Just a quick note to wish you a happy new year! May 2011 be a better year, by far! Here’s some Death Cab For Cutie, performing The New Year, to ring out the old year and ring in the new!

This video has everything I want for my new year: a nice ride on a bike and a meal with my loved one.

On the drive home from California, I snapped this photo of the snow that hit St. George last weekend.

It’s hard to drive from the sunny warmth of California back home to the snowy cold of Utah. The temptation to stay there all winter was hard to surmount this time.

I’m so sad that I can’t really talk about it, but I wanted you to know that Sid died yesterday night.

We came home yesterday at about 4pm and Sid was acting groggy, ashamed and lethargic. There was a tiny amount of slobbery puke on the floor under the kitchen table. He was so changed that we immediately took him to the vet. They checked him out and said that he looked fine, but to watch him over the evening. We took him home and he lay next to us the whole time. After a couple of hours, we tried to wake him up, but he was so loopy that he barely noticed us, so we drove him back to the vet’s. They took his blood and gave him a few X-rays, but while he was on the X-ray table, he had a gran mal seizure that stopped his heart. They tried CPR to revive him, but he was gone that quick.

The doctor did what he could to find out what went wrong. The blood work came back almost perfect. He was slightly anemic, but everything else looked great. The X-rays looked pretty good as well. There was a slight growth on his liver, but a death of liver failure would have taken about three days, not three hours. The slobbery puke on the floor indicates that he must have had a seizure at our home while we were out. The doctor was able to rule out poison and other toxins. Considering the two seizures and lack of other indicators, the vet thinks that it was a brain tumor.

I know we took the best care of him while he was alive. I had Dr. Lynette’s office fax over all his records to the emergency vet and we were able to compare all of his blood work every year for his whole life. We took really good care of him and we rushed him to the vet the second we noticed there was something off about him. He died quickly and without pain, so I’m grateful for that.

I’ve been looking at all my old videos of Sid. Here are my favorites.