About My Ocean the Wiggle Cat

I had last posted how my wiggle kitteh was getting thinner and not as active, that Ocean was having trouble jumping onto the furniture like usual. So I took her in to the vet.

...They found a mass near her stomach. They took more ultrasounds and found two lumps, one on her large intestine and on her liver. They also spotted enlarged lymph nodes, which told them she had lymphoma and the aggressive untreatable kind.

(small "no").

She wasn't in any outward pain, but she was clearly uncomfortable, and I didn't want Ocean to struggle for another month or so before the pain got too much. It's hard, really hard for a person to take a pet companion - a fur baby - to the vet one last time.

It wasn't easy back in 2013 when I had to let Tehya the Pretty Kitty go to rest, and it wasn't easy today for Ocean.

Ocean was the kitten who came to me a week after Tehya died, on Halloween night meowing for trick or treat at the apartment stairwell. She was so fearless, happy to run up the stairs to my doorway to greet me going out and okay with coming inside my apartment to check it out. I called her Wiggles for how she'd roll around on her back when I got close. When I took her in for good a few weeks after Halloween and took her to the vet, the nurses there said "Wiggles" wasn't a proper name so I named her Ocean (for a then-recent Gaiman novel). But she was always Wiggles to me.

And then she had her babies on Super Bowl eve as the Broncos got blown out by the Seahawks. I hope the five kittehs I gave up for adoption - River, Simon, Inara, Zoey, Jayne - went to good homes and hopefully staying healthy. I kept Mal, and you all know how much of a handful he's been.

I wonder how confused Mal is going to be tonight, the first night without mama cat. :(

These are among the last photos I've taken of Ocean. I may upload a video or two of her purring later. I never videorecorded Tehya or Page when I should have, because today I can barely remember how they purred or meowed at me. :( 

This is Ocean just before the vet
came in. They let me hold her
to my side as they performed the
injections. It's so heartbreaking
how she stopped moving.

I am so sorry I wasn't able to take better care of you, my kittehs. /cries

Trailblazer: RIP Nichelle Nichols

One of the sadder things about the passage of time is the passing of legends and inspirations. All the actors and performers and motivational figures you knew when you were children do not stay 30 years old, they age as you do, and given how brief our times may be at some point that time ends.

I've been growing up as a Generation X geek, still living that life - I just came back from the 2022 Tampa Bay Comic Con, I will post elsewhere about it - but where I was a child of seven watching Star Wars on screen and Star Trek reruns on TV, a teenager watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, a college student laughing to Red Dwarf, I've aged into a thirtysomething-turned-fiftysomething keeping up with the ever-growing Marvel Cinematic Universe and thrilled as a child at heart as my youthful geekdom gets fulfilled.

But as these years pass, so to do the heroes of my youth, and today came the painful news that actress Nichelle Nichols famous as the USS Enterprise's Uhura died this weekend at the age of no I won't go there (via Mandalit Del Marco at NPR):

Nichols was one of the first Black women featured in a major television series, and her role as Lt. Nyota Uhura on the original TV series was groundbreaking: an African American woman whose name came from Uhuru, the Swahili word for "freedom."

"Here I was projecting in the 23rd century what should have been quite simple," Nichols told NPR in 2011. "We're on a starship. I was head communications officer. Fourth in command on a starship. They didn't see this as being, oh, it doesn't happen til the 23rd century. Young people and adults saw it as now..."

"Trailblazing" is the word they're describing her. I've written before about "Representation Matters" when it came to the likes of Wonder Woman and having characters like Rey emerge in the Star Wars canon. This is what I wrote about the importance of Nichols back in the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s when she played Uhura on the original show:

It cast African-Americans in prominent starring and guest roles: Just having Uhura - despite the seeming meaningless task of "hailing" calls - on the bridge of a starship alongside White men (mostly) in a genuine attempt at ethnic and gender sharing was shocking for the 1960s television market. Would it stun you to find out that Southern television stations back in the day would insist on cutting out any black characters on shows as much as possible? Having Uhura in nearly every bridge shot made that impossible. No less a figure than Martin Luther King spoke to actress Nichelle Nichols to convince her to stay on after she wanted to move on: She was that important a role model...

