(no subject)

Peeper didn't make it through the night. when i woke to give her her medicine this morning she didn't respond to her name, or move when i touched her, then i realized she was cold. i think i'm going to have her cremated and keep her ashes until i can find somewhere nice to scatter or bury them.

please tell other people for me so i don't have to.

when my dad says all the wrong things, my mom says the right ones

dad keeps insisting i want a chinese urn for peeper's eventual ashes. he also insists he pays. i figure i'll go shopping for it later and when i see the right thing i'll know it and get it. bugger.

a couple hours after finding peeper i went searching for something to keep her in for now. a while later i foudn it. then an hour or two later i put her in it. and a couple hours later took her back out and held her for a whlie while laying in bed. by then i was realizing that i wouldn't get her to the vet today. her body's going to be away from me for a few days whlie they cremate her, and just her being in a shoebox in the next room seems too far. not that it's really her anymore - it's so quiet and stiff and cold and fragile, all things she never was. but she's still small and soft, i wish she weren't. a couple hours later (am i out of hours in the day yet?) i moved it to the kitchen.

then mom called to ask how peeper was doing - neither i nor dad had called her to tell her since she's a teacher and interrupting class is to be saved for dire emergencies. this was dire, but not an emergency. so i told her. she asked what i'd done with her body for now, and i told her. sometimes practicalism is horrible (c.f.: dad), but sometimes just what you need to give you a kick in the pants: mom told me not to keep her too long or she'd start to smell. not very dignified, and absolutely disgusting.

a little bit after getting off the phone i wrapped the shoebox in a plastic bag and it's now on the top shelf in the freezer. man, now i won't want to ever eat anything from the freezer again. and on the other hand, it gives new meaning to that joke about the cursing parrot and the frozen chicken.

i'll have t$ give me the moral support i need to bring her over to the vet for cremation over the weekend. they'll keep her in the coolor until they can send her/it out monday, and i'm not sure how long it'll take to get her ashes back. it's not her, i'm already separated from her, being apart from her corpse won't make a difference. i'm sure i'll see that when i charge her death to my discover card in the amount of $180, plus tax.

one of my college friends, the one i'm doing the astro outreach stuff with this summer, his parents have some gorgeous land outside albany, he said i could scatter her ashes there probably. if it weren't so far from me i'd do it as soon as i got them back b/c it's just so beautiful, they have a nice field on a hilltop that's grassy and sunny and when i did occasionally take her out in the summer she loved to sit on me in the grass, and then after a while she'd start wandering through the grass pecking at things in the sun, never straying too far from me. she liked it.