(no subject)

RIP Edward Jet Oliver Yuri Pigarin IV, our little one-eyed pirate piggie. Enormous name for what was, in his prime, an enormous guinea pig. Over the last several months he'd been fighting some sort of infection and possibly kidney failure and had lost massive amounts of weight, but he seemed reasonably happy up until the last day or so; even up until late last night he was grabbing the plastic blueberry container and trying to pull the whole thing into the pigloo with him. Being small prey animals, I think guinea pigs are good at masking how ill they really are. Sometime early this morning the infection, probably combined with a fairly advanced age (6) for a guinea pig, won. I was asleep at the time, but nminusone wrote about it a bit. (f-locked post, which you probably want to avoid if talk of critically ill animals will bother you)

Heh. The story behind the enormous name: we got Ed during a period that we were watching a lot of "Cowboy Bebop". My favorite character in the show is Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV, usually just known as "Ed", and his long name was a riff on that. "Oliver" was from his near-lifelong habit of asking "Please sir, can I have some more?"; I swear, his stomach was like a bottomless pit. "Yuri Pigarin" came from a very early stunt of his, which was wiggling out of my arms and launching himself into space from my shoulder. He landed on his snout on the wooden kitchen floor, miraculously unhurt. Luckily he never tried that one again; the first time nearly gave me a heart attack as it was.



EXTREME SNOUT CLOSEUP! (More like "Hey, is that camera thingie food? I'd better check.")