Multiple whammy!

This has not been the best of weeks.

A couple of weekends ago, Ali comes back from a friend's house with a fish tank that her friend no longer wants. "What are you going to do with that?" I ask. Silly question. Kids all excited at the idea of adding to the household menagerie, and in come two guppies.

Two days later, Megan's dies. Very upsetting, but soon a carbon copy is installed (hmm...could you really make a carbon copy of a carbon-based life form?) and all is well.

Until this week.

Tuesday (again) kids return from school to find Megan's guppy dead (again). "I hate Tuesdays," she sniffles.

Wednesday, Matthew's joins it in the great fish bowl in the sky.

Wednesday, also, is a grim day at work. My Ministry is shedding over 200 jobs as part of "transformation", another word for cost-cutting for those to whom the only costs worth counting are financial. Unionised staff got their letters on Wednesday, including people in danger of being "bumped" under the union rules for clinging on to long-serving people at the expense of the new blood essential for the future. Many offices severely slashed, including some friends and valued colleagues of mine.

The best bit is, we now know there are a load of non-union (that's me!) redundancies still to be announced, but not until next week. Keep sweating guys!

Thursday, Ali finds one of our cats, Princess, looking ill and in pain. Rushes her off to the vet, worried about a road hit. If only it was that simple. No signs of trauma, possibility of poisoning or some kind of infection.

Friday, she is no better I take her back and then sign her in to the vetinary hospital downtown. Lots of waiting around. Urine sample shows protein and other stuff that shouldn't be there, and red blood cells getting sticky & clumping. Not good signs, but too many possible underlying causes for any certainty of treatment.

Sunday, we could be looking at pancreatic cancer, but still not positive.

The cost of all this would be worrying at the best of times, but this has come at the worst possible time on top of all the uncertainty at work.

Not made any progress on writing this week. I just can't get enthusiastic about anything like that right now. But we now have two zebra fish, still going strong!