So we've had some rough stuff going on and I saved it to the end of the week when I might have some more time to focus on it, since I had work and pinball league finals and supporting women's pinball league finals and that's just a lot.
First round: bad pet news, including deaths. I'll put that behind cuts so people who do not need to deal with that right now don't have to. First, our goldfish.
We were downstairs feeding the fish and ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger mentioned the great color they've had on their new food. Then she saw a fish lying on its side, dead on the floor of its tub. Worse, it was two fish, one of them a fry we'd gotten a couple weeks back from someone moving out of the area.
Somewhat better? The large fish, the one that we'd already had, wasn't actually dead. They just can't swim much and will mostly do so if bothered in some way. The diagnosis, based on streaks across their body, is a bacterial infection that's endemic to goldfish and just takes advantage when they're weakened by something else. What is that else? Poor water quality is the obvious candidate, since we were lax about changing the water most of winter, but bunnyhugger has been doing a good twenty percent water change every week in each of the three tanks for weeks now and our measurements say it's not bad.
So the fish is in special care and getting medicated, but our track record on healing fish is dismal; by the time they show symptoms it's almost always too late. All we can do is feel guilty we missed some clue.
Next, our very temporary we hope pets, the captured deer mice.
Back when she caught them, bunnyhugger noticed one of the deer mice looked nursing or pregnant. But later, the same mouse didn't seem to be obviously pregnant. She supposed she had mis-read things the first time around, and continued to suppose that until she saw in the chimney of the log-cabin dollhouse this small ball of fur. With eyes.
It was not a baby deer mouse. It was two baby deer mice. Which left the mystery of why would they be on the top of the house, way out of anywhere the mother might get?
The terrible answer was outside the log cabin house, where bunnyhugger found the partially-eaten remains of another baby deer mouse. Something, apparently, spooked the mother into thinking this was an unsurvivable situation and ate at least one baby, as mice will do, because in a lot of ways nature sucks. The other mice, we imagine, were either kicked out or fled and got to the most nest-like thing they could find outside.
bunnyhugger bought some goat milk --- Internet advice said baby deer mice could be nursed on that --- and found the mice had no interest in having a paint brush of goat milk shoved in their faces. She also discovered the water bottles were empty and neither of us could swear that they were not empty the night before, in part because of the bad news to be shared tomorrow. Two nights before, yes, but we hadn't paid attention to the water situation immediately before.
It's easy to construct the narrative that the adult mice couldn't find water, decided there'd never be water again, and set about consuming the infants in favor of the litter they'd make at a better time. We don't know this is what happened --- we don't even know they were out of water more than ten minutes --- but it's hard to compose a more compelling alternative.
With the water refilled, and the adult mice drinking so they knew it was there, bunnyhugger set the babies back in the log cabin birdhouse and they don't seem to have been rejected, as best we can tell.
Besides making 'check on the water levels' being a required nightly task we are now going to have to keep the mice a couple extra weeks, so that we can release, we hope, two fully-grown young deer mice along with a parent and an older mouse. Like this all wasn't heartbreaking enough already.
Well, here's lighthearted stuff. The Friday after Labor Day --- once upon a time the ``Bonus Weekend'' Friday --- we went to Cedar Point for what did turn out to be good riding; it was the first time we got to ride Siren's Curse, particularly. View, in obsessive detail.
Skipping the car establishing shot. The park used to have a bunch of Peanuts topiaries lining the causeway into the park, and a few years ago they put them in a green area outside the park.
Snoopy and the Woodstocks look pretty good in this form. Charlie Brown needs more detail.
The real trouble is the eyes don't come across this way and if the head has enough shape, like with Lucy, you can get away with that, as long as you're not looking them straight in the face.
So instead, yeah, Charlie Brown looks like the 2000s Hitchhiker's movie version of Marvin the Paranoid Android.
Seeing them like this makes you really appreciate how much Peanuts male characters don't have hair.
Now it's time to get into the park. I don't remember anything important being closed but maybe we didn't notice.
Trivia: Between the United States's declaration of neutrality in 1793 and 1805, the country declared that carrying any goods --- including provisions and naval stores --- to the warring United Kingdom or France (or their allies) was nevertheless neutral and inherently non-contraband traffic. Source: Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, Peter Andreas. For a while Britain tolerated this, even though merchants were using this as a barely plausible loophole in the continental blockade. Eventually European merchants realized if they just claimed on the shipping labels that the goods had travelled to an American port they could avoid the bother of two trans-Atlantic journeys.
Currently Reading: The History of the Telescope, Henry C King.
