Lose them all

So, here we are. Well into the late part of the first decade of the third millennium.

Does anyone else hate Mazda for warping your memory into thinking that that word is now spelled "millenium" because of that crappy sedan they built in the 1990s?

Anyway, Suzanne was still very sick on December 31, so I stayed out without her and then went home after midnight, preserving my 2002 pledge that I was never going to spend New Year's at home ever again. Suzanne understood. Yesterday, we overdosed on football and cookies and stuff, then grilled some bratwurst for dinner.

Not the most memorable holiday, but it served nicely.

This morning, she went to the vet and picked up Ben's ashes and his urn. They had also made a small (well, not that small, since it was Ben the Megawabbit, after all) pawprint in plaster. They also returned to us all the incredibly-expensive hardware that had been placed to try to repair his broken leg, since it wasn't going to burn or melt or fit into the urn. She said there were a zillion screws involved. I'm not surprised, since Ben was an engineering marvel and would have required lots of hardware.

And so, he comes home. He'll sit on the mantel in the bedroom next to the urn containing one of her previous wabbits. This has all made me think that maybe I should think about cremating any cats we lose in the future. Melody used to do that with her cats... there were two or three white boxes in her closet containing the cats' ashes.

That, and the pet cemetery out on the hill near the cherry trees is starting to get rather large and hard to maintain. There are more than a dozen cats in it now (and one dog, the dog of a friend of mine who wanted a more permanent place to bury him than the yard of his West Virginia rental house).

The kitten. Data. Harry. Othercat. Boris. Tess. Mao. Audrey. Yellowcat. Henry. Marnie. A couple of stray cats. And a couple of cats from the no-kill shelter.

It's getting too big and too much a reminder of the fact I will lose them all some day.