Lemme throw an oldie but a goodie at ya…Kevin Costner….Judd Nelson…a crazy Cessna pilot…a bottle of buried Champagne…a classic scene about tying a Cadillac to the back of a train…a little flick called ‘Fandango’…love that movie…

Mark

Sorry I was’nt here to respond to this earlier…..I only check in once a week anymore.

Looked like a great cat. And no doubt he had a nice long life. Condolences.

My advice….get a new cat as soon as possible. The distraction of a new face in the house helps you to get over the loss. If I could do it at my apartment building I would….rumor has it I might even be able to get away with it-seems the place is up for sale and some folks have been sneaking cats in.

Hope everything works out for the best for you.

Mark

Oh, I’m good…the girl with whom I raised him came over and told me on wednesday night that he had to be put down and that she had just come from that sad event….I comforted and consoled while she was here and kept the stiff upper lip….but the moment she left I lost it, especially when scanning in these pics you guys see here, the memories…and the tears….came flooding back. But I’m ok now. These things happen, nothing you can do about them. We’ll have, as they say, ‘closure’ next weekend when we put him in the mountains…might be hard at that time to keep the tears back but then it’ll be over…and in the spring, the area will be green and gorgeous and it will be partly due to Mooch and his contribution.

Mark

Barry…

I’m glad that you’re doing that for him…that’s too cool…every day he wakes up is one more day others never said he’d have…but you’re giving him a chance….here’s hoping that he outlives all the naysayers and has a good long life span, 15 years or more. Maybe not, but who knows. That cat will never know how much of a lifespan you added to his numbered days. Keep it up, man…and good luck with him.

Mark

Your comments are much appreciated, folks….I would go get another cat but here’s the thing…I live in an apartment building where they’re not allowed. Mooch never lived here with me, rather he stayed at a friend’s house (was born there actually, back when I still lived there too) and since I could’nt take him with me when I got my apartment, he just stayed where he was and he was completely happy…this girl I know shared in his raising, we took him to the hills and such, kinda was raised by a bunch of folks at that house, but he was our favorite. Next weekend we take his ashes to the place you see in the photos where he is dabbling his paw in the river, a clump of aspens with that little stream running through it on Fish Creek road near Estes Park, CO. He always liked that place. Now his ashes can help to enrich it and we can visit him anytime and know that the plants and animals in that area have been helped along in their growing by his ashes. Maybe a weird way to look at it….but the same way I plan on going out AND continually being a part of Colorado at the same time when I go.

Only wish I’d been able to take him camping once with me…always promised to do it (always figured we had the time!)…never got around to it. He would have loved it.

Mark

I seem to recall that a certain well loved Aussie was killed recently by a stingray, and yet no call went out for the wholesale slaughter of stingrays worldwide because people collectively (and correctly) attributed it to it being an ‘act of nature’, ie the stingray defending itself from a percieved threat….

Daz well knows my position on sharks, I am very ‘pro shark’, I find them fascinating creatures and have studied them ALMOST as much as I have WWII planes…despite this I HAVE eaten them and found them delicious (sorry Daz)….but then they have also eaten US and found us worthy of an occasional nibble here and again….to which we (humans) inevitably overreact..

As someone’s tagline over on the WIX forum says “Remember, when you enter the Ocean or the Forest, you are no longer at the top of the food chain.” No truer words were ever spoken…

Having been in the US Coast Guard I have seen basking sharks and many other types of sharks….released a catshark from an Irish man’s fishing line on a beach in Wales near Porthmadog on a trip to the UK in 2000 (hopefully it survived)…after the Coast Guard I went to California in ’86 and worked on both commercial fishing boats and commercial day charter fishing boats….saw a guy catch a baby Mako shark on the charter boat and take the hook out and set it free back into the ocean-VERY encouraging-and while working on a fishing boat in Calif I had my own encounter with a 4 foot Blue shark, while I was reaching into the water to pick up a fish, it came up to TAKE the fish…we both scared each other and went the other way!! To this day it remains one of the most beautiful fish I have EVER seen…dark, intense blue above, silver on the sides, and blinding white on the bottom…

Long live the shark, in all its guises…

Mark

I love this stuff….and I can contribute, too….how ’bout a ‘Bermuda Triangle’ experience?

I joined the Coast Guard here in the states in 1982 and was stationed on a 180 foot boat called the ‘Evergreen’, a medium endurance cutter….one time headed south we found ourselves in the waters just north of Bermuda and near a fog bank…the lookout noted he had ‘something’ off the port side of the ship splitting the water….now, we were used to dolphins, whales, all kinds of sea life stirring up the water but THIS appeared to be what looked like a ship splitting the water…only there was no ship there! The water was being split like a destroyer was knifing through it, and it was parallelling us, but we could not see ANY source of the water’s disturbance…and before you all in unison say ‘sub periscope’, let me say, yes, this was also considered by the now growing crowd who wanted to see it for themselves, and the sub periscope theory was discarded because we would’ve seen the silhouette of the sub beneath it or SOME part of the periscope above…dolphins and whales move up and down and leave an inconsistent wake and this was VERY consistent, so it was’nt them….after a while, it angled off into the distance and dissappeared in the fog and we never saw it again…. but we sure as heck pondered what it might have been for a long time and NEVER reached a satisfactory conclusion…not even the skipper!

Mark