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From my chair this afternoon, I heard Sebastian incessantly licking something plastic-sounding.  After quickly running through a list of plastic-sounding things that could kill him, I decided this is one of those things I was better off not knowing, and went back to work.

I just went to go make some lemonade, picked up my 1 lb. bag of generic sucralose, and found it covered in, seriously, like a two-millimeter-thick sludge of greyish bodily fluid.  Three guesses.

So: Splenda transferred to new bag, hidden from cat, and mental note added: check on weird licking sounds.

I got a new, cheap 7.1 megapixel camera, which I think will pay for itself in increased eBay sales.  Here is one of my first pictures, when Sebastian offered to help test the “Macro” mode:

Fun game: Wandering around the house with your eyes on the carpet, trying to discern where the audible cat barf landed.

Poor Sebastian.  Probably time for the vet again.  But he’s so much better now than “almost dead”, which was his state last year.

As regular readers will know, my surviving cat, Sebastian, has a liver condition.  He has a tube surgically grafted onto his esophagus, and we are force-feeding him via syringe.  His food?  Made up of pig liver, poultry liver, and fish liver.  Now, while pig liver is a delicacy in some cultures, there is probably an abundance available in the US market as a slaughterhouse byproduct.  But poultry livers are eaten, and fish oil is used medicinally, so the food is probably not entirely waste products.  Actual killing, of species otherwise immune to microfeline predation, is going on to sustain my cat who has a natural condition.  We have to go back to Gnathostomata to unite these “food” products; they are from different classes entirely.  Such is the price of miniaturizing, domesticating, and doting upon carnivores, I suppose.

How do I feel about this?  Not sure.  PETA (fuck ‘em, but I’ll talk about them) has a compelling shirt that shows a cow and pig juxtaposed against a cat and dog.  “Why love one and eat the other?” it demands.  “Make the connection.”

OK, connection made.  But I love my cat.  And apparently, I’m willing to kill for it.

“Hi!”

Back to bed.

I’m trying to take the train in to work tomorrow.  Wish me luck.  This is, after all, Los Angeles.  Any day now (ominous voice) the 118/210 is going to be closed due to a fire.  And I’m feeling environmental.

Fed the cat (syringe + g-tube + coöperative cat = not too bad).  Time for bed.  See you at 02h00.

Sebastian is tolerating his g-tube and syringe-injected food, and is happy to be home.  We’re feeding him every four hours, 35 ml at a time, along with 10 ml of water.

I’m enjoying just being with him and cuddling him.  He was away for too long.

Sebastian is home, and we have Mika’s ashes now.  He will be going in for a checkup next week.

Seriously, it hasn’t ceased to amaze me, the outpouring.  More hamster stories, eight this month alone.

Mika, our beloved cat, died this morning in her hospital incubator following surgery.  She never regained consciousness.

Thank you to everyone who wrote in, publicly and privately, to wish her and us the best.

Sebastian is recovering well after his surgery, and is expected to make a full recovery.

Mika
1999 – 2007

Mika, our cat, is dying.  I got a second opinion this evening, which was essentially to keep her comfortable and put her to sleep when it seems that she is in pain.

Our glassy-eyed beast of the night whom we have loved since before we were married is going to be gone.  I am a wreck right now.

Friends of Mika, please make arrangements to come and see her.  She doesn’t bite any longer.

I’ll keep readers updated.

Such a big world.  So many hamsters.  So much grief.  Anyone want to help with the new site, myhamsterdied.info?

I’m hoping this post will help web surfers.  If you’re looking for a caustic solution to dissolve paper, cardboard, and ink of all tested varieties, mix cat urine and diet cola in roughly equal quantities, and immerse.

This research was underwritten by the Amazon.com VISA card, which provided Thank You For Arguing and Color for Philosophers to my nightstand, and I was ably aided by assistants Mika (our poorly-housebroken cat) and Sebastian (our clumsy cat).

Anyone read Dutch?  Can you tell me what they are saying about my hamster photo on this page?  Scroll down and look for the picture to the right.

Note added 18 Jun 2003: OK, I heard back from the author of the hamster post.  Apparently she was saying the hamsters are ‘zielig’ — ‘miserable’ or ‘pitiful’.  I think it is because there are several in the same cage.  And she is right!  But in my defense, shortly after the picture was taken I moved the hamsters to individual, much larger habitats.  Chronologically, here are the posts about hamsters: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], and [7].  The last link is about the hamsters’ deaths.  Note also that “eulogies for hamsters” was one of the searches in my Two Years of Google Searches.

If anyone out there speaks Dutch, I would still like a summary of what was said in the thread.

If you don’t know already, you should probably be told that one of the pieces of information passed by most browsers to a server is the address of the page with the link that got you there.  This is called the “Referrer”.  I have two years of mcgees.org server logs at my disposal, and was able to run a search for all the Google queries that people used to reach my site.  I have posted a page containing all the search queries.  It’s quite large, so you’ll have to wait a few moments for it to download.

