This was actually yesterday, but I spent the morning cleaning out an old swimming pool that had become my dogs' mud wrestling pit and the afternoon in an extended meeting at work, so...I will use today instead.
In Memory
Angel
For only being in our lives a couple of months in 2014, this sweet bird left a pretty big hole when she died. My son had planned for her for months - getting the cage and toys all set up, cleaning up his room - and he was dedicated to caring for her.
She was rather shy around us, but we could often hear her chattering away at him while he played games in his room. He was working hard on perch training her and trying to get her to talk to him. She was fine when he went to sleep one night and extremely sick when he got up the next morning. She died hours later.
We'll never know what happened - budgies are such fragile creatures, it could have been anything. But the house was very quiet once she was gone.
Boo
We found Boo eating chicken nuggets in a Burger King parking lot in 2007. He was super friendly, so we brought him home and put up "found cat" signs. When nobody claimed him, we took him to the vet. That's when we discovered that he was FIV positive.
The vet strongly implied that we should put him to sleep right there. They also told us that we could not keep him in a house with an FIV negative cat. We panicked a bit, since we already had Mike, but we were already pretty attached to Boo and were categorically against euthanizing an otherwise healthy cat.
We switched vets, read up on FIV, and decided to keep the little bugger. There were ups and downs, but I have zero regrets about keeping that cat. He was loved by everyone who met him; in fact, I regularly had visitors threaten to take him home with them because of his sweet disposition.
We lost Boo to kidney failure in November 2013. There are still times when we rush to shut the door because he always tried to get outside.
Goofy
I could overflow the storage capacity of this blog with photos of the Goof, but I limited myself to just these two. The first because it shows off his happy grin and the second because that dog *loved* snow. He couldn't get enough of it, even in his older years (he was 13 in that photo).
We adopted Goofy from the Lawrence Humane Society in July of 1997. He lived in the fraternity while we finished college (and yes, he knew the word "party"), and each time we moved afterward, we made sure it was to somewhere we could take him. Finding places that would allow a 50+ pound dog wasn't easy, but surrendering this guy was never an option for us.
Besides rolling in the snow, Goof loved swimming at the dog beach while we lived in Florida and running around with Cosmo after she joined our family. He developed seizures later in life, but that didn't stop him from enjoying all the things.
We lost Goofy to lymphoma in August 2011. It was well over a year before I no longer felt like I was missing something at 4:00 (his afternoon dose of anti-seizure medication).
Corby
Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of pictures of Corby. When we adopted him from a rescue organization at PetSmart in Overland Park, Kansas, in 2001, we didn't have smartphones with digital cameras inside of them. And any physical photos I have were misplaced in one move or another.
Corby liked us well enough, but he wasn't a big fan of Goofy. He used to sit on my lap while I played MMORPGs for hours on end. The funniest memory I have of him, though, was his behavior with the automatic litter box: He would poop and go tearing across the apartment. 10 minutes later, when the box triggered, he would go tearing back across to bat at it while it scooped his poop. This cat had a serious hate on for turd burgling.
We lost Corby to hyperthyroidism in the fall of 2005. It was rough to have a cat go so quickly - four years is not enough time. Though really, it's never enough time.
I have loved and lost other animals, of course. We always had pets while I was growing up, so many dogs and cats (and a few gerbils) have owned pieces of my heart. But these are the pets of my adult life, the ones who made a family with my husband and child.
Rest well, buddies. We love you.
