Returned to the Annapolis Valley to go apple picking with church friends at Noggins Corner, first time I’ve ever gone apple picking. There were huge orchards with rows and rows of different varieties of apple trees, thousands of apples overhead and underfoot.
I learned that I like Cox Orange Pippin apples, and do not like Kestrel apples. Ezra’s trying a Gala:
There was also a pumpkin picking field, an expansive playground of hay bales and farm equipment, and a giant corn maze, which changes every year. This year’s theme was “dinosaurs.”
We didn’t actually navigate the entire maze but instead wandered the “mini-maze” tucked into a corner, which gives you an immersive corn maze experience without being an all-day adventure.
Came home with a nice big bag of assorted apples to last for weeks after.
Grief and sadness: our cat Martha has passed away due to sudden and severe renal neoplasia leading to multiple organ failure. She had just turned ten years old (Oct 2012 to Oct 2022) — far too early.
I didn’t know it at the time but this was her last healthy photo outdoors:
We adopted Martha Jones along with her sister Amelia Pond in 2013 (a couple months after the death of Pandora) through Lost Dog Rescue, from a litter called the “Companion Kittens” by their foster — all named for Doctor Who companions.
Through the years and multiple moves, she was an affectionate and precocious kitty who loved chin rubs and nose bumps and being held in arms and resting on bent elbows as we went to sleep.
Martha had been in a state of slow decline for the last couple of years, but I hadn’t recognized the warning signs quickly enough: weight loss, hissy ill temper towards her sister Amelia, and frequent vomiting. (Previous vets had checked the vomiting and found no issue other than that she was eating too fast and getting active right after, but it got much worse later, which, with the weight loss, I should have recognized as a sign of kidney failure.)
She crashed hard in early October, showing signs of pain: curling up in corners, growling when we came near. I finally found a nearby still-covid-cautious vet and took her in, where they diagnosed her with kidney disease and referred her to the local emergency vet clinic for IV fluids and confinement for observation.
Martha perked up for a day after coming back home but still had difficulty moving due to muscle atrophy. I got her a cage as a convalescent habitat, and set it up with food, water, and a small litterbox so she wouldn’t need to move too far for basic life necessities, figuring this would help with a lengthy, difficult recovery period.
There was no recovery.
She crashed again and I called the emergency vet, who recommended I bring her back in. At 4AM I got the call: her heart was failing. I drove alone through dark, foggy, empty roads to the veterinary ER clinic in Burnside. They led me to a pet euthanasia room and brought Martha to me, still alive, curled up on an cushion which smelled of isopropyl alcohol. I held her for a few minutes to say goodbye; she still purred but was limp in my arms and would sometimes twitch in pain.
I laid Martha down on the cushion, and as the vet injected the euthanizing drugs into the IV catheter in her leg, she rested her head on my hand one last time and went to sleep. “She’s gone,” the vet said. It was 5:03 AM of October 17th, 2022. I was allowed a few minutes to mourn alone with her remains. “I’m sorry, Martha,” I whispered to the air, before the vet came back to pack her away. I couldn’t seem to cry.
I’ll never forget how foggy it was that night as I waited for the box with her remains.
I brought her home first so Amy and Ezra could say goodbye, petting the cold fur one last time. (There was an ice pack placed in the box to keep the remains preserved till cremation). Amelia sniffed at the box. I don’t know if she comprehended.
We had her remains cremated at Metro Pet Crematory in Upper Sackville, with the ashes returned to us in a box for later scattering.
I’m okay. We’re okay. This is the third cat I’ve ever put to sleep, but of course it doesn’t and shouldn’t get any easier. She was an affectionate and cuddly and mischievously playful cat who died far too soon, and I’ll miss her like I miss Pandora.
Martha leaves us with over over 500 cat photos. Please enjoy these of her going O_O through the years:
She is of course also survived by her sister Amelia, who is still strong, healthy, and has gotten rather large.
More photos of Martha’s last days. (Warning: this album does contain potentially traumatic photos of her immediately before and after euthanasia.)
Update, December: We scattered Martha’s ashes here, on a cold leaf-covered slope overlooking the waters of Cole Harbour:
This was not far from the old Poor Farm cemetery. I like to imagine the ghosts of those lonely outcasts perking up one night as a spectral black cat approaches them from the nearby trees, to jump into their arms, all cuddly with purrs and nose bumps. Just sometimes, in my imagination.
Thanksgiving dinner spread for 2022: Boxed boneless turkey (whole turkey is too much for just the three of us), bread stuffing, cast iron pan fried string beans, baked potatoes, cranberry sauce, buttery rolls, corn, peas, and a nice fizzy bottle of No Boats on Sunday hard cider.
Figured it was worth risking some phone camera CCDs to get this shot of faint sun dogs flanking the sun in late September over Halifax:
Nothing quite so spectacular as sun dogs in Sweden or Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, but still a sign of colder days coming as the sky fills with refractive ice crystals.