The NPR article goes into more detail about what happened:

"He complimented me on the manner in which I'd created the character. I thanked him, and I think I said something like, 'Dr. King, I wish I could be out there marching with you.' He said, 'no, no, no. No, you don't understand. We don't need you ... to march. You are marching. You are reflecting what we are fighting for.' So, I said to him, 'thank you so much. And I'm going to miss my co-stars.'"

"His face got very, very serious," she recalled. "And he said, 'what are you talking about?' And I said, 'well, I told Gene just yesterday that I'm going to leave the show after the first year because I've been offered... And he stopped me and said: 'You cannot do that.' I was stunned. He said, 'don't you understand what this man has achieved? For the first time, we are being seen the world over as we should be seen. He says, do you understand that this is the only show that my wife Coretta and I will allow our little children to stay up and watch.' I was speechless."

This was back in 1967, on what was supposed to be yet another television show, a science fiction show representing a genre that wasn't being taken seriously by the academics... but was turning into a cultural phenomenon that redefined fandom and brought the hopes and dreams of the future to the kids and teens who were watching Star Trek. Reverend King saw it and understood, as a Civil Rights leader he knew all about "Representation Matters." As much as he mattered on the political stage, Uhura mattered on the TV screen.

While the role eventually dominated her career - much like her co-stars who had to live with and come to terms with their legacy - Nichols took it in stride and accepted her place as a role model to Blacks, Women, and both as the years went on. Above all, Nichols took up a job working with NASA to promote more Black Women in the sciences to get more of them working in space programs.

In the matter of "Representation Matters," Nichelle Nichols was the undisputed queen. Entire generations grew up to her as Uhura. She defined the role even as other actresses - Zoe Saldana in the reboot films, and Celia Rose Gooding in this year's inaugural season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - grew up to succeed her.

Nichols blazed an arc across the stars. I leave you with this, one of her best badass moments in the TOS film series, dealing with "Mr. Adventure" in III:

When the cocky cadet's talk got Uhura's eyes rolling, everyone in the theaters knew he was toast. She was on a five-year voyage, son, and slapped down the likes of V'Ger and Khan. She probably kept him in that closet until Star Trek VI.

Farewell, Nichelle. All our hopes.

A Lifetime of Writing For Children, Who Became All Of Us: Beverly Cleary Wrote For Us

This is the kind of news a librarian and childhood reader does not want to hear. Beloved writer Beverly Cleary finally passed away this weekend (via Zoe Chace at NPR): 

Children's author Beverly Cleary died Thursday in Carmel, Calif., her publisher HarperCollins said. She was 104 years old. Cleary was the creator of some of the most authentic characters in children's literature — Henry Huggins, Ralph S. Mouse and the irascible Ramona Quimby.

Generations of readers tore around the playground, learned to write in cursive, rebelled against tuna fish sandwiches and acquired all the glorious scrapes and bruises of childhood right along with Ramona...

Her writing style — clear, direct, uncomplicated — mirrored the author's own trajectory. Cleary was still a young girl when she decided to become a children's book author. By the 1940s she'd become a children's librarian in Portland, Ore., and she remembered boys in particular would ask her: "Where are the books about kids like us?"

There weren't any, so she sat down and wrote Henry Huggins, her first book about a regular little boy on Klickitat Street in Portland. Henry Huggins was a hit upon first printing, but her readers wanted to hear more about the little girl who lived just up the street.

Ramona Quimby, the most famous of all of Cleary's characters, was unforgettable. Mischievous, spunky and a hater of spelling, Ramona would be the first to tell you she's not a pest — no matter what anyone (especially her older sister Beezus) says...

I read Cleary as a youth, around seven or eight years old, after my family moved to Florida and we went to Dunedin Public Library pretty much once every week. It started with Henry Huggins but moved onto Ramona where even as a boy reader the angst and issues for girl characters echoed a lot of the drama and anxiety of childhood itself.

Along with Judy Blume - with Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing anchoring the Fudge series - Cleary was one of the few authors I read who seemed to write FOR children, not to us (in terms of lecturing and preaching). The moral life lessons of her works - in the Ramona series, often odes to the strengths of family and sisterhood - offered in subtle yet recognizable moments.

