the patron saint of veterinarians is after me

I was feeling pretty damned pleased with myself for saving a chicken and some money with my DIY emergency medical skills, and then we came home yesterday to discover the cat's eyeballs had turned grey and cloudy. My veterinary skills start and end with sticking my fingers in things, and that didn't seem likely to help the situation at all, so we shoved the cat in a carrier and drove to the vet.

"There is pus accumulating inside his eyes," the vet said, giving him a shot in the butt.

Did you know that cats can get infections that fill their eyeballs with pus? I did not know this. I did not want to know this. Those dog anal glands are starting to look more and more manageable these days.

I was sent home with a $180 bottle of eye drops and instructions to administer them 4 times a day for a week. Except I am not home 4 times a day. I realized I was going to have to forfeit my precious lunch break illustration time while I drove back and forth from work in the middle of the day to chase a cat - and then the school called. "Your kid threw up all over the cafeteria floor, he needs to go home."

CHICKENS. CATS. CHILDREN.

So the good news is that I got my illustration time after all, and I'm home to fight with the cat over eye drops.

Three mishaps is the magic number, right? I have paid my penance to the gods of pus and vomit and chicken butts. Looking forward to hearing from the gods of $5 bills found on the ground and surprise candy in jacket pockets, instead.

- - -

Related, I stayed up late the other night to decompress with actual paper and pencils/pens. Spent the whole time tapping "undo" and trying to span my fingers to zoom in. Maintaining brain connections is hard.

DIY emergency vet proceedures

I have read A Day No Pigs Would Die and All Creatures Great and Small and been glad I never have to be armpit-deep in a cow. I have had a mishap during birth and had my doctor's hand up to the forearm to find torn pieces inside me and had space in my thought between the screams to decide that midwifery would not be the life for me.

So this holiday weekend hasn't been a great one so far, but everyone made it out alive, and the facebook thread it spawned is the best (worst?) one I've had since the Robotripping Cake Incident (I'll dig that one up some time).

For posterity, here is the Guess What/Chicken Butt Fiasco (names of other people redacted. Not even really sure why I edited my own last name, but I did):

Reply to anal gland comment was, "Ask me why I had latex gloves on hand in the first place". SEE.

5am pictures with exhausted chicken and devil egg:

So another rite of passage has been successfully navigated. I feel moved by the universal nature of this kind of suffering. The weak, strained sounds as she pushed fruitlessly, the way she cried for help and then endured my uncomfortable prodding, the exhausted relief when she fell asleep against my arm afterward. I know those feels, little chicken. I liked her before, but I really do love her now.

The abominable chicken run

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY, NEIGHBORS. We have contained the marauding small-animal-decapitating chickens in a nice roomy new coop and safely re-homed the noisiest and murdering-est of them. They got loose inside my truck in the process, though, and ripped down the lining from my sun visor.

Of course she did

But aside from some light vehicle damage, everything is under control again, and my life no longer smells like chicken crap and embarrassment. The nice little old lady next door can go back to being annoyed by the guy with ten roosters in the yard behind hers. Those cock-a-doodles are not my problem. My problem is the number of eggs we are suddenly having to eat. Related: I have started jogging (read: walking, but trotting past houses with dogs) again.

Plucky the Terrible Terror. She will chase you down and bite your feet 

until you pick her up and rock her like a baby

super deluxe chicken condo which we forgot to build a back door into

I am ahead of schedule with the book illustrations so far, which is a sure sign that I will get overconfident and cause something terrible to happen two weeks before deadline.

Meanwhile, the comic is coming along, slowly, and I'm working on a web launch. If I can post it as I go, I can maintain momentum better than if I chip away at it for the next 2 years. The point is really just to make the thing.

some small real world impact

Online politics can be consuming and harrowing, but in general the effectiveness of an administration can be gauged by impacts in daily life. Things were rough for libraries under Bush. Things improved a lot for libraries under Obama. And now federal funding for public libraries nationwide (which pays for research databases, e-books, and Zinio) is on the chopping block, right alongside the National Endowment for the Arts and NPR/PBS. I don't see how any country can expect to be great without valuing the arts and sciences and public education, BUT HEY, WHAT DO I KNOW? LET'S BE A NATION OF FACTORY WORKERS, POLLUTION, AND SHITTY BEIGE ARCHITECTURE. 

