I’ve posted about this on Facebook, Lit, AllDeaf, and Twitter. It’s time I shared it here.

We are having Amanita put to sleep tomorrow. My sweet little girl, who I named my website after in 1999, is senile and has kidney failure. She hydrates herself okay, but over time she has forgotten all about the litter box. So she piddles everywhere, and she isn’t suddenly going to get smart and figure it out. She also hasn’t groomed herself in months…after she pees, she sits in it, and then doesn’t wash herself. She’s been completely deaf for years, but now her eyesight and sense of smell are also going. She has trouble finding treats when you hold them in your hand right in front of her. She has been doing “inappropriate vocalizations” for the past several months; we thought it was just the change of house and then wanting to be let out of the bedroom, but I found that it was a sign of senility and since she had never meowed so much in all the years we’ve had her, I suspect it’s related.

It’s so hard to have to do this. Right now she is snoozing with me on the bed, and she - oh, now she is getting up. See, she walks around fine, doesn’t like being held too long, doesn’t like you getting in her face, all the normal cat things. So it just doesn’t seem like she’s really sick enough for this. But she is senile, she is basically a dotty old lady without a clue now. She gets terribly depressed without us, so we can’t give her to a farm or anything like that - and anyway, I don’t want to. So the only place she could live would be the bathroom, and what kind of life is that?

I took today off work to be with her. I’m taking tomorrow off work, and so is my wife, so we can do it. I’m not sure about Thursday. I’ve been crying on and off all morning, I’ve found a place that will cremate her for $150 and we already have an urn (with Wu and Toadstool) to place her in. Once again I am really sorely tempted to buy some kind of cremation jewelry. Also, it’s going to be time for another paw print tattoo, dammit.

Pictures and video here.

I sent the following e-mail to my wife shortly after I got home this afternoon.

Do you have any compressed air at work? Can you please bring it home?

I have the world’s most disgusting computer problem.

Remember the tiny ants I mentioned? Turns out they’re not in the bedroom.

They’re in MY COMPUTER.

I am NOT making this up. I have watched them coming out of the keyboard at least a dozen times now.

I think an ant crawled in through one of the vents, and did whatever ants do to reproduce, and now I have a computer full of ants.

This calls for a nap.

There still aren’t as many pet networking sites out there as human networking sites, but the field just got a little bigger with the addition of AnAmigo, a site for pets and pet lovers. I already have kitty profiles on another site, but I tried out AnAmigo too. The first thing that caught my attention is that it’s for US users only…I wonder why they’ve made that limitation. The funniest thing about the site is the pets they have on there - dogs, cats, and horses! I would guess that birds, guinea pigs, and fish are more common in the US than horses, just because horses are much more expensive to buy and maintain. So anyway, I made profiles for the kitties, and I was surprised that you have to provide a date of birth. I just listed all of mine as January 1st, except the red boy’s, because I know he was born sometime in May.

So anyway, my kitties are now on there. It will be interesting to see how the site takes off; they had a launch party at Sundance that Paris Hilton went to…but I can’t find her dog on the site, heh!
 

We went to the San Diego Zoo today, and walked around Balboa Park a bit. The zoo was both delightful and disappointing. Many of the exhibits were really outstanding - the habitats for bonobos and gorillas in particular. But I was surprised how many of the exhibits were depressing. I know animals in zoos don’t have much to do, but they were all just sitting there. I think the most excited ones were the birds, just hopping around in their little cages without much going on in their heads. The hippos were bored, and so were the tigers, although I think actually we just happened to catch the tigers at lunchtime. We got to see a really funny looking pig eating his piggy chow, and of course we saw the meerkats rolling around in their rascally way, though we had to walk quite a ways to get to them. I think my favorite part was the clouded leopard. When we got there, a keeper had the young leopard on his lap and was petting him the way you’d pet any cat. Eventually kitty got bored and hopped down, and then rolled around on the ground and marked things just like a housecat! He may have been a very expensive and exotic cat, but he was a cat just the same. The zoo settings were just gorgeous. The whole place is wooded, and it’s basically on a hillside so there is a lot of opportunity to go up and down to various levels of the park.