Hurricane Fiona went a bit east of us, hitting eastern mainland NS, Cape Breton, PEI, and SW NL especially hard. Strong wind and rain all night Friday and Saturday. We lost power and mobile data near midnight Friday, but got lucky and had our power restored Saturday afternoon. Branches fell off neighbours’ trees but no damage to the house:
Welp, after two and a half years of dodging it, I finally managed to catch COVID-19. Some notes on the infection:
Probably BA.5 subvariant, most likely caught from sick coworker’s presymptomatic exhalations on the one day I slacked off on masking at work while in an open-air workspace people walk through and pop into occasionally. My CO2 monitor showed good airflow in the 500s and everyone seemed to be healthy, and that made me overconfident. At least one coworker was presymptomatic and another had just finished 5-day isolation and come in while still possibly contagious.
Symptoms started about a week after exposure with sore throat and joint aches, then proceeded quickly to fever, body aches, cough, chest congestion, diarrhea, insomnia, delirium, and extreme anger at provincial government and public health agencies for their “get back out there, go to work after 5 days, masks optional” messaging, plus locking down PCR tests to juke stats and hide outbreaks, delaying boosters for under-50s, and gatekeeping antivirals for the gerontocracy.
We all masked up at home on symptom onset with an N95 Aura before I even tested positive. Wife helped move a mattress into the Basement Isolation Room, and I lived there for two weeks. Basement had its own bathroom and a door to the backyard. Outward-facing fan in basement window provided negative pressure so none of my air was shared with the rest of the house. Wife left meals by the door for me to fetch after she vacated the basement.
Days 2-4 were worst: fever, lower respiratory congestion, hacking cough so hard it made my head hurt so it was impossible to sleep. Despite this I slept as much as I could, while still working remote the best I could.
Waking delirium gave me strange visions of a “verbal audit” in my brain: every time I spoke or had a thought I would hallucinate a ticker tape receipt being printed, with a series of scores gauging my every thought and utterance according to incomprehensible criteria. The only score I remember vividly was “StormConformance.” I do not remember any of my StormConformance rankings.
Windows stayed open most of the day for ventilation (fortunately it was late summer and not too hot or cold out) and Amy built a CR Cube with a box fan and four furnace filters. That supplemented an existing Aeramax DX5 , plus the heat pump running in ventilation mode all day; air handler was outfitted with a MERV 13 filter and a UVC light helping to disinfect the air stream.
Besides [remote] work, I spent most of my waking time playing Papers Please, reading “Raft”, and watching through The Orville.
By Day 5 I felt mostly normal again except for some chest congestion and a cough, though I continued to show strongly positive on rapid tests. Stayed safe and continued to isolate: I was committed to a full two week quarantine.
Finally tested negative on a RAT as of Day 10 but stayed down in the Isolation Basement till Day 14, as I was anxious about persistent phlegmy post-nasal cough.
Our mitigation measures worked: with vaccination, isolation, ventilation, and air purification, plus respirators for rare times in shared air, I recovered quickly, and the wife and kid never caught covid from me.
Post-recovery I’m avoiding too much exercise, and getting as much rest as I can for a couple months, as strenuous activity immediately after recovery is a risk factor, so 6-8 more weeks of continued rest and generous naps.
After all this I have steeled my resolve to avoid additional infections and keep my wife and kid at zero, in defiance of every covid minimizer who said “it’s just a cold now, live your life.” This wasn’t just a cold, someone “living their life” while contagious infected me, and I continue to feel effects well after recovery. It might be months or years before I know if my heart, brain, or immune system suffered long-term damage — damage I’m starting to observe in other people as society pressures them into pretending the pandemic is over.
So I will continue to [not] party like it’s 2020: masking with N95 or better respirator indoors and in crowds (though I mostly just avoid crowds), work from home when possible, improve personal air filtering at work, get updated vaccines when available, and sadly resist pressure to mingle unmasked indoors with family and friends who have abandoned caution.
Went down to Fishermans Cove and McCormack’s Beach Provincial Park in Eastern Passage, where there was a Pirate Festival going on with live music, a bouncy boat, and a treasure hunt. I’d just recently dusted off my old Google Glass and recorded some POV video:
Ezra ended the day with a haul of several replica gold doubloons, a “real” gold nugget, and various other treasures. Avast, me hearties.
The fair was back in town (same traveling carnival we saw in 2019), so we went over at an uncrowded time to go on some rides, especially the “Orient Express” dragon mini-coaster.
That got me thinking about roller coasters in Nova Scotia — or the lack of them, as there currently none active as of 2022. There was the Tree Topper in Upper Clements Park, now closed. Atlantic Playland (now Atlantic Splash Adventure) used to have Rockin’ Roller Coaster, retired in 2016. They’ve imported Runaway Mine Train from Gillian’s Wonderland in Ocean City NJ but construction on that has been delayed.
