Ah weaning, when kittens wear their food
Very elegant looks for Sarah and Ellie
Messy baby jail!
But also... Sarah... Sarah WHY
That is not a pillow!!!!! Ewwwwwww
Today was also "hold your premature kitten like a potato day". Very good day.
Poor Tess looks so confused and Joel is just resigned to his fate
And now I will drive home.
Fuck my life.
The manager whose actions resulted in me developing anxiety enough for an official diagnosis and had me having panic attacks on the way to work just got hired at my shelter as my direct manager.
He's a goddamned brown noser to anyone in a position of authority and never backs his staff if the higher ups are in the wrong. He yells at and harasses his staff and he finally got fired from VCA for cooking the books.
I'm currently just sitting in the back lot shaking and I want to go home
The semi good thing about this is he is entirely unprepared for how different it is to manage shelter technicians versus corporate techs, and he's never worked somewhere with a union.
And I have told every. single. coworker. about him and his behavior and I've told the vets and the vets are all very protective of us, with 2 of them particularly protective of me.
Everyone is going to be watching and waiting to document anything he does that might be out of line. And he doesn't know how I feel about him so he won't be suspecting at all. And I talked to the department head to at least say that due to past experiences for my mental health I cannot be one of his direct reports and so I'm not. He's still technically in charge of me, but day to day our interactions will be limited.
So we'll see what happens. If he dares try to yell at us shit is going to hit the fan in a most impressive manner.
isthere an update on rutabaga comblebutt please i need to know how he is doing what he looks like in 2023
Because I work at an animal shelter and my fosters get adopted by members of the public, I almost never get updates on them once adopted.
Fight fight fight fight fight
Alas for anyone backing Tess, Joel is almost always the winner in these battles. Persistence and bulk is winning over brains and agility
Joel’s tummy pattern is exquisitely adorable and I very much want to kiss his belly, inevitable scratches to my face be damned
While that would be a concern with Ellie or Sarah, both Tess and Joel got a lot of extra handling due to being premature and more fragile. Joel in particular is used to being held up like a prized pineapple and will contentedly sit there while you kiss his tummy for ages and ages.
I really hope he stays like this through adulthood
Tomorrow's life goal: take enough pictures of Ellie and Sarah that at least a couple aren't just black blurs
In the mean time, as Tess and Joel are still on the bottle, they go into a milk stupor for a few moments that does allow for some photos still
i love your tlou kitten updates !!! how old are they now?
Tess and Joel are roughly 40 days old, and Sarah and Ellie are 35 days old. Despite being technically older, in reality Tess and Joel are more like 30 day old kittens due to the whole didn't bake long enough thing.
This was 30 minutes of surgery time
It literally does only take a minute to neuter a cat and yes you literally can line them up like this and get them all done like an assembly line, though it would be more hygienic to change gloves between which would slow you down as it takes longer changing gloves than actually neutering one cat.
Spay and neuter clinics do things fast and cheap; they have to and they are a very much necessary part of vet medicine. I hear my coworkers sometimes complain about the local spay and neuter clinic and I have to remind them someone has to do these animals that can’t afford it. Someone has to do the rescue spay and neuter (we couldn’t do them anymore, it was stressful on all parties involved) and this clinic fills that niche. Our standards are VERY high and none of my coworkers were around when we did rescues so they don’t understand. Techs and vets that go into rescue work are very strong people. I’ll admit I’m not strong enough.
Our surgeons absolutely change gloves between patients. The 30 minutes was with 4 techs, 2 surgical tables, and 2 surgeons and included induction and prep time. We use "kitty magic" to induce and isoflurane to maintain and induce by litter so we would have 2 or 3 kittens to a table at a time. All of these kittens are also foster kittens from my shelter.
I love tumblr and how I can never tell which posts will get a hundred notes and which will break containment
But also this is tumblr so I probably should have expected the kitten castration conga line to do so
We just got 2, poorly marked, male calicos from one litter. Their sisters are both calicos, too!
regarding your post about the two male calicos I must say that is so cool!!! Also absolutely adore when calicos calico badly. Like great job buddy! That's the worst anyone has ever done it! You have one tiny little spot! (jk though they are well dressed.)
