![\"Photo](\"http:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/03\/photo-011006-001.jpg\")
<\/p>\nI hope I don’t soon have to write such a difficult-to-write blog entry as this one.<\/p>\n
Alex, Tracie’s cat of 15 years, is no longer with us, as of about an hour ago. He was our constant companion, although Tracie of course was his preferred human. Every pet owner–or every good pet owner, anyway–thinks that their pet is extraordinary, but Alex truly was an extraordinary cat. He had an enormous personality and charmed every cat-loving human who met him. He was, as Tracie recently put it, “a larger-than-life cat.”<\/p>\n
Alex achieved a tiny amount of international exposure with the release of Cycling ’74’s Max 4. His photo appears in the help file of the pictctrl object, which I created. (Maybe someone who has Max 5 can tell me whether it’s still there.)<\/p>\n
Sadly, Alex had health problems as large as his personality and physique. A number of years ago it was discovered that he had a heart murmur, and a few years after that he was diagnosed with diabetes. Hence his age of 15 puts him well past his statistical life expectancy. The only reason he lived as long as he did was due to Tracie’s untiring, devoted attention to his well-being, giving him insulin injections twice a day every day for years (literally). Over the past few weeks he had a series of health complications the details of which I won’t go into, but they were in some sense inevitable and also incurable. Last night we realized that we had helped him as long as we could, and today we helped him in the last and most humane and caring way that any pet can be helped.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Of the hundreds of photos we have, this one stood out as my favorite. It was taken with a lousy camera in a PDA and it’s not even in focus, but it captures a number of things about Alex. He was a large, orange, and handsome cat, and he was always at Tracie’s side. We miss him terribly.<\/p>\n
As a footnote, I’d like to extend a huge amount of gratitude to the folks at the Foothills Animal Clinc<\/a>, who have been Alex’s medical professionals over the last nine years. To say that they went above and beyond the call of duty during the last week and a half doesn’t even begin to express their dedication. I can’t imagine a more caring and skilled veterinary organization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I hope I don’t soon have to write such a difficult-to-write blog entry as this one. Alex, Tracie’s cat of 15 years, is no longer with us, as of about an hour ago. He was our constant companion, although Tracie of course was his preferred human. Every pet owner–or every good pet owner, anyway–thinks that… Continue reading In Memory of Alex<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1109\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}