My Mom Passed Away

My Mom passed away on 2023-01-03 after a multi-year battle with cancer. It was a pretty devastating event for me personally and in retrospect I didn’t really deal with it all that well. I have struggled since then to decide if and how I was going to talk about it here.

In my mind I was making a website here to catalog my projects and things that I have built that I am proud of or that look cool. I wasn’t sure I wanted to write a post here about my Mom passing away. The last time I updated the site was on 2022-12-31 which was just a few days before my Mom passed away. Since that date I have done some work on re-theming and re-building zrinsky.us however it became a project that I would do a bunch of work on, and then become unhappy with and put away again. Every time I would think about writing new content I would go through the same mental loop of “I do not really want to put new content up on my old site without changing the design first and updating the codebase it was built on.” Every time I started to tackle that though I was faced with the thought of what content I would put up on the new site first. That would lead me to think about my Mom, since I felt like that was the next major event that happened in my life after 2022-12-31. I didn’t feel like I could just move on with other content without saying something about it. So here it is.

Our Cats Passed Away Too

A few weeks later in January of 2023 our cat Alice of 17 years passed away, she had been diagnosed with feline leukemia / lymphoma so we were already doing everything we could for her. Sadly we also had another cat for 18 years named Opal who was having Kidney problems and she then passed away in July. Opal was pretty sick and had needed Subcutaneous Fluids which I was giving her at home every day. Needless to say 2023 was one of the roughest years of my life.

Where Do We Go From Here?

No idea. But at least now we CAN go. zrinsky.us has been stuck in time because 2023 was such a rough year and progressing on my personal website has been wrapped up for me mentally with everything that happened then. This post is an inflection point in my own history and so by extension my personal website. Where we go from here is to reflect on who they were.

Remembering My Mom

I remember my Mom as being a fun person who people liked to be around. My Mom and my Grandmother were definitely the kind of people that would treat all the kids like their own kids. Whatever kids were around would get included in whatever was going on. They both just had a kind of funny, no-bullshit way about them that I always liked.

Remembering Our Cats

Alice and Opal were really great cats. We had them for 17 and 18 years and so they were a big part of my life. Opal was found on the street inside a cat carrier abandoned. The day we picked her up she was eating Mc Donald’s French Fries in the office of a mechanics garage (she was being looked after by the husband of the person who found her), and she loved french fries for the rest of her life. Any time we would get Mc Donald’s she would expect (and get) some fries.

Alice was a stray who was found in a bush, the person who found her, heard her yelling and found her alone in a bush. She was incredibly small and was only a few weeks old. She could sit in the palm of my hand she was so small. I have a picture of her on actual film I took when she was a kitten. She was an amazing little kitty and liked to give a cuddly headbutt, where she would just put her head on you and sit there. One of her favorite foods was flaming hot cheetos. For some reason she loved them and would seek them out and once chewed through a bag of them.

Moving Forward

I will finally be moving forward with zrinsky.us and will be creating content on a more regular schedule. That is what I was hoping to start doing in 2022. Better late than never I guess.