With 38.1% of the vote, the winner is Violet Silk Brocade! I’ve sent in my measurements and fabric choice and all that and if I’m lucky I’ll get the corset by the time we go on vacation; if not by then, maybe by the Mr. DC Eagle contest.

Poor Amanita had to go to the vet today. She has been having problems hearing, and she hadn’t had a health checkup in forever - she’s probably about 12 years old now. So off to the vet she went, and the poor baby puked on the way there and peed herself on the way back. She got a rabies shot and a leukemia test, and was pronounced in reasonably good health. The hearing problems - she was quite deaf for a while, but she responds to loud sounds now - are due to gunk in her ears, so they cleaned that out, and there’s more in there they weren’t able to get to. She also has a cracked tooth that will have to be removed at some point, and they’ll clean her ears more deeply when she’s under anesthesia for that. The vet wasn’t particularly concerned about her stiffness, it’s just part of getting old; he said losing some weight would help but not to worry about it too much.

Well, that’s an experience I don’t care to repeat. Specifically, dragging a very scared and confused Maine Coon out from under a deck that hasn’t ever heard the word “clean” in its life.

Somehow, the cat got out. Read the rest of this entry »

Toadstool is gone. It was a long time in coming; she almost died in January and then again in May. We were living on borrowed time for a long time, and her quality of life had gone sharply downhill. In the end, we decided to stop giving her water; she was drinking it willingly but it wasn’t bringing her back and so it was only prolonging the inevitable. Last night, when we were trying to go to sleep, she was crying quite loudly from the sink (she liked it there) every 20 minutes, but we couldn’t do anything for her. So we gave her a couple of Ativan and she was peaceful through this morning. She was so peaceful that when I woke up at 5:00am and peered at her in the dark (she was in a basket on our bed at this point) I thought she was already gone. A came home to check on her around noon today, and she was almost gone. She stayed with her through the end, giving her morphine to ease her passing. She died at about 3:30pm and A arranged her in a basket (picture here) so I could see her when I got home.

She had a good long life - 16½ years. You can read her final missive at hello_grumpy. It’s quite fitting, really…that’s just what she would say.

Tonight I watched the premiere of “Meerkat Manor,” a new half-hour series on Animal Planet. Everybody knows meerkats are adorable as they pose up on their hind legs. But do you know what’s even cuter than a meerkat? A baby meerkat. Specifically, a three-week-old baby meerkat. Especially when they’re practicing balancing on their hind legs. And when you put a couple of baby meerkats together, the cuteness factor shoots through the roof. See, I made this icon to prove it:

“Meerkat Manor” is narrated by Sean Astin, known to most of us as Samwise Gamgee from the Lord of the Rings films. The narration is a mix of anthropomorphizing and reality - the writers attribute a lot of emotions to the meerkats, but in a way that might just indicate what they’re actually feeling - or at least doing. The animals probably don’t have the depth of feeling we do, but they definitely interact in a social way, and it’s captivating to watch. If you get Animal Planet, I definitely recommend checking out “Meerkat Manor.”

For more information about meerkats, check out the Fellow Earthlings website. For $100 you can adopt a meerkat, and that includes a two-hour session for four within the meerkat enclosure! (The center is near Palm Springs, CA.)

I had promised kgola a little video with a couple of signs, and quarterling seemed interested too (?), so I made this video blog. It also gets into the new Gallaudet president a little bit, and at the end is an introduction of Amanita. :MK:, my sister-in-law, walks by in the background!

I still had Windows Movie Maker open when A started playing with Toadie and a lunchbag, so I took a short video of that, too.

Transcription follows, use rot13 to decode:
Read the rest of this entry »

Do you think having 73 pictures of Toadstool is overkill? I can’t help it. She’s an old lady, and she’s had some close calls recently. In January she wasn’t eating or drinking and got so dehydrated she had to stay at the vet’s overnight (this was a couple of days after Wu left us). Since then she’s been on wet food pretty much exclusively, and it seems to have reduced the barf episodes to once or twice a week (as opposed to four or five days a week, with at least one episode a day, with multiple - uh, products). She’s really stiff and old now, and her paw is still swollen with the mast cell tumor. She’s had a couple of episodes of neurological tics (I took the video because A wasn’t home and I wanted her to see what was happening) and she’s been having multiple episodes of feeling unwell - where we can just tell she feels really bad and uncomfortable.

So she’s going to go soon. She’s 16 years old. I worry every time I go to sleep, go to work, go out, anything - I worry she won’t be here when I get back. Hence the tons of pictures and videos. Because I worry about my old girl.

Tonight A and I had to take MK&R’s cat Mischa to the vet. He’s been overlicking a couple of spots lately and they’ve turned into bad sores, so we wanted to get him taken care of. We brought him to the vet and she pronounced him…well, neurotic. She announced that immediately after we explained that MK&R have been away from home a lot lately, and he’s been lonely. So she gave us a prescription for Prozac, a packet of antibiotics for the sores, and an Elizabethan collar so he wouldn’t keep licking his sores and the antibiotic could heal them up. He looks like a dork and we have been laughing uproariously, but he is not happy.

I think I’m going to get another tattoo. I got my current one (SFW, NSFW) in December 1999 and I screamed bloody murder the whole time, so I never got it touched up. I have been considering another tattoo for a while now, but I promised I would get the original touched up before getting anything additional. I just called Dragon Moon to see if my original artist could do the touch up, but they require $100 cash before they will even make an appointment. (Because I live more than an hour away, they’d accept a $100 money order in the mail.) Also, the black they use is different now, so she would probably have to go over the whole thing to make it look even.

So I think I’m going to get my other tattoo first, because that will be small and will help prepare me for the larger project of my original tattoo getting touched up. I had originally wanted a Hello Kitty tattoo, but I discarded that idea a little while ago. Now, I know what I’m getting: a memorial tattoo for Wu. I’ve been reading an “Over the Rainbow” [Bridge] group at Catster, and I’ve been thinking about a memorial for her. Someone suggested a scrapbook, but I realized…I could really go for a tattoo. It would be like keeping her with me always - and probably about the same price as any of the cremation jewelry I looked at.

I’m planning to get a paw print, but I want a realistic one rather than a stylized silhouette, probably not more than an inch square. I’m going to get it on the outside of my thigh, up close to my hip. As my other cats cross the Rainbow Bridge, I will want to get a new paw for each of them, until there is a trail of them down my thigh. A couple of people have suggested an initial in each, or a name with them, but I don’t think I’m going to do that - I want to memorialize in the abstract. I know it’s a memorial tattoo, but nobody else has to.

I have to decide where to go. Dragon Moon is too far away, so it should be somewhere in the DC area. There are apparently a couple of places in Fairfax, and of course there are several in the city itself. Jinx Proof is reportedly very clean and reasonably good, but everyone agrees they are expensive and some people say the artists have poor “bedside” manners. Fatty’s Custom Tattooz is also supposed to be good but pricey, but I don’t think I want to tell people “Fatty’s” when they ask where I got the ink. There’s also Tattoo Paradise, and I’m curious about AX Tattoo because she’s on the LiveJournal friends lists of both preppyperv and redwaterlilly, and I could swear I recognize her. So I have to figure out where to go, and I should probably visit a few places. But I’m pretty damn sure I want this tattoo.