mistressofmuses

Last Friday was the other concert that we went to go see:


Aesthetic Perfection, doing an old-school set, plus genCAB and Whorticulture opening.

This one was cutting it a little closer to get there, since I wasn't able to leave work at all early, but luckily the class we were closing at work didn't keep me longer than usual, either. I was able to wear most of what I was going to wear to work, and change what little I needed to on the drive there, haha.

We actually wound up being down there earlier than needed, and had to circle like vultures for about fifteen minutes until one of the driving lanes turned into a parking lane at 7:00. As usual we car-bar/pre-gamed for a bit, then headed to the venue.

We weren't late this time, so we got to see our first opener, Whorticulture.



Whorticulture is a local band, and they've hit at least a little bit of success! We last saw them opening for Solar Fake (last year? the year before?). They got to play Dark Force Fest last month, which was pretty cool.

I've been impressed every time I've seen them, and even having only ever seen them live as an opening band, their songs have been memorable enough that I recognize them every time.

I always figure "hey, I should buy a CD!" and then don't have merch money, so this time was going to be the time! ...They do not have CDs at their merch table. I poked around on Bandcamp and discovered that this is because they do not have any albums... just nine singles released over the course of the last six years, haha. So I did buy their various singles, haha.

Their set was great, as they have been every time I've seen them, and even only getting to play four songs.

Three more Whorticulture pics + a music video embed

"Okay, hold on a minute. Time for an on-purpose wardrobe malfunction!"

Watch on YouTube

Here's their song from last year, "Faust," which I quite like. The video is them being dramatically gothy in the Molly Brown House Museum, which is fun, too.

After that was genCAB. They were supposed to open the last time Aesthetic Perfection came, but had to cancel because the singer had Covid.



Unfortunately I found them solidly... meh. They weren't terrible, but I found myself getting a little bored. I couldn't understand more than a handful of words out of each song (just kind of nondescriptly loud and yell-y.) The singer also seemed... shy? Like he didn't want to look at the audience, ha. He's the synth player for Aesthetic Perfection while they're touring, so I feel like he's had a good tutor in stage presence, but... I mean, I'd be petrified and hate being on stage, so. Glad to have gotten to see them, but not someone I'd seek out to see again/look for as a headliner.

Three more of genCAB

Not really a "good" picture, but I liked the dramatic silhouettes.

And then, Aesthetic Perfection!


This is by far the best picture I got for the night, ha.

It was exciting to see him back, since he swore that the last tour would be the last one in the US ever. (He doesn't live in the US anymore, and he's always very open about the business side of being an artist. Basically it's just prohibitively expensive to tour, in a way that doesn't work out as a financial decision. He's said he'd be willing to tour as a supporting act, and I think he did so last year, but I wasn't interested in the artist he was supporting.)
I think the old-school thing was really meant to be just a single special show, and then expanded to a very small tour, and it was exciting for Denver to have a date added. It's very possible that this one is in fact the last tour, so I'm glad we got to go. (Or maybe there'll be another in a year or two!)

I'm actually less a fan of his older stuff than I am his like... middle stuff. I'm a 'Til Death fan, sorry. Even so, his older stuff has grown on me quite a bit.

He opened with "The Great Depression," which was a good starting song. Having the first words of a set be "Hey you motherfucking son of a bitch!" is pretty good, lol.

Got a lot of other faves from A Violent Emotion (and I'll be honest, while I knew most of the other songs, I don't have the albums they're on. I'll have to get them from Alex, as I'm sure he does, ha.) I was glad we got "Pale," which is one of my favorites from that album, as well as "The Siren" and "Living the Wasted Life."

The final encore song was "Spit It Out," which is a great energetic song to end on. I'm pretty sure that was the song he opened with at the first AP show we saw, way back at Castlemans (RIP a great venue.) The energy of the crowd screaming along with "Spit it out scream, spit it out scream!" does make it a great one to hear live.

Could have done without a small cohort of girls who came in about halfway through the set and pretty viciously shoved their way in front of me, but ah well.

