Just the opposite of a great month

[womzilla]

Things go poorly at work--the project that we were told to finish in six weeks will be lucky to be finished in six months; this is not the fault of anyone at my job, but rather of a vendor (one of the leading players in the field, no kidding) vastly over-promised and vastly underdelivered. This has made my days very long and very frustrating and keeps threatening to explode into an out-and-out seven-day-a-week deathmarch. It hasn't yet, basically because my boss understands how much that takes out of people, but his bosses get less patient every week.

But far worse was this weekend's rat health crisis, which resolved today in the deaths of two of our elderly rat ladies after consuming much of all our attention for the last three days. Neither girl was exceptionally old. Norf was just two years, which our rats almost always get past now. We were never 100% sure how old Sophie was--somewhere between two and three--but until the last problem started up, she was a stubbornly healthy gal. (You may recall that she had, and beat, cancer earlier this year.) Respiratory problems can go quite abruptly from "minor" to "severe", and rats will tend to hide their illness, so this caught us almost completely by surprise, and it's quite devastating.

nellorat will almost certainly do a memorial post for each of them, but for now, here are some photos, behind the cut.




This is Norf, sitting on Chiki at Tupelo's 30 month birthday party in May.



This is Sophie (center), grooming Honey and being nuzzled by Tupelo, back in April.