Surely you jest!

So, while I'm still working on an update about more recent events, I thought I'd add in a more light-hearted moment from the complete and utter insanity that is Vancouver's housing market.

First of all, the lovely 100-year old home that we rented for the past 4 years, is now on the market. Our landlords, having been forced into acting sooner rather than later since we decided to give our notice before they got a few reno's started, clearly realized it's time to get off the pot and put it up for sale or risk it sitting empty while they continue to deliberate. Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not bitching by any means. After all, their indecisiveness about the house meant we got to live there for a full 4 years, instead of just 9 months, while they figured out what they were going to do.

Anyhow, if you're curious - here's where we lived and, if you've got close to $1,000,000 burning a massive hole in your pocket then why not go take a look. Though, believe me, if I had that amount of money to spend, you would not see me wasting it on uber-inflated property in overrated Vancouver. A petit chateau in France or a casa a la playa in Spain? - Quite possibly. But a slum in this over-hyped city? Not bloody likely.

And if you'd told me a few years ago that I'd one day live in a million-dollar house in Vancouver, I would have laughed my pretty little head off - not to mention that I would've also expected it to be a 6-bedroom, 6 bath mansion with private beach, a massive swimming pool, tennis courts and stables!

Reality is, while I did move to Vancouver, property prices here have escalated far beyond the realms of realistic. Et voilà!

Admittedly our last place was....is...a cute character house in a great neighbourhod and we really loved living there. It shows really well in the photos too - you can even see the efforts of all our elbow-grease in cleaning the place. Though I can't deny that, when I look at that lovely bay window in the living room, I'm reminded - with a distinct lump in my throat - of just how happy our cats were too - all 6 of them that lived with us in this house; 3 of whom passed on during our time there, 3 moved with us to our new place and 1 of whom has since bid us farewell :-(

Naturally friends of ours - one a realtor and the other all mortgage-horny and obsessed with 'upgrading' to a bigger money-pit in the dull old 'burbs - soon piped up with, "You guys should buy it!" - Bless! But seriously, ask yourself - why on earth would we lock ourselves into 25 years of serious debt, use up all our hard-earned savings on the 10% down payment and then pay out a 'mere' $5,200/month on the mortgage for the very same house we've been renting at just $1,400/month. Admittedly the rent was slightly below market average - but who the hell could afford more than $5,000/month in mortgage payments???? Especially on the average meagre salary in this city? Chaining yourself into 25 years of massive debt with no money left for anything.....ever....and yet reside (notice I didn't say live), completely house-poor in the very same place we rented for 75% less with a lot less stress and lot more life!

And, for what it's worth, a million dollar property in Vancouver is definitely not going to live up to your average expectations. If you think the above price is high, on what is really just a 3BR, 2-bath house (including the basement 'suite'), then feast your eyes on this $ Million+ joke:

Yes folks, you too could shell out $1,100,000 for a disgusting teardown property on a piece of neglected land so narrow that the only building you'd get on the same plot would likely be a luxury dog kennel at best. Or maybe a tool shed. But not both! 

Got $1,100,000 to dump on a Vancouver des-res?

Of course you have to take a good look at the interior photos to really appreciate this high-end property, especially (what's left of) the 'kitchen'....notice  the shovel? Literally looks like they'd just finished shovelling their way through years and years of scuzz and shit dirt, took the photos and no doubt ran the heck out of there......laughing all the way?

How about this for Hell's Kitchen? Ramsay's worst nightmare!

 

Lovely looking....erm....1-piece bathroom.
Where's the rest of it?

Vancouver's nice, don't get me wrong, but it's seriously not that nice. And it's nowhere near nice enough to warrant paying more than a million bucks for the privilege of giving up on life just to own a ready-to-bulldoze crack shack such as this. Which, reminds me of one of my favourite sites for a good laugh, "Crack Shack or Mansion" - which could easily include the above property. See how well you score.

Anyhoo, baffled by these two prices, on houses just a block apart on the very same street no less, I felt compelled to inform one of my long-time favourite bloggers and public speakers, Garth Turner, author of the viciously frank blog: greaterfool.ca. A smart man who unapologetically tells it like it really is, no B.S., and writes wonderfully irreverent, blunt and downright sarcastic commentary on the real estate insanity in Canada, especially Vancouver. So, imagine my utter delight when I discovered that the email I sent him (somewhat on a whim last Friday) was actually included in his blog post the very next day! I strongly suspect you'll guess which part stems from my own fair hand. Now that's street-cred!

