goodbye, colfax

Poor little Colfax just disappeared yesterday. It was the weirdest thing – she’s been wanting to go outside lately, which we thought was a good sign. Neither cat ever goes far – they just hang out around the deck usually – but she hadn’t even done that in ages. She’d just lie on the plushy little cat bed I bought her most of the time, only coming out to eat. So we thought she must be feeling better when she started wanting to go outside again. Baker B got home before I did yesterday and left the deck door open for her, and when I got out of the car she came dashing up to me, meowing like mad. Which was really strange – she’s never been a very vocal cat. So I said hi to her and petted her and she just kept carrying on like she was telling me something terribly urgent. I picked her up and carried her in the house, sat her down – – and never saw her again.

The deck door was still open, so she must have gone right back out and didn’t come back. Baker B said she’ d meowed like that to him too. She must have been telling us goodbye. And even though we certainly expected her not to live much longer after being diagnosed with leukemia, still, it’s so shocking. Of course we’ve looked and looked and looked for her, yesterday and last night, and Baker B went home at lunch and looked some more. We’ve searched inside and outside the house, and searched around the neighbor’s house, and he’s combed the woods behind our house. And he keeps saying she may still turn up – but I can’t imagine she will. She’s skin and bones, frail, feeble, and probably 95 in human years. I guess she went off to die. And I feel just awful, not even getting to tell her goodbye.

I’m glad she didn’t suffer, at least. I guess if you have to go, that’s the way to do it. But it’s an awful shock, to have her just vanish. And I do hope she’s not inside the house somewhere. We’ve searched and searched, but it would really be awful to find her later on. Ewww.

Stella was helping us hunt for Colfax, which was kind of funny. She’d run around with us, looking anxious and like she knew something was wrong. On the positive side, I guess we can put her on a serious diet now. She’s getting so heavy I’m afraid I’m going to do something dire to my back just picking her up. And it was hard to limit her food without limiting Colfax’s, who has always been on the skinny side.

Well, I need to get back to work and don’t want to get all weepy in front of my coworkers. Even though K and J have been terribly nice – J is a cat lover herself, with two cats they treat like kids, and although K isn’t a pet person, she has a daughter with a menagerie. So I’ll end with some pictures – I don’t have that many of Colfax on Flickr, sadly – I’ve got scads of pictures of her that I’ve scanned,  but I lost my Picturetrail account before getting much put on Flickr, and I can’t get what’s on the old dinosaur computer off of it and onto something else. It won’t save to any of its drives anymore, and I can’t get the UBC drive thing to work. And last time I tried I couldn’t get anything to upload to Flickr from it, thanks I’m sure to dial-up. So I’m not sure what to do about that. I guess if we ever get DSL I can upload them all then, but I fear the computer dying first.

And I just posted that one – it’s from a few weeks ago.

Wow, I really DON’T have many of her on Flickr – that’s about IT. And I really DO have lots of pictures of her! She was not as photogenic as Stella, so I took more of Stella with the digital.

And I think I already posted this one, that I found on an ancient disc I’d forgotten all about, from 2000. I’ve got to do something about all those scanned photos.