I think I quoted on this before, but let me quote here from Kate Dries at Jezebel about Cleary's importance and influence:

As an adult, I remember far more of Cleary’s descriptions of the life that influenced her children’s books than the actual fiction she wrote—stories about how she hates the taste of almond extract because it’s all they had to make desserts with during the Depression, or how eating a whole avocado every day from the tree outside her window in college caused her weight to bloom, or what she and her friends asked of each other’s clothes during the lean years: “Is it new, or new to you?”

Cleary’s writing is always matter-of-fact, observant without being unkind. In her limited first-person work, she’s evaluative of herself perhaps more than anyone else, and she allows certain undertones that are mostly absent from her children’s books to creep in...

Remember, as Cleary does, it would be years before “the labels ‘teenager’ and ‘young adult’” would even be used regularly. Back then, to look at young people this way, you had to be extraordinarily interested in understanding the emotional states of an age group that was almost always overlooked. Cleary did; she had a firm grasp of the reality that children have complex inner lives, and this sensibility made her books break through...

That emphasis on writing simply and about life’s minutiae explains why Cleary’s fictionalization of her normal if sometimes difficult life has been so embraced. “For years I avoided writing description, and children told me they liked my books, ‘because there isn’t any description in them,’” she said of her simple style, influenced (perhaps negatively in her mind, though not in anyone else’s) by a teacher who was overzealous with the red pen early on. Her characters are flawed but not overly dramatic: average, but interesting because of it, you might say (or in other words, realistic). Upon reading her memoirs, you can see the specific and broad bits of real life Cleary did use in her books—the “Smells to Heaven” casserole that her friend’s mother served that Jane won’t eat before a date in Fifteen for fear she’ll ruin her breath, or the comfortable home she didn’t have growing up run by Bernadette’s less-involved mother in Mitch and Amy...

Cleary described how her writing mentor encouraged her to pursue writing about 'the universal human experience,' the shared hopes and despairs that we all feel when we're young and curious and worried and envious and learning how to cope. As a writer herself, she gave us characters and stories that showed us how to cope, and we all grew up under her care.

She is one of the reasons I enjoyed visiting libraries. It wasn't until I was a librarian myself in my 30s when I found out Cleary was a children's librarian from Yakima WA when she started writing her stories for her youthful patrons.

Cleary should have won a Nobel Prize for Literature, goddammit.

I am deep in mourning tonight. My childhood physically ended a long time ago, but emotionally and spiritually that childhood stayed with me. A part of that is gone now.

A Little Bit of My Childhood, Gone Away.

The actor who played Chewbacca in Star Wars, Peter Mayhew, recently passed away.

While I have a fondness for all the original characters, Chewie was kind of my guy. Oversized, covered with fur, goofy, unable to play chess...

When I was 7 or 8 years old I asked for a large Chewbacca action figure for Christmas. My parents may not have understood the request because I ended up with a fluffy teddy-bear Chewie. I wasn't entirely thrilled at the time, but Plush Chewie grew on me and so he was a regular bedtime companion until I was 12 or so. Afterwards he was pretty much on a book shelf for display and I admit I grew out of the idea of owning a doll like that. I can't recall when he ended up going to a donation store, or whatever else happened to him.

There's times in my adulthood when I wonder why I let so much of my childhood things go. It was like letting go of some memories here and there. I feel this way when the actors I grew up with, playing the characters of my childhood, pass away.

Goodbye Chewie. What a Wookie!

Dragons on the Wind of Morning, RIP Ursula Le Guin

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
-- Ursula K. Le Guin

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
-- Le Guin

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
-- from The Dispossessed

And now I need to read The Dispossessed.

I read her Wizard of Earthsea back in 8th grade.

I read Lathe of Heaven back in high school, maybe 11th grade.

I read Left Hand of Darkness in college, can't recall the year though.

I should have read more of her works.

Granted, I was content with reading Douglas Adams, and Frank Herbert, distracted by some groundbreaking writing in comic books during the 1990s and all.

