Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").

links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   Sylvia's last trip to the vet
Friday, June 23 2017
This morning Gretchen had set up another vet appointment for Sylvia, who was now down to three pounds and had eaten nothing in three days. The poor little cat was still alert and communicative, and could even walk around (sort of), but there was no sense in letting her starve herself to death. In a call that Gretchen had just before the appointment, the vet told us that it was unlikely this was a temporary setback. So we carried through on the euthanasia. As we arrived at the Hurley vet, there were some guys there sawing the parking lot apart. We had doctor F, the one who euthanized Eleanor and Stripey, and she had it all set up. We went into the examination room with its own exit door and it all went off without a hitch, even though Sylvia had little in the way of veins. Back at the house, we had her corpse on the couch for a couple hours before I got around to digging a small, 30-inch-deep hole in our pet cemetery. It always feels monstrous to put a familiar creature in a hole in the ground even if he or she is already dead, so as always, I lined the hole first with pine needles and put in more needles before throwing in the dirt and rocks.
I told my colleagues in the remote workplace that I wouldn't be there for the daily video chat because of the death in the family. It's the kind of organization that understands such things.

Sylvia the Cat: March 30, 2000 - June 23 2017


April 8, 2005: Sylvia soon after she arrived. Her original name in the shelter had been "Babe."


May 5, 2005: Sylvia with a time capsule that is still there on the bedrock (now beneath a couple feet of soil). (Click to enlarge)


Feb. 20, 2006: A dining room scene. Sylvia in the foreground with Clarence in the background.


Feb. 20, 2006: A dining room scene. Sylvia with the contrast turned up so you can see her eyes.


Feb. 20, 2006: A dining room scene. Sylvia in the foreground with Clarence and Julius (aka "Stripey") in the background. (Click to enlarge)


March 9, 2006: Sylvia on top of Eleanor the Dog.


May 31, 2007: Sylvia walking away from Julius (aka "Stripey").


April 23, 2008: Sylvia with Marie (aka "the Old 'the Baby'").


June 9, 2009: Sylvia on the railing of the laboratory deck, half of a stereo photo. (Click to enlarge)


March 5, 2010: Clockwise from Eleanor the Dog: Marie (aka "the Old 'the Baby'"), Julius (aka "Stripey"), and Sylvia. All these creatures are now dead.


Nov. 15, 2010: From left: Julius (aka "Stripey"), Eleanor, Gretchen, Sylvia, Sally (on the floor). All these creatures except Gretchen are dead. (Click to enlarge)


Dec. 25, 2010: Sylvia with me as I ply the internet on a netbook. (Click to enlarge)


Jan. 19, 2011: Painting of Sylvia.


Feb. 11, 2011: Sylvia in the living room.


May 22, 2011: Sylvia in the laboratory.


Jul. 8, 2011: Breakfast time for kitties! From left: Marie (aka "the Baby")


June 6, 2012: Sylvia as her alter-ego Dusty McGee. (Click to enlarge)


February 2, 2014: Clockwise from my face: Darla, Olive (Susan and David's two dogs), Clarence the Cat, Ramona the Dog, and Sylvia the Cat. (Click to enlarge)


January 17, 2015: Another breakfast time for kitties! From left: Oscar, Clarence, Julius (aka "Stripey"), Sylvia, Celeste (aka "the Baby"). (Click to enlarge)


August 14, 2015: From left: Ramona, Oscar, Sylvia, me. (Click to enlarge)


September 2, 2016: Painting of Sylvia.


June 2, 2017


June 22, 2017: Sylvia the day before she died. She weighed only three pounds and was not eating at the end. (Click to enlarge)

I nevertheless managed to do some work today despite my grief. I'd been prepared for this for weeks, so most of the grief was already priced into my mood. [REDACTED]
This evening Gretchen and I went to the Garden Café for dinner. We ordered the aduki bean tempeh skewers and I had the black bean tempeh reuben. The woman with the kombucha shop out on Route 28 has been experimenting with making different kinds of tempeh (like I was doing back in 2012). Gretchen doesn't like the mushiness of the non-soy tempehs, but I do.
Next we went to the Colony Café to see our friend Rebecca M and her band perform a set of oddball rock. It was hard to categorize, but it drew on shoegaze, noise rock, and perhaps folk. At times the bass player seemed to be playing his instrument as if he had learned how to play yesterday. Sometimes Rebecca picked up a violin and played that. Other times a wall of sound would build to a crescendo and end. I like that sort of thing. Rebecca is a huge animal rights activist, and near the end of her set she included a song that was partly spoken-word that had a strong animal rights message, which probably made some of the assembled uncomfortable. The Colony Café is, you see, under new management, was recently renovated, and now offers a full dining experience, though (for some reason) there are no vegan options on the menu. That underlying reality was the context for the performance of two bands tonight whose musicians were all vegan.
Though we didn't know much about them, Gretchen and I stuck around for the second band, which was fronted by Luis Mojica, a white guy wearing a turban and having a bindi on his forehead. He had an amazing talent for laying down several tracks of sounds in a digital loop live and then performing over them, and if he wasn't such a weirdo (with all the goofy head bobs and facial expressions) I would've warmed to his music much more quickly. Initially I hated it, but by the end he'd won me over. For Gretchen, the biggest turnoff was one of the Luis' bandmates, a tall tattooed woman in a black dress who wore ridiculously enormous false eyelashes, sang a little, and also bowed a saw (that's what I said). Gretchen was convinced she was transgender, because her breasts appeared to be entirely within her dress. But she had hips that any transgender woman would die for. And her voice was clearly female. While I was there, I should mention, I drank a fancy $12 cocktail and a simple Jack Daniels on the rocks.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170623

feedback
previous | next