Suffice to say, we're perfectly happy to continue renting at less than 30% the cost of owning the same type of place in this fairly ordinary city. Now, if we can just get rid of the damn carpenter ants we appear to have unwittingly inherited as room-mates!

Walking a horribly familiar pathway

What started out so well last weekend quickly developed into a strange, melancholy, unsettling and heartbreaking week. The winds of change are not only blowing around us lately, they're approaching gale force and a dark cloud is lurking on the horizon.

Having survived (somewhat knackered) the drawn-out move into our new place - which happened to coincide with a perfectly sunny day, thank goodness - we are still riding the disarray of unpacked boxes and general mayhem of "Where's the....? What did you do with.....? Have you seen the....?" And I'm still trying to figure out just where the heck did I pack my trousers?

And within days of the move we also bid a sad farewell to our much-loved camper van, which we sold for mostly financial reasons, with me still not having a permanent job lined up plus all the incoming costs from moving house - including the fact we've had to pay a full month's rent at both places this month.

Hard to believe relaxing scenes like this won't be
happening for us this summer :-(

But we love that van dearly and, since buying it in September 2006, we've made many wonderful camping and road trip memories and we're really going to miss that ease of a last-minute weekend getaway. We'd like to upgrade and hopefully get a more modern camper next year, though it depends largely on my work situation really, since my current freelance contract is still set to finish any day now and I've nothing lined up after that.

Anyway, the van's gone off to join a rock band apparently, so if you ever hear of a group called 'Ridgewater', we just sold them their first tour bus. I actually like that idea - even if we're still feeling melancholy about selling.

I'd say more, about the van and post many more pictures of our amazing camping trips, but for now even the van isn't the main subject of this post.

Now, if I can write this next part without tears flooding my keyboard, it'll be a miracle.

Over last weekend we noticed Mishka looking more bloated than usual. Assuming it to be the usual chronic constipation she battles (surely not helped by the stress of us moving and packing boxes these past few weeks - although she handled the move really well and seems otherwise quite content) we added an extra dose of lactulose to her daily regime of gastro-intestinal medications....but to no avail. By Monday (3/25) I took her to the vet, fearing she was severely backed-up and might have mega colon. To my initial relief Dr Goldberg felt her tummy and said he really wasn't feeling too much poop in there and suggested an x-ray to see if anything else was going on. When he came back 15 minutes later the words, "I need you to come and look at the x-ray, I'm afraid it's not good news" were not what I expected nor wanted to hear. I could feel the blood drain from my face as we looked at Mishka's cloudy abdominal x-ray. There was almost nothing to see, just a milky cloud inside her abdomen that almost completely concealed her liver, spleen, kidneys etc. Then came the verdict - the bloating is because of severe fluid build-up in her abdomen, otherwise known as ascites and the main cause is usually cancer. He suggested taking a fluid sample via ultrasound and at the same time he drained 200ml of fluid from her abdominal area. That's a crazy amount of fluid and there really is no good news in this scenario. The fluid was sent off for testing, along with her blood and urine sample and we booked an emergency ultrasound the very next day, which confirmed there appears to be a growth in her pancreas plus what look like nodules spreading into her intestine that would signify pancreatic cancer that has possibly already spread.

On Wednesday, when the test results came back, we got the full picture, more or less, and there is no silver lining here. Even though the tests didn't prove 100% conclusive for cancer, the "best" case scenario is severe pancreatitis and/or even FIP (Feline Infectious Peritonitis), which does not bode at all well, least of all in a cat approaching 16 years old who's endured  chronic gastro-intestinal issues in one way or another her whole life. Sadly, the most likely scenario is that she has pancreatic cancer and related abdominal/intestinal complications. Either way the outlook is grim. Our poor little furry princess Moo is in very bad shape and is not going to recover from this. In fact Dr Goldberg gently warned us that this will progress quickly towards a heartbreaking farewell to our very, very loved and wonderful Mishka. And that end feels like it's coming at us like a freight train.