But Le Guin was groundbreaking in her own way. Feminist but not overtly militant, philosophical - a Taoist - but not preachy, insightful in every way.

She passed away just now. A bright light in fantasy and science fiction lost to us. There are other lights, other voices, but hers was brighter than most and our world now diminished.

“I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.”
-- The Farthest Shore

RIP Berni Wrightson

I'd say DAMN YOU 2016 but that was so last year.

But today I find out that one of my favorite graphic illustrators died. Berni Wrightson, co-creator on DC Comic's Swamp Thing and arguably the most influential Gothic Horror visionaries of our era, passed away...

One of the first posters I ever owned... from Batman: The Cult

He was also one of the more recognizable Batman illustrators out there. He infamously drew Batman's cape to be longer than his own height.

In Berni's mind, Batman's superpower was being able to stop himself from tripping on his own cape.

Wrightson also worked on a project - on his own time and dime - illustrating Shelley's Frankenstein back in the 1980s, his most famous work and considered one of the best adaptations of that classic work ever.

But I will always remember Wrightson as the one who teamed with Len Wein to create Swamp Thing, one of the best-loved comic books from the early 1970s

I was seven, maybe eight years old, when my family was part of a comic book trade-off at the Dunedin Public Library. We ended up with a copy of the Special Issue re-release of issues 1 and 2 of the original Swamp Thing. It was an eye-opening work, far darker and mature than most of the children's literature I had been reading at the time:

In hindsight, the story itself was pretty simple origin story stuff: good scientist gets killed by mobsters trying to steal his plant formula, the plant formula turns scientist into a monstrous plant-human, the Swamp Thing gets his revenge but not before his wife is also killed, and a vengeful government agent swears to hunt the Swamp Thing down for all the wrong reasons.

But the artwork was incredible, with the beautiful use of shadow, and stylistic camera angles:

I will remember this sequence to the day I die.

This was one of two comic book in the house (the other was a beat-up copy of a Star Wars #14 I think with Han and team battling space pirates) until the 1980s when I snagged Issue 3 of Dark Knight Returns and got hooked for good.

When I was that age, I dabbled a bit into drawing, to see if I could develop a talent for it. Never really could. I got into writing instead, and I hopefully have some talent to that.

One of the things I want to do as a writer is become a comic book writer, to work in that genre of storytelling. I had hopes of someday getting into the industry, and getting to team up with the aritsts I liked.

Berni Wrightson topped my list.

At least I met him back in 2014 at the Tampa Bay Comic Con:

Buying a Wrightson-drawn print of two of my favorite characters: Batman and Swamp Thing.

Rest in peace, Mr. Wrightson.

"He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance."
- Final line of Frankenstein

Carrie Fisher, Princess Leia, Drowned In Moonlight Strangled By Her Own Bra

I have a eulogy over at my other blog, but DAMN YOU 2016 this has been a nasty year for losing generational celebrities and cultural mainstays.

Carrie Fisher passed away this morning.

DAMN DAMN DAMN DAMN DAMN...

Noli Timere Messorem

Which means "Don't Fear the Reaper."

It comes from Discworld.

It's a world that's flat, resting atop four elephants that stand on a giant turtle swimming through space.

The turtle, by the way, moves.

There's a religious debate on whether the turtle is real, or that such a large thing even moves.  But he does move.  And he's pretty much the only being associated with Discworld who knows where he's going.

This is important to point out because today the chronicler of Discworld finally met one of the characters from the fantasy series.  Sir Terry Pratchett passed away, and met with Death, the one who meets everybody.

AT LAST, SIR TERRY.  WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.

As a Librarian myself, I take pains to uphold the Laws of Space-Time Librarianship:

1. Silence; 
2. Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 
3. The nature of causality must not be interfered with.

My personal favorite book is Small Gods.  I mentioned that as a favorite book years ago for a year-end review.  It's a book both serious and satirical about the dangers of blind faith and theocracy, a rumination on how faith actually works, and the importance for both humans AND gods of living honest lives.