We had a chance to talk about the impending cuts at Institute Day. Also, we had to do lots of ice-breakers and group activities, which were basically 5-minute long sessions of "you go first," "no, YOU go first" as 500 librarians tried to politely defer to each other. We are not a very wild bunch.

Except for whoever made THIS TYPO

I always like a work field trip, even if the training topics were a bit too broad. Instead of learning vaguely about 'identifying the characteristics of difficult people', I wanted specific, practical tips for deescalation and defense against berserk meth addicts - but evidently it is not considered good customer service to spray our patrons in the face with Lysol.

I thought I was going to doodle comics about my day at Institute 

but there were THIS MANY people too look over my shoulder 

and see that I wasn't taking notes on mindful breathing

But I drew my cup, because I am a rebel. A rogue with attitude.

"Active listening" is a useful method to calm patrons who are ranting about how we are refusing to look up their library card number even though we can obviously do it in less than 10 seconds and we know who they are because they come in every week and they have their ID right there and the fucking GROCERY STORE can do it, but maybe instead of actively listening to them while they vent we can just change that stupid antiquated pre-computer rule so they don't get mad in the first place ? MINDFUL BREATHING.

"Active listening" exercise 

They gave us free lunch, though, so I was on board with it all. I breathed through my belly and wrote down the trick questions and charged the bento line with my lunch ticket like a good solider.

The vegetarian option was fried noodles. 

The caterer's theme was "we can't afford vegetables"

Home again home again, 2 hours of driving

This morning, over breakfast, I thought that maybe I should pursue the training I actually want on my own time. Maybe I should take classes. Maybe I should get a uniform and do it properly to increase my strength and skill before I am too old to smash someone's face in with a barcode scanner.* Maybe...

Except I still haven't taken up falconry. We don't actually have falcons here, but we do have owls, and I bet owls would be even easier to train because they sleep during the day and wouldn't put up much of a fight while you run around throwing them. A trained raptor would probably do the job just as well as kung fu and I wouldn't have to spend $100 on a martial arts costume just to get my head pinched between a strange man's thighs. I am a librarian, not Artemis.

Still. Maybe? A small local class where I can kick people on my days off? TO THE GOOGLES.


*okay, I have only ever been manhandled by a customer once, and he was super old, but what I'd really like is to have the confidence and training to stand solidly and not have my hands quiver like a purse-dog when someone flies off the handle about library fines.

Football and the chickens who resemble them

Way back in the 1980s, in the family home in Newfoundland, my grandfather and I would sometimes watch football games when Indiana or Arizona State were playing. Grandpa wasn't much of a sports fan, but he played the game in high school and enjoyed cheering for his alma maters from time to time. "You want to be the kicker. That guy sits on the side until he's needed, and he hardly ever gets clobbered. But the rest of us had to spend the game playing on our noses - and this was back before face guards." We sat together on the big recliner, watching the little colored helmets run back and forth. He cheered when his team scored, and I cheered when the medics were called out.

We moved to Arizona when I was 8, and that was the last time I sat with my grandpa for a football game. It was strange and fortuitous, then, that he came to visit this month and I ended up hosting a family dinner right on Super Bowl Sunday. I don't watch sports, but another household motto is don't crap on other people's yum-yums, so instead of getting on twitter to brag about how little I care about this thing that so many people like, I play the game on the laptop while cooking ribs, chicken wings, banana pies, bacon-wrapped hors d'oeuvres, potato salad, and I lay out the table with beer and soda and chips for a family get-together. I am on board with food holidays. On this day, I sat with my grandad watching football for the first time in almost 30 years and got to hear his familiar cries of "OH HO!" while Zenny sat on his lap and cheered along, looking so much like I did back in Newfoundland. And I was just so damn happy, folks. 

