Busy Night

This evening, I went to a fundraiser for Tim Walz. He's a veteran, a football coach, a high school teacher, and runs a small business through which he conducts educational trips to China for high school students. Tim Walz is also running against Gil Gutnecht for the first district Congressional seat. I got to meet him and Al Franken, who was also at the fundraiser. The race hasn't gotten much coverage (i.e. polling), so I don't really know how close it is. The first district is traditionally a Republican stronghold in the state, but in the last election many of the Republican state legislators were voted out. Also, Bush only got 51% of the vote in 2004, so it's more of a swing district than the state Republican party would like to admit. Tim Walz was an inspiring speaker. He's a true blue patriot, and he speaks with sincerity both when he praises the military, and when he criticizes the war in Iraq. He's humble and eloquent, but also clearly cut out for leadership. I really hope he wins.

I got home and took Madame Kyuuri out of her cage and went and sat over in my papasan chair. She likes to climb around on the chair, and she will sit on the top of the chair and stretch her neck down over my shoulder for head scratches. As I was sitting there with her, I noticed that her beak was all wet. Then I noticed that her nares were wet too. Then she sneezed.

I thought, "Crap! My bird has a cold".. :( I couldn't decide whether to take her into the emergency vet - while many of the people at the bird rescue think highly of the Oakdale clinic, I'm still not really sure what they could do for a bird with the sniffles. I tried calling various people from the bird rescue, and eventually ended up calling the bird rescue itslef. I know the Thursday night shift leader and I would trust her advice. I got ahold of one of the other volunteers, who said the shift leader had stepped out for a few minutes. I left my number for her to call me back and started rifling through my one Quaker book to see what it said about runny nares. Around this time, I noticed that there was a little draft coming from the window by the papasan. Drafts are notoriously bad for healthy birds, let alone sick ones, so I moved over to my couch. As I looked through the book (which oh so helpfully said that Quakers have a strong constitution, tolerate cold temperatures extremely well, and rarely get sick), I noticed that her nares had stopped running. I stopped freaking out quite so much at that point. I heard back from the shift leader after about 5-10 minutes, and she was extremely helpful. I told her what had happened, and that it seemed to have stopped. She confirmed my belief that the emergency vet is better set up for dealing with physical injuries and breathing problems than what I was seeing, and that the stress of moving Madame Kyuuri could make a mild illness quite a bit worse. She also thought that maybe something had just gotten into Kyuuri's nares that had irritated them, since they had stopped running and had been running clear when they were running. Nonetheless, she recommended that I set up Kyuuri's cage overnight with a towel above the grate, a heating pad underneath the grate, and a blanket over it so that she stays plenty warm. And she also recommended to be sure that her cage is close enough to me during the night that I can hear her and can check on her easily. Even though Kyuuri's sniffiles seem to have passed, I'll call my regular vet first thing tomorrow and will bring her in if the vet thinks I should.