Pratchett's skill was writing in a humorous, wry tone that rarely condescended towards the reader, with well-rounded characters and a bemused understanding of how the world (our world as well as Discworld's) works (which is to say, rather clunky and imperfect).  Pratchett had an anger about the sins of the world but was optimistic enough that things can, did, and might work out.  He was funnier than Tolkien, more serious than Rowling, more skeptical than Lewis, and more profound than Gaiman.

There's a link to an online Discwolrd story here.  It's a brief example of the subtlety of Pratchett's work.

Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.

The end.*

* One hopes not.

Do Not Grieve, Admiral...

...and we will not debate his profound wisdom at these proceedings. Of my friend, I can only say this: Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most... human...

Science fiction is at its best not about space rockets firing lasers at each other or furry creatures threatening to invade planets, but about the human condition, of who we are and where we are going.

Star Trek at its best was about the possibilities of life, of life on other worlds, of other perspectives and philosophies.  The show's producers came up with a Vulcan concept of "infinite diversity in infinite combinations," of which Spock - its truest representative - was a perfect example.

Spock, half-Vulcan and half-Human, trapped between the philosophies and yet the most ardent defender of the Vulcan way, even when by the time his character aged into a wisdom that realized his Human traits had value as well, meshing them into an iconic figure that outgrew science fiction into one of legend.  There are few fictional characters who grow to such a stature - Sherlock Holmes, Superman, Robin Hood, Hamlet, perhaps today Doctor Who - but Spock stands there as more Human than Human, more Vulcan than Vulcan...

The actor Leonard Nimoy was basically appearing in this thing Star Trek back in the 1960s as a paying gig, but it was one that quickly grew into a phenomenon with his character one of the major draws.  For a time there he railed against the expectations that he had to play Spock as a person, but later on he settled down, and came to terms with him.  Spock was, after a fashion, himself: Nimoy threw in a few things from his own life - the Vulcan salute is from his Orthodox Hebrew upbringing, and he put into play character quirks he felt were appropriate to what a logical Vulcan would do - to where he could never really leave the character.  Not every actor gets to play a character for the first time, and have that character become as important, as iconic as to how that actor fit into that role.

Nimoy passed away today.  He lived long enough to see other actors take on the role of Spock.  There will be others long past us who will play the role, add to the legend perhaps.  But they will be building on the archetype that Nimoy forged.  A great legacy...

...to boldy go...

Kittehs Gonna Plan a Jailbreak 4/12/14

Today was the day...

Today I took the kittehs in to the Lakeland SPCA shelter for adopting them out...

Jayne getting a goodbye hug...

Zoe telling me how much of an idiot I am...

Shy Simon needing a little propping so the Shelter lady can get a good picture...

Inara looking very miffed / annoyed that I'm holding her up like that...

River was the first one into the cage, last one out... She's the climber of the litter, so I let her climb up my shoulder for the goodbye hug...

These five kittehs have moved on to the shelter, where hopefully they'll get treated for their flea woes and then properly adopted out hopefully to good homes.  Maybe a family might take two or three of them as a group, so the siblings can grow up together...

I'll keep in touch with the shelter to see how they're doing, if they get adopted.  If anybody in Lakeland/Polk County adopt any of the kittehs, please swing by this blog and drop me a line, let me know if the kittehs are settling in...

sniff...

Ocean doesn't seem to register yet that I came back without most of her kittehs.  Maybe by tonight it might sink in that it's just her and Mal now...  I hope she's content with the thought that she birthed a litter and that they were healthy enough to go out into the world...  I hope.

200th Post: Also, Caturday. Also, New Cat

For my 200th post on this blog, here's a picture of a cat.

This is the cleanest picture I can get at the moment.  The cat is damn wiggly.

The month before Halloween, Tehya my Pretty Kitty developed a severe case of lung cancer and I didn't realize it until it was too late the week before.

It had been two years since I lost Page my Silly Kitty to skin cancer, the Monday before Thanksgiving.

On Halloween night, sitting around my apartment complex - in an empty place - wondering where all the trick-or-treaters were, I hear this meowing.  At the base of the stairs was this little kitten, clearly hungry, wanting attention and food and love.

With nothing else to do, I raced out to Publix for packets of cat food, paper plates to put 'em, and put the food out.

