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24 Jun 2008 - Thanks
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Thank you everyone for your comments and hugs. I'm actually feeling a lot better about it all, now that it's all over. When the vet gave Ming the injection, and I heard him take his last gasping breath and then was still, I felt such a feeling of relief - the stillness was such a contrast to the last couple of days that I realised how much he'd been suffering, and knew we'd done the right thing in ending it. The vet agreed too, and in fact thanked us for deciding to put Ming down and not wanting to prolong his life just for our own sakes. He said given his age and the symptoms, it probably was cancer, and that there was a 95% chance that any treatment he could have given wouldn't have achieved anything other than more distress to Ming, so we definitely were doing the right thing. That's what we'd been thinking anyway, but it was nice to have a professional confirm it. We stayed with Ming, stroking him and talking to him, while the vet gave him the injection. I'd never seen a lethal injection given before (it's the first time I've had to have a pet put down - usually they've been killed by cars, or have just crawled off and died on their own before we knew they were sick), and was amazed by how quickly it worked - the vet had barely started to push down the plunger on the syringe when Ming stopped breathing. I still can't work out how the poison can make its way round the body that quickly - biology can be a fascinating thing sometimes! I'd like to say I saw the light go out in his eyes, but that light had already been out for a couple of days, really. All there was left was fear and pain. Afterwards, we brought his body home and buried it in the garden under a standard rose he used to like to sharpen his claws on. In summer, when the roses bloom in a shock of pink, we'll look at them and remember our good friend Ming. [P.S. For those who might be confused about the Mim/Ming thing, Fuzzle (his original owner) named him Mim as a kitten, and that's what I first knew him as, but when she moved into a new flat a year or so later, one of her new flatmates couldn't get her tongue around "Mim", and kept mispronouncing it "Ming". And as his adult personality developed, Ming seemed a better fit to his volatile and aggressive nature (everyone always assumed he was named for Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon), so the name stuck. By the time I came back from Britain five years later, even Fuzzle was calling him Ming.] My only regret now is that we haven't been able to get hold of Fuzzle to let her know. She's been travelling overseas for the last eight years (so much for the 6 months she originally told us when she asked us to cat-sit Ming and Saffy!!!), so changes address and phone number frequently, and (through a tendency to lose phones and forget passwords) often doesn't even keep the same mobile phone number or email address. We've tried phoning the last mobile number we had for her, but it didn't work, and we've tried emailing what we think is her most recent address, but had no response, so don't know whether she's received it or not. We can't even contact her family, as they're similarly nomadic. Ming and Saffy have been living with us for longer than they were with her anyway, so I suppose they're technically more our cats than hers, but I know she'd still like to know. Hopefully we'll find a way of getting in touch.
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24 Jun 2008 - The good stuff from the weekend
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On Friday night, lytteltonwitch, rarsberry and I went over to Lyttelton for the Festival of Lights (which I kept calling the Firelight Festival - I've obviously been watching too much Gilmore Girls). After getting there too early last year, so that they hadn't even set up the stalls, we decided to go over a bit later this year, which of course meant all the decent parks were taken, so we ended up parking miles away at the top of a very steep hill (ok, so it's Lyttelton - everything is at the top of a very steep hill!), beside an even steeper bank. That provided a moment of drama (and later hilarity), when I slipped on some wet grass as I stepped out of the car, and in my efforts to stop myself falling over the bank, ended up dropping my bag so all the books I'd brought to release went flying over it instead. Lytteltonwitch and Rarsberry commended me on my new technique of mass releasing :-) Finding all the books again by torchlight was a bit of a challenge, but eventually we got them all gathered up (they weren't in plastic bags so they would have got too damp overnight if I had left them as genuine wild releases), and we headed down to the street party. It turned out the schedule had changed from last year, so we'd missed the parade, but we wandered around the stalls dropping books, and sampling the wares of the chocolate stall, and only managed to lose each other once, which was pretty good going in that crowd. The fireworks were earlier than last year too, so caught us by surprise, but we fought our way out of the crowd and down to a good viewing spot on the waterfront just in time. The fireworks would have been great, except that it was a very foggy night. And because the air was still, the smoke from the fireworks stayed in one place, thickening the fog even further. So after the first few, all you could see was a glowing cloud of different colours :-) Actually, it was kind of pretty (I wished I had a decent camera with me - a time exposure would have produced an amazing photo), but not quite as spectacular as fireworks should be. I'm not sure whether they cut the display short because of that, or if their budget was just smaller than last year, but it was much shorter this year too, which was a bit disappointing. But although the festival wasn't as much fun as last year's, we still enjoyed ourselves, and we did manage to release a LOT of books over the course of the evening - I think 46 altogether. Mine were:
Other releases last week were: Monday 16 June Tuesday 17 June Wednesday 18 June
Thursday 19 June
Friday 20 June I wasn't in the mood for releasing over the weekend or yesterday, but I released a couple this morning, The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe edited by Eric W Carlson and Freud's Discovery of Psychoanalysis by William J McGrath, and was rewarded by the psychology book being caught almost immediately! Catches may not be everything, but they're a great inspiration to keep releasing :-)
Currently reading: Mercy by Jodi Picoult
Currently listening to: Erewhon by Samuel Butler
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