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.

I am back home now. I woke up this morning and it occurred to me to look for caches along the route home; as I did so I noticed this new cache so I went out and logged it. I also noticed that this cache was in the Thomas Edison rest area on the Jersey Turnpike, so we planned to switch drivers there. That was fairly soon after leaving NYC, but we needed gas anyway so we stopped there. While A waited in line for gas I went off in search of the cache, which I found quite easily - for a total of three caches in one weekend, in three different states, without my GPS receiver! I drove the rest of the way home, which is a long drive, more than 200 miles from that rest area. When we got home Toadstool was nowhere to be found; I quickly located her under our bed and in very bad shape. She gets depressed when we go away, and she had apparently stopped eating and drinking. She was extremely dehydrated, and too weak to drink even though she was interested in the water. So we used the squirt bottle (originally filled with feline dental cleanser, but washed and filled with plain water) and got some water into her; she’s doing marginally better but still in extremely bad shape. So who knows what will happen now. Oh, and and the power was out for several hours when we got home, which meant that we couldn’t do anything but lie around sweating. Just as I suggested we take a cool shower (by candlelight; there’s no window in the bathroom) the power came back on, so we had our rinse-off and that was it for the night. I did have to run over to A’s parents’ house to pick something up, and on the way back I could see the town’s fireworks over the trees, so that was fun.

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.

They have been called ugly, freaks, and weird - but the Sphynx cat is exactly like other cats, minus the fur. Those who claim the Sphynx is a freak have probably never met one.
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• I lost 11 pounds in my first month on Diet to Go. I know it won’t continue at that rate, and I need to start exercising a lot more, but I am pleased with that start.
• I kind of exercised today: I went geocaching with a guy from the NoVAGO group. It was a couple of hours of tromping around in the woods, probably 1.5 miles total, with some light rain part of the time. We found all four caches in Fox Mill District Park.
• Toadie weighs in with her thoughts on the pet dumping.
• This one is important! I need your help! For a while now, A and I have had a website in the works about MK&R’s cat Mischa. (Those are my sister-in-law and her husband, by the way; they live with us.) They like to tease us with fake websites: “Oh, I found a new website today! Know what it was called? YouAreADork.com!” So we started teasing them back about MischaIsAFattie.com…and then we went out and registered it! So there is a website at that address with pictures of Mischa, stories about him, etc. Please go look at the website and sign the guestbook with a comment about how FAT Mischa is! Once there are lots of comments in the guestbook, we’ll casually suggest that MK&R go look at that URL. (And yes, we will have taken down the Xmas theme by then - we just didn’t have it ready for Xmas.)

If you live anywhere in the DC metro area, you might have heard about the hundreds of deceased pets found dumped in Hampshire County, WV. The situation is similar to the Tri-State Crematory case in Georgia; the crematory didn’t dispose of the bodies in the agreed-upon manner, which is illegal.

I heard about the pets in West Virginia yesterday on the radio but I didn’t pay much attention. This morning, during a local news segment on NPR, I heard more about it, including the fact that Fairfax County (where I live) was somehow involved. I couldn’t help wondering if it was the place we took Wu, but the news moved on and I forgot about it. Tonight, after we finished dinner, A started a philosophical discussion about souls and bodies and what happens after we die. I didn’t know what she was leading up to, so we talked about it for a while before she broke the news.

Family Pet Creations, in Chantilly, was where we took Wu, and they are presently under investigation in the dumping case. A found out about this during the day today, and she called the Fairfax County police to ask what was being done with the animals. She learned they had already been destroyed, and no attempts were made to identify any of them individually, only that most (if not all) had come from the Fairfax County animal shelter. The officer she spoke with was very sympathetic - in fact, she had taken her cat to the same place a year ago. The officer said she was “choosing to believe” that they had cremated her pet as promised and returned the ashes to her.

So we talked about how we felt about the situation. We opened the white box for the first time and held the sealed clear plastic bag while we talked about it. We agreed that although the company may have dumped shelter animals because they didn’t get paid enough for them, they probably treated individual pets brought to them as they were supposed to be treated. We brought Wu in ourselves, we paid for her individual cremation, and we think we received the actual ashes of our cat and only her. So I don’t think we were lied to or mistreated by Family Pet Cremations, but I am really mad at them for putting the doubt into my mind in the first place. A has disputed the charge on her credit card.

When we finished talking, we finally opened the urn we bought for her. A put in some loose catnip, I put in two milk jug rings and her favorite piece of string, and then I put in the bag without opening it. We got our sweet girl, I’m sure of it, but I just don’t understand why some people can’t do their jobs right in the first place.

It’s been two weeks since my kitty girl had to leave us. I am doing much better but looking at this Catster thread still brings tears to my eyes. Recently we were driving on Route 29 near Fairfax Circle, near some condos or townhouses (something residential), and we saw several cars pulled over to the side of the road and a group of people standing in a circle around something in the middle of the road. As we drove by we saw it was someone’s golden retriever (or another large dog) who had been struck. That really wrenched my heart. I’m so glad we got to be with her, that we got to say goodbye, that she died peacefully. My torn heart just went out to the owners of that poor dog.

Wu is still in her little white box, and her picture is propped up in front of it right next to the TV in our bedroom so we see her all the time. (We had kept her in her favorite basket, but Toadstool only let us do that for a couple of days before reclaiming it.) Her urn is on top of the TV, and two of her favorite toys - the ring from around a milk jug and a thick little piece of black cord - are on top of her box. I don’t know when we’re going to put her in her last home. I can still see her in front of me on the table, see her fall as the drug went into her veins. Sigh…it seems I have mostly pushed the grief aside in favor of things like birthdays and legal drama, but when I think about her it just keeps hurting me. So I’m crying at the moment. I haven’t been able to look at her final picture lately, but this one is on my laptop’s wallpaper and this one is on A’s laptop wallpaper.

Oh, I miss my kitty girl.