That's when we got the news that he was dying, likely had bone cancer, certainly had arthritis, and got the first recommendation to consider euthanasia.

This threw more than the usual things into chaos. For several months now my family had been planning a gettogether outside Washington, DC, a place that my family thinks of as central to where everybody lives, as long as you don't actually try and figure it out. But it also has a lot of free and cheap attractions so that's also going to pull on the family genome a good bit. The thing was it was to start that Saturday. I'd taken the Friday off --- so I was looking at a three-day workweek --- and we were figuring on an epic-by-our-standards drive out to Washington. We figured one of the days there we would get to Six Flags America, a Maryland park with a roller coaster that's arguably over a hundred years old. (The argument for: it's the relocation of the Giant Coaster from Paragon Park, Hull, Massachusetts, which opened in 1917; the argument against: Giant Coaster was redesigned significantly after a 1932 tire.) We figured after the trip to drive up, likely stopping in on Dorney Park where Thunderhawk is a hundred years old, give or take a significant redesign in 1930. And that, with Thunderbolt at Kennywood, would have given us arguably three centennial coasters this year. And then, Dorney or not, up to Kingston, New York, to visit bunnyhugger's brother and attend his wedding.

Except. With Roger in such diagnosed awful shape, could we leave him? bunnyhugger's parents didn't want to caretake him without an exact idea of in what circumstances they could put him down, including a vet (and emergency vet) given express permission to let them make the decision. Meanwhile I didn't want to leave him being babysat before we knew just what kind of care he needed. If he needed just a shot of meloxicam (painkiller) every day that's fine, that's easy to do. If we were still working out what treatments might stabilize him, or leave him stable enough? I didn't want to do that, not when we had one or two days to figure out what he needed before dropping him off with them.

(This led to a misunderstanding. bunnyhugger's parents feared that I was reluctant to leave Roger out of fear that they'd have him euthanized right away. Or at least too soon. Not at all; I especially don't question bunnyhugger's mother, who brings a career of nursing experience to animal care. What I wanted was not to drop on them a rabbit with ``we don't know exactly what he needs, here's a bunch of options''.)

Well, I couldn't leave Roger in that state, not with so much up in the air yet. I decided to bail out on our trip to Washington, at least, and told my parents and siblings about the choice and why. Every one of them agreed we were making a good choice.

As it happened, all Roger needed back then, early August, was a daily dose of meloxicam, which he loved taking. He was moving around with reasonable ease and energy right away. We probably would have been all right leaving him with bunnyhugger's parents ... although then, we would have missed about half the good time he had remaining to us. But there was no way to guess that, and I went for the safe call, and while I missed the chance to see my family in person and maybe make my 300th roller coaster (not on Thunderhawk, as we've ridden it already, but on one they've built since the last time we were there), I don't regret it.

---

Next on my photo reel was Thanksgiving, and a bunch of pictures of Roger at what would be his first and final Thanksgiving with us, and I don't feel up to that right now so I'm passing on photos today.

Trivia: ``Judge Judy'' Sheindlin is [or was] a resident with an apartment on the luxury liner MS The World, perpetually circling the world. Source: Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World, Simon Winchester. At least as of the time of the book's writing (it came out in 2021, so, probably true to 2019). I can't find any reference about whether she has maintained the residence post-Covid.

Currently Reading: Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis, Kim Todd.