Five more pictures

Bought Alex an Aesthetic Perfection shirt (since the last one he tried to get, he wound up with the wrong one and didn't realize until later. The cut of the one he got didn't work for him, so I wound up with it.)
I bought a Whorticulture shirt, since there's not an album to buy, haha. (Forever sad to have missed out on their "Goth as Fuck" shirts, which were styled to look like the "Queer as Folk" logo.)

Back in 2011, Alex decided he wanted a dog. He knew he wanted a pit bull, and he knew he wanted to adopt one. We went to the shelter, and he absolutely fell in love with a sweet little pittie... a girl named "Joy." By the time we were able to get the house ready, and set up a chance to meet and greet with my dad's dog who lived with us at the time, Joy had been adopted, and Alex was very sad about it. I remember thinking at the time, though I don't know if I actually said it, "Don't worry; we will find you another dog, and in the end you won't be able to imagine having had a different one."

We went back to the shelter to look at another young, female pit, but during the meeting with my dad's dog she was just a little overly hyperactive for him.

Not quite grudgingly, Alex asked to meet "Montana," a little brown, black, and white male pit bull. He was a cute dog, but not very personable. He stayed in the back of his kennel, not very interested in interacting. We'd completely overlooked him on our first visit, and his informational page said he'd been there for eight months. But the meeting with my dad's dog went well, and he was sweet when we did get his attention, so we took him.

It took us a little while to come up with a name, but we decided on "Cyanide," since he needed a dangerous name, as a pit bull! The shelter said he was two, but considering how much he grew after we had him, we think he was closer to one. (Though considering he'd been there for a while, it probably was closer to one and a half.) We picked New Year's Day as his birthday, since it was as good a day as any.

Cy was one of the sweetest, smartest dogs I've ever known. He really was wicked smart, and it's lucky that he chose to use that genius for non-evil purposes. He was extraordinarily sweet, and one of the most patient dogs in the world. He would tolerate just about anything, even when he didn't need to put up with it. He loved people.

The only thing he didn't like: raccoons.

He had the strongest paternal instinct I've ever seen in a dog, too (though as far as I know, he never fathered any puppies). He adored little baby animals. He was more annoyed by puppies once they got to the exuberant, mostly coordinated stage, but when they were little? He would just melt for them.
At the dog park once, he played tug-of-war with a tiny, floppy little mastiff puppy. He let her lead him around by that rope, just barely sometimes tugging on it, basically letting her win the whole time.
By coincidence we ran into one of my coworkers and his husband at the park once, with their brand new tiny terrier puppy. Cy let that little five pound ball of fluff jump up on him, and then he'd dramatically fall over and roll onto his back, like the tiny puppy had obviously vanquished him.
He adored kittens, too; when we were staying with some friends, they had some orphaned foster kittens who were still being bottle-fed. We let Cy meet them, and he was utterly smitten. He wanted nothing more than to cuddle and nuzzle and groom them. (Probably only partially because they were messy eaters that had cat food on them, haha.) For years after, up until he went deaf, if he heard a kitten mew on a video or something, he would excitedly try to find the kitten.


Cy with Sherlock, our friend's cat. This was one of "his" kittens, though grown up in this picture. (Our friend says she credits Cy with how much Sherlock grew up to like dogs.)


A picture Alex took, Cy at the Chesapeake Bay.


He was a great hiking buddy. This is him at Mt. Falcon.

I wanted to pick out my favorite pictures of Cy, but trick question, because they're all my favorites, so I'm still posting too many.

25 more pictures of my best boy.

He used to have so little white on his face!


Alex and Cy. Just like I thought: couldn't imagine ending up with a different dog.


Me with Cy. We were watching fireworks. He was the mellowest dog; truly nothing scared or bothered him (except being left alone for too long.)


At the dog park, eyes on the tennis ball.


He was always the most majestic sleeper.


On a "cliff edge" at Red Rocks.


Bane of baseballs everywhere!


He used to be so spry! Excited for Alex to chuck the tennis ball already.


Hot dog in the sun at a friend's farm out in Maryland.


Champion slorper.


Helping me carve a jack-o-lantern. <3


His silly hat with reindeer antlers and ear warmers. (It brought joy to the masses, judging by how people in neighboring cars reacted when he'd wear it, haha.)


He loved his naps, and he loved napping on plushies.


My best boy.


