Stone Age Thursday

Ooga booga! Me Cat! Me no internet! Me no tv! Me no fucking clue what to do with myself!

Seriously though, I’m writing this blog offline right now, because cable is dead and has been dead all day. To make things a little more fun, we seem to be experiencing rolling power-outs right now, so I may very well lose this text in the middle of the creative process. Oh well, guess I’m gonna do it like Jesus and save. Harhar!

My friends back in Germany like making fun of me for living in England and bring up the usual stereotypes whenever they get the chance. You know, English food, English weather, English oral hygiene, that kinda thing. Which is okay, I’m a bit of a troll, myself. “Still enjoying your cancer, Bob?” Jokes aside, England and Germany really aren’t all that different. Germany has better beer, England has better comedians, but they both have the same supermarkets selling the same stuff, they both run the same shitty “reality” and “talent” shows on tv and Opel cars are branded Vauxhall and have the steering wheel on the wrong side, but they all still drive German cars around here.

Aaaaand I just had a blue screen of death! I wonder if my PC got damaged due to the power out while it was running. Can that still happen with today’s modern hardware? I’d look it up, but since there’s no internet…

And that brings me to one of the things, where living in England feels medieval at best. For about a week now, the internet would simply stop working for no apparent reason. Sometimes for ten minutes, sometimes for an hour. Boom! No internet.
Great. The minute I finished typing that last sentence, the internet actually came back on, so I fired up my browser and BAM – power out!  So I waited for electricity to come back, rebooted my PC, restored this text (thanks, Word recovery feature!) and now the fucking internet is dead again. Nice. Having a kickass day here.

I don’t know what kind of ancient technology they use around here for power and basic cable, but if I had to guess, the whole thing is probably handled by the same guys who are in charge of water and facilities. I have seen bathrooms in East Germany in the late 80s, before the fall of the Berlin wall. The poorest, shabbiest areas, which were still recovering from the war. And facilities were more modern over there than the bathrooms they have around here today. “Oh hey, I want to take a bath! Better push a button and wait a whole hour to get some fucking hot water! Or maybe I should take a shower instead. Oops, water is still cold! Silly me, I should have pulled the little string on the bathroom ceiling to make the water go hot!”

Yeah, our internet is like that. Sometimes it just dies and nobody gives a fuck. See, that's another difference between England and Germany. If this kind of crap happens in Germany, people complain, they demand their money back and if it keeps happening, they change ISPs. Which, essentially, doesn't do shit, as they all use the same cables and connections anyway, but it makes us angry Germans feel better. Your service is shit, watch me tear up the contract. Around here? Pfft!

I dunno if people in England are just happier and more relaxed. Or maybe they don't really trust that new invention called the internet. I mean, they still advertise fucking audio CDs in this country! 

I'm not entirely sure how Queen qualifies as "trucking music", but that's a different story.

Speaking of things that die - Chompy, our bearded dragon and my first ever pet reptile, has taken a turn for the worse and I'll be surprised if she's still with us by the end of the week.

There is that cheesy saying that you don't choose your pet, but pets choose you. Chompy would jump out of her tank and climb all over me at the shop, which ultimately lead to the decision to buy a beardie in the first place. I know, that lizard probably just wanted food and would have jumped any random idiot at that time, but you gotta bond someway, right?

Unfortunately, something was very wrong with Chompy and her siblings, who all turned ill and had to be put in quarantine a short while after we bought her. Our beardie grew a weird bump on her back and started showing off-coloured scales, which later turned out to be yellow fungus, whilst her siblings started dying back at the shop, one after another.

So we treated her, put wound healer on the sores and infected areas, bathed her a lot and kept her warm and clean until she seemed perfectly normal and healthy. Well, "normal"... she would never shed her skin properly and no amounts of peeling, bathing and helping would stop one of her feet from growing an increasingly thick layer of old skin. She'd drop a claw, then a toe and eventually the entire foot became petrified until she lost it.

We took her back to the shop for intensive care and she made a full recovery, aside from the obvious missing foot and a milky eye, which had gone blind. Chompy could no longer chase after locusts in her condition, so Claire would feed her by hand.

She was a bit of a sad sight, but she ate, basked, had relatively normal weight and everything was fine. Until last week, when she no longer ate any bugs at all. Didn't seem like much of a problem at first - sometimes they're just not hungry. But she'd refuse them the next day and the day after that. Eventually we had to force-feed her. We stuffed her full of fatty worms to stop her from losing weight, gave her vitamin treatment, but she lost more and more weight every day. The strange bump on her back, which had disappeared roughly two years ago, is back. So is the yellow fungus.

We're putting wound healer on the infected areas again, we're keeping her clean and we've fed her all week long, even though she doesn't want to eat, but she's not getting any better. She is practically skeletal. If we weren't so attached to her, we probably would have put her in the freezer by now to put her out of her misery. I have never seen anything so depressing. Nothing seems to help at all. Right now I'm not sure which option is more cruel. Stuffing more and more food down her throat, hoping for a miracle or putting her to sleep and taking away all chances for a recovery, however unlikely. 

Oh and since people are rather quick to judge on the internet when it comes to animals: We've rescued a beardie about a year ago, who is happy and healthy, we have a very healthy royal python and our savannah monitor is perfectly fit. We take very good care of our reptiles, as does the shop where we get them from. Whatever problem Chompy is having and whatever killed off all the other beardies in her clutch, is down to the breeder who gave them away in the first place.

It's frustrating. I don't know what to do. It feels like I'm not doing enough, but what could we have done, that we didn't already try anyway? This is not how I was expecting to lose her, and after only two years at that.

-Cat