So on Tuesday when I took my rats out of their cage to run around for the evening, I noticed that one of Hank's eyes looked bad. He had a good amount of discharge all around his right eye, but not his left. I was surprised that it came about so quickly, and was only affecting one eye. The vets have decided that Hank is blessed with both crappy genes and allergies, so a little bit of porphyrin is common with him. But this kinda freaked me out. I thought he might have an eye infection or something.

( Check out the eye nasties ... )

The next morning I called the vet and made an appointment. I took him in today, and was a little relived that his eye was looking a lot better. The doc took him back to look at his eye under better lighting. She returned a minute or so later, with Hank wrapped up like a little rattie burrito. She said, "There is something going on with his teeth, do you want to come back and hold him and we can take a look together?" So we went back into a surgery room and she told me to hold him so we could look in his mouth. I turned him over on his back and the vet said, "I was just saying how great his teeth look and then I noticed this--", she pushed back his upper lip and looking in from the side it looked like he had a whole third tooth growing in behind his top teeth!

I had never noticed it because usually I just take a peek from the front to make sure everyone's teeth are growing fine. His teeth look totally normal from the front, and I would probably not have noticed what was going on because it took a weird angle to see up and behind his teeth. The doc said they would put him under and she would try to trim everything out.

I waited for a few minutes in the lobby when a tech came up to me and said, "We usually don't let people in with the anesthesia but the vet wants to show you what's going on." I went back and with Hank knocked out we were able to take a good look inside his mouth. It turns out part of the tooth root was pushing down behind the front teeth, and had caused an ulcer, and was causing trouble in his sinuses on that side of his face, which led to the nasty eye. Oddly enough Hank seemed to be eating fine ... but the doc snipped away all of the extra tooth and cleaned up his eye boogers. :)

I went back up front and shortly afterward, they brought up a groggy, bruxing, boggling Hank. The doc said that she was really happy that Hank came in when he did, and that no permanent damage had been done. I'll take him back in a month to see how things are coming. He may end up needing regular trims from now on. The doc also said that she was excited about his case, because lately everyone had just brought in rats with upper respiratory issues, and she was getting kind of bored. ;) She also said that she had dealt with plenty of crooked and overgrown teeth, but none that had involved the root growing behind the tooth.

After getting some extra cuddles from the receptionist, we were sent home with Baytril to help everything clear up. Hank has been spending most of the evening curled up in the pocket hammock. I think he will feel much better from now on!

If you don't already know how much I hate using my phone ... I hate it. But my number is currently the business number for the clinic so I get a lot of calls. I usually put off checking/returning my messages for a few days but sometimes I do get calls from people who have found dogs or from the animal shelter, stuff like that, that I know is important to follow up on immediately or ASAP. So now on my voice mail it says "if you have found an animal with our tags, are calling from TLAC, or a vet clinic, please press 5 to send a numeric page". Then it sends me a text message so I know to call them back right away (I don't answer my phone at work).

So at first I got two messages, and they were both from people who had found dogs, so I felt good that it was working out. Then I got another text and thought it was strange to have three lost dogs in three days so I called them back. It was just some lady asking if we were open (we weren't, we only do the clinic twice a month). She was nice so I shrugged it off. Today I got ANOTHER message and I was thinking no way this is another lost dog. Nope, some lady who is boarding her dogs soon and needed a copy of her vaccination records. HELLO? Did you find a stray dog? Are you from the animal shelter or a vet clinic? No. Do not press 5, do not send a numeric page. Just leave a message. Not to mention that I've already sent this lady her records before, because she lost the first copy. I understand losing them the first time, but please hang on to them! I can't even fax them tonight because the number she gave me is long distance, and I can't do it from home so I'll have to fax them from work tomorrow.

It's going to be really annoying when people start abusing the numeric page thing.

I'm grumpy and have a headache.

Hank has a really runny eye and is still making breathing noises; I need to make a vet appointment.

I need to make an appointment for myself to take my wisdom teeth out.

I'm going to sleep.

lol, rats.

What a bummer of a day.

I worked last night and didn't get off work until 10:30. When I got home I was tired, but starving so I ate and watched a little tv before I went to bed. I got up this morning a little earlier than I usually do and went to work feeling pretty upbeat. Or as upbeat as you can be at 6:20 in the morning. But soon after we opened at 7:00, my stomach started hurting. Not so bad at first but it got worse. Unfortunately, being a Thursday, we were pretty busy so I didn't have any time to go to the restroom. I could have asked someone else but I knew it wouldn't be just a one-trip thing, and having to ask someone to cover for you when you need to make repeat visits is kind of embarrassing. Luckily Carrie came in and covered for me when I needed it, even though she was doing her own stuff too.

