cavy castration!?
About a week ago, I gave up all hope that our baby guinea pig was a girl. We named him Doctor Girlfriend, anyway.
Gloria took the good doctor to the vet today, who gave him a clean bill of health, and gave us a $300 estimate for neutering. This struck me as Totally Insane, and I promptly declared that we wouldn’t do it. Since we can’t keep him with the girls, we’d have to give him back to Linda, from whom we got Snoozer and Wookie (and, thus, Dr. Girlfriend). The vet had told us that Dr. Girlfriend couldn’t get the girls pregnant until he was four months old, which we thought was nuts. Linda called to confirm this, urging us to separate them immediately, which I did. I put a cage wall between the girls and the boy, so they can still see each other.
For a while, it was pretty awful to watch. Dr. Girlfriend would scream and try to fit through the cage, which he only recently grew too big to do. All the pigs chewed at the cage, and Wookie kept staring up at me with really sad eyes. They seem to be a little more relaxed about it, now.
Linda also said that $300 was nuts for a guinea pig castration, and that she’d had it done for $100. I’m actually feeling tempted to have it done, if that’s the case, because the three of them are so cute together. Gloria and I will have to talk it over.
We’ll do it later this weekend, though, because she’s in New Hope, now, doing Mysore-style yoga with David Swenson. He is, I am told, something of a yoga rock star. Gloria has wanted to study with him for a long time, now, and I’m super-excited that she gets too. I’m a little bummed that I couldn’t go along and stay at the B&B with her, though. I have my bike maintenance class tomorrow, and we wouldn’t make it back in time. Still, it sounds like the inn is really nice, which is good. I’m using my time alone to… well, do nothing special. I tried to go to Moravian to get some dinner, but they were out of everything I wanted. I walked up to the Hedgehog and had a really nice salad and a slice of quiche from Jumbar’s.
I think I just generally felt better – not healthier, exactly, just better (and maybe more productive) – when I was mostly fasting, during Lent, and I’m thinking about trying to keep my diet a bit more like that in general. I don’t know if it was a coincidence, but it can’t hurt to try and find out.