Cy in his Pride hat, at fourth of July. Again, bringing joy to the masses. We had so many people stop and smile and comment about the dog in the hat.


His dragon Halloween costume.


Reindeer-on-reindeer violence!


Looking like a model advertising the treats in the background.


His nose. <3


In front of the flowers at the park last year.


Alex took this picture, of both the dogs at fourth of July last year.


Not a great pic, but I think you can tell that this is a cool dog with cool places to be and cool things to do.


He loved blankets so much. All you had to do was hold a blanket up and he would dart over to be under it. He wanted to be tucked in before going to sleep at night.


Fairly recent, I know I shared it already, but it was sweet when the dogs would actually cuddle together.


Cuddling his dragon toy. <3

Today, talk of end of life:

Overnight, around 1:45 in the morning, Cy got up from his bed and was very suddenly extremely agitated. He was making terrible scream-bark-howl sounds, and frantically running around the apartment. It was very scary, and we took him to the emergency vet. They did an exam, and then gave him a sedative that would also help with pain. The best hope was that this was basically "doggie dementia," and that getting some rest would lead to him waking up feeling better, and then we could look at treating the anxiety if it remained.

We took him home around 4:00, but even with their sedative and his usual pain meds, I don't think he ever fell asleep. The physical agitation stopped, and he was laying in his bed, but he was awake and still whining with almost every exhale.

Around 8:00 he started moving around more, though the agitation wasn't where it had been in the middle of the night. We took him outside, which initially seemed fine... then a few minutes later, still outside, he started with the horrible screaming again. Our regular vet wasn't open yet, so we went back to the emergency vet.

They did blood and urine tests, wanting to rule out anything they could: infection, organ failure, drugs or other toxins. Unfortunately in this case, the tests came back normal. His kidney levels were slightly elevated, same as his annual exam had showed, but everything else was normal. (My last, quiet hope had been a UTI/kidney infection; I know that can cause neurological symptoms if it's advanced enough, and as bad as that would be when his kidneys were already bad, it would be something we could try and treat.) The emergency vet said that in absence of any physical cause that it was probably neurological, with the most likely causes being a brain tumor or possibly a blood clot. She recommended we look at this as a quality of life question.

His obvious distress meant it wasn't fair to him to drag things out. I called our regular vet, and she was able to get us an end of life appointment at noon, just about an hour after we were leaving the emergency vet. (We could have done it there, but our vet has been our vet since I was a child; for thirty years she's been the one to help our pets pass when it's time, and I'd rather have had him go there. I suspect she was offering to do this at what should have been her lunch break; she said they were basically double-booked for the whole day. They'd offered us a 5:00 appointment, but that seemed like too long to wait, when he would spend those hours upset.)

We went and got a pup cup from Starbucks. The vet gave us some time with him both before and after. He passed very quickly and quietly.

This was something we knew was coming, though we didn't expect something like this to force it. We thought it would be the end last March when we took him to the emergency vet the first time, the day he suddenly couldn't walk. We were hoping at that point for a couple more months, maybe making it into summer... and he was doing well. Then he had a repeat flare of the back problems on Halloween, and then again the day before Thanksgiving, and two bouts within a month seemed like that was the end; we doubted he'd make it to Christmas. And then he made it to New Year's, and another unofficial birthday. And then we made it past our birthdays, and then a year past his scare, and then long enough for him to get another annual exam... Lots of tiny little milestones, but ones we didn't think he'd reach. It's felt like more than a year of borrowed time, and it's time I'm glad we got with him.

I'm painfully glad this didn't happen a week from now, when I'll be out of state for my grandmother's memorial.

I've been a weepy, sobbing mess all day, and I feel like I'll remain a weepy sobbing mess for a while.

Cy was truly my Best Boy Ever. While he was Alex's dog, always first and foremost, he was also my dog, the first one I was ever primarily responsible for. We had him for fourteen years of his life, whether that life was fifteen or closer to sixteen years. It wasn't long enough. I would have wanted fourteen more years with him, and it still wouldn't have felt long enough.

I already miss him so much.

On Tuesday, in part for late Mother's day and in part for early birthday, we wanted to take my mom to the Denver Botanic Gardens. We planned ahead for a day when she would be back from her New Mexico trip, and that she and Taylor could both take the day off from work.

