Not the best start to 2013

I haven't really been around much this month... Mostly because I haven't really done anything. That, and it hasn't been a happy time for Ambs and I lately. I've lost track who I've told about it and who I haven't, so I'm just going to make a journal about it to cover all the bases, I guess.

Anyway, earlier this month we had to put our golden retriever mix, Muffin, down...
The rest is TL;DR, and I'm including it just in case you're curious.

She had been thinning out the last few months and her appetite waned, too, more so than her regular picky eating habits. We took her to the vet. He had trouble finding anything physically wrong with her from a regular check-up, so he did bloodwork on her, and found evidence of a chronic infection. He prescribed a broad spectrum of antibiotics for her (They cost as much as our monthly rent, so we've been fucked financially lately, too.) A few days after giving her the pills, she started to fight back when giving them to her. I couldn't really blame her, having 4 pills literally shoved down your throat twice a day probably isn't a pleasant experience. Either way, after 2 weeks of the meds, they had little effect on her, and she was keeping even less food in her system.
So, back to the vet we went. By this point, we were pretty sure there wasn't going to be good news coming. Muffin had always had minor benign, fatty tumors on her that are normal to golden retrievers, and the vet hadn't been worried about them before hand. But, we had begun to suspect that she might've had some sort of malignant cancer. One of the aides came in an weighted her. She was 35 pounds. Her normal weight was around 65... Despite giving her whatever she'd eat to try and keep food in her, she was still losing weight. Even the vet was kind of bewildered when he came in this time. He's a meek guy anyway, but coming into an exam room where 2 chicks in their 20's are already in tears probably isn't the part of the job he looks forward to. He said at that point that he assumed that she did have intestinal cancer, and because of other things in her bloodwork, he thought that it had metastasized to her bone marrow, and that the most humane thing to do was to let her go. We had to agree with him. She wasn't able to keep food down, and at that point she had started stumbling around, and was so weak she couldn't get up on our bed without one of us lifting her back legs up. When the procedure was finished, we took her back to my parents home (where she had lived the majority of her life) and buried her in her favorite hole-digging spot. Either way, it wasn't, and hasn't been easy. She'd been one of my best friends for the last 10 years and was one of the rare living beings in my life that had never wronged me. She wasn't always the best behaved, but she was a damn good dog... And we miss her terribly.

I've already started working on things again, (Otherwise I think I would've lost it by now) but nothing's been finished enough to show, really, mostly sketches and writing Hitchhiker... I have some things for groups this month half done, so hopefully I'll get them finished before the deadlines. Yesterday was the first day of my last semester of college for my AA degree; I ended up going full time this semester so try and get it all done, so I'm going to be swamped between that and work. We'll see how this goes.