the mellow tigger's musings

On most days during my patrol, my back is fine. Some days, I can feel the arthritis in my back. Today was the first time that my lower back (where the arthritis first showed up many years ago) was hurting so much that I wondered if I was going to head home early so I could get off my feet. I stayed through the whole shift, and I feel better sitting in a chair now. It'll take a while before the feeling disappears.

In better news, as I was putting on my gear for patrol this morning, I spotted this rabbit in my back yard. I watched it for a while and took this photo before I continued my preparations. The light brown fur with white underbelly is the perfect coloration for my back yard right now, where the white snow covers the ground below the upright light brown stems and dead grass.

I have an appointment today around noon. I have an appointment today at work for 3pm for a training session (so I took off an hour early yesterday to compensate and avoid overtime for this week). I still need to do my taxes. I still need to put some seeds into flats, getting ready for spring in the garden. Yesterday, I succeeded in ordering some more columnar apple trees and a few other plants/seeds.

For now, though, I'm going to play some Coral Island to chill.

Early this morning, Hope spent a long while peeing in the cat box, hanging out afterward, then marching through the house meowing and vomiting and straining to poop. I immediately got up from my work desk, mixed the usual dose of Miralax into her watered down food, and went about my day waiting for her to lap it up.

That moment never came. She spent an hour or two roaming around the house vomiting, then she holed up in the closet in my bedroom. She doesn't even go in there during thunderstorms. She only goes there when I have to let a worker into the house, once a year or so.

Here, I managed to coax her head out of the darkness for a brief pet. She didn't feel like she had any fever. She's not panting or showing other obvious signs of distress. But she's not budging from her hiding spot.

She's been there about 10 hours now. It's starting to worry me as much the howling she did last time before I took her to the vet hospital. Total silence and isolation this time. I don't like it. I emptied her food bowl and mixed more watered down canned food with a full dose of Miralax from the vet recommendations last time. I'm hoping that sometime tonight she takes the water from the food bowl so she gets her medication.

I'm watching more YouTube (free) lately, because I cancelled subscriptions to all of my major online channels. I realized that I wasn't finding enjoyable things to watch perpetually on them, beyond whatever titles enticed me originally to subscribe. So Disney and HBO/Max were gone. For months, I had been unable to stream Viki from my phone to my television, and I just wasn't watching the many Boy Love dramas on the webpage as a workaround, so Viki was gone. Which left YouTube, where I still am not a paying subscriber... yet.

This 7-minute video is chock full of interesting details about chickens. Specifically, about chicken eyes. Chickens have tetrachromatic vision (including ultraviolet), double cone photoreceptors (sensitive to movement and polarization), double fovea (areas of high visual acuity, one for close-up and one for distant vision), 300-degree field of view, and independently controlled eyeballs. Their big downside? Terrible low-light vision due to fewer rods than humans.

Here's a 7-minute YouTube video from a homesteader (and self-described conservative), talking about the science of chicken eyes. Science and observation is a good thing to see and to encourage, so I was happy to add my view and my Like to a video on a channel I wouldn't normally watch.

Chickens are much more interesting than I knew.