Esme 2014-2016
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♥Jan. 31st, 2016 // 03:04 pm♥
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It's funny: I know the duck for "feed me!" and for "the food is coming!" and for "where did you go?", but I don't know the duck for "goodbye".
Two days ago, Esme 'helped' me with the weeding, plonked next to me waiting for worms.
Yesterday, she laid an egg and, Mike reports, was her usual noisy, gobbling self when it was meal times.
This morning, though, she didn't want to leave the house, and she couldn't manage the steps up to the garden. When I carried her up them to see if breakfast was tempting, she was struggling to catch her breath. Later, after the other ducks had come back to the stableyard, I carried her back down so that she wouldn't be on her own, and she went and hid inside the bonfire, panting frantically and silently.
This was very similar to when she had a chest infection last autumn, but that took four or five days to develop, not just overnight.
It being Sunday, the vet doesn't open until 10am, but they booked us in for 10:45 and I borrowed Mrs Next Door's cat carrier. Fortunately, Esme had emerged from the bonfire by this point, but she was in a pretty bad way.
Unfortunately, she didn't make her appointment: by the time we got there, I no longer needed the vet's help to make a diagnosis. I very much doubt that it would have made any difference if it hadn't been Sunday and she'd been seen a couple of hours earlier.
As Mike said, it would have to be Esme, wouldn't it? she's always been my favourite, for all she's a bit runty.
This afternoon, we went to the garden centre and got that corkscrew hazel I'd been planning. It's got extra fertilizer in the bottom of the hole.
Magrat, Esme and Gytha 1, looking scrawny just after they arrived:
Agnes, Magrat, Esk and Esme, looking stylishly accessorised and much plumper, last month:
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In cute news
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♥Jan. 31st, 2016 // 09:11 pm♥
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Months ago, I wandered into the craft items shop in Canterbury (it's a fairly basic place, that moves around empty units in the shopping centre) and saw some very cute tartan stuffed rabbits. I very nearly bought one, but couldn't quite justify spending £40 on one.
A few days later, I was at the quilting show and one of the dealers was selling kits to make your own, almost identical, stuffed tartan rabbit, for £15. So I bought one.
And then it was New Year, and I needed a hand-sewing project for sitting around and chatting time, so I cut the pieces and did some of it. I've been intermittently working on it since, usually while watching Sherlock and often while swearing at the instructions*.
This evening, in a spirit of Keeping Busy, I finally finished him off, and I'm quite pleased:
* The instructions were very odd. Actually, the whole kit was very odd: there was about twice as much fabric as was needed, carefully cut into pieces you were supposed to use for the different bits of the pattern; the order of doing things was all over the place and made some bits much harder to do than was necessary (as you were doing them after it was stuffed when they could have been done with it flat); and the instructions specified that you should sew the glass beads on as eyes after stuffing but the eyes that came in the kit were those two-part safety ones that you have to have access to both sides of the fabric to put in....). On the plus side, I scanned and re-printed the pattern rather than use the one that came with, and hey: I've got enough fabric left over to make another one! |
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