and things went downhill from there

We had to say goodbye to Merry on Tuesday. She had a good run of it, but her health issues were compounding, and she took a serious turn on the weekend. She'd been in and out of the vet lately, and each visit stressed her out more than the one before. We've known for awhile that she was on borrowed time. We might have been able to get her another year or two if we'd shipped her off to Saskatoon for a month for radiation therapy for her thyroid.

The keyword is "might".

There was no guarantee that it would fix her thyroid (the tumour was too aggressive for medication), and even if it did, she had other issues piling up alongside it. Also, we have no idea what cat we would get back after she spent a month in a vet the next province over. She was never quite the same after just spending two days at the office down the street from us.

We brought in a home service to send her on her way so that she would be as stress-free as possible at the end. Cats are more attached to their place than to their people, so she got to leave this world in familiar surroundings.



We are utterly crushed. She was a wonderful cat.

My brother died on Tuesday, right on schedule. The family is as much stunned by the suddenness of it as we are by the loss. He went from feeling a bit off one day to dead from cancer in just six weeks.

His diagnosis got delayed a bit because so much of the medical system is tied up dealing with pandemic cases, but the cancer was so aggressive that they don't think an earlier diagnosis would have made a difference to the outcome.

I am still trying to resolve myself to what has happened, and I don't think it is going to truly hit home until we next visit the west coast. Visiting this brother was always one of my top priorities on these trips, and his absence is going to hit like me like a truck.

Moving on ...

I've been getting lots of practise cooking since I retired, and I'm starting to become more confident in my skills. I am starting to move away from leaning on recipes for everything because I'm starting to get a good feel for how the ingredients interact with each other.

On Thursday I made a goat & yam curry in the pressure cooker. I glanced at a couple of recipes to get a feel for proportions and timing, but I winged it from there. The result was really good. Goat is one of those meats that can really dominate a dish if you let it, but I managed to tame it in this dish. You can still taste it, but the curry tastes of goat, not GOAT.

While I was bandying breakfast ideas about in my head this morning, I noticed that I had nearly used up the fancy, organic, whole milk we bought last weekend (we usually don't go for the fancy stuff, but we bought what was available - and this milk was notably good. It was lighter in colour and sweeter than the usual milk we buy - something to be said for grass-fed). I figured there was enough milk left to make pancakes for one (atara had already fed herself this morning).

Normally, the first thing I would do for pancakes is pull out a recipe, but I thought, "Eh - I know what goes into pancakes. I don't need no stinkin' recipe."

I poured the milk into a mixing bowl, added an egg, some vanilla, agave syrup, vanilla extract, and what I thought looked like enough vegetable oil. I whisked that together, then grabbed the sifter and started sifting in flour until it looked like about enough. I mixed that together, whisked in a bit more flour because was a tad too soupy, then added what looked like sufficient baking powder, baking soda and salt.



This was the last pancake of the batch, and the picture does not do it justice. It has a slight crease in it because the pan I used was too small, and I had trouble getting the spatula under it to flip it (and I'm not practised, nor coordinated enough to flip them without a turner without it ending in tragedy). I daresay these are the best-tasting (non-buttermilk) pancakes I have made to date. They were fluffy, but not quite as airy as others that I have made. I think that I could have addressed that if I had added a touch less agave syrup, and a touch more oil.

That said, i would be quite content if my next batch replicated this recipe exactly.

When I was growing up, I always thought that I had a pretty normal family, but the older I get, the more I have come to accept that my family is a little ... odd.

Mom sent out an email this evening (with names redacted by me).

Subject: Christmas

Hi Gang, [eldest sister] phoned earlier today, [cousin] had been in touch with her to say that your Aunt [deceased] had passed away yesterday evening. I'm glad that [eldest sister] and I were able to go visit her last summer.

Another thing on my agenda: no gift exchange here, just dinner and games. If you want to give each other something, please get it over with before coming here.

Thanks.

Love,
mom

You wonder where the oft morbid humour in my stories comes from. "Merry Christmas family. Oh, and by the way, your late father's sister died."

I was always fond of that particular aunt, having spent more time with her than any of my parents' other siblings. I spent a whole summer with them in Penticton when I was in my early teens - the longest stretch I ever spent away from my nuclear family before I was an adult. I feel like she deserves a bit better than an aside in a note about what gifts not to bring for Christmas, but on the other hand, I wouldn't expect much more that; this is just how my family communicates.

For example, I learned that my eldest brother was getting married when a mutual friend asked me if I had picked out a suit because he'd heard I was going to be an usher. I was helping him with his master's degree at the time (writing some software he was going to use in teaching music theory). The conversation went something like this.

Him: I hear you're going to be an usher at your brother's wedding. Do you have a suit picked out?
Me: My brother's getting married? (pause) Which brother?
Him: Are you serious? Your brother D is getting married. You mean he hasn't told you yet?
Me: No. (another pause) Marrying who?
Him: I don't believe this! I've never met a family that communicates as badly as yours!

Anyway, so apparently my aunt died yesterday. Merry Christmas.

I know that many people have a final wish in place for what to do with their body after they die. Some want to be cremated, or buried in a particular location, but the more thought I give to the matter for myself, the less I care. I cannot possibly care. The moment I die, there is no longer a me to have any concern over what happens at that point. I do not want to burden those I leave behind with trying to fulfil some wistful final desire that I have no way of verifying.

Pretend I am somehow able to know what you choose to do with my body and surprise me.

In some respects, I have a hard time understanding some peoples' obsessions with happens to their body post-mortem. If you do not believe in an afterlife, then there is no point in stressing over something that is, and will always be beyond your control anyway. If you do believe in an afterlife, then what does it matter? The moment you pass on, your former body becomes an empty husk, like the carapace of a beetle that has been shed so that a new one can take its place. Why would you, or anyone else care what happens to it once you are done with it?

I understand that the handling of the dead is really meant as a form of closure for the living. So ... let them deal with it if they need closure. Stuff me in a sack and throw me in the river when I am dead. Dip me in wax. Cut me up for science. I cannot possibly care.

A few weeks back I refreshed the list of subs I follow on Reddit, adding a few and dropping a few. One of the ones I started following is /r/Showerthoughts. For the most part, it is a gathering place for ideas that are just stupid enough to be clever. Often the posts will sound profound on the surface, and then dissolve into absurdity when you start to think about them too hard. It is a sub for things that you try not to think about too hard.

Sometimes I find myself pondering things that would fit nicely in that sub. For example, I have pondered on ideas that would make eternal life even remotely bearable. I think one would need to have the ability to forget, so that there would always be new things to discover. As I thought about it more, I realized that my own life may as well be eternal. From my perspective, I have always existed, and always will. I have never known, and will never know a time when I did not exist.

In a sense, I have my own, private immortality.