Do you have another one in stock...

...it's just that this one's broken?

This won't go down as a great week animal wise. After losing Alfie last weekend, this weekend started with Charli spending the night in the pet hospital in Zafra.

She'd been happily playing with Rosie all week, but midday yesterday, the play was interrupted by squealing. Kate got outside first and could see she'd hurt her leg. After checking her, I confidently declared it wasn't broken.

Joanna, the vet, spent about 5 seconds checking her before declaring it was broken.

Her leg's now held together with pins and scaffolding. We think Javi oversaw her operation, but didn't do the work himself. Javi is the vet who fixed Pirata's leg after he broke it before he came to us, so hopefully Charli will make as full a recovery.

So long Alfie

Rather out of the blue, we lost Alfie on Sunday. We'd taken Tinkerbelle to the vet Friday morning for a revision as she's had a cough. Before leaving, Alfie had coughed a few times, but not anywhere near enough to think about taking him with us.

We were back home by lunchtime and by mid afternoon, Alfie was starting to cough a lot more. I made a second visit to Zafra to have him checked out and they wanted to keep him in overnight.

I went back Saturday morning and he hadn't improved. I asked if we should be considering putting him to sleep, but they wanted to give him a day or two to see if he could bounce back. Because his breathing was poor, they didn't want me to see him and get him excited, but would call with an update on Sunday.

By then, I was preparing for having to put him to sleep, but at breakfast on Sunday, they called to say he'd died that morning. Obviously rather sad and I do wish I'd been with him, but being at the vets was obviously the best place for him.

He'd have marked four years with us in April and as we were told he was 12 when he came to us, he'd had a reasonable run. All the more so as late summer 2015, his sudden epileptic seizures made us all assume he had a brain tumour and probably wouldn't be with us for that Christmas.

We'll never know how he came to be a stray up in Palencia, but he'd obviously been cared for in his earlier life. Someone had his eye patched up and his back leg that he'd lost at the knee. Hopefully his time with us and with his previous home will have offset the bad things he went through.

I remember when we were driving away from the vets a few years ago having discovered he had an airgun pellet lodged by his lung.

I turned to Kate and started to say, "I can't believe that someone would shoot..."

Then, "...oh actually, no I can!"

It was probably someone who'd tried to feed him some frankfurter. He had drugs twice a day and these were given to him in a chunk of frankfurter. I learned the hard way not to pass it to him, but to put it on the ground just in front of him and let him pick it up from there.

For such a little thing, he's left quite a space. Along with Herbie and Millie, he's played a big part in turning me into a bit of a Yorkshire Terrier fan. That's something I'd never have imagined saying five years ago.

Climbing Horace

Horace is a bit of a climber. We've had to move his bed as he used his bed to climb onto a chair to climb onto the bed base to climb onto the mattress to climb on top of the duvet. I watched him do it and it was like watching the squirrel from the advert on the television a few years ago. The trouble is, as his preferred method of movement is skip, he skipped over the top of the duvet and straight on the floor. So I moved his bed to stop him from climbing.

He also climbs onto the sofa now and no longer needs the little box he used before and I think he'd climb onto the table if I let him. He's also finding his way onto the back step when I put him outside. That doesn't happen every time though, I think it depends how far away his has gone. If he goes up one of the steps he can't get down, so he gets stranded. However, I've put a water bowl outside the back door and he's getting used to drinking from there, which is better.

Poor Sam is in the middle of a cluster of seizures at the moment. It had been a very long time since he'd had a seizure - over a year - but he's had several now since Friday.

I bought Larry some super-posh food. It's food specially formulated for South American parrots. Although goodness knows how many generations you'd have to go back to find Larry's South Amercian roots. It's formulated by the Tenerife Parrot Park and contains less sunflower seeds - which is good, and more grains and nuts. I'm watching him closely, however, as he is a very piniky eater, and when he was ill two years ago, it was because he was only eating sunflower seeds. He's a lot better now, but we still have to watch him.

Still been very dry. It did rain the other day, but not much. We now want it to rain as it is getting close to the asparagus season!