it’s good to have the both of you back

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

fig died friday night. it rained all saturday so we had her funeral last night.

apart from in the general sense of knowing she was mortal, it wasn’t expected. she was fine, then she wasn’t; got her in to see the vet right away, vet said she seemed to have a UTI/bladder infection, prescribed a course of antibiotics + an anti-inflammatory, said she should start getting better every day. that was friday afternoon.

over the last ten years i’ve had ~50 small mammal pets (mice, rats, and hamsters). so, over the last ten years… i’ve also lost ~50 small mammal pets. there was a particularly rough stretch of a year and a half with a death about every month. i haven’t found that it ever really seems to get any easier, but fig dying has definitely hit me the hardest of them all.

despite what many people tend to think about rodents, they each have their own personality, preferences, quirks, etc just like cats, dogs, or anything else. they’re all a little different (and i’ve loved all of the ones i’ve known!). but fig was different different. honestly, she was perfect. the very best rat anybody could hope to know. my little buddy.

a small brown and white rat perched on the author's arm/a fleece slingALT

^^ baby fig, her first day here. she was so small!

and now she’s gone. and i was so, so dreading this because of course i knew it would happen eventually and it’s always too soon but this feels much, much too soon. i wanted to give her everything and more and i couldn’t and i didn’t and now she’s dead and i can’t and i kinda just want to hurl myself off a cliff, it all feels so wrong.

it wasn’t the awful death the first vet said i should expect when she had the tumor and i am very, very grateful for that much but there’s no real good to be found in any of it, there just isn’t. she wasn’t even two yet.

i miss her. betty and tonibler miss her. i brought them carrot last night, which they love, but they wouldn’t even take it… they just kept sniffing my fingers and looking around. i felt awful.

i don’t know if many people know/remember this song from babe… it pretty well wrecks me whenever i happen to so much as think of it. but it’s really lovely, and it keeps coming to mind now because, well, how could it not. for you, fig 🧡

rats fig-rat pet death
kuttithevangu
kuttithevangu
Please sign and share to help save Samuels Public Library
Please sign and share to help save Samuels Public Library
Fight For The First

Petition via Fight for the First in support of the public library in Virginia where a group challenged over 500 books, largely without reading them, for having LGBTQ+ content, positive depictions of fat and BIPOC characters, and other such “harmful material”

Challenged books include WHEN THE ANGELS LEFT THE OLD COUNTRY and @alizalayne’s BEETLE AND THE HOLLOWBONES

cannot fucking believe this this is my bib!!! 😡 it’s a really lovely library too wish these people were even half as invested in solving actual problems in front royal the last thing the place needs is to have no library (esp. as the next-nearest is i think ~20 miles away?) there is one (1) library in the entire county and it is this one

so, i acquired this small bookcase a while back, and on it was a set of books (harvard classics). they filled the whole small bookcase exactly. and this was some time ago but long story short i hadn’t dealt with the books yet, so i left them on the bookcase, as they were. it was small enough that i’d just moved them all as a unit—with another person, i simply carried the bookcase + its contents, all together, into the house.

and then today i finally went to move the books off the bookcase. started packing them into a box. got the first shelf into one box, okay, cool, prepped another box for the second. took the first couple of books off the shelf, put them in the box, go back to grab the next few, and then i notice something: there’s something behind the books. idk what the deal with this bookcase is because the top shelf books and bottom shelf books seemed to fit equally well out to the same place on the shelves but there’s definitely something of not-insignificant size, relatively, behind the books on the bottom shelf. but what is it? i look closer.

it’s peanuts.

PEANUTS, people of tumblr. it’s a pile of peanuts. at first i thought they were styrofoam packing peanuts, added to push the books out a little to the edge of the shelf for some reason of aesthetics, but no, these are PEANUT peanuts, as in the legume. shells on, apparently mostly intact? a little pile of maybe a dozen peanuts behind these 2-3 books.

????????

WHO DOES THIS. WHO PUTS PEANUTS BEHIND THEIR BOOKS. is this the work of a squirrel ??? or am i meant to conclude this was in fact the doings of another full-on homo sapiens ??? for what possible reason would you choose to store PEANUTS behind your books! what on earth! thinking maybe this was just some sort of anomaly, i took the next book, a fairly thick one, off the shelf, and… there’s more peanuts behind that one, too!!!

i am wholly bewildered. and the thing is, again, long story short, i never actually met this man—the guy who’d owned the books + bookcase (+ peanuts?!)—but i came to be more than familiar with his books and bookcases (and the rest of his house), and on not one single occasion did i find a stash of peanuts (or anything else!) stuck behind a shelf of books. and he had a hell of a lot of books + bookshelves both.

i don’t really see how it could have been a squirrel (or any other small mammal, for that matter); the books aren’t particularly light individually and they fit tightly enough on the shelf that you certainly couldn’t squeeze a peanut—a peanut sans shell, even—between any two of them and somehow fish it back behind them. but to whom, apart from a squirrel, would this make any sense at all ????

PEANUTS! i just can’t understand it. and it’s not like i thought i’d already seen it all (though thanks to this guy, more than a fair few things were added to what i *have* seen, even before today…), but damn, i certainly did not ever anticipate seeing a thing such as this.

tumblr suggested i add tags to this post but what more can i say! PEANUTS mysteries of life idk