Sailbourne

It seems like 2008 was a really wild and crazy year for just about everyone we know — no less for Joe and I.  Before the memories fade too far into the distance, I thought I’d do a brief summary.  Then I can stash all the grief where it belongs — the past.

Q1 (Jan-March) — Black Cat, Giallo Hotel

It all started looking like Lilith had a cold — her nose was runny.  We gave it a week — the normal time for a virus to run its course — and took her to the vet.  It wasn’t a cold.  After some tests, it seemed likely that she had nasal lymphoma.  There was only one way to be certain it was cancer — take her to a specialist for a rhinoscopy.  We had the money for that.  We paid it, Lilith had the surgery, and we got good news and bad news.  Bad news: it was definitely lymphoma, it wasn’t really curable, and we didn’t have the money for things like chemotherapy.  Good news:  the rhinoscopy left Lilith feeling much better, almost as if she wasn’t sick at all.  We had some more time with her.  No telling how much.

At the same time, Joe was working like crazy on the last episodes of the latest, biggest, meanest Afterhell story:  “Bloodbath at the Giallo Hotel.”  The final installments went out over the podcast feed, and Joe compiled the story in time to send it off for the Mark Time/Ogle Awards.

Q2 (April – June) — Farewell, and a Mention

After six weeks of good health, Lilith took a bad turn for the worse in early April.  We and the vets did what we could, but there wasn’t much left.  At the end of April, we had her euthanized.  It broke our hearts.  After almost exactly ten years with us, she was gone.  Lilith had adopted Joe back in 1998, and he was always her person.  He has begun to tell her story in his own blog.

Not long after we said goodbye to Lilith, we got surprising news from the folks at the Mark Time/Ogle Awards.  Afterhell Volume 3: Bloodbath at the Giallo Hotel had earned an Honorable Mention Ogle award.

And at about the same time we realized that Kyouju wasn’t well.  More vet visits, more bad news and good news.  Bad news:  he had a hyperactive thyroid, not uncommon in older cats but relatively rare in a nine-year-old.  The treatment: radioactive iodine, involving a four-day vet hospital stay and four weeks of isolation and minimal contact with us.  The good news:  He was completely cured.  Even before we could let him out of his cage, he was putting the pounds he had lost back on.  Joe’s written about this in detail, too.

I’ll cover the second half of the year soon.

(Crossposted here and in the Black Is Pink Livejournal community.)

It has been two days, and it is still hard to write about. We said goodbye to Lilith on Monday.

She had been diagnosed with lymphoma in early February. We did our best for her, including having a rhinoscopy done which confirmed the diagnosis but also helped give her almost two months of a good life that she would not have had otherwise. Just about the best thousand dollars I’ve ever spent. She’d been gradually declining despite our best efforts for a few weeks, and over the weekend took a sharp downward turn. Clearly she was suffering. It was time.

I have had pets die. I have never been there when one was euthanized before, though. The vet and his tech who came to our home were sympathetic and kind, and the process was swift. I know we did our best for Lilith, and I know that in letting her go when we did, as we did, we were doing the right thing.

Still hurts like blazes though.

A small webpage we made for Lilith a few years back can be found here.

I’m assuming that most of you who read my journal are outside the Portland area, but just in case, I wanted to share this:

Humane Society Needs You (to adopt a cat)

Short version: the shelter’s full, they don’t kill cats for lack of space, but they can’t take in any more until they adopt some out. The goal is 100 cats by Thanksgiving. You can even adopt one adult cat and adopt a second for no fee.

We have no more room ourselves (five cats in a 1050 square foot apartment is really pushing it), but I wanted to spread the word in some way.

And a bit of fun to go with — my first attempt at a lolcat. This picture is of a feral kitten rounded up at JFK Airport in New York City. Those cats are not as lucky as the ones at the Oregon Humane Society — most of them face being euthanized.

“We have cats the way most people have mice.”
–James Thurber

I’ve always loved cats, and when Joe and I moved to a place where we could have a cat, a decade ago when we came to Oregon, we had one. In reality, Mina had adopted us before we had even moved, a few weeks before when we were in Anaheim. Quite unexpectedly, in early December of that year, she presented us with a litter of kittens. I’m not sure I ever looked back.

At the moment, we have five cats in residence. If you’re curious, they have a set of webpages here.

