If I could put a sad face or broken heart emjoi in the title of this blahg, I would.
Be forewarned this is indeed a sad blahg. Yesterday we had to put down our beloved cat Annie. She is the little black cat in the photo to the right with her friend Zoey.
Back in October of 2015 I wrote another sad blahg, FRANK’S LAST STORY about losing our cat Frank. That was extremely sad and I talked about a prolonged illness with Frank before we had to make the decision to let him go. In that blahg, I wrote the following: “Zoey, who has been with us for two years, also loved Frank. She always played with Frank when he was in good health but left him alone when he became ill. After his death, she pined around the house and was very lonely. We had to eventually adopt a playmate for her. A new little black kitten who we named “Annie” joined our family at the end of August. I will write about her another day.” I don’t think I ever got to that blahg about Annie but in December of 2015 I did a summary blahg with the title, THIS IS 50, PART ONE, and I debuted the photo above of Zoey and Annie. Here’s what I said: I’m posting a picture here of Zoey and Annie. Zoey has been with us a couple of years but Annie is our new addition that came into our home this past August. This is the first picture I have posted of our little black kitten, Annie. You can see that she and Zoey are best friends. Definitely click on the above picture for a larger view. Just looking at that photo is making me feel sad all over again.
I won’t go into great details about Annie’s illness. It was very sudden and very quick. Last Friday we noticed she was very listless and sleeping a lot and seemed uncomfortable. She ate some and drank a little but we thought she might be having difficulty going to the bathroom. We were able to get her into the vet yesterday and they found she had a large mass inside her and it was obstructing her from urinating. Surgery was going to be major with no guarantee. I called my wife after she messaged me and then I went home early. We talked and cried and then decided we didn’t want Annie to suffer so we made the decision to take her back to the vet and let her go. A very tough decision with lots of crying at home and in the vet’s office. Nine years ago, I did that with Frank and it was just as hard this time around with Annie.
I don’t know what I would have got around to saying about Annie if I ever wrote a blahg about her while she was still alive. She was a funny little black cat. She was smaller than Zoey and Rogue (our other cat). She rarely meowed and never purred. Maybe she did silent purring but I never heard her purr in the nine years she was with us. I don’t think she was ever unhappy until her recent illness and the discomfort she felt. She loved lying on my lap every night. I had to sit in a lounge chair with my legs out and she would stare at me from the floor until I patted my lap and told her to come on up. Sometimes if my legs weren’t just the right way, she’d get up, turn around and then stare at me until I moved my legs to her satisfaction. It sounds annoying but last night I missed the interaction immensely. She had other quirks as well. When she went into heat, she was as annoying as hell and that’s when she would really meow. Over the past six weeks she also started scratching at our bedroom door at all hours. We eventually gave up and she started coming in and would sleep our bed up against my legs. Perhaps this change in behaviour was also signaling something was wrong. Of course, she had no other way of letting us know what was happening to her. It’s funny but I can’t find fault in any of her annoying traits. I will just miss those as part of the whole package. Annie was unique. I’ve heard people say never get a black cat because they’re odd. Don’t you believe it. It’s that oddness that made us love Annie.
I’m going to wrap this up because everything’s still too raw. I went looking through my phone for a recent photo of Annie. I found this one from April of 2023. It shows all three of our cats enjoying themselves on their cat tree. Rogue is on the top, Zoey is in the middle, and Annie is on the bottom. There’s no pecking order. Whoever got there first, got the top spot. We called it the cat-bird seat and Annie loved getting up there. She always had to wait her turn. Click on the image of a larger view and you can see Annie and the other two sunning themselves.
There are no further words that I want to share at this time about our grief. Annie was loved and still is. Part of my heart is missing but it will heal. When I feel sad or upset I always think of The Weepies song “Mend.” I’ll close with that song and I’ll begin to mend. Farewell, Annie my lovely.
After a recent Windows update it would no longer load into Windows. Bryan just kept getting the spinning blue wheel of death. I know, I know, the image to the left is not a spinning blue wheel but it belongs to death so who am I to argue. Bryan got the spinning blue wheel of death and his laptop would no longer load into Windows. He asked for my help. In the past, when he had the same error he was able to fix it himself so I knew that this time would be a bit of a challenge. 
I have my Ipod on shuffle when I’m shaving and this morning a song by Fred Eaglesmith came into the rotation. The song was “Crashin’ & Burnin’ ” from his ‘Drive-In Movie’ CD. I highly recommend it because all of the songs are great and there’s a train theme running through many of the songs. Sorry about that running through pun. I know it was a bad pun but listen to the song, it’s very good: 
My brother Tim had the Harry Chapin record, “Greatest Stories Live” and he played that record all the time until I was almost mad. I had to trade him for that record to get him to stop playing it. Fortunately, for me, the record began to grow on me and I eventually purchased every Chapin record I could find. Chapin’s songs were essentially stories set to music and you could understand the lyrics. As I’ve grown older, most of his songs take on more meaning for me. Here’s a particularly endearing song that reminds me so much of my daughters. It’s Harry Chapin’s “Tangled Up Puppet.” 