Many are quite amusing, some are frightening (consider the ten searchers looking for rape images), others are downright bizarre.  You have to wonder about a search for bitmap images of badgers, or calculus project “differential equations” “dr. jekyll”, or coca cola kidney stone cure, or essential tremor bicycle, or (what could this even mean?) notebook fall asleep even typing linux.  There is the poor sod who didn’t know that Google limits your searches to ten words, and searched for cheat codes how you can get the star and the shoes and how to get into unlocked door you get from nana luigis mansion, which must relate to some video game (Any insight, Dave?)  And there is the amusingly phrased ill cheat codes for tony hawk playstation.

Then there are the people who must think the computer is psychic.  There is the person who searched for what do i do if my printer will not pick up paper, makes a grinding noise, panel lights blink, and the person who looked for pictures of rachel a girl who died from heroin a few weeks ago.  I was also introduced to the search word “fakes”, wherein the search consists of, say, Jennifer Garner fakes.  Judging by the fact that all of the people searched for are well-known and at least reasonably attractive female entertainers, I gather that “fakes” must be faked — what? — nudie pictures?  Pornographic photographs?  In addition to Garner, people looked for Alicia Keyes, Amy Brenneman, Callista Flockhart, Mariah Carrey (and Carry, but not Carey), Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jane Kaczmarek, Lucy Liu, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sela Ward, and Sheryl Crow.  (Now I’m going to get all sorts of Google hits to this page from people looking for “fakes”.  So let me take a moment to say to them, “Fellows, get a life.”  And I’m going to get blocked by content filters.  Since their users will never see this, it would be pointless to tell them to get a life.)

Feel free to peruse the list yourself and see if you find any more gems.

My hamster died last week.  This was especially hard as Jennifer’s died the week before.  We found Jennifer’s in the morning, cold and rigid in her nest, and we took her out to bury her.  For my hamster, though, it was different.

Last Thursday evening, Jennifer called me at work and told me that she thought the hamster was dead.  This impacted me, but I had an important presentation the next day and needed to stay and finish it.  I tried to keep my mind off of it.  Fifteen minutes later Jenn called back and told me that she wasn’t sure it was dead, that it seemed to be moving, and asked me to come home.

He was not doing well.  He was breathing very shallowly and infrequently.  He did not seem responsive.  When I picked him up, he opened his eyes and squirmed a little.  Jenn told me that was the most she had seen him move yet.

He looked like he did not have very long.  I held him and stroked him and tried to keep him awake.  I blew some air at him regularly.  I strongly believed he would not come out of this.  An hour later I decided I needed to hear it from someone else.  I took him to the animal hospital in town.  They agreed.

I took him home, made a small blanket out of fabric, kept him warm and kept stroking him.  His breathing was becoming increasingly strained.  His breath rattled, and after a certain point he made a little squeak at each breath.  I was an emotional wreck.  I held him for nearly two and a half hours in total.  He would breathe every ten seconds or so.  His final breath did not seem any different.  He just inhaled and never exhaled.  We buried him that night.

Life is precious.  I, as a vegan, try to live this concept in everyday life.  The hamster lived for fifteen months, enough time for me to bond but not long enough for the death to be understandable.  He had a personality.  He displayed curiousity.  He had goals and made efforts.  He was alive.

I miss him.

Parents: This post and all comments are kid-safe.  The rest of the site may contain content inappropriate for small children.  Please use discretion.

It is surprising how much personalities can differ between two hamsters.  Of the two, one is very shy and reserved, terrified of being touched, and content to stay in a tiny space all day.  The other is far more adventurous and will happily eat out of my hand.  He is also scheming ways to escape from the habitat.

I recently added an extension to his habitat (no picture yet).  I bought a larger module and connected them with a set of “toobs” [sic].  He climbs up a straight toob, across a longish flat toob, and then down another descender.  To get him to explore the new module I moved his water into it.  He was happy for a while to travel back and forth between water and nest-and-food-stash.  One day, however, he very deliberately moved house: he went to the new module, made a new nest by the water bottle, carefully moved his entire food cache over, then (apparently) destroyed evidence of his previous nest.  To be honest, I never considered that he would do this.  Now he lives primarily in the new (larger) module but still visits the other for foraging and exercise.

I just cleaned out the habitat of one of the hamsters (my favorite one.)  He will regularly build a nest right against his water bottle, but the contact of the bedding material to the spout causes a slow leak, and he ends up with soaked bedding and an empty bottle.  This weekend I will get some expansion modules to extend his habitat, and try moving the water to a different compartment.

