and a bit more of most things

so, the chicken and two mynahs and a bunch of pigeons all went to their new home at the beginning of the week. Chook, of course was a huge hit. She must be the ugliest bird I have ever seen, but somehow appealing anyway. What was really funny was to see Gustav the Egyptian goose (who is a non-flier that I homed there a year ago) stalking around her with this look of "WTF is this thing"! Cockatiel went today, so now it's down to 9 feral pigeons.

And I'm off to visit my parents at the other end of the country tomorrow. We had a really bad scare, when the gynae found a 5cm tumour on my mom's ovary. Emergency surgery this morning, and thank God it was benign. Didn't realise until my dad called with the results and I basically folded up and sat on the floor cos all my muscles went limp, how tense we'd all been. Going down just to keep them company and do whatever errands I can to help.

Otherwise, my focus is totally dude-centric, and awesome. Almost six months now, and just gets better every day. And scarier, because he is so totally different to me, and sometimes I am really not sure of what I have let myself in for. Dude-blog post to follow, probably tomorrow, about the last week or so. In a detached observer way, it interests me that I see him as so strong, and so in control, but that - as is happening at the moment - if there is anything or anyone that threatens him, I would kill without any qualms. If that was what was needed.

In the rehab context, I have euthanased when birds or animals have been in pain beyond fixing. I drew my line at doing it based on 'invasive' species like mynahs or ferals, which is how I ended up being the specialist in those species. I have only ever killed once on purpose, when I hunted a blesbok and shot it. My cousin, who arranged the hunt (and selected the buck, as an unwanted male that he would have had to cull regardless), also made sure that I did everything else - the head shot, bleeding out, slaughtering and processing the meat. I will probably never ever hunt again, but if I have to, I know that I can do it. As an extension of that, while I don't think I would ever choose to kill a person for any other reason, if they threaten what I love, I don't believe that I would have a problem with that either. It's a very small group that I would defend that way - immediate family, three maybe four others, and the dude. Him especially, although he is more than capable of looking after himself. Guess this is something I should raise with girlshrink when I see her next week. Oh yeah, but I'd need to add her and pdoc to the group as well!