But what really amazed me was that as huge as the zoo was, it was less than a quarter of the size of Balboa Park as a whole. We wandered around in the park a bit, including taking a ride on the little railroad that A remembers from over 20 years ago. She went into lots of museum shops, which I wasn’t interested in because I always feel clumsy in them and I worry about breaking stuff. We had a snow-cone thing, and just sat in the sun and enjoyed watching all the other people enjoying the park. There were several buskers and it was just a really perfect day. Of course, then we had a two-hour drive to Los Angeles ahead of us, but that was okay. We were tired from walking all day plus cramped from sitting in the car, so we have been sitting around staring at each other since we arrived. Tomorrow I plan to wake up, drive A to her training, and come back to shower and get ready for the day. I’m going to meet a friend at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, and we are also going to visit the Queen Mary.

Too tired to upload today’s photos and videos - I got clouded leopard and meerkat videos! This hotel’s wireless connection is superb though, so I’ll be uploading everything sometime tomorrow.

Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken is on TV, it’s the 1991 movie about the old Atlantic City diving horses and the girl who was blinded during a dive. I was 10 when the movie came out, and I loved horses, so I loved this movie! But I haven’t seen it in at least a dozen years. It just happens to be on one of the 87,000 channels my in-laws get (Encore Drama, to be specific) so I’m watching it now. I went looking for information about the diving horses, and I came upon this page about them.

I was quite surprised to see a mention of “Petticoat Discipline Quarterly” in the article. I looked up at the URL, and to my surprise, I was on the Petticoat Discipline Quarterly site! I’ve heard of petticoat discipline before, and it doesn’t bother me at all, I just don’t get why the page about diving horses was on a petticoat discipline site!

I made this!

Supposedly you can vote on it here, though I don’t see no votin’ link. Also, I ordered the lolrus shirt because I COOD NOT HEP MYSEFFS.

Technically dogs aren’t allowed on the boardwalk from April 1 to October 31, but it’s definitely past tourist season even though there’s technically a couple of weeks left. Nobody seems to mind the dogs around. A gay male couple just went by the one direction, walking a tiny Yorkie. They passed a giant St. Bernard wearing (I swear I am not making this up) a hot pink harness and leash. I think I actually heard the guy say “don’t laugh” as I started to chuckle. Anyway, the St. Bernard passed and the Yorkie sniffed at it, and the gay guys walking her said “down girl, don’t hurt that big dog!”

Deaf Cats.
Mr. Harrison Weir, president of the National Cat Club, England, says in his book “Our Cat,” that a white cat of the long or the short-haired breed is likely to be deaf. Should it have blue eyes, the fancy color, it is almost certain to be deaf. Mr Weir, at a cat show, purchased a white cat - a beauty, loving and gentle, for the low price of two guineas. When he got it home, the cat proved to be “stone deaf.”
Then the trouble began. if shut out of the dining room, its cry for admission could be heard all over the house, for it being deaf did not know the noise it made, though its owner often wished it could hear its own cry. When it called out as it sat on his lap, it called with ten-cat power, and its commanding voice caused it to be named the “Colonel.”
One day a friend saw the “beauty,” and admired it so much as to accept it for a gift, even after being told that it was “stone deaf.” A few days after Mr. Weir received a letter from the friend offering to return the loud-voiced cat.
“Give it to any one you please, but don’t return it to us,” was the reply.
The “Colonel” was given to a deaf old lady, and both were very happy.
The Silent Worker, vol. 4, no. 35, October 29, 1891.

On my last day in Las Vegas, I once again walked a lot - about four or five miles. I thought of something I should have bought at the Star Trek place, so I caught the monorail from Harrah’s to the Hilton. I spent forever in the gift shops again, and got what I needed.

