A gorgeous, but nippy, Friday off. I’ve been failing a bit at my running, more so at my hiking, so today I did a bit of a combo. A little bit of walking, a little bit of hiking, a little bit of trail running, and a little bit of something that resembled rock climbing but involved using everything from rocks to branches to roots to farms to hang on to both on the slip and slide down, to the crawl and scramble back up. I’ve realized that the hiking was also a lot of the strength training, and missing that has been making my running worse than last year.
Time to step mix it up again.
There were some fabulous icicles on the underside of some of the overhanging rocks, and the edges of some of the pools along the edge of the river were laced with thin sheets of ice.
In the afternoon it was a visit with Gizmo, who was happy to see me, insisted that his head was scratched for about an hour, and even performed his spring courtship routine for a few moments. Dr. McDonald had a well deserved day off today and the technician told me that another vet (Dr. Miller) was on duty today, that she provides relief for Dr. McDonald one day a week, that she would come to see me (us), and that she had been face first in Gizmo’s cage this morning providing much appreciated neck and head scratches.
Gizmo has been busy charming everyone at the clinic the past week. He’s not been lacking for love.
When Dr. Miller came in, we chatted about Gizmo, about welfare and quality of life, went over his chart, and I asked about realistic expectations. Could be a year or more, but could equally be a week or more, depends on so many factors. It probably wasn’t a fair question on my part and, realistically, I already knew the answer.
We’ve been here with the animals before.
Gizmo has just seemed so indestructible for so very, very, long.
She also told me that she also has a Senegal, and that he is 28 years old. She said that he was equally as large bodied as Gizmo, with similar colouring. He was an adoption from the parrot refuge that shut down a number of years ago and left over 500 parrots in dire straights. She said he also has similar behavioural and personality characteristics to Gizmo and that she thought there was a possibility that Gizmo could be a big brother to hers.
She asked me if I had any other questions, I didn’t, but I did mention that I thought we might share a friend.
The world is a small place that one of the vets attending to my little monster, in Vancouver, went to University with someone I know from high school.
A quick run to the US for a few parcels, and the day was done.
And now we wait for the weather….20-30cm of snow predicted for tomorrow…inconvenient since we have tickets for the theatre tomorrow night…..guess we will see what tomorrow holds.
