RIP Honey the rat, 2005-2007

Our current senior rat, Honey, has died after a long illness. I mostly went through the worst of the grieving two weeks ago when her tumor was officially declared inoperable, but I'm still shaken.

nellorat has written a wonderful memorial, full of pictures, for ratties. I recommend it to one and all.

I will add one last anecdote. As her infirmity progressed, Honey's mobility decreased, and we were all worried about her getting sticky food in her fur or, worse, in her wounds. nellorat chided me--gently--for putting birdseed paste directly in the plastic cube Honey was using as a shelter, because she could roll over into it. So, after we cleaned her last night, I put Honey into the cube on clean paper towels and clean padding, and put a hunk of naan slathered in birdseed paste outside the cube, opposite the water bottle, so that she could reach it from within the cube but wouldn't step into it on the way to the bottle.

Honey cleaned herself briefly, and then pulled herself out of the cube--directly into the birdseed. While nellorat and I watched, she sat in it for about a minute, shook herself, and crawled back into the cube. Honey just wanted to make sure that nellorat knew that Ratdaddy wasn't to be blamed for the food in her fur. What a thoughtful girl, right to the end.

A point about gay marriage

Gay marriage isn't about fucking.

Gay people can fuck that now, and they do. Heck, in the United States, right now, I'm pretty sure it's not legal to stop gay people from fucking. Civil unions, domestic partnerships, marriage--they're completely irrelevant to the question which tab goes in which slot (or no tab, as the case may be).

Gay marriage isn't about fucking. It's about what people do with their lives when they're not fucking. It's about home ownership and wills and health insurance and visitation rights and parental rights and leaving messages for their honeys at work and just saying "I'm his husband" and having people understand what that means.

It's about people taking care of each other because they don't just want to fuck, they want to live their lives together like human beings.

Those of us who support gay marriage, we're going to live like human beings. The rest of you: Go fuck each other. It's apparently all you can understand.