Excellent weekend. Less excellent Monday.

Our backpacking trip went spendidly.  The weather cooperated quite well for mid March.  It was around 60 degrees on Saturday, up to about 55 on Sunday.  It got a wee bit cold at night.  Not below freezing, but my sleeping bag was wholly inadequate.  I've officially given up on that sleeping bag except for ~50 degree weather, and am now on a new search for something to keep me warm when it's cold out.  I think I might have gotten 4 hours of sleep, if that.  And I was in bed from 9-7.  That's a long time to be cold.

I'm planning to write up the weekend in trailjournals entries Real Soon Now.

Today was a day of multiple vet visits.  Beauty woke me up at 6:30 because OMG THUNDER!  We headed over to the vet at the appointed time to get her blood test done.  The results came back very high (i.e. bad) for liver values.  The vet thinks that is related to the steroids she's on.  We just reduced the steroid dose on Thursday, and you can't ramp down too quickly.  So we stay at the current dose, but we're going back for an examination and more blood work in a couple of weeks, barring any other negative symptoms in the mean time. 

After that I headed out to the farm to meet the equine vet.  Pluto's explodey node hasn't shrunk, and she got pus out of it this time.  Since the last blood test came out low positive, she repeated it (per the lab's instructions to repeat at 7-14 days - to make sure it's still a low positive, not a high positive, as it would be if the infection were increasing).  She is also sending the pus to the lab to be cultured.  The quarantine continues to drag on.  I am hoping very hard for a negative on the culture.  If it's positive it should at least tell us what drugs it's sensitive to, as the sulfa antibiotics didn't do anything.

Aside from the bad node, Pluto seems healthy and in good spirits.  So that's something. 

Me, I have a migraine, a couple of earaches, and some dizziness.  Yay spring?  JD gets the firehose nose, but I tend to get more painful symptoms.  IIRC the next round of spring things brings the "my eyeballs are going to fall out" feeling.  That's always a good one.

All in all I would not say today was a good day for my household.  But, we're all still alive.  I will settle for that today.