Saying Goodbye

First off, I'd like to welcome any and all of you that decide to visit this page. Several of you expressed interest in viewing a weblog of my "adventures" before I left for Wyoming, so I hope this site will do my experiences justice. More than that, I hope that I have experiences to do justice to! Please know that I wasn't able to email the link to this blog to everyone... If you weren't on the receiving end of an email directly from me, it's not because I intended in any way to leave you out. I've been very poor at saving email addresses, and thus only had a few for my group mailing list. Feel free to pass the link to this site on to anyone else you know that may (or may not) be curious.

A lot has happened in the last few days. Last Friday I made the official move to Newcastle, Wyoming. Cassie the rat made the trip up with me. Her sister, Gemini, died in February from... something... A uterine tumor, perhaps, or a uterine infection too tough for antibiotics. But I still had Cassie, although getting on in age, 3 years and some number of months, at least, which is old for a rat. I joked with my mom before I left that she would make it to WY and then die at the peak of my loneliness, leaving me with no source of comfort in a foreign place. Not surprisingly (at least not with my luck), she did just that.

She made the move fine and seemed to be perfectly content with the new digs, settling in nicely and going about her ratly business as always. She died the day after my mom left.... So on my first day of work at the BLM I woke up to a dead rat. It certainly wasn't surprising. She was very, very old and lumpy and had some troubles getting around. But, unlike with Gemini, I didn't know exactly when it was going to happen. I wasn't entirely prepared for it. Especially not on my first day of work in an unfamiliar town with no other friends.

I knew it would be hard to lose her. I've become so accustomed to a small furry individual running around and begging for attention (or food, as the case may be), snuggling up in the evenings to sleep while I read, or to be groomed, bruxing and eye-boggling and gnurking (a special rat "hiccup" that signals extreme content), and the special rat privilege of being let out early to sleep in the bed for a few hours in the morning before the alarm went off. I always looked forward to coming home because I knew that she (or, at one time, they) would be there. I loved coming back to the apartment (or the dorm room, as the case once was), and letting her (or them) out of the cage, just to see how happy she/they seemed to see me. It's been very empty here the past couple days, and I do feel more alone that I think I've ever felt before.

I keep expecting her to crawl up on my foot an pull on my pants (as she often did) as a means to ask to be picked up, to hear her sounds at night...the hollow sounds of her getting food out of her bowl, or the quiet gnawing that followed, the metallic click of the ball bearing in the water bottle as she drank, the clicking sound of her claws on the ramps of her cage. I keep expecting to see her head poke out from under the bed or the couch, after having stashed some precious item (i.e. a piece of food, a stolen receipt, a tissue, a drinking straw), or to find her in front of the refrigerator hoping with all her little rat might that the door may magically open and reward her with a chunk of carrot, or some corn, or her absolute favorite, peas.

I was hoping this first entry would be about my internship, about meeting the people in the office and about my first day out in the field. If nothing else, about my new boss and his plans for me this summer, a tentative idea for the kinds of work I may be doing. But things seldom turn out the way we plan. Instead, as of today, I've still not met my boss, have a very poor idea about what my job may entail, and have little more to talk about other than the fact that I lost my best friend, and I feel very much alone.