So that was the good news this week. The bad news came in the mail along with a brochure on how to teach your chickens good manners before they start earning fines for being noise nuisances. The young rooster has begun crowing all day and humping everyone, and all the hens began screaming their heads off this week as they laid eggs for the first time, and then the nice little old lady next door finally had to draw the line when they started rampaging around murdering rats in her back yard. The coop isn't big enough to house them anymore, we can't get them out of the tree without a broom, I am afraid to clip their wings because I read that if you do it wrong they will bleed to death, and this whole situation is OUT OF CONTROL. I DIDN'T EVEN WANT TO BE A CHICKEN LADY. More than that, I don't want to be a bad neighbor. I'm so embarrassed. Every SKRAW makes me want to bury my face in the couch pillows. Last night I dreamed I was trying to re-home them, but in my rear-view mirror I saw children stomping them, snapping their legs, poking their eyes, and I woke up crying with my pillow clutched like a broken chicken, trying to hold its eyeballs in. This is no good.

So they're all locked in the basement today* until some co-workers with farmland can be strong-armed into adopting them. We will keep the two nicest, quietest, most-egg-layingest, and the rest need to shut up and settle down before we punt them into the gulch with the wild chickens. (Ok, no, we are not going to abandon our animals - mostly because it's heartbreakingly cruel and irresponsible, but also because they would probably stage a hostile takeover and organize a ferocious rat-chasing mob, terrorizing the neighborhood cats and small children, because they are twice as big as any of the skinny feral chickens.) 

Between the two things - the football and the chickens - I would not have guessed my brain would be laying down good memories in the the long-term lobe over a sporting event.  It's been that kind of week.

*the safe, empty, well-stocked with food and water, equipped with dirt-covered landings for egg-laying, pre-renovation basement. Not, like, a pile of junk for them to crap on and knock onto themselves. That basement is going to be my art studio some day, though, and NOT A GIANT CHICKEN COOP. 

Comic roundup and also really pissed chickens

I assembled all of yesterday's hourly comics into a lump here for easy viewing. It was not an action-packed day.

I am home sick AGAIN today. And since I can't lay down without my head exploding, it's a nice chunk of time to work on the new book without interruption.

So of course the chickens all started screaming like they were being murdered as soon as I settled on the couch with a cup of tea. I went skidding downstairs, dropping wadded snot tissues, and found one of the girls hunkered miserable on some eggs in the basement while all the other hens publicly shamed her at high volume. I shooed them all out to give her some privacy, yelled at Mr. Weasley for humping his sisters, and then tried to get her to eat, but she wasn't having it. She hadn't shown up for breakfast this morning, but she had been staring in the window while I was making tea yesterday, so she probably hadn't been on the eggs for too long. It seemed really mean to steal her babies and eat them, so I just left her down there. She started cussing her damn head off, probably pissed and upset because eggs had squeezed out her ass with no instructions on what to do next - understandably - so I finally went down, picked her up, took the eggs, and carried her out to the coop. She ran to the water trough and guzzled fluids gratefully. I held the eggs up to the light and they look fresh and fine, even with rooster spunk in them. 

So there we have it: our first fresh eggs! They are small and adorable and I am scared to crack them.

look at these cute things which are probably alive. horrifying.

"I'M TOO YOUNG FOR THIS KIND OF PRESSURE"

hourly comics day

I was going to go to work and watch all the cool kids on twitter post their hourly comics, but fortune shone upon me and I woke up gross and sick. Power of the seeeeeecret.

I'll update this post as I finish them. Also on twitter. I'll have the hashtag right on the next post. It should get more interesting after I down some Dayquil. 

Thanks, Freddie. The Millionaire's Waltz and Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy 

set the bar a bit high there.