22 May 2008

Not Dead Yet

For those of you who recall the Plague scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Pongo is like the the old man who says, "I'm not dead yet. I'm gettin' better!" We have been through a couple of varieties of prescription food, and now have settled on homemade chicken soup with vegetables and brown rice. Our geriatric little German Shorthaired Pointer gets a first course of that, followed by bone dry (his preference, discovered by experimentation) prescription high fiber kibble (for his irritable bowel disease) mixed with torn pieces of rabbit jerky (which acts like a catalyst to get him eating). Then he has to run around outside and hunt things, whether he can smell them or not. Then it's back inside for another dry kibble and rabbit jerky course.

Why rabbit jerky? Because our Great Dane thinks that rodents are not food. The other category of things being, of course, food. This enables us to maintain discipline during Pongo's protracted feeding ritual, because the stuff he gets has limited appeal to her.

Anyway, his weight seems to have increased a little, despite his nasal and kidney diseases. He has now made it to the average survival time since first diagnosis for nasal cancer. So far, so good.

So far, so good for my career, too. Tomorrow I find out if I still have a job. If not, I'll shop myself around, and try to gin up a bit of consulting. If I stay, I'll continue to do my best for God and country.

And finally, so far, so good working through the Book of Mormon. I'm struck that the original plates were passed from father to son through so many generations. Each son added to the record, and passed it on to his own son. Very strong family values. And quite unlike the books of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the New Testament, which were written by people who usually had no relation to each other.