Quiet Sunday Thoughts

Sunday is the first day of the work week in Egypt. For me it's now natural to think of the weekend as Friday and Saturday, and it causes me no end of problems when I go to the US. But I'm here in Abu Sir and Sunday is the day that all my office job friends go back to their cells and I get to stay home. I like that.

That's not to say that I have no work to do. I still have things that I'm doing for the airline and I'm working on a website for the trucking company. Website work on a 45 thou Kbps line is excruciating work. There is an optimist at one of the DLS providers who thinks that we can connect in the boonies, and the connected ones out here are cheering him on but not holding our breath. So this morning I did some web work for the airline since the so-called website designers who manage the website managed to make it virtually invisible when they got it up and running again. Some company in Australia managed to nab our old url, so they adapted it. That's no problem except that they changed all the company names in the website to the adapted name. As I pointed out to the power that is looking over these things, that makes the website invisible because everyone will look for the website by the original company name, not by the url. Brilliant work, guys. As I mentioned to our marketing people, website work isn't rocket science, but these guys are barely making bicycle repairs. Well, they will have a lovely time sorting that out. And better I get to work here looking out my big double door to my garden than I'm stuffed into an airconditioned cubicle.

The next task was to find the dosages per kg for fipronil, better known as Frontline drops, so that I could Frontline all the dogs. That's a lovely new verb. Naturally, it only took me about an hour to load the pages so that I could save Merial's dosages to my computer. I used to have it as a note, but when I moved information from my old Mac iBook to the new Powerbook some things went missing. That was one of them. I buy my Frontline in packages for enormous dogs like Danes and then divide the dosages with a 3 ml syringe to suit Rat Terriers. I can do 5 Rats for one Great Dane which makes Frontline an economic possibility with 13 adult Rat Terriers around. I don't recommend this as a practice unless you are sufficiently anal to be sure to underdose if anything. Fipronil does a great job on fleas and ticks, and I find that I only need to administer it about 4 times a year rather than the monthly that they recommend, however too much can make a dog very sick. But the Rat Pack are all snoozing on the chairs and sofas in peace so I got the dosages right.

I still have to go over to the paddocks to do the five dogs there, but I have a guy who comes over once a week to sort of garden for me and he should be arriving any minute. Eid (means "feast or celebration") won't stay if I'm not here. He's kind of nervous with all the dogs watching him. Can't imagine why. If he doesn't show up soon, I'll head over there. Meanwhile I can finish this post.

I'm expecting my equine vet as well this afternoon to finish a dental job on my 18 year old mare. Horses grow their teeth throughout their lives and the teeth get ground down as they chew the rough grasses that they feed on. Over time, the molars wear unevenly and there are sharp points left that can cause problems in the horse. This mare had lost weight recently, so we were suspecting tooth problems, which indeed she had. Dory is particularly precious to me as she was the first horse I ever owned after longing for one for my entire life. She's a smart, tough little mare and has given me two lovely sons over the years.

A few weeks back I was riding her at night and the trail we were cruising along suddenly disappeared into a corn field. Dory spotted the problem right away and made a quick 180 degree turn on the roughly 15 cm wide path that was running along the canal. Unfortunately, I'd decided to hop off on her left side (the side away from the water) but by the time I hit the ground, she'd turned and I hopped off into a chest-deep canal. Yuck. There were people leaving a house party about 40 meters or so back the trail, but no matter how loud I shouted, they didn't hear me, and there were no bushes or bunches of grass or anything on the bank that I could pull on to haul myself out. The dredging back hoe had undercut the bank so I couldn't just climb out either. Dory watched me for a couple of minutes, standing just far enough away that I couldn't grab her leg either, and then ambled back down the path to the cars. A fully-tacked horse did catch people's attention and they followed her back to where I was marinating in who knows what. A couple of men grabbed my wrists and hauled me out while women fussed over me. I was, thankfully, wearing a black tshirt and dark grey pants, even darker with the lovely canal mud, and they wanted me to shower, but what was the point? I still had to ride my horse home so I thanked them for their kindness and headed home. We checked Dory over for scratches and scrapes and then I dripped my way back to the house.
Dory could have just taken off for the stable while I was standing around in the canal. She knew the way home. She could have just settled in for a lovely evening snack in the cornfield. She went to the cars instead and I got home at a reasonable hour to have a long shower and a dose of anti-everything medicine to counteract the effects of the lovely canal water. Good mare, that one.

Well, Eid the gardener hasn't shown but Emad the vet just called so I'm off to the paddocks with my Frontline vial and syringe. Hope that your Sunday was good as well.