Sheep Guarding Llama

It’s a hard morning here waking up without Chocolate Milk. The girls are struggling to process her passing. It’s difficult because she’d become a part of the routine. Check on her (and the other kittens: the buñuelos) as we called them because they were babies and their mother’s name is Fritter; feed them and play with them throughout the day; and then go to feed them at night. The girls would come to my office and be like “let’s go see the cats.” Every few hours we built them into our routine. And the cats loved to be close to us, they spend countless hours on the windowsills of the girls’ bedrooms or on my office window or the bathroom (like Chocolate Milk did two nights ago) or in the video game room.

And they have been such a part of planning. The three buñuelos are so close we were struggling with the idea of separating them and were trying to figure out how to move them with us in the future. The girls were dreaming of future two decades with these three siblings living with them. We’ve been watching over them since they were so tiny and we failed this one. This is one we saved from drowning in such a panic.

Now it is going to be so hard to look at Orange Juice and ‘Mæra without seeing the ghost missing between them. Calling them the buñuelos will always remind us that the other little buñuela isn’t there. Chocolate Milk was the mirror image of her dad, who sits in the garage watching over them at night from afar. She had one white leg and one sleeved tabby leg reversing his own markings. He went to her when she was hurt and we think she was with him when she collapsed; he likely only left when we gathered around her. He called for her long into the night last night, it’s heartbreaking. He did come into the kitchen at one point, something we’ve not seen him do in many months.

Liesl was up early and still crying. She sat out on the veranda with Dominica and played Animal Crossing on her Nintendo Switch to try to keep occupied.

Luciana didn’t get up until the afternoon. She was feeling a little less sad than last night. But she was sad enough that it seemed to have induced an anxiety attack or something akin to it and she was unable to eat for most of the day.

I was mostly able to stay busy today and not have to think about it too much. This morning I was very sad. I went out several times and spent some time with the remaining kittens. I’ve not seen either of the parents today.

Tonight was so hard. Around nine in the evening I heard the dogs go running and the scream of a kitten. I ran from my office as fast as I could. It is so frustratingly hard to get from behind my desk into the front yard. It’s inches away but the distance on foot is ridiculous with so many turns. I was too late. I found Clive in the darkness with Chocolate Milk in his mouth as he was trying to kill her. I got her out of his mouth and she went flying. As far as we know, the other dogs never got to her.

She fled and went to the neighbors. We searched for a while and finally found her. She seemed okay, scared for sure, but moving okay. Her dad came to watch over her, but she kept disappearing. After an hour Liesl came running to get me, they had found her laying in the grass behind the garage. She was barely able to move. Barely able to breath. It was clear he had punctured internal organs. We had already scheduled a vet for the morning, thinking that she seemed just fine or maybe a little limp. We weren’t able to catch her and she didn’t seem injured at first. But once Luciana had found her out back, it was bad.

We called every emergency vet that we could find and got one that started heading towards us, but it was too late. We got Dr. Jorge on the phone eventually too, but he mostly just was able to tell us how to check for vitals. We spent probably thirty minutes all standing around her crying watching her shallow breathes, the occasional cough or gasp, but there was no hope. Long before the vet arrived, her heart and breathing stopped. It was heart-wrenching. Not just losing such a sweet little baby, but also the timing. Just last night she had gone from timid and always avoiding us to playing with the girls like a comfortable house cat. She had totally changed and loved playing with us. Liesl had been sending me so many videos of her playing in the house last night. Exactly twenty four hours before she died. She had come into our yard tonight to get to the girls in the house to play like last night, but last night the dogs had been locked up. Tonight they were loose and found the kitten in the yard.

The girls were petting her and talking to her as she passed. Dominica and I stood with them in the darkness with flashlights as she passed away. This is so hard, the girls don’t remember Oreo dying. We weren’t with him at the time. We were in Italy, having been away for months and he was with my dad. He was old and died of heart failure that we knew would take him one day. And the girls were very little, Luciana barely over a year! Luciana has no memory of Oreo, Liesl only a tiny bit. He was old and blind for them and they had been away from him for so long when he died that it wasn’t so painful. But it kept Dominica and I from having another pet for much of the girls’ childhoods.

But this, this is the first death of a pet for both of the girls. This is going to be hard. This is going to be a searing memory for the rest of their lives. I remember so many cats that died back on the farm. This is so much easier to remember. They are older, and they spent so much time with Chocolate Milk. They are really struggling with processing this. They’ve been shielded from this kind of pain for so long. It’s so awful.

Luis, the night guard, and I (but almost entirely Luis) buried Chocolate Milk in a grave on the north side of the bitter orange tree that provided shade on the garage where Chocolate Milk spent her life. She’s buried just two meters from where she spent her life, just on the other side of the garage wall where she will likely never be disturbed. Right by the French drain where we first discovered the three little kittens huddled together for safety.

