OmegaMom

Tap, tap, tap…

Pffffttt…Pfffftttt…

“Hello?” Tap, tap.  “Hello?  Anyone there?”

Yes, it’s OmegaMom, reporting after four days of silence.  Hi, there.  Yes, I’m alive.  Yes, OmegaGranny is alive.  My computer is being filled to the brim with OmegaGranny’s pictures, which I am supposed to burn to CD or DVD just before she leaves.

I fully expected to find at least one, maybe even two comments taking me to task for my vaccination post.  Nope.  What a disappointment!  That was supposed to be controversial, dammit.

Oh, well.

What have we been doing?

Let’s see:  Driving in to Big City at midnight to pick up OmegaGranny, arriving back home at 2 a.m.  A day spent recuperating and peering out at grey and gloom.  Two days wandering around the area in the sunshine.  (YES!  Sunshine!  TWO DAYS of it!) 

Two failed attempts to return OmegaGranny’s fancy-schmancy portable oxygen doohickey which she used on the airplane (the little franchise store was closed, even though the sign claimed it was open.) 

One failed written drivers’ license test, courtesy of yours truly.  Ahem.  Hey, look, I just didn’t read the manual, and had no idea what the basic speed limit on roads was if it wasn’t posted (55 MPH), got my solid and stripy lines mixed up in a passing zone question (I thought I was on the stripy side), and depend totally upon my insurance agent to tell me how much insurance we’re supposed to have.  Ah, well; we’ll try again on Monday.

And a visit to the veterinarian.

With a chicken.

Yes, I took one of our chickens to the vet.

This was at OmegaDad’s behest.

Winnie, our golden-laced Wyandotte, had cracked her beak, you see.  I figured it was like a fingernail; it would grow out and all would be well.

But OmegaDad wanted it checked out.

OmegaDad, many years ago, was concerned about the big black spot of rough skin on our 2-year-old butterscotch Teddy Bear hamster.  I told him, “Hmmm…It looks like cancer.  She is two years old.  There’s not much we can do if I’m right…”  So he took the hamster to the vet.  The vet looked at the hamster, poked, prodded, and said to OmegaDad, “Hmmm…It looks like cancer.  She is two years old.  There’s not much we can do if I’m right…”  Then he added, “But we could do a biopsy, if you really want to…”

OmegaDad did not get the biopsy done.  Our hamster lived happily for another six months, slowly going bald, and getting incredibly wrinkly skin.

Anyway, he wanted me to take Winnie to the vet.  I made sure we all returned early enough from our excursion that day that we had time to put her in a box and haul her off.  When I entered the vet’s office, a customer at the counter looked at me, and the box, and the dotter, and said, “Oh!  You must be the chicken!”

Yes, we were the chicken.  Apparently, our appointment was a great source of amusement for everyone.

Anyway, Doctor Sheila–a fine vet–came in, exclaimed at how beauteous Winnie was, and how tame, gently chucked her under the chin, peered at the beak, and called her “Sugar.”  (Doctor Sheila calls all our animals “Sugar”.)  Winnie, normally a high-strung bird, drank it all in.  The only evidence of chicken nerves was when Doc Sheila came at the beak with a trimmer, at which point I had to put Winnie into a chicken-hold.

I kept explaining that it was my husband’s idea to take the chicken to the vet.

Doc Sheila reassured me by telling me that she had done much more ridiculous pets than that…for instance, she had done surgery on both a goldfish (!) and a frog (!).

So Winnie’s beak has been trimmed, we have been reassured that she’s a splendid specimen of a bird and quite healthy, and I’ve been ferrying OmegaGranny and OmegaDotter hither, thither, and yon to various splendid scenery and tourist spots.  I now have some 300 posts in my BlogLines roster to wade through…