A lesson on dying

We have a cat, a very old cat, she turned 19 in December of last year.
My wife has had this cat since she was still a teenager, she got it when she was 19, and has had this cat for half of her life.
She has had this cat longer than she has been married to me, longer than any of our kids have been alive.

As I said, the cat is very old and recently has begun to rapidly fail in health. My kids are very lucky, they really have never seen death or the process of dying. We have had family members pass away, but none that they were close to. We have been very open about the process and they understand what is happening, as much as they can. We have decided that we will not put the cat "to sleep", which is a term I have always hated. We are essentially providing hospice care for the cat and the kids are helping as much as possible. The cat will die, and they will all be sad, it might be tomorrow or it might be weeks from now. They have asked for her to be cremated, which we will have done.

I'm not sure what the point of this is..it's just something we are dealing with in my house, the impending death of a family member.

Origins of a name

How does someone come to be known as "Bumwaller"?

Well, I'll tell you. There is a comedian that I find to be hilarious, Eddie Izzard, and in one of his shows he was discussing the process that Gerry Dorsey went through to become Engelbert Humperdinck. One of the name combinations that he lists is Slut Bumwaller, my wife and I found this to be hilarious and it has become a joke name that we use for dinner reservations. When I decided to start playing World of Warcraft I used that as my character name.

I started a World of Warcraft blog, For the Herd, first and just decided to use the same account for this blog. That is the story of my name.