This will be one of the hardest days in my daughters’ memories. Sixty years from now, they will remember this clearly. This is going to be a pain they never lose. It’s so hard seeing them feel that pain that I remember from so long ago, and feel again today. It’s never easier losing a pet, a life you loved and cared for and tried to protect.

Marcela is very sad too. She was so excited to be getting Chocolate Milk. She loves cats and she had this one picked out for many months and had just played with her yesterday and was ready to take her home.

Tonight after months of carefully watching over the three kittens who live in our garage – after having saved them from flooding when they were caught in a French drain, and hunting one down that was missing for days and finding her stuck up on a wall – tonight we had a huge breakthrough. While they, and they mother, have been known to come into the hard in the wee hours of the morning to hang out with Paul, they’ve not been able to do that since he has been in Colombia. Today, they started getting a lot closer. Chocolate Milk, the one that is earmarked for Marcela to be a companion with her kitten Happy, finally, for the first time, let her approach and pet her. I got to pet her while she ate as well, a rare thing. In the evening, I went into the guest bathroom at the front of the house and saw the outline of cat ears in the window and there was our timid little girl hanging out in the shower window.

Tonight, all three kittens, Orange Juice, Chocolate Milk, and Chemæra came into the yard and made their way into the house and spent HOURS playing with Liesl and Luciana in the house. They had so much fun: both the girls and the kittens. It was a huge breakthrough. We are hoping to be able to make them house cats. They really want to be with us. They come running to us anytime we go outside. And the three of them are inseparable. We have decided to try to keep all three, they are such a team and all want to be with us all of the time.

We check on them all day long. We see them first thing in the morning, check on them throughout the day, often sit in the garage and play with them, and we always see them just before going to bed. Sometimes their mother, Fritter, is around, especially in the morning. And their dad normally sits at the far end of the garage and watches them from afar (mostly to avoid us, he is very skittish.)

The girls were so excited to have the night with the kittens tonight. They’ve never had cats that would play like this and they’ve been taking care of these kittens for so long now. To have them suddenly leap from stand-offish to full on snuggly, pettable, playing in the house was a really big deal.

Mostly just a work day. More work on getting my storage project working. Always the first stage goes so far then fixing the little problems takes forever. Project name is currently Freehold, but I think it needs to be like Freehold Cloud or Freehold Storage.

As always, ended up being a decently busy day, but not terribly. But due to lots of problems with my tooling today, it was not very productive.

I continue to be really happy with my as-of-yet unnamed Chat application. We’ve had it in production for an entire week now and it is really getting smooth. Having it installed on mobile is making all of the difference, we really are back to parity with RocketChat which we were generally happy with previously. That’s very excited to have one of my software platforms get put into production so quickly and to be working so well.

This afternoon after some toxic troll got a little too much community sympathy I decided that my time spent on the Expat forum on WhatsApp just wasn’t good for my mental health and while I definitely feel that a lot of people appreciate my time on there, the amount of time and work that it takes to keep the group moderated and to deal with the inevitable, and often paid, trolls who are sent to make it unpleasant just isn’t worth it. I hate that I can’t be there to assist people, but they can post on my YouTube channel and there are other people to help them. It’s unfortunate that a tiny few had to ruin it for everyone, but the other option is heavy moderation and that would make me feel bad and people to be upset with me. So the only good answer was to recuse myself. And much like leaving Facebook and Twitter, it’s a weight lifted.

Tonight Luciana and I finished making the peanut butter ice cream and jelly custard that we prepped last night. This is definitely our best success yet. We’ve made ice cream before but we weren’t too impressed. And we’ve gotten making frozen yoghurt (froyo) down pretty well and make that regularly. But the peanut butter ice cream was very good, better than any ice cream we’ve managed to buy in the country thus far. And the jelly custard was, acceptable but weird. Jelly is just a bizarre concept for ice cream and it didn’t work that well. When mixed with the peanut butter, it was okay. But I feel that the custard aspect of it was very good. The texture was excellent. I want to try that with vanilla.

The girls played Hades (Liesl) and Animal Crossing (Luciana) while I did some work late night on Freehold before finally going to bed around one in the morning.

I slept a good, solid fourteen hours last night. It wasn’t good sleep, but it was long. Me and my pile of dogs. They are very good nurses, always there when you don’t feel well. I wasn’t 100% when I finally got out of bed, but I was much improved.

Unfortunately Luciana got to be the one that was sick today. She thinks that it came from eating too much pizza yesterday because she was so excited about having made her own pizza that she had five pieces and focaccia pizza is quite big.

It was a very busy day for me today. Since I got sick while working yesterday I was extra backed up on work today. Plus I slept through all of the morning. So today was focused on trying to get caught up on work since I lost so much time yesterday and this morning.

I did get to eat some more of Luciana’s pizza from yesterday today.

This evening the girls and I got a little time to watch The Expanse and they are loving it. We are well into the second season now.