A trio of cats emerged from the bushes to partake, and before I knew it me and my neighbors had settled into taking care of two cats, the meowy kitten and an older (by a year) grey cat.  Both of them were literally skin and bones.  We fatted them up and they were content.

The black-and-white kitten quickly grew brave and learned to race up the stairs to my apartment, and finagled his/her way in past the door to check my place out and recognize I had cat toys still about, and got to wiggling about on the floor contented and purring.

After more than a month of doing this and finding out no one else had reported a missing kitten or twelve, of figuring out the poor things were most likely abandoned - ferals are NEVER this friendly - and in need of a home, noting I only had the budget for one cat to join me, I succumbed to the inevitable that the kitten I had nicknamed Wiggle was my cat, and took him/her today to the vet to proceed adopting it.

The nurses told me Wiggle was a girl cat.

Wiggle is more nickname than name.  I needed a good girl cat name.  The nurses suggested I get one from a book.

My smartphone has ebooks on it.  I opened up my Nook reader and the first book up was by Neil Gaiman.

Her name is now Ocean.  If you've read Neil's book, you'd know why.

My Wiggle Cat.

About My Cat Tehya

My first full-time job was at Broward County Libraries, they had opened a new Regional Branch which was a joint-use with Broward Community College's North Campus.  This was back in 1994 (Good Lord: 20th anniversary is around the corner!).  One of my co-workers was Judi, with the college but part of the Reference team on the second floor.  She was active with the local cat rescue groups, rounding up strays and abandoned cats for re-adoption.

By 1999 she had convinced me - and my personal budget was steady enough - that I ought to have a cat in my life.  She was at the time counseling a newly-caught feral mom and three kittens, so I came by for a looksee.

The mama kitty and two of her kittens were calicoes, a special hair color pattern of motley black, orange and white (the male was black: it's rare for calicoes to be male).  The mama was pure feral and avoided people.  The kittens were skittish but if you held one and petted one they weren't too vicious about it.

There was one with a pretty little orange stripe running up her nose to a point just behind her ear line.

I asked to adopt her and went looking through the baby name books in the 929.44 shelf range.  I was a librarian and I was going to show off with a cool name.  I went with Tehya: it means "precious" in Native American.

Tehya was jumpy, flighty, inquisitive, skittish, clawy, scratchy, and meowy.  She was also pretty.  I quickly nicknamed her "Pretty Kitty".

Because of her meowing and clawing at the doorways, I came to believe that she felt herself lonely and was seeking companionship, so about a year later I asked Judi for a second kitten and brought home Page, a kitten born of a litter from an abandoned mom cat.  Page was more well-adjusted to people and more relaxed around me.

Tehya hated her.  I had completely miscalculated the situation - Tehya didn't want a friend, she wanted to hunt - and didn't realize that Tehya needed time to adjust to the idea of another cat in the house.  In time the two developed a guarded but accepting relationship, but never became the closest of friends.

Tehya and Page quickly got used to a few things... such as me moving half across Florida as by 2001 I was moving into a condo in Coconut Creek, and then moving out of South Florida altogether to Gainesville to work at UF Libraries in 2003, to moving down to New Port Richey to work in the Pasco Libraries system by 2006.  They adjusted as best they could - in particular they LOVED an apartment in Gainesville we lived in for seven months that had a wide screen porch overlooking a forest full of SQUIRRELS - and settled in fine each time.

Page had become the talker of the two, as Tehya went relatively quiet most of the time.  Tehya instead became the jumper, the climber.  When I moved into a huge house in Gainesville that had an open alcove to the kitchen and dining room areas, Tehya would find a way to leap on top of the cabinets and then leap ACROSS to the pavilion over the dining room.  Getting her down took forever, but she loved it.

I made this on I Can Has Cheezburgr site...

When I got to bed at night, Page would be first to bed with me: jumping on my right side, and sliding herself butt-first against my arm near my waist.  It would take a few minutes, but Tehya would jump onto the nightstand next to the bed, access the situation, and come over to my left side where she would knead my upper arm, pushing my shoulder to open up a little so she could curl up head-first in my arm.

