We've unfortunately had two pets cremated in the last 4 months - 1 cat and one guinea pig. We paid $80 apiece. So now we have two ornately carved wooden boxes full of dead animal ashes.
One of my dumb dogs in Mississippi got hit by a car. I picked up his body and buried him in a corner of my dad's field and made a little cross out of sticks and weeds for him, I figured it was appropriate....Beau loved sticks. About a week later I was out in the field and noticed my father had decided to do some plowing. Yep. He plowed up my dog. There's not much dog left after being plowed. At least he made good fertilizer I guess.
This past summer we had to put our cat to sleep. Amidst my grief I was asked to decide whether I wanted to cremate her or take her remains home. Having spent copious dollars trying to heal her, I opted for the cheaper option of taking her home. That was a mistake. Husband thought it would be cool to plant a plant above her remains. That is a good idea. Except every time I saw the plant, all I could think about was my beloved cat's corpse liquifying in the ground in the summer heat. Then of course later we decided to split and sold the house and now the cat's fucking remains are on someone else's property. Anyway, lesson learned to just cremate the fucking pet. I may or may not be drunk. It is after all the drunk thread.
The lawn mower at our lake house gets stuck on Maggie unless you hit it at a certain angle. My grandpa was a smart, badass WWII vet but he buried his dog on a hill for some reason.
When I got married I got 1 wife and 2 cats. They were pretty old already, and got older with us, but they were pretty good cats. One in particular, a little black cat out of central casting, started to lose his vision. Turns out he had some kind of super high blood pressure problem and spent a night or two at the emergency vet getting stabilized. Old cats get hyperthyroid sometimes, but it didn't seem to be that based on some tests, and we never did figure out what the root cause was. The vet prescribed him a number of meds to control blood pressure and various other levels. A total of 5 pills, twice a day, every day. Now the pills were generally small but cats are smart, and if they are feeling ornery, they don't want to take the pills. We started out trying to hide the pills in wet food, and the damn cat could lick up 100% of the wet food and leave 100% of the pills behind with no problem. I swear to God, if he had opposable thumbs he couldn't have done better. Then we started to crush up the pills (we verified this was OK, they weren't time-release or anything) and mix them in with wet food. That worked better, until he started to get wise to that and wouldn't eat any of the delicious food at all. But he ate it up reliably enough when my wife was giving him the pills. Now, when she'd go out of town for a week to visit her folks, it was my job to give this damn cat his pills, and he didn't like me nearly as well as her. He'd never take them for me at all, even crushed up. Out of desperation, I got some pill pockets (little soft treats shaped like a thimble, where you can embed the pills and totally surround them so the cat doesn't know it's a pill) and he'd take those for me most of the time. That became our go-to strategy. It never worked 100% of the time (he could still chew on a pill pocket, swallow it, and spit out 3 untouched pills at the same time when he was on his game). Later, when he was being especially stubborn and missed a dose or two, I became an expert at a vet-taught technique where you tilt the cat's head back, convince him to open his mouth, and pop the pill pocket in the back of his mouth where he couldn't spit it out. While that sounds kinda bad, it was actually pretty low-trauma for both of us. But it usually took him an hour or so to like me again after that. That cat lived for another 3 or 4 years, taking 10 pills a day, every day. When we'd both be out of town, we had to arrange for special pet sitters that would come by to give the cat his pills. Otherwise, we'd arrange trips and such so that one of us was home for pill time. He passed this year at the ripe old age of 17, which is a pretty good run for a mostly-blind cat on that many meds, and he outlived his brother-from-another-mother by a few months too (I think his brother made it to 16). They were both excellent cats and I miss them a lot. We did get them cremated, and instead of opting for a vet-provided urn we just got the ashes back in a little plastic box (they're in a Ziploc inside). I have a little wood shop in the garage and made them simple little oak boxes, and now they've returned to the Earth in our backyard.
That's what I thought about our cat, the badass black cat who was my hunting buddy. Right before xmas, she got sick, started throwing up but otherwise acting normal. We figured it was a stomach bug but regardless, called the vet, first available was when they opened again the next week. Yeah she decided to do the dying cat thing and ran off into the woods somewhere. Either she died by herself under a log or something, or more likely a coyote or something got her. It's been like 3 weeks. She gone. It sucks, but it is what it is. She's a cat. We knew she was never going to live long enough to die of natural causes (though a coyote eating her is about as natural as you can get). I viewed our cat like that fat ugly friend you keep with your group. She was our first line of defense. If an intruding vermin came the house, she was the first one to jump at it. She slept with us at night, but she also attacked coons and armadillo and shit. It literally cost me nothing to put her down. And I didn't have to deal with any extensive sadness of losing her, because one day she just stopped coming home. When we get back from our trip in a week, I'm going to the local animal shelter to get two more cats. Rinse and repeat. Our dogs are our pets, all the other animals here are working animals.
It probably sounds silly, but Buddy is almost like a comfort or therapy dog or something. He is protective, calm, easygoing, (obsessed with me helps), and SO FREAKING SOFT. His fur is as soft if not softer and finer than a cat's. It is the first thing every single person who lays a hand on him says. When we lived in Hawaii, even before my stuff shipped in from a cargo ship, we had Buddy. Buddy is my first dog, and when that day finally comes, he will be the best dog I've ever had in my life.
Dear God I am going to freeze my ass off when I get back to Minni. Right now I'm sitting here in shorts and a hoodie watching tv meanwhile its like 55 out and the high will be around 70 today. When I get back in, the projected low is -11. Fuck that.
Yeah, if you're in a place where the expected high isn't going to surpass single digits; today is one of those days where you don't even bother putting on pants and leaving the house. Started some chili in the crockpot this morning for dinner, now to sit around and watch football all afternoon/evening. The only problem is I didn't plan ahead and I have no beer in the house. Anyone up for delivering?
We bought this winter beer sampler pack at world market. Here we go! They are in the freezer and I have a chocolate martini in the meantime. I just stocked my bar with lots of liqueurs so now I can make all sorts of fun stuff. I am missing my Bayou rum though so I will have to pick some of that up. Also it is really cold here. A wet, gross cold. I want to love it but I can't feel my thighs.
Loving this eating for two thing el preggo wife has going on. I've decided to join her. For dinner today we had homemade potato soup, an entire loaf of garlic bread, and together we're about a third of a way through a chocolate lover's cheesecake sampler. Tomorrow I'm doing my version of caldo de pollo in the slow cooker. I hate corn (comes out whole in my shit, that's unnatural, so I don't eat it), cabbage unless it's in sauerkraut form, and tomatoes. But I'm adding chipotle peppers (along with the adobo sauce), poblano peppers, a handful of garlic cloves, some fresh oregano and cilanto. Plus all your other caldo stuff. Carrots, celery, potatoes, dark chicken meat, kitchen sink for spices.
My favorite part is how Fry doesn't post anything for seven years, and then like drops it all in one post. Tell us another story, Uncle Fry!
Did it in the serious thread too. I read it all because it's like a relative you haven't seen forever and then they go on this forever story but you listen because you're just glad they're back.