Unfortunately, this wound up being the *one* day that was forecast to be chilly and rainy all day. (We've had rain basically every day for a bit now, but most days it's only for a little while. Tuesday was going to be overcast and drizzly basically the whole time!)

Mom still wanted to go for it, and was glad for the cooler temperatures, rather than walking around on a hot day. (And I was glad for that, especially for Taylor; last year we went and they wound up overheated and miserable, and had to head back to the car early.) Even so, I was a little apprehensive, because I loathe being cold, and I was afraid the cold rain would make it hard to appreciate anything about the day.

I was pleasantly surprised! It wound up being lovely. It did get uncomfortably cold a couple of times, but for the most part it was nice enough with a jacket. The initial drizzle let up within maybe half an hour, and minus another quick rain shower, it was just cloudy. While I prefer sun, the clouds did mean I didn't get sunburn. It was also nice for pictures - easier to get fairly accurate colors without direct sunlight.

And I took way too many pictures, lol. Even when I was trying to narrow it down very significantly, I think I kept... 70? So this will be split into several posts! Sometimes I try to split the posts into "themes" or something, but this time I think I'll just go for chronological through the gardens.

Hope you like pictures of ~water droplets on flowers~ lol.


One of the most dramatic in terms of water droplets!


Kind of an odd one, but I loved the way the water had collected on the seedpod inside this poppy.


This rose is so perfectly classic it looks fake. :)

Fourteen more pictures:

We waited at the entrance for a bit while we figured out our plan for the day.


There are some wonderfully tall yucca. There was also a very loud sparrow! I'm guessing they have nests within the yucca, which is probably the safest imaginable place.


Water droplets on poppy leaves.

In some of the gardens at the front:


I do like the way the water droplets look like little glass beads.



Then the "perennial walk" and a plaza:


Delightfully goth irises.


A ladybug pupa on a rose.


So ruffly!


Very classic rose!


A hummingbird, perched up high.

On the other side of the plaza is The Ellipse, the gardens around the Chihuly sculpture and in front of one of their admin buildings.


The columbines were having an absolute banner year this year! I don't know that I've ever seen quite so many doing so well.


Nice irises.


I like the burnt orange color.


And some lovely lupines!


And some two-toned ones! Plus the admin building (a beautiful converted house) in the background.

(Today was mom's actual birthday! I did stop by to see her briefly after work. I gifted her Overgrowth and the last six months of short stories from Seanan McGuire's patreon. I'm planning on getting some garden plants for her once I have a chance!)

Thursday night we went to a concert! First one in quite a while.



Beborn Beton is a German synthpop band. Apparently the last time they were in the US was back in 2002, as support for Apoptygma Berzerk (Alex's five-ever favorite obsession.)

If you've ever heard of them, it's probably from their hit (within the goth scene) from 1997, "Another World."

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I got off of work slightly early, having come in slightly early, which was good... but we still wound up running late. (Had to make a grocery trip that I assumed would be done before I was off of work, ha.)

It took a bit to find parking, though we wound up not too far away. Then of course it took a minute in the car to pre-game.


A very small ladybug landed on the car window as I was getting out.


Rainbow crosswalk.


I like the snake. And of course the queer stuff in the window.

We ran into PJ outside the venue and chatted with her a while. It sounds like she's doing well, which is good. She and Mark broke up last year, which was sort of a shock to everyone, I think, and then she also quit basically all social media (minus a wordpress blog that I never remember to check in on.) But sounds like she's happy in her new apartment, maybe has a new boyfriend, is doing well at work, etc.

Sadly we missed Faces Under the Mirror/Jake's set. ;_; We got inside just as he was finished and packing up. We did get to talk with him for a little while, though.

We were there in time for Voicecoil! (Mark) He played some things that are new to the live rotation, which was cool. Also the single off the album that will be coming out sometime this fall.



Got to chat with him for a bit after his set, as well. He's also doing well, it sounds like, minus some potentially-scary eye surgery stuff coming up.

Then Beborn Beton!


The struggle, even in a small venue, to get all the members of a band at least sort of in focus under stage lighting...