What a weekend. As I was contemplating this journal entry, I realized that much of the experiences I’ve had this weekend, which seem quite different but actually can be tied together by one theme:

I hate selling. But I have to do it all the time.

I spent most of the weekend sitting at my jewelry table at a cat show. I was fortunate that I didn’t have to pay for said table. As it was, once I deduct for parking fees, gas, and one snack from the onsite concession stand, I made $4. I could have come into the office and cleared that much by working for fifteen minutes.

On Saturday evening, a family which had been corresponding with me about buying two kittens came to see them. We showed Zoe and Wash. Wash warmed up pretty quickly, but Zoe ended up getting backed up by the boy (I think he was about six) who ended up scaring her half to death. The thing that really gets under my skin, though, is that in all of her correspondence, the woman acted like buying these cats was a done deal. When I asked her Saturday night whether she thought she wanted the cats, she went on about how she was still thinking about it, did she want one kitten or two, an adult cat, an adult and a kitten … in other words, she was still in the info gathering stage. Not what her letters were like at all! I’ll probably never hear from her again. And I really ought to know better.

Sunday night, Joe and I agreed to go to a local meeting of the MoveOn PAC. They talked about “volunteer opportunities” for the Kerry campaign. We want to help, but neither one of us really wants to do canvassing. We don’t really have that kind of time, among other things. We decided to go, hoping there would be something else we could do that didn’t involve knocking on doors. No such luck. We decided to sign on anyway. As I answered Joe’s question of “Do you feel up to this?” — No, I don’t. But it’s important.

I end with two thoughts, tangentially (at best)related to the above and each other.

In medieval Japan, merchants were at the bottom of the social ladder. The only folks who rated worse on the social scale were the undertakers.

You gotta love the Klingons. They seem to have come out for Kerry — in Portland, anyway.

This is getting to be too much fun.

• The only person who shows any interest in buying my cats wants one cheap and wants it declawed
• Maxis has finally added pets to The Sims, but you gotta buy an add on and when am I gonna have that kind of money?
• Certain twerpy kids are patently ignoring complaints
• I’m probably going to have more night shift work next week
• this damn headache STILL won’t go away!

On a more serious note, my grandmother is still in the hospital, not getting better when she should have been days ago. I have a bad feeling about this. I’ll miss her. Maybe more than my mom will, but I have to wonder how she will react if the worst happens soon. She hasn’t had much good to say about her mom lately, but … you never know, do you?

Okay, so here’s my whines for the day.

• I’ve spent over $700 in the past year on advertising for the cattery, and haven’t sold cat one from any of it
• The harder I work, the more in debt I am
• Just for one night, I’d like to sleep without constant weird dreams
• This damn headache won’t go away
• No one seems to want to answer my email, especially when it comes to working together on a project of any kind
• I’m tired of cleaning three or more spots of cat barf off the carpet every single day
• I’m tired of being talked down to over the net by little twerps who are half my age and who decide to disappear as soon as I get mad
• Why the hell doesn’t anyone want to buy my cats? Even the folks who asked me to call them back when I had a cat for them won’t return calls
• I can’t even call back the damned telemarketer to tell them to stop calling me
• My feet hurt all the time and my calf muscles are so knotted they feel like bad macrame, and won’t loosen up

Well, I guess that’s enough for going on with. Maybe if I make a habit of venting here, I’ll start to feel better. I guess it can’t hurt to try.

Current cat count: 14

Struggling with work against the desire to sleep. This has been happening for such a long time. I don’t know if it is depression or if I really am this chronically sleep deprived. All I’m really sure of is that as much as I love my work, I would rather be playing with my cats, or my beads, or sleeping right now.

Current cat count: 14

I’m still amazed by how much power dreams seem to have. For quite a few days this week, I slept for eight hours and still woke exhasted — after a night of miserable, dreary or frightening dreams. Yet this morning, I felt energized and refreshed after just 6 and a half hours — because, perhaps, my dreams had been positive and exciting. It was a very cinematic dream, too … while writing a log for the Phoenix game, the visual alternated between the real world of writing the log and the imaginary world we were creating as we wrote. The transitions back and forth were as seamless as the best directed movie. It might well be a long day, but dreams like that, and being able to remember them, should help me through.

Current cat count: 15