A few years after moving to New Port Richey, Page developed a bump on her hindside.  At first I thought it was a bad reaction to one of the booster shots she'd recently gotten and that the inflammation would go away.  But it didn't.  By the time I got her back to the vet's, the bump had gotten worrisome.  And it turned out for good reason: the bump was cancerous.  We tried for surgery, but the biopsy revealed the tumor was malign, and indeed within a few months the bump had returned.  Page wouldn't have survived any chemo... I didn't have the budget, I was unemployed at the time... this was the Monday of Thanksgiving week 2011.  I had to take Page in... for her... last visit.  God curse me for a coward, I couldn't stay to watch.

The last picture I ever took of Page, five days before her skin cancer got bad enough to...

With Page gone, Tehya became a bit more expressive.  She'd meow more often, at least that I'd noticed.  Where Page would join me on the recliner arm, Tehya preferred the headrest: without Page, Tehya would jump and check my lap first.

This year in January I got interviewed for a librarian job in Bartow and got it, meaning another move.  Tehya didn't mind it too much but missed the large porch she had access to in New Port Richey.  She'd still jump onto bed at night, with a new bed alignment she'd jump on my right side where Page used to be, jump right onto my chest making me go "ooof" and then checking out my left side before coming up to curl in my arm like always.

A month ago she started coughing bad.  Like a hairball wasn't coming out right, if at all.  I took her to the vet here in Bartow and he checked her out: she seemed healthy, was eating well, her lungs sounded normal.  I didn't think she needed an x-ray or bloodwork.  The vet gave me meds for her system to help with any hairball issue, and after a few days of taking it - she actually ate the pills I stuck in the meat! - her cough went away.

But then I took a trip to New York City - a personal vacation, one I hadn't had in years due to the lack of employment - this past weekend and when I came back Tehya seemed to have stopped eating.  Mom and Dad noted she'd still eat her meaty stuff but left her dry food untouched.  She'd eat her snack bits - ever since we moved to Bartow she constantly parked herself in the middle of the apartment with the insistent look of "give me my snackage" - but that was about it.  But this week, she just... stopped eating.  Everything.

By Wednesday I was concerned enough to schedule an appointment for Thursday afternoon.  I tried different meat flavors to see if it was just a flavor issue.  Tehya was losing interest in anything other than sleeping in spots on the floor where she'd be out of the way.  There would be occasional meowing, like she wasn't happy.  Like she was in pain.  And she wouldn't stay on the bed even if I picked her up and put her there with something comfortable to lie on, like my pants or a towel (her usual comforters).

Thursday afternoon couldn't come fast enough.  When it did, we got bad news: the x-rays spotted a lump in one of her lungs (the source of that cough), and her bloodwork showed low platelet counts.  The vet didn't want to give me absolute confirmation that it was cancer, and suggested bringing in an ultrasound guy to check Tehya on Tuesday.  The vet tried to give Tehya an appetite stimulant pill to help with her eating so that she'd regain some strength.

At home, I kept trying to feed Tehya.  She'd drink some of her water, but the food... no, not a bit.  I tried rubbing my finger in the wet stuff and rubbing it against her mouth to make her taste it, she refused.  Tehya's meowing got worse.  Deeper, hurting.  Mournful.  She didn't jump into bed to sleep with me.  When I woke up in the morning and picked her up, she was lighter, fragile... weak.  Her purring wasn't contentment, it was anxious, painful... more growling and grunting than ever before.  She insisted on sleeping in one spot now, a place on the futon where she would try to fall asleep, but meow in pain and roll around into another position to find some comfort...

Further efforts to feed her got worse.  Her body temp was getting cold.  I called the vet's this afternoon and asked him bluntly how certain he was that lump was cancer.  He said he was certain.

I took Tehya - my Pretty Kitty - in for one last visit.

I brought with her a toy that Tehya liked.  A green cloth fishie toy that she would use as a pillow whenever she lay on the living room floor when I'd watch television.  We waited in a small room while the vet took care of the other appointments he had that afternoon.  While we waited she lay down in the cat carrier, using the fishie as a pillow.  I rubbed that orange stripe on her forehead.  I always rubbed it from the day she was a kitten, and I'd have her in my arm or lying nearby I'd reach over and trace a finger along that stripe from her nose to her head and she'd purr like mad and lean her head into my arm as I rubbed that stripe.  She tried to purr this time but it came out like a wheezing grunt.