They did play quite a few favorites of mine. I'm a basic bitch who loves the singles, so I was very glad (if utterly unsurprised) that the single from a couple years ago, "Dancer in the Dark," got played (with a joke about whether we should go hang out at a nearby bowling alley, since the music video is, inexplicably, the band bowling.) A few others that I really like from that same album, like "I Watch My Life on TV" and "Last Chance."

Their intro to "Newborn King" was about how yes, it was 1997, and of course he was obsessed with Dana Scully... (the song being about aliens coming to earth.) I mean, same, bro.

And of course, "Another World" as the final encore. (With "yeah, I guess it would be a dick move not to play this one...") Afterwards, Alex said he had forgotten about that song entirely which was very funny to me. That's like... their one song that they're known for, lmao. I'm pretty sure that was one of the songs he sent me before we were dating!

Five more pictures + two youtube links:

Voicecoil! On keyboard is a new partner, Kat. I didn't get to meet her, but it seems to be going well.


One more of Voicecoil.


Beborn Beton, doing their introduction.




I do love catching everyone in a weird position, lol.

Watch on YouTube

The "Dancer in the Dark" music video.

Watch on YouTube

"Another World," definitely what they're still best known for.

At the end, I got one of the setlists!


Which I did get signed. <3

Mildly bummed that "Dr. Channard" (though a deeper cut) apparently replaced "Burning Gasoline," which is one of my faves, but it was fun to hear, too.

It was a very fun show, and I'm glad we had a chance to go out. We haven't been out since... last fall?

One more show coming up next week, too! We were really spoiled for a lot of excellent shows coming through between this and next week, but we had to be choosy, ha.

Bella had another FastCAT today, this time sponsored by the Keeshond club. (As usual, I would rather have been there than at work. There is one in early June I get to go to, though!)

Her scores today... weren't great. Her first time was okay, 11.49. Her second one was pretty bad, 19.12. Apparently she got distracted at the start, and didn't actually start to run for several seconds, heh. Alex said the wait for both runs was pretty long, so she started to lose a little bit of her hype.

But she accumulated enough points to get her BCAT, which is the first title for doing the event! (Each run gets points, faster runs getting more points. The BCAT title means she got 150 points total in the event. The intermediate is the DCAT, at 500 points, and the highest level is the FCAT, at 1000 points.)


So here she is with her big fancy ribbon!

I also had her pose with her ribbons at home this evening:




A noble sport-beaft.

Today we had to get a pair of tires for the truck, but before that we headed over to my mom's, to wish her a belated Mother's Day, since I had to work yesterday. Alex picked out an orchid, and I gave her a rooted cutting from my begonia. We'll do more later. Usually I give her plants to plant in the garden, but it's still just a touch early (we had temps in the 30s just over a week ago!) She's going back to New Mexico next week, and won't be back until the end of the month, so won't be doing any serious gardening until then. I think we're planning a trip to the Botanic Gardens once she's back in town.

Two pictures from mom's house:

While there, we appreciated her lilac.

Which is hiding...


A praying mantis egg case! (Technically an "ootheca".)

After getting the tires, we went to Pelican Pond for a walk. It was very warm today, in the mid 80s, and it was lovely to be outside. While it was to far off to get a decent picture of, there was a pelican today!

There were lots of flowers blooming:


Honeybee on honeysuckle!

Five more pictures of flowers:

Globemallow, with a sweet pea in the background.


Bluebells


Chokecherry


Blue flax


Another of the honeybee on the honeysuckle.

Also quite a few birds!


I really liked these three crows.

Four more pictures of birds:

Geese and goslings! One of the parents was hissing at us.


Red-winged blackbird! You can see his nice bright shoulders.


No actual bird in the picture, but you can see the woodpecker hole! I have seen flickers nesting there in previous years.


A crow!

Bella in the water!

Some things found on the shore:

Small claw.


Much bigger claws!


A very pretty shell. A lot more color than these usually have; typically they're very plain, matte white.

Less nice, I did find two different fishhooks, with their lures and lines. There are a bunch of fish line disposal receptacles all around the park, so it frustrates me to still find them just discarded along the shore. :/ Of course I took them and disposed of them, but I'd hate for a dog to find them with a paw, or a bird to see the lure and try to swallow it...

