13:00 Thursday Update: Buddy is still in hospital and is unable to keep any food down. They will be feeding him by a tube today. They have some pills they want to try, but they won’t be effective if he can’t keep them down. Several of us will be going to visit him in hospital at 14:00. We’ll know more after the visit.

I have some extremely troubling news: Mr. Buddy, our famous mascot, is very, very ill. He has suffered several illnesses so far this year. On Sunday he was fine. Sunday evening he became violently ill. Monday he went to the vet and Monday afternoon he was fine again. He had a little something to eat Monday evening and became even more ill and very weak. On Tuesday, the Vet said, “It doesn’t look good.” She sent his blood in for a full workup, and everything came back fine. Tuesday afternoon, he rallied. Then at 15:00 he went back to the vet and she put a camera down his throat and couldn’t find anything. The also fed him some liquid so they could look at him on the ultra-sound. Last night and this morning, he has been very, very weak and nauseated. He had to remain in the hospital over night, because he had to have a general anesthetic because of the video camera. As I write this (16:00), Mr. Buddy is back at the Vet’s again.

Our entire crew is wish him the very best. I will know more in a couple of hours. It seems to be very touch and go with Mr. Buddy. I can tell you Aida and I were very lonely last night.

I’ll update this post when I know more.

This Gallery was shot on Saturday by our ex-workshop student. The photos are great, and you can see what great shape Buddy was in as recently as Saturday morning.

UPDATE: Pavel Nikos called me from Vet and said Buddy will have to stay in hospital for 48 hours. He needs 24 hour monitoring. They will do many tests to see if they can find the problem.

(I think this gallery works best on IE. There is an update to the gallery software, but I had to publish this using the old version.)