The bedding was thoroughly saturated this time; I had to remove all of it, including his food store, which was also drenched.  This is obviously stressful for him, and before I had even finished putting dry bedding in the habitat, he was already arranging it properly.  He seems to know exactly where everything needs to go (they are fairly neurotic rodents, I feel.)  I wish I understood the system so that I could arrange the replacement bedding in the proper fashion.  But I don’t, so I instead watched him for twenty minutes as he relandscaped the enclosure.  Poor little guy.

I finished Author Unknown earlier this evening.  I have an index card (5″ x 8″, not 5″ x 7″, as I mentioned before) with notes ready for my write-up:

(Granted, my handwriting is not so great in general.  But in partial defense of its particular hideousness here, let me state for the record that most of these notes were scrawled without the assistance of desk, table, or any flat writing surface whatsoever.)

One of the hamsters bit me tonight.  It was not an angry or scared bite, it was a simple “is this thing food?” bite.  He was sniffing my hand, then reached up and grabbed my index finger, opened his mouth, and took a tiny chunk right off the front of it.  Their teeth are amazingly sharp; the bite felt like the pinch one gets when exercising insufficient caution playing with small rare earth magnets.

Well, the hamster saga has turned out well, I think.  The pet store was willing to take the two hamsters back, and gave us a half-hamster worth of store credit (about $7 total) for each.  We went to Petsmart to purchase a second habitat so the two kept hamsters would have their own spaces.  It seems to be working out.  Both built nests from shredded bedding after they realized they were alone.

Also found … ack! … that Petsmart sells the habitat purchased on Thursday for $15 less than For Pets’ Sake.  For Pets’ Sake is a small local store, and generally I like to support stores like this, even if it means spending a little bit more.  However:

1. $15 is not “a little bit more”
2. For Pets’ Sake has a worse return policy
3. For Pets’ Sake stocks probably two orders of magnitude fewer items
4. For Pets’ Sake does not necessarily have better service.

My effort should probably be to support small business owners whom I admire, who work against odds, paying higher wholesale prices than the big chain stores, with no choice but to charge a bit more.  I don’t think my effort should be to support the theory of small business ownership.  If you want me to pay more for a worse selection, you’ve got to make it up somewhere.

There are other small businesses in the Thousand Oaks area that have a smaller selection and higher prices than larger stores, but don’t do anything to make up for this lack.  Conejo Valley Wine & Provision Co. is one, where the business model seems to be to make every buyer feel stupid (”I’ve got it!  If they feel offended and embarrassed, they will give me more money!”)  Paper Depot in Thousand Oaks (right next door to the previous store) is perhaps worse: they assume your question is stupid without even listening to it.  I was looking for #6-3/4 envelopes.  I was walked through the conversational steps of being told that such envelopes don’t exist (which they do), then that their width wasn’t 6 1/2 inches (which it is), then that that size wasn’t listed on their wall chart (which it was).  At the end of this she finally looked in her catalog and found some examples, but was unable to get me a sample envelope: I would have to pay for them in full and if I didn’t like them when they arrived, too bad.  Sorry folks … I can order out of a catalog (and for lower prices) without your help.  [— Text removed 27 March 2001 —]

To offset the negativity of this list, I should provide a list of small stores that do go above and beyond the call in order to provide a great shopping experience:

1. Wine & Liquor Depot in Van Nuys has the largest selection of single malt scotch in the U.S.
2. Video 4 You stocks a large number of DVDs and foreign films and employs very knowledgeable people.
3. Malibu Fish’n Tackle gave exemplary service the one time I shopped there, even though patronizing them violates my “terminal g rule.”
4. Words on Wine has beautiful items and great salespeople, although I can’t attest to anything else as I have never purchased anything from them.

Multiple hamsters in one cage is turning out to be a bad idea.  Our gamble of sociability based on their blood relationship seems to be a losing bet.

Unfortunately the store has a policy of only accepting returns of sick animals.  Our plan is this: we want to keep two of them, which will entail purchasing a second habitat.  We are going to try to return two, in the hopes that they can find good, solitary homes elsewhere.  If the store won’t give us money back, we’ll try to get merchandise credit.  And if that doesn’t work, we’ll offer to just give them back if they will sell them as pets (rather than, say, use them as feeders.)  This is my sentimentalism getting the best of me here.

I hope this all works out.

We have hamsters.

On Thursday night (14 Dec 2000) Jenn and I went to “For Pets’ Sake” here in Thousand Oaks and bought four “teddy bear” hamsters.  I had been talking about wanting some for a while, and was up-front with the fact that my primary motivation was to build an increasingly elaborate habitat of tunnels and rooms for them to explore.

But I have fallen quickly in love with the little guys.  They are such fun to watch, as they explore their environments and try to understand the world around them.  Some websites I read warned that hamsters are territorial and that it is a bad idea to keep multiple ones in a single habitat.  Other sources said that if they are of the same litter, it won’t matter (or won’t matter as much.)  We are gambling on the latter for now.

Here is a picture: you can click on it for a full-sized version.  At some point I will post pictures to the Pictures page.