I finally felt a little better at the end of the shift. When I got home I ate a bunch of stuff I probably shouldn't have and then just felt mildly crappy. Joey got home and I was feeling in a little bit of a better mood, and was excited about making the bison burgers for dinner. When I was shopping for everything on Tuesday, I was thinking "this is going to be awesome!" Unfortunately the meal turned out to be disappointing. I bought some corn to grill, but it ended up being undercooked. Joey didn't like the flavor of the bison and thought that the buns I had bought were too big. I liked the flavor but since I was stupid and binged earlier, my stomach was still a little achy and I wasn't really hungry and didn't finish my meal.

Now I'm just in a bummed out mood. For a good while today I kept thinking it was Friday. I didn't do my "Dog of the Day" for work today, because I was too busy last night and felt too crappy this morning to whip something up. I'll get counted off for that.

AAAND the house is filthy and the yard looks like shit. Maybe I'll try to do something about those things this weekend ...

Have some rats with corn.

Crisis averted. Apparently when the Wells Fargo people told me that my mom no longer had access to my account, they lied. So when she set up her bill pay they were like WOULD YOU LIKE TO USE YOUR CHECKING ACCOUNT? and of course she said yes but it was more like by your checking account we mean your daughters. So NOW they say our accounts are separate. Not that I care if my mom has access to my money but if she didn't then Wells Fargo couldn't facilitate mistakes like this.

Went to the dentist this morning, got a referral for an oral surgeon to get my wisdom teeth out. Will have to figure out when I want to do that ...

Then I stopped by the sewing place and showed them what my machine was doing to my hammocks ... they couldn't get it to screw up but then they discovered that I wasn't using Brother-compatible bobbin spools. Oops. I got everything for Christmas so I never thought to check what brand everything was. Turns out I was using Singer bobbins which are just ever so slightly too small for the Brother bobbin assembly. I'll just give them to my mom since she's got a Singer machine.

After that I went to Central Market and picked up some extra ingredients for the rat food. I also got some ground bison meat to make burgers Thursday night, along with some Texas-grown tomatoes (on the vine, yum) and some corn to grill. When I was at the butcher's counter getting the bison, the guy asked me if I needed anything else and I asked him if he had some bones laying around. He went into the back and came out with this gigantic cow leg bone and said, "Is this ok?" Luckily he offered to cut it and even took a few minutes to discuss with me which way he should cut it so that Rowdy could get the most marrow out of it. Cool guy! I got four large pieces of raw bone for $6, and Rowdy is very happy.

I wanted to grill burgers tomorrow but I have to work in the evening. Danielle gave me the wrong day off so I had to switch around to be able to make my dentist appointment. I was hoping to have all of tomorrow morning to myself but Noni wants me to go to the office for another interview at 10am. She started out suggesting Thursday, which I really would have rather done, but I guess she didn't want to wait around for me to get off of work. Oh well.

Off to go make hammocks now.

So I was about to go get in the shower and decided to make sure I got my direct deposit from work. So I log in and expect to see my full paycheck, yet it says "Available Balance: $184.06".

WTF. I will tell you right now that I should have a lot more than $184.06. So I looked at the details and there I see a charge for "Bill Pay Wells Fargo Home Mortgage". Now that's funny because I don't remember ever buying a house. So I called my mom and asked her if she pays her mortgage through Wells Fargo, and she said yes, and asked why. I said, "Well because *I* just paid it for you."

When I first got my account, it was under both my mom's and my name, with me as the minor. Then when I was no long a "minor" yeeears ago I tried to get them to make it just my account, and I thought that had worked, even though I would occasionally get mail addressed to me with the word MINOR tacked on to my name. The last lady I talked to about it said that my mom had been removed, but for some reason she couldn't take the "minor" off, but I think she was just stupid. Argh. The weird thing is is that my mom said that it looks like they took part of the payment from her account, and the rest from mine.

Whatever, as long as it gets resolved ASAP. I am thinking I might change banks after my loan gets paid off because generally I like Wells Fargo, but I think my account is just permanently screwed.

My sewing machine is acting up and it's driving me crazy. It sews fine for about a foot of fabric and then as much as I can figure, the lower thread breaks, makes a nice rats nest on the underside of the fabric, and then picks back up again. I can usually tell it's going to happen because right before it looks like the tension's all wrong, then it screws up, and then goes back to sewing correctly. I've lowered the tension. I've raised the tension. I've messed with the lower tension. I've used a million different threads. I've re-wound the bobbins. I've sewn slower. I've sewn faster. Nothing works.

