some photos of Tuna

i received these yesterday via email. they were taken by christopher wirth at the cafe.

and her with the kittens!

a sad day in my animal kingdom

“A Week of Horrors, A Week of Hope: Part Deux” is being put on hold for the moment. today was a tough day for my animal-loving friends and family; two members of my extended furry family passed on, and they will be greatly missed.

the first one to pass was Mittens the Sheep. Unfortunatly, i don’t have a digital photo of her (but i have many prints, and there is even-yes-a painted portrait of her at my mother’s house).
Her mother, Madeline the Sheep, is still alive-she was a teenage mother, just one year older than Mittens. Mittens’ father Flash the Ram is long passed, may he rest in peace. I have fond memories of Flash’s statuesque nature; sometimes you could catch him standing with his two front hooves on a small rock, perfectly still, staring off into the distance, as if he was thinking “YES, I OWN ALL OF YOU.” Mittens looked more like her dad than her mom, and had a slight overbite–you had to mind your fingers when you hand-fed her grain.

Mittens the Sheep was euthanized today because of health complications due to a meningeal worm infection. I don’t want to humiliate her here with the details, but, as she was an old sheep (14!), my mother and the vet thought it best to let her leave this earth before the pain was too great.

I had never heard of a meningeal worm before. Apparently, if you don’t have a minute to read the link, it’s kind of like spinal meningitis in humans. Here is a diagram showing the life cycle of the worm:

and, i couldn’t find one of these for a sheep, but it affects llamas in the same way:

the numbered parts are all the organs and other bodily functions the worm seriously damages. apparently, from what they could tell, Mittens’ entire nervous system was ravaged by this worm, which comes from white-tail deer. and if you know anything about hunterdon county, nj, them bitches is everywhere.

I was talking to my mother on the phone about what happened to Mittens while taking a break at work when my manager came in from the back garden and told us that she went to pet Tuna, the cafe’s cat, and Tuna was dead.

We had taken Tuna in as a stray; she had appeared one day in the back garden, small and cute and friendly as can be. My boss loves cats, and decided to keep her. We soon after discovered that Tuna was pregnant (she couldn’t have been older than nine months!) She had her kittens, four of them, which I helped her to deliver because one was stuck in the placenta. Tuna had given birth on the concrete, and being able to dry off newborn kittens and help calm Tuna down and make them all comfortable in a kitten nest together was such a special experience.

The kittens were immediately spoken for. We told all the adopters to wait until the kittens were off nursing and Tuna got to spend some time with them; it was a real Discovery Channel-touching-moment to see how Tuna instantly knew just how to be a mom.

This past week, some of the kittens started going home with their new human parents. Tuna got spayed a few weeks ago, had an infection, but my manager and my boss both took care of her with medicine and paid the vet bills (along with help from all the generous donors at the cafe to the Tuna Health Fund) and Tuna seemed good as new.

Until today, when she was found laying under a bench on her side, stiff with rigor mortis, a small pool of blood on the concrete under her mouth. Tuna had no wounds or external signs of physical trauma. After my manager and I bagged her up and put her in a box and called our boss (who is devastated) a customer told us that she saw Tuna no more than two hours earlier, strolling around in front of the cafe, looking and acting like the usual Tuna.

I think she may have had a brain hemmorage or an aneurysm or, this is something else I found which may explain what happened.
Whatever it was, it was obviously quick and not diagnosable, since she had just gotten a vet checkup not even a month ago.

i’ve lost a lot of animals in my time, and it’s difficult to deal with, but it’s always much harder when the animal is young. there is no feeling of relief when they die, because they had a long life ahead of them and you expected to see them everyday.

i also don’t have any photos of Tuna–if anyone does, please send them to me. i know my boss would love to have them, she got very attached to Tuna. the sound of her voice when i told her the news broke my heart.

now, you should all learn about the Rainbow Bridge. apparently, it really helps you deal with situations such as these.

A WEEK OF HORRORS, A WEEK OF HOPE: Part I

it’s been a tidal wave of a week.

first, michael crichton died. i thought back to my favorite book of his, SPHERE, with fond memories of the endless beautiful imagery provoked by the story. i remember sitting in my room and seeing a thousand tiny glowing orbs floating through deep aquatic darkness; looking through small glass portals embedded in steel and Jerry wrapping his strange presence around my dreams.

note: apparently the movie ruins all of this. i’ve avoided seeing it for this very reason; it is rare that a movie does a book any justice when you have an active imagination coupled with a habit of creating specific environments and characters to go along with every chapter.

moving on, today is the anniversary of Krystallnacht. you know, i’m not going to make any jokes here, cause when it comes to the Holocaust it will always be “TOO SOON” until the Earth turns upside down and we perish in the fiery combustion of all our wrong-doings and escalating filth. but, i just finished reading WATCHMEN last night, and there is a page that alludes to Krystallnacht during the “alien invasion” that kills half of New York City (if i ruined something for you there, sorry, but there’s a lot more to the book than just that part) and it got me thinking of urban destruction in general.

like, last week there were small riots in philly because the Phillies won the world series.

(don’t you love how cute they made it, with the late nineties ska/punk and everything?)

everyone saw how well the Phillies were doing, and knew that there was a 99.99% chance that there would be a riot, but no one could do anything about it.

of course, the riots weren’t anywhere near as severe  as the alien invasion in Watchmen, or obviously as Krystallnacht, but nothing is ever as extreme in Philly as the rest of the world. we are constantly crawling like sloths in the shadow of New York; the Phillies riots were the biggest city-wide disasters in years and ironically, they were instigated by city natives and inconsiderate suburbians, not aliens or terrorists or a facist regime. and, relatively speaking, nothing really bad happened; there were no reported deaths or rapes or hostage situations. just a lot of damage. pointless, mob-encouraged damage.

when the alien invasion happened in Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan should have/could have been able to prevent it, but several factors got in the way. he has a sense of the past, present and future simulatenously; he can use telekinesis, telepathy, and has all other sorts of God-like qualities. the rest of the Watchmen and a few of the featured New Yorkers had an idea something was up, as did Philadelphians and the Police sector.

so what if Philly had a Dr. Manhattan? he wouldn’t be a global asset, of course, but maybe he could help us out with overly drunk and desctructive sports fans, gun violence, domestic disputes, cop killings, etc. he wouldn’t be as streamlined as Dr. Manahattan but he would still have a fantastic presence. he would look like an amalgamate of

a mummer,

a yeti,

a Communist soldier,

an injured bicycle courier,

and boba fett.

but who knows, a lot of people seem to think Barack Obama is the nation’s new miracle worker, or, the New Dr. Manahattan, DR. USA. some think that he already is a Cyborg.

Who knows.

And, to go back to the Phillies riots, were they the riots to end all future hope of the Phillies winning a world series again? were they a curse to the lift of THE PHILLIES CURSE? can that happen? i mean, Philadelphians acted like the city has been reanimated, risen from the dead, all because of one victory. like this was THE END of being the biggest losers on the east coast. i don’t know. i’ll leave you with a related excerpt from Watchmen, and you decide for yourself.