And now a spot of happy news! It turns out Crystal, our mouse, isn't dying of cancer at the advanced age of maybe two years. It turns out she's just old. Also fat.
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bunnyhugger had the veterinarian's appointment, early in the morning, while I went in to another office day at work. And it turns out the vet doesn't think there's anything particularly alarming at work in her innards. To make sure we could get a CAT scan done but for obvious reasons we don't want to put her to that stress.
But she has gained a lot of weight. Something like ten grams, which doesn't sound like a lot until you remember she started at 48. So, she has to stop getting so many snacks, which may be a self-solving problem as the young mice don't see any reason they shouldn't have treats we give her more.
One treat we do have to give her and her alone, though? Everyone's favorite arthritis pain-manager, meloxicam. The catch is that it's hard to give an injection into a mouse's mouth that doesn't threaten shoving it down their lungs. So we're looking to trick her into eating it, by soaking the meloxicam into a bit of bread. This has caused us to realize we're not sure Crystal has ever had a bit of bread and so she doesn't know whether it's a treat. Bread smeared in peanut butter, though, peanut butter being the food mice love as much as cartoon mice love cheese? She's not sure she likes that either. But also impairing things is that we took her out of her cage to put in the travel cage and feed her there, and that's circumstances that put anyone off their diet.
So we have to figure the best way to get medicine into mouse on a regular timetable. If we're lucky she'll come to see it as a special treat she and no other mouse gets to have and maybe that helps her feel not quite so aching and toddling. If not, well, we're old hands at doing stuff for our pets' good that they don't see why we're bothering them about.
Have some more pictures now of Oostende, the far point of our trip on De Lijn and where our last full day in Europe started to end.
Public art outside the train station, a couple concrete benches along with statues in case you want to sit in a faceless person's lap.
Somewhere over that way was a lighthouse. It didn't seem near enough to visit, especially behind fences like that, so we can't say we got any credits with the North American Lighthouse Society European League.
I think it's lovely they have a whole ship channel dedicated to the Mercator projection map!
We figured on the cathedral as the thing to walk to while we were out there and heading up that way discovered a tattoo parlor.
We didn't get anything this time but we were delighted by the Popeye, Betty Boop, Flower, Minnie Mouse, and ... Snuffy Smith For Some Reason ... tattoos they had on offer.
Serious things to ponder on a car painted to look like a late-evening sky.
Trivia: The traditional 753 BCE date for the founding of Rome is generally credited to the calculations of Marcus Terentius Varro, 116 - 27 BCE. Source: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, Duncan Steel.
Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.