If it was just one spot, and just one kitten, I'd be thinking more somatic mutation. But each has multiple spots around the body, even if they're small... and it's odd there's 2 either way. Something is going on with those boys.
Spring has officially reached me, everything is green, everything smells like flowers! There are even wild strawberry blossoms in the crevices of the walls…
I'm jealous of my neighbour's extremely lush grass so I want to let my pasture rest for a bit. Which means partitioning it so the animals can't graze one half of it for a while.
Of course, this means telling Pampe she can't go somewhere.
I chose the dividing line carefully. There's a dense jungle-like area in the middle of the pasture that I've never seen the animals try to cross, they go around it, so it can act as a natural fence. I built 2 temporary fences on either side of the jungle to finish cutting the pasture in two. The setup looks like this:
The fenced areas on either side of the jungle are made up of sheep netting, one length planted in the ground, and another above it, attached to tree branches with string (they are also tied to one another), so the fence reaches a height of 2 Pandolf.
I have weighed down the bottom of the fence with heavy branches so the llamas can't crawl underneath. (Before I did that, when the fence was still under construction, Poldine decided to make her mother happy by showing her she'd listened to Pampe's life lessons. Pampe behind her was bursting with pride.)
Finally, in one particularly at-risk area, I made a quadruple fence using 4 lengths of sheep netting + 1 piece of rigid mesh fence, tied to one another and to nearby trees with string. Look at the below pictures. Zoom in. Do you understand this fence? No? Good. Neither will Pampe.
Don't mind me just playing 5D chess with my llama.
There's no way she'll win. For the first time in four years I will be victorious.
Okay, let's get to the point of this post.
(Bonus question, do you think she'll try indiana jonesing her way to freedom or that she'll focus on the fenced areas? Crossing the jungle might be easier but Pampe doesn't like easy, she likes mind games and destruction.)
P.S.1: for people who started following me recently, you might want to check out my llama drama tag to understand who Pampérigouste is.
P.S.2: I don't know if this will factor in your decision, but when I last saw Pampe behind 5 layers of fence she appeared to be smirking.
Update on May 1st protests and how the french goverment handled them?
^ The May 1st protests were pretty violent esp. in Paris; two cops were set on fire (they're ok, one has 2nd degree burns), lots of destruction in city streets, and hundreds of injured protesters. The French gov is sticking to its M.O. of denying any police violence against protesters, emphasising protesters' violence and portraying it as mindless anti-democratic savagery rather than the result of their own anti-democratic policies.
There were more people protesting in the streets on Monday than at any other May Day protest in the past 20 years (by a large margin—7 to 10x more people than usual.) And the numbers are still impressive in terms of this current social movement—there were about 1.2 million people at the first protest against the pension reform in January, 900K at one of the February protests, around 1.1M on March 7 and I think 1.2M on March 23rd... We're in May and there were 800K people in the streets on Monday (using the police's probably low estimate). The first marches earlier this year were peaceful; people started destroying shit in March after the 49.3 (=the gov not letting elected representatives vote on the reform); in the following weeks we saw a brutal escalation of police violence + suppression of just about any means of non-violent protest, which results in more violence.
The vast majority of protesters are still peaceful, but in terms of providing context for the increased violence, well—people protested peacefully, peaceful protests got banned. People banged pots and pans, pots and pans got banned and confiscated. People started a petition on the National Assembly website which got a record number of signatures, the petition was closed before its deadline and ignored. MPs asked (twice!) for a national referendum on the reform to be held, their requests were denied. Electricity unionists cut power in buildings Macron was visiting, now he travels around with a portable generator. Unions tried to distribute whistles and red cards (penalty cards) to football supporters before the French Cup finale last week, so the ones who wanted could use them if Macron showed up (he ended up hiding and greeting the footballers indoors rather than publicly on the stadium lawn); the police prefecture tried banning union members from gathering outside the stadium to distribute these items (although the ban was struck down by the judiciary as it was illegal, like most bans these days...)
