Leave well enough alone, why should I want to roam?

[austin_dern]

First, some rabbit news. With Athena not being all that interested in eating again she got a vet visit. This was during my office day at work, so bunnyhugger, on her Spring Break, took her in.

The verdit is we don't know why she hasn't been interested in pellets. It turns out she has some points growing on her molars, the kind of thing that could be an early stage of malocclusion, teeth missing each other in a way that makes it painful to eat. Which would explain her not eating, but is inadequate to explain why she's happy to eat hay and vegetables and treats and cardboard and wood and power cords. The gastrointestinal incident would explain her not eating, but not why the disinterest in eating has lasted given she's definitely not still in it. She's far too energetic (and her droppings too healthy) for that to be the case.

So with medicine once more giving way to idiopathy we're left with some guesses. The first, to Athena's great relief, is that she's off Critical Care. The vet thinks it's not likely to be giving her nutrition she's missing, and having the food shot into her stomach might keep her from feeling like she needs to eat anything. Also, she hates it and if we keep force-feeding her she's likely to seek revenge. She is going to be getting some shots of the gut-motility-increaser, three jabs a day in the scruff of her neck. But while she tenses up at that she doesn't get stressed by it, and she's quick to forgive of that insult to her dignity.

In the meanwhile, she's got a couple days to start eating pellets before another follow-up. And she did eat some pellets when she got home. Just not all of them.

Second, some mouse news. bunnyhugger had opened Crystal's cage to give her a treat and then, distracted by something or other, forgot to close it for an hour or more. Had we lost our mouse? There was an excellent chance we hadn't, since her cage is on top of the rabbit hutch, four feet or so off the ground, and mice do not go plunging into the unknown depths if they can avoid it. But sometimes there isn't any avoiding it, and if she were feeling unusually adventurous she could climb down the hutch or to the record player tower beside it. All we could do is wait and see if we'd ever see her again.

Or we could go looking, and bunnyhugger decided on looking. She poked into the lair Crystal has made of the bedding material in her cage and found it surprisingly solidly packed, resistant to the damage of her fingers intruding. And then that there was at least one empty space inside, with the soft feel of a mouse suddenly having a very annoyed day in there. With the mouse proven to have stuck around bunnyhugger stopped her intrusion, and left a treat, that Crystal was in no mood to stick around for. Pretty sure if there were any more litter left to use she'd have used it to build an even more impenetrable fortress by now.

Very likely that, originally, Crystal had taken the treat and retreated to her lair to eat it or cache it, and never went back to discover the door had been left open. But we can't rule out that she didn't explore how far she could go outside and then returned to the safety of home, rodents being as they are fond of checking back in at home a lot after exploring a tiny bit away. So, we have a mouse who's at least happy enough with where she is to stick around there.

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You saw yesterday me closing out the last pictures of our Tuesday at Kings Island, so what was there to see next on the photo roll but our Wednesday at Kings Island. Here's how it started:

Parking lot shot. The Kings Island sign you can kind of see in the middle is about where we parked the night before, to give some idea how much busier it was even though it was early in the day. Mind, the day was also 2,850 degrees Fahrenheit and muggy.

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Near the bathrooms up front and about the same location where I took those photos of the guy photographing the reflecting pool that you saw yesterday.

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There was a staff-members-only door open nearby and I got this view of the Hall of Fame, which they appear to expect will be expanded upon.

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Sculpture of Don Quixote alongside the International Midway. bunnyhugger found that it is based on a specific real Don Quixote sculpture but is, remarkably, not a copy. Just a variation on the idea.

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bunnyhugger goofing around with Don, possibly pleading with him to leave the windmills alone, they have enough problems.

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The German/Bavarian area of the park has dwindled to an Auntie Anne's, but at least pretzels are a German thing. (There's a few other spots but the original premise that there was a touch of World's Fair to the place is all but gone.)

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Trivia: The Dutch West India Company in 1630 chose as its main base in the New World a set of delta islands on the Brazilian Coast, on which they would build Mauristaad, modern Recife. Source: A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, William J Bernstein. (By 1654, with the Portuguese revolt against Spain, the Dutch colony was taken over by Portugal. Which seems odd to me as the Dutch were busy revolting against Spain themselves at the time.)

Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine Volume 56: Uss vs Themm & Thees & Thoos!, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly, Editor Stephanie Noelle. Done with Yapple versus Napple and we get to ... somehow ... another College Football Season story?