My next stop was to be Luv-It Frozen Custard, which I’d read about somewhere or other. I had only had a muffin for breakfast and the custard shop didn’t open until 1pm, so I figured I’d get lunch on the way. It was a little confusing as I made my way back to the Strip on foot; I had figured I’d be able to get there if I just headed for the big buildings. It was extremely windy, and all day as I walked along I got dust, sand, and grit in my teeth and eyes. It wasn’t pleasant but there also wasn’t anything I could really do about it.

The only place I stopped along the way was a head shop to take a picture of the funny sign they had on display, so I ended up getting to the custard place about 40 minutes before it opened. I wasn’t the only person to arrive early - at about 5 minutes to 1:00 a guy pulled up and sat in his car waiting. Once the place opened I had to wait a bit more for the flavor of the day, but then I got my treat and headed back to the Strip.

I passed the Stratosphere but decided the rides at the top probably weren’t operating due to the high winds, so I didn’t go up. I kept walking, and I suddenly noticed that the NASCAR Café had a roller coaster in front of it - and it was operating! I had thought I’d already hit all the coasters on the Strip, but since I hadn’t been on this one I went in and paid $10 to ride. When I was done I headed right back out to the Strip and kept walking south.

I was heading for the Mirage, because I wanted to see the white tigers and the dolphin habitat. We had passed the tiger display the night before going to the Love shop, but the big cats had already been put to bed for the night. I cut through Treasure Island to get to the Mirage, and headed for the dolphin area first. Let me tell you: that is the biggest ripoff on the Strip. They had three dolphins doing tricks in a main pool for just a few minutes, and then they were put back into a small, featureless pool with underwater viewing windows. If you’re not familiar with dolphins, you might not know this, but they are extremely intelligent and require play and ways to entertain themselves. Their holding pool was 100% empty, but the permanent “smiles” on their faces fooled most visitors into thinking they were happy anyway. There were two more dolphins in a huge research pool elsewhere, but those two were just hanging out by the gate, hoping to get let through. I was so disappointed at the situation these dolphins were in that I couldn’t even look at the garden included in the $15 admission price. If you have ever seen a dolphin elsewhere, then you already know what they look like, so don’t waste your money visiting these. I’d love to do the Mirage’s $500 “trainer for a day” program and find out more about their facilities, and why they treat them the way they appear to be treating them. On my way out, I went by the tiger display, where there was a single bored-looking white tiger pacing and occasionally catching a drink.

I got back to the hotel and I was ready to relax for a couple of hours, but A’s training let out early and she came in 45 minutes after I did. We decided to have dinner at Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba, a tapas place that was recommended to me. The wait for an inside table was 30 minutes, but they had those patio warmers around the outdoor seating, so that’s where we sat, and we were plenty warm! Their specialty seems to be sangria, so we ordered half a pitcher of passionfruit sangria and some tapas. We finished the sangria pretty quickly and the waiter offered to bring us some more, so we ended up having a merry time during dinner. I took A into the Wynn on the way back so she could see their lovely bright mosaic floors. Once we were back in the hotel room, she started to pack and I started on my solemn duty of drinking up all the leftover soda and vodka - so I had a very fun last few hours in Vegas.

Our trip home today was entirely uneventful. We arrived at the airport in plenty of time, waited in the long security line, and headed for the gate. The flight itself was long with lots of turbulence, but otherwise fine.

I just have to share this, because I am so totally thrilled about it. Ladies and gentlemen, today I am twice as close to being on Cute Overload as I will ever get.

If you saw my quicklinks in the past day or two, you may have noticed the scuba diving cat video that I personally captioned, including two minor errors that I don’t feel an urge to fix. It took me about 45 minutes to caption the one-minute video, because I kept having to start at the beginning to make sure everything was still in sync. Now, I know there are multiple editions of the scuba kitty video on Google Video. But only one of them is captioned, and the two posts from CO both include the captions. (It’s also up on CuteCast.)

No, it’s not me in the video. No, I don’t know the cat. But you know what? That is as damn close to being on Cute Overload as I will ever get, and I’m totally stoked. So there.