Tomorrow I'm going up the road to the "authorized" repair place and showing them a hammock that's been screwed up. I'm hoping they can just say OH do this and it'll be fixed. But I'm prepared to leave the machine. I just hope it doesn't take too long or cost too much. I was so happy-- I finally got some orders coming in and now things break! I should get paid tomorrow (I SHOULD have been paid today but work screwed up with direct deposit), but I only have $20 that I can use as of tonight.

Also, "All but one of my rats died in the past few months so my boyfriend bought a new one from petsmart and he was getting over a respiratory illness and so we stuck him straight in with our other rat and left them alone and now they bit each other! Help!"

...

I was also looking in her journal and she's got photos of all her bongs and pipes with a rat cage in the background. Even though she is also feeding crappy food, I will give her the benefit of the doubt and hope that she's not dumb enough to be smokin' the ganja around her rats.

__________________________

ALSO on Saturday I saw a guy downtown who looked JUST like Freddie Mercury if Freddie Mercury had hairy shoulders. White tank top, sunglasses, 'stache and all.



He told me to go get some free powdered donuts that were being handed out. AND I DID. :D:D

So at work there is a position open for Administrative Assistant. I would like to continue to work there, but I am getting tired of doing the same thing. So anyway, I applied and had my "phone interview" today. It went fine but they said that it will be AT LEAST several weeks before I hear anything else about it because they're busy, blah, blah. Ugh.

They always throw around the idea of how they want to encourage and facilitate the personal and professional growth of employees and stuff like that. The first time I applied for an "internal" job, it was assistant manager. I didn't get it, but whatever. Then I joined the training program. Carrie and I were the only two people who stuck with the program the whole time. We had our final test and they told me that they really liked the way I handled the dogs but that I wasn't ready for the position. BUT they didn't want to discourage me and I could still help out with the training when it was really busy and stuff. Yeah right.

Then I applied for assistant manager and got turned down because I didn't have any management experience. They told me that they really thought I was right for the job aside from that and they would make sure to give me more opportunities to build my management-related strengths, so the next time a new location opened they would be able to use me in some way. They told this to the other girl who applied also. Do you know the only additional task I got? Once a week I write 50 words about a dog and post its photo to the website. WOW.

Now they're opening a new location and they already have the people picked out for it before I even knew it existed. I am tired of getting the run around. I am tired of hearing how they want to help me but don't, even when I try. Right now I feel like I don't even care if I get the job or not. Maybe I will feel different about that after I sleep on it. What I really want to do is to stop working all together and go back to school. but without a job, I need money, and I already have a car loan and a credit card that I need to pay off.

We'll see, I guess.

Yesterday, Carrie's dogs were eating some kibble she had tossed in the yard. Rowdy is usually pretty smart and stays away until they are done. Bodhi had started to walk away from the area and Rowdy took the chance to try to see if there was anything left over. Bodhi caught him and started "arguing" with him, which happens. Rowdy likes to make him mad and then run away.

Though this time Carrie's other dog, Buggy, who is usually timid and mild-mannered, caught a wild spark or something and jumped in and attacked Rowdy. Carrie was trying to separate them and I ran over with a stick. Buggy was crazy and was biting and shaking Rowdy by the back and neck. I swung at them and may or may not have hit Buggy, but either way it scared him enough to let go (and express his anal glands).

We pulled everyone apart and at first didn't see any wounds on Rowdy. Then we saw a bit of blood and discovered two puncture wounds on his left side. I took him inside, shaved the spot and cleaned it. I called Doc and he said he would leave some antibiotics on his front patio for me to pick up later that evening. When I told him there were only two wounds, he said, "Only two? Are you sure? If there are two, there are more." I was pretty confident but after getting off the phone I found three more on the back of his neck. Carrie and I found one more on his right side this afternoon.

Everything actually seems to be healing well, but he seems tender today so I might go pick up some ascriptin for him. I'm keeping him home from work this week and will probably walk him in the evenings ... it was just too hot for it this afternoon. :<

And what you've been waiting for ... pics! ( Nothing too graphic. )

Also, Charlie (the rat) bit ME today. I had them out while I cleaned their cage and reached out to pick him up to put him back. I actually went slowly but when I started to lift him off the ground he bit into the palm of my hand. Dumb rat! I'll get him neutered if he keeps this up. He already picks on JR a lot ...