There's a little... water management structure at one end of the lake. I've never seen water through it, but it looks like the intent is to help control the flow of water into the reservoir. But there are some murals there now:

Two more:

They all appear to be views of the lake. Very nice!

It was a lovely day to go for a walk, though Bella was again very tired by the end of it, haha.

Yesterday, after stopping by the vet to get Cy's sample foods, we went on a walk along the greenbelt. (Not with Cy - these sorts of longer walks are too much for him, anymore.) It was a nice day, fairly warm but not terribly hot. I did get my first sunburn of the year, and I think even poor Bella got a little burned on her nose. (Not badly! Some aloe and we're all good today.)

The usual spot we park at was going through repaving, so we started our walk at a different point, and went the opposite direction that we usually do, so we saw a slightly different stretch. We still looped back to see a few favorite points along the part we'd been originally planning on.


Nice dramatic tree, with the smaller flowering trees in front. (These are the ones that remind me of the plums in our yard as a kid, but I think they're actually sand cherry.)


The creek and a lone female merganser. She had a pretty great mohawk.

( Fifteen more pictures: flowers, birds, etc. )

(Cy and Bella, sleeping.)

Today was annual vet visit day for both dogs. (It's a little hard to believe it's been more than a year since Cy's emergency vet health scare.)

They each got their physical exams and their leptospirosis shots.

Cy is only down about a half pound from last year, and while I'd *like* him to gain a pound or two, that's pretty good. Bella has dropped a couple pounds, which is odd, because she doesn't look like she's lost weight. But we'll try to get a couple more pounds on her. (She's close to the weight she was when we first brought her home, and she looked *terrible* then; she looks pretty good now.)

Both of them were very good for their exams. Cy of course always is, but even Bella handled it well. She is NOT a fan of getting her temperature taken, and jumped pretty hard when she got her lepto shot, but she did great. Cy was just happy to be getting so much attention and didn't react at all to his shot.

Cy appears to have a lingering mild ear infection. He had one a while back (started right before the handful of days I'd stayed at my mom's) but we thought it had cleared up. There wasn't any visible gunk and he'd stopped the head-shaking. It's not serious, but still there. The vet gave him a topical antibiotic (a nice tube of goop squirted into the ear). She also showed me how to clean out his ears and gave me an easy recipe to mix up to help with it. (I hadn't been going quite deep enough when I was cleaning them, turns out.) Can't clean it out for two weeks, as the antibiotic is supposed to stay in there, so he's gross and slimy with antibiotic ointment until then, haha.

He also had a little gum inflammation around his bad teeth, though not nearly as bad as it has been in the past. He's too old to want to do a full tooth-cleaning under anesthesia, but she did as much tartar removal as she could. He also got a short course of antibiotics for the gums + the ear.

We'll get the results of his bloodwork in a few days. He has a refill of his Rimadyl, but the results of the bloodwork will determine whether we can keep him on it. (I hope so - it seems to help him quite a bit.)

The tech said he was just so good for his blood draw and his teeth cleaning, ha. (I believe it for the blood draw; I am more skeptical that he was good about his teeth.)

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Bella also then got to go on a long walk around a local lake (after Cy got dropped off at home), so she had a Very Big Day.

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Of course, the very day that I had to drop several hundred dollars at the vet, the truck very suddenly started sputtering and running EXTREMELY rough and the check engine light came on. Fuuuuuuuck.

So we will have to take it in tomorrow and find out what the problem is. It could be anything from "replace the fuel filter" or "replace a spark plug" to "your fuel injector is fucked" or "your catalytic converter is fucked". So I'm really hoping it's on the simple end instead of the "we're fucked" end, but I am very afraid to find out which it is.

Despite miserable cold and snow for a few days last week, it's finally starting to feel like things are tipping over into spring. (Not to say that we're done with snow; we probably aren't that lucky. But at least it's more like "spring, with occasional backslides to winter" instead of "winter with teasing hints of spring.")


This picture is from the very end of March, when some trees finally started blooming!

Today we got to go on a walk. Ended up being a little shorter than hoped, though Bella was tired by the end anyway, so maybe we need to work back up to longer walks anyway, ha.


Finally, flowers!

( Seven pictures, mostly turtles and birds: )

On Saturday, everyone returned from their respective "trips." I have lots to catch up on.