Confiscating saucepans was already so absurd it felt like a gratuitous fuck you, but now they're trying to prevent the distribution of pieces of red paper. Cancelling petitions that would have had no real impact anyway. Prosecuting people for insulting Macron. Arbitrarily arresting hundreds of nonviolent protesters to intimidate them out of protesting (guess who's left then?). The French gov is systematically repressing democratic or nonviolent means of making your opinion heard, and when people get more violent they're like "This is unacceptable, don't these terrorists know there are other means of expressing dissent??" Where? This week a 77-year-old man was summoned to the police station and will be forced to take a "citizenship course" for having a banner outside his house that read "Macron fuck you" (Macron on t'emmerde). Note that he would have been arrested (like the woman who was arrested at her home and spent a night in police custody for calling Macron "garbage" on Facebook) but they decided not to only because of his age.
So that's where we're at; on Monday two cops caught on fire (well, their fireproof suit did) after protesters threw a Molotov cocktail at them. (The street medic who tried to help them with their burns ended up getting shot by a cop's riot gun a few seconds later—with French police no good deed goes unpunished!) The media talked a lot more about this incident than about the fact that the cop who got most severely injured on that day (broken vertebrae) was injured by an explosive grenade that a colleague of his meant to throw at protesters (you can see it at the end of the video below). If police with all their protective gear get so badly injured by their own weapons, no wonder the worst injuries have been on the protesters' side. (nearly 600 injured protesters on May 1st, 120 severely, according to street medics.) I'm not including images of these incidents in the video but on May 1st a protester had his hand mutilated by a police grenade + a 17 year old girl was hit in the eye by a grenade fragment, may end up losing it (during the Yellow Vests protests, Macron's first attempt at repressing a social movement, 38 protesters lost an eye or a hand).
What you see in the video: cops charging the front of a march to tear a banner off people's hands then retreating and drowning the street in tear gas when protesters throw paint bombs at them (protesters have umbrellas because of police drones); at 0:30, a journalist saying "They're not even arresting him, just kicking him when he's down—they kicked him right in the face!" then police spraying with tear gas protesters who try to fend them off; at 0:46 when a protester being arrested asks a journalist if he's filming and starts reading out loud a cop's ID number, another cop shoves the journalist and throws him to the ground; at 0:54, an Irish journalist runs away from the police tear gas grenades that you hear going off, at 01:08, the incident mentioned above when a cop drops a grenade he tried to throw, which explodes in his group, breaking another cop's vertebrae. There's a lot more I'm not including, like how CNN said "there's so much tear gas in Paris, our foreign correspondent can barely breathe", how another journalist was hit by a sting-ball grenade (he was also bludgeoned on the head so hard it broke his helmet—even though cops know the people wearing helmets are journalists...), and yet another journalist who was calling out a cop for aiming at people's heads with his riot gun (which is illegal) ended up having the guy aim the riot gun at his head from 2 metres away (getting shot with this "less lethal weapon" from that distance would be lethal.)
All of these videos are from May 1st (most of them from this account monitoring police violence.)
So yeah, nonviolent protests followed by violent police repression and bans of nonviolent means of protesting result in more violent protests. The French government responds by a) pikachu surpris, b) condemning violent protesters and praising violent police to the skies, c) continuing to ban everything they can think of. Confiscating saucepans didn't work but confiscating pieces of red paper will do the trick! Let's prosecute people for bashing or burning an effigy of Macron, because banning symbolic violence always works to prevent actual violence! And this week after the May 1st protests we learnt that the gov is thinking of making street barricades illegal, because that'll definitely solve everything. It's going to be interesting for history teachers to teach students about the 1789 revolution that allowed us to take down an absolutist regime and become a republic, under a government that banned barricades because they see them as terrorist anti-republican structures.
^ Statue symbolising the French Republic (on Place de la République in Paris) dressed with a 'Macron resign' shirt by protesters on May 1st.
Porcelein turtle vessel, China, early 16th century
from The Ayala Museum, Manila
Is hard to do zoomies when 4 weeks old and orb
Zoomies over tiem for sleeps
Joel screaming for the Hand of Mom to rescue him from his plight (not yet spherical this feeding)
