The beaver is a proud and noble animal
Notes from a bemused canuck
I just went back through 7 years of blog picture roll. Dear lord, I keep weird shit.
Edit: I had a bunch of pictures on my phone that weren’t on the blog. This has been rectified. I’m also that anal that all the pictures are now chronologically ordered, from latest to oldest. Yes, I did that. Yes, it matters to me :)
How he used to be bitey-bitey and nip at my elbows or toes when I wasn’t giving him the attention he wanted.
How he was a sound-powered cat and always had to made noise when he jumped in the bathroom sink to get a drink (usually while I was on the toilet).
The attack-cat chittering noises he made towards the birds who dared to come on the balcony.
Being woken up in the morning by him jumping in bed with us, walking over us and wedging himself between Katy and me.
The contented, smug face he’d make when getting a chin scratch at just the right place. Pavel gave good face!!
Generally just walking into a room, rolling your eyes and going “oh, Pavel!” at whatever convoluted and/or obscene position he was sleeping in (see above picture).
How, on a king-sized bed, he’d always sleep on any item of my clothing (usually pj bottoms), or nestled in my body pillow.
How he had a stupidly loud purr for a cat his size, and how Katy would always ask me to “turn down the volume on my cat”.
How he loved to chill on his cardboard scratching pad, in his cardboard box. Even after Tolstoy barfed on it.
How he’d sleep on the sofa arm, as though he was the only thing holding the sofa together.
How he loved to eat anything that was made of rubber or silicone, including a grooming brush, Ben’s wellie boots, Ben’s Ikea nightlights, Ben’s crocs, Ben’s stress popping toy…
How he was a soft, fluffy, furry ball of lovable dumb.
I’m going to miss the hell out of you, buddy…
We hoped to be able to delay the inevitable for a couple of days to try and spoil him rotten, but it wasn’t in the cards. His back legs were still paralysed. It wouldn’t get better. If by a 2nd miracle it did, it would most certainly happen again, god knows when. He wasn’t in pain, but he couldn’t stand to eat or drink. When we brought him home so Ben could say goodbye to him, he had a bit of fuss but then dragged himself into a cat cave.
In the end, Pavel fell asleep on my hand, with my forehead to his. It was painless for him, but heartbreaking for me. We did the right thing, for the right reasons. We’ll get through it. But right now, it sucks.
Pavel just had another thromboembolism ? he’s at the emergency vet, with high dose heparin and morphine. Same thing as last May, but now worse prognosis because it happened again, while he was taking the meds to supposedly try and prevent new clots from forming.
He made it through the first day, first week, but it seems to have caught up with him. We had a month and a half we didn’t expect to have, but now we need to see what happens again and make some potentially heartbreaking decisions.
This sucks.
I mentioned that Pavel has amusing sleeping habits. He’s not the only one.
Edit: this is the view Katy woke up to a few days ago:
Ben inadvertently clicked to install a security update no his macbook – which turned out to be a full Big Sur upgrade. Even though it can, theoretically run it, in practice he keeps the HDD so full of crap that there isn’t any room to update properly and then everything falls over. I’ve already had to do one full reinstall, and even though I was kinda-sorta more clued in to what I needed to do, the damn thing fought me all along the way. I ended up staying up until 1am this morning, trying to get it fixed. Booting from USB barfed just near the end because of corrupted media. Recovery-over-the-internet gave an alphabet soup of error codes. I managed to recover an old TimeMachine backup from my old mac – but then realized that I didn’t remember my account password.
I started again this morning with a clearer head. I managed to download Catalina and create new boot media during the night last night. This morning, I tried to force reinstall, and that sort of worked, except it upgraded the version I couldn’t log into. I nuked that installation and then started the installation from USB.
IT. TOOK. FOREVER.
The time estimation is a joke.
It stayed at “3 minutes remaining” for just under an hour.
And then just like that, it started to do something again. Ben’s screen is a toxic waste dump.
And again, it got stuck at “3 minutes remaining” for about 30-40 minutes again.
And huzzah, I got it working. The 1st thing I did was to take a full TimeMachine backup so that if/when he borks it again, I have a stable restore point – because if I have to go through this shit again, the macbook will take a flying leap out the patio door.
So, fact about me: some (many!) songs will make me cry at the drop of a hat. Les Miserables? Waterworks. All of you by John Legend? Floodgates. Love of my life by Queen…. you get the picture, but I digress.
It’s too hot to run right now so I went for a power walk to get some air and VitD. Beautiful sunshine along the lakefront. I’m bopping along to ZZ Top and Van Halen, when boom! Tear song!! Still power walking, still lip singing, bawling my eyes out. Didn’t give two shits. Then Grandmaster Flash and the Wheels of Steel came on, and everything was OK.