The vet finished his scheduled cases and then came into the small room.  We were the last one for the day.  I waited as the vet took Tehya for the catheter for her foreleg.  I was given a minute with her one last time while the vet went to get the shots.  I wasn't going to chicken out like I did to poor Page... poor Page, she died alone, I will never forgive myself for that... but I was bouncing between tears in my eyes and snot out my nose.

The vet came in with two needles.  He asked if I was ready, I said no... but that it had to happen anyway, Tehya would starve to death in pain... He gave her the needle to put her to sleep... but her eyes stayed open... less than a minute later, he slid in the second needle.  Tehya just... stopped.  Stopped.

Tehya's fishie.  That and her photos are all I have of her now.  I can't remember how Page meowed at me sometimes...

I returned for the first time in years to an empty house.  No expectation of a friend, a cat, someone who waited for me for more than just food or snacks or ear rubs or anything...  This is the loneliest I've been in ages.

Dear God, I should have taken better care of you Tehya, of you Page.

I'm not in a good place right now.  I hope to God Tehya and Page are, and that they're finally getting along.

Hug your pets.  Do your damnedest to let them know you love them.  Please.

And Before I Knew It, I Was Back To Job Hunting

The reason - and it's a good one - I hadn't posted anything for most of February is because I finally got hired to a full-time job.

The reason - and it's a sad one - I'm posting now is because this Friday they let me go.  I hadn't even last a full two weeks.  Even my temp job with the US Census lasted longer.  :(

They said I was a good worker, reliable for the most part, it's just I was having problems with figuring out the proper Status settings to apply to the records I was tracking.  Because the team I was hired with was moving up to a higher tier project, they didn't want to waste everyone's time waiting for me to grok the proper procedures and so... out the door.

And so, back to the grind of finding someone who will hire me.  But now I've got this albatross of yet another workplace I didn't fit in: for three years I've been struggling to find a full-time job, and pretty much since 2011 onward trying to find even a part-time job.  If no one was taking a chance with me then, who's gonna take a chance with me now...?

Sigh.

The Mix Of News, Good And Bad And Sad

There's a few things to note:

In the Good News category, Centennial Park Library in the Pasco Libraries system is going to stay open!  After the threat of closure by the county commission, the library got 3,000 plus signatures of support from the local community and was able to convince the commission to keep it open.  The Bad News: the state and the county are still tight against the budget, meaning cuts will have to come from somewhere else - jobs.  The commission will see about eliminating any current vacancies first, but if they have to they may cut existing jobs, which is still a bad thing to happen (as an unemployed person, I will be saddened by anyone else losing their jobs).

In the Sad News category: someone I knew from Tarpons Springs High School Class of 1988 passed away.  Mike McGee was someone I knew since middle school, actually, and he was who I considered a regular guy: smart enough to be in the good classes, popular enough to be in the good cliques, but thankfully not a total jerkass about it.  Played football, linebacker if I recall (EDIT: My brother Phil corrected me, said it was Offensive Guard).  Went to Florida State, got a law degree, went into Patent Law at a firm in Chicago.  Only saw him at the high school reunions, but I had emailed him once or twice about patent ideas I was bouncing about me brain (informal chats, really.  Any formal chat would have cost me!).  He got married, had  kids.
And then he got cancer and died yesterday from it.
I don't like death.  It ends so many chances, so many things to do, so many people to meet, so many regrets you're left with.  I'd like to think McGee didn't regret much: he lived in all respects - a family, children, a good job, God knows what adventures he'd had along the way.  The regrets are all ours now.

George Carlin RIP

Man, this week started off with some real weak tea... :(

Carlin was best known for his routine over Seven Words You Can't Say On TV. In terms of being anarchist, free-thinking, and an occasional writer of words, I do note his passing. I also wonder if Sam Kinison and Richard Pryor are gonna let George pull up a bone throne to the discussion table in Hades...