My apologies for going dark on the .org for the past few weeks. By mid-December I had already become quite frazzled, and the confluence of the semester ending (and me having sixty student portfolios to grade in a very short period of time), Spookytooth’s death, the holiday season, and a cold on top that all, just left me feeling out of it. The combination of emotions resulting from Spooky’s death, going through Christmas without Dad for the first time, and feeling lonely since I didn’t…

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Spooky was in bad shape when my sister came to the house yesterday, so she had her husband take Spooky to the vet right away. Spooky’s brain problem had gotten to the point where nothing could be done to alleviate his pain and make him better, so my mother and sister agreed that he should be put to sleep. Needless to say, the last thing this family needed when trying to deal with our first holiday season without Dad is yet another death.

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This past summer, shortly before we took Skooter to a shelter, the calico cat who had been hanging out on our property (alternately called Cali, Hobbes, Mikeneko, and Momma by the rest of us) gave birth to five kittens, who eventually joined their mother getting food on our porch. Four of the kittens eventually stopped coming here, presumably going their own way, but the fifth cat, an all-black boy, kept hanging around with both his mother and his presumed father (Lion King). When the weather…

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