Hard to believe that just a week earlier both Lorne & I were both commenting on how great she seemed. She was happy, eating well, hasn't been sick for ages (though on daily meds all the same) and even seemed to have a renewed spring in her step. She surprised us both recently by jumping up and joining the boys in chasing the laser-pointer toy. She raced after it almost as fast as they did and it's lovely to watch her play.

One week later and the story couldn't be more opposite. The best we can do for her now is to keep her comfortable, give her all our love and come to terms with the sadly inevitable - knowing to take her lead about how she's feeling and accept when the time is right to let her go. This is a horribly familiar road that we've been down too many times in the past few years and it breaks my heart to be here again.

After having the fluid drained last week she actually picked up considerably for a few days, even on Thursday & Friday she seemed like her old self again, was eating really well to the extent that, had we not got the awful diagnosis, it was hard to believe anything was wrong. But, since Saturday, she's been starting to fade. She's eaten virtually nothing since Friday evening, she's lethargic and the bloating came back. I took her back to the vet on Saturday and they were able to take another large amount of fluid from her abdomen. Thankfully she's so easy-going and placid that she tolerates the procedure - called an abdominocentesis - very well, but it's obviously not something we want to keep putting her through and there's a limited number of times it might even continue to have a positive (or any) effect. In fact, while she improved somewhat Saturday afternoon following the procedure, by the evening she seemed withdrawn again and refused to eat.

Bugger, here come the tears again. Deep breath.

Well, in an attempt to try and keep it somewhat together as I write this, let me first post a little collection of photos that I had put together on Facebook when I celebrated the 15th anniversary of this tiny, adorable bundle of fluff coming into my life (Sept. 17, 1997) - the $10 kitten bought on a rainy night at Steamworks pub (Gastown) just before heading home at the end of a beer-filled evening, having heard that a man at the bar had a bag of kittens he was selling.

She was so small when I first brought her home, that Vicky seriously thought she was a Beany Baby toy, laid on the back of the couch.....until Mishka opened her huge eyes.

She was smaller than a 6" side plate

Scary Hallowe'en stance

Hide and....sink.
I'd looked everywhere for her and here she was,
as cosy as anything.

Perhaps my favourite baby pic

Filed under "C" for cuuuuuute!

I used to take her over to Vicky's with me - where Ellee was
immediately enamoured and followed Mishka's every move.

She wasn't at all impressed about being
spayed, nor the cone-head attire.
(Her one and only surgery.)

One of her other favourite places to hide

My little $10 kitten blossomed into the most
stunning supermodel of cats with beautiful long,
glossy hair and the most gentle personality.

And this was in 2011, a lovely and very regal shot of our
Princess Moo, taken by our friend, Mike Sudar.
(You can hardly notice the bad haircut - which we had to start
giving her to calm down the hairball barfing.)

Well, these are mostly older photos and there are so many more beautiful pictures of this adorable little kitty that I could, and will, post. But for now I can't put into words the depth of pain I feel deep in my heart at the thought of being so close to saying goodbye to this most treasured little sweetheart who's been with me every step of the way, my little shadow, for the past 15.5 years - almost my whole 'Vancouver' life.

I honestly don't know how I'm going to get through the empty days ahead when I don't hear that little chatty voice of hers and see those huge eyes.

In my heart-of-hearts I know we've done everything we can for her, taken great care of her and attended to all her medical and emotional needs - to the extent she's still with us at almost 16 years old. (The same little cat that a rude and much less-diplomatic vet (let's call him Dr John Clark of Granville Island Veterinary Clinic) so vehemently cast off as having cancer almost 10 years ago! With a wave of his hand and an admonishing, "This cat has cancer, I'm telling you. We just haven't found it yet, but I know I'm right." Thank goodness Lorne and I did our own research & sought out a 2nd opinion - to the extent she's lived 9 more years! Needless to say we avoided taking any of the cats to see him again.

But with her fighting intestinal issues her whole life, we know we really have exhausted all treatment options, even prior to this latest diagnosis, which we are powerless to fix. It certainly doesn't make this whole thing suck any less, but it brings an ounce of solace knowing Mishka's enjoyed a full and very happy life, knowing only love, affection and the very best attention to whatever she's needed from us and we'll continue to keep her happiness and wellbeing top priority as we continue on this very difficult, short and oh-so-horribly-familiar path.

I  love you with all my heart Mishka and I really, really, REALLY don't want you to go :-(

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