Some recent photos. Nights have been slightly cloudy, which is both good and bad for photography.
More photos below. The difference between “red” and “blue” is the white balance… red is balanced for sunlight, blue for sodium lamps. The ATK facility some miles from here along with the major metropolitan areas of Thatcher, Bothwell and Tremonton, add a good deal of light pollution to a somewhat dusty sky.
A few recent photos taken from across the road past my front yard. Yes,the local area is hideously overcrowded, but the skies can be quite photogenic.
And here’s a Bonus Upside-Down Speedbump:
In lieu of anything resembling a social life, I’ve been working on this…
… along with a few other projects. At one point late Friday night I looked out the window and thought, hey, what’s that, and realized that it wasn’t Friday night anymore:
That’s a hell of a thing to see when you’re expecting pitch black.
Some photos taken as the sun crawled up behind the very distant Nebraska horizon a few weeks ago. Note the reflection on the clouds above, a phenomenon that the camera does not do justice to. Very striking in person.
Some more:
Early in the month the skies were clear and beautiful. Recently, and somewhat appropriately, they’ve turned gray and kinda sad, yet still photogenic. Here’s the first set of panoramas (out of three).
Put in an appearance over Thatcher, Utah, this evening:
Losing Raedthinn has been rough, to say the least. Thirteen years is from one point of view a fairly good run for a cat; out in the world, they might only last a few years. But housecats have been known to exceed 30 years, with 20 not being unusual. And Raedthinn had a lot of life left in him. Were it not for this *one* thing, he should’ve gone the distance. But there was that one thing.
Anyway, yesterday morning it was obvious that things were going wrong, so I called to set up a vet appointment. The *hope* was that I was setting up an appointment for the vet to look at him and say “oh, that’s not a problem, easy to remedy,” but the full expectation was that I was setting up an appointment to put him to sleep. AAARGHingly, the earliest appointment was some hours off, so there were hours of waiting. The first instinct was of course to spend those hours doing things with him, but I decided it was best to spend those hours letting him do what he liked. Mostly that meant laying in one window or another, and eating all the food that was suddenly made available to him in portions unheard of. When the time came, the vet Xrayed him again and found that, rather than improving, he was substantially *worse* than when they’d seen him a week earlier. The vet offered only the one way forward. Fortunately, that shot of whatever it is is *amazingly* fast and apparently entirely painless, and he was gone in seconds. The other vets working on horses and cows at the other end of the clinic could hear me give vent to my feelings. I wish I could say it was a manly Viking roar to warn those in Valhalla that a new warrior was coming and to get the hell out of the way, but it wasn’t quite that.
Anyway, had to spend some time after that processing. If I was a drinking man I likely would have spent a good chunk of the day blackout drunk, so perhaps it’s best I’m not a drinking man. One odd thing: he was, as is well known, a giant of a cat. But carrying him out of the vet… it felt like I was carry a hundred pounds. “He ain’t heavy, he’s my cat” transformed into “why is this so hard?”
Yesterday in those last hours, I took many photos of the old boy. I didn’t take any of him at the clinic, nor did I video his last moments. I’ve seen a number of YouTube vids where people did just that, and I gotta say I don’t freakin’ get it. If there’s something I’d never want to see again, nor share with the world, it’s the last moments of a beloved pet and my subsequent breakdown. But people do seem to love liveinstafacestreaming every damn thing these days so… shrug.
He spent a good deal of the day in the front window, and Fingers spent a good deal of that time next to him. She was not as pushy as she often was, and he did not push her away as he often did. It seemed good to let them have their time together.
Below is the very last photo I took of Raedthinn. Somehow it seems appropriate, him looking out onto the wide world.
So, thanks everyone for your kind words. Raedthinn was one hell of a cat and the world is that much less for his absence. Discussion of an afterlife normally leaves me cold and unmoved, but the notion of a heaven for cats simply seems *just.*
Buttons: seems to be back to normal. I think his problem was a bit wider-spread than just him… for several days Buttons, Fingers and Speedbump all refused to eat. When food came out they’d come running, but when they got to it they just wouldn’t eat. Finally this evening they all decided that they were in fact actually hungry and began eating again. Did thy have some sort of flu? A reaction to pollen or the smoke in the area (it’s “burn the farms to the ground” time of year out here)? Some other environmental problem? Dunno. But it seems to be over, at last.
Raedthinn: Mostly seems to be ok so far. Still has a good loud voice, but his breathing sometimes seems a bit more labored. It’s really hard to tell. Fortunately, the loss of his voice seems to be a good indicator that his lungs are getting squished. So, so long as he can complain good and loud, he *should* be ok. When that changes, *if* that changes, I’ll take him back to the vet. If it’s more than a few weeks since the last visit (we’re close to one week… less than 12 hours away from that milestone), then I’ll see if it’s advisable to get his chest cavity tapped and drained off. With any luck the problem will fix itself. I’m not stupidly optimistic about that though.