Alex went to a model show in Kansas last week, so I brought the dogs and stayed with my mom and sibling for a few days, Wednesday through Saturday, since I didn't have access to a vehicle at home, plus didn't want the dogs to be alone for 9+ hours while I worked.

Berry Mad got to stay home alone, though we of course made sure she had a full pond and she got the last of the most recent batch of crickets.


She's so cute! Standing up all tall.

I was very worried about the extended time with the dogs in the house with Jaspurr, the new cat. Not so much because I expected anything to go badly, but just knowing that if something did go wrong, it could go extremely wrong.

Fortunately, nothing bad happened! Really... nothing much at all happened.

Jaspurr did stay upstairs basically the whole time, but he also didn't seem distressed about it. He did not hide or get anxious. He just didn't want to be around the dogs, though it seemed like he sort of enjoyed watching them. That was a relief, because that was basically my ideal scenario: cat with his own safe zone to stay in without needing to be confined, with no evident stress for anyone.


This was basically the whole three days: Bella in motion, Cy oblivious, Jaspurr judging from the railing of the upper floor.

Bella noticed the cat a few times, but was more jealous that mom would go upstairs with treats for him and to play with him than upset/interested in reaching him. Cy also noticed him a few times, and he had a meltdown about it every time, because he couldn't figure out how to get upstairs (as we had the bottom of the stairs blocked off.) Cy loves cats, ever since he got to "help raise" some orphaned kittens our friends were bottle feeding. Cy has some of the strongest paternal instincts I've ever seen in any animal, and he loved those kittens.

Cy did realize that sometimes he could specifically see Jaspurr in the hallway mirror, which reflects more of that upper floor than is visible from the living room, so he would just stand there and stare at the mirror and cry about it.

More pictures of the dogs:

Saintly Sister Belladonna, true martyr.

The dogs and I slept downstairs in the basement, so that we could shut the door on the dogs and give Jaspurr his house back overnight.


Cy was pretty happy about the basement sleeping arrangements, since the couch was wide enough for him to sleep on it with me.


Bella was a little less enthusiastic about the basement, because you can hear everything else going on in the house so loudly. I'm not sure if she knew it was people walking around upstairs, or if she thought the ceiling was haunted, haha. She'd walk around trying to figure out the source of the sounds.


Bella in the living room with the rainbow banana.


Dogs on couch.

Some pictures Taylor sent me while I was at work:


Couch dogs.


The saddest beast the world has ever seen.


Cy, helpfully assisting with opening the bathroom door.


Cy watching the oven dog TV.

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Alex's drive out to Kansas on Thursday was fine, but unpleasantly windy.

The hotel he stayed in was quite nice for a relatively inexpensive hotel. Dated, but clean and everything worked. (Which was better than we can say for the one we stayed at in South Dakota, damn.)

The Breyer Midwest model show was on Friday.

Alex did pretty well!


18 placings out of 50 models is pretty good. 6 NAN cards and one sectional champion! (Sectional champion also came with a prize model, "Sorry Not Sorry," which was a special run from BreyerFest last year. However, Alex already had this model, so he sold it to his table-mate, since she wanted one.)

BreyerWest/now BreyerMidwest has, for the last several years, had an event-exclusive model. These are only available to people who attend the event themselves: you cannot have someone else pick it up for you. This year was a glossy version of the portrait model Marc of Charm!


He's so shiny!

This is one of my favorites of Breyer's recent sculpts (sculpted by Jennifer Scott, an artist who lives fairly local to me, and who by utter coincidence is a mutual acquaintance of a DW friend of mine!) The regular Marc of Charm model is part of the general Breyer line, and we have wanted to see him in gloss ever since he was released. (Breyer sometimes does special gloss runs of other regular run models, but while others of his release year were, Marc of Charm was never never included in those events. We were SO EXCITED that he was the event model this year.)

The drive back from Kansas to Colorado on Saturday was also apparently very windy and unpleasant, but uneventful. Alex is super wiped out and unfortunately hurting pretty badly, but it was a good not-quite-weekend.

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It was nice to have a couple days that I got to hang out with Taylor and my mom, and while I started off being very stressed and anxious about the dogs and the cat, it all went just fine.