Click here to read our latest 4 page batch!

Our update schedule is once a month on the 15th. We will post an entire scene, which are generally between three and seven pages.

Our next batch will be FOUR pages and will drop on OCTOBER 15th, 2026!

Hey all, it has been a hot minute, and I am going to explain why below. If you don’t want to read a Certified Rant, the tl;dr is this:

I now present to you The Long Version:

On July 2nd, an 11 year old child in my province died of rabies. Apparently Ontario has seen a rise in rabies in bat populations over the past couple years, and there was a very nervous and low key panic reaction in conversations around it at the time. A week and a half after this happened, Shay got up on July 12th (Sunday, we are rural, pretty much everything is closed) to feed the cats and found a dead bat on our living room rug. I will say that it was remarkably undamaged, which leads me to suspect that it actually flew into the ceiling fan in the kitchen and died on impact. There were some small punctures in its wing membranes, though, suggesting that one of the cats, no idea which one, found this cool new toy on the kitchen floor, picked it up, jumped over the kitchen gate with it and then promptly lost interest in it, leaving it laying next to the gate, on the rug.

So. You NEED to take rabies seriously. Once you start showing symptoms, the time for intervention is passed. There’s no cure, and you die, and it’s horrible. If you or a pet has come into contact with a bat, even if that bat looks fine, there are steps you have to take pretty much immediately, just to make sure. You also can’t just like…do a blood test on your cat to see if it has contracted rabies–the only viable tissue for testing is brain tissue, and that would require euthanizing any animal you want to test. We obviously were not jumping to euthanize three beloved pets, so it was time to make some phone calls.

Step one was call the emergency vet, because everything else was closed. We described the situation to them on the phone, and after assuring them that our indoor only cats were vaccinated, they said that our next step should be to confer with Ontario’s Public Health agency. We did that, but it was, again, Sunday, so we were on hold for almost an hour total and were repeatedly bounced between people before speaking to someone who could direct us to what the next steps were. We told them that we’d already spoken with the emergency vet, that we were pretty sure that our cats were all up to date on rabies vaccine, and the woman on the phone said that this made her a little less concerned and that it seemed like there was a low chance of infection. She recommended that we make an appointment with our regular vet for whenever they had available during the week, take all three cats in to renew their shots ahead of schedule, and they’d check back in from there. They declined to collect the bat for testing and directed us to put it in a reusable container without physically touching it, and then to throw the entire bat and container into the trash. Garbage is picked up on Monday morning.

On Monday our vet is pretty concerned on the phone, and I am informed that only one of our cat’s rabies vax is up to date, because Parsnip got his shots after we adopted him, but Ham and Dusty got their shots updated several months before adopting Parsnip because that is required of the rescue before they will adopt out another cat to you. Less good! Either way, all three of them need to go in on Tuesday for renewed shots, aaaand then Dusty complicated things a little by biting the fuck out of Shay in protest of being put into a carrier, which we did need to report to the vet, but also reassured him that this is typical behavior for her. They got their (expensive) shots, we were sent home, and we were told to wait for a call from Public Health because our vet was required to coordinate with them now that their rabies shots were updated.

The next day, we got a call from our vet. It is explained to us that because of the rising rabies numbers in Ontario bat populations, and because we no longer have the bat to test because the person at Public Health we talked to on Sunday told us to throw it out, Public Health is now saying that we are legally required to follow strict quarantine guidelines for all three of them. The cats are:

• Not allowed to come into contact with anyone who lives outside of our household. This means that if someone stops by for five minutes to drop something off? If they need to step a single foot in our house we are not allowed to open the door to them unless we have rounded up all three cats and locked them in an enclosed room for the entire duration of that visit.
• Not allowed to be in a room where any human in the household is asleep, for any reason. Readers, all three of these animals sleep on me while I am sleeping every night, this is fucking sucks!
• Not allowed to leave the house unless they are being put into a carrier to be brought to or from the vet’s office.
• Need to be observed for any symptoms, and anything that could be a symptom needs to be discussed with the vet immediately.
• All of this, for THREE WHOLE MONTHS. Quarantine ends on October 16th for them.

Both Public Health and our vet have been periodically checking in on us to make sure that we are following the terms of that quarantine for the past two months. I cannot tell you how much this entire process has sucked, even though I understand why it has to happen this way. It’s been two months and all three of them are completely normal and symptom-free, and the last time public health checked in with us the new lady were were speaking to was like “wow, the whole three months? I would have recommended one, but I guess we’re being cautious because two of them were not up to date combined with Dusty biting Shay.” Which actually kind of makes me feel worse, if I’m being honest.

Anyhow, this batch of pages going up today? Was essentially done except for the lettering back in July, before this all went down. It was two weeks before all of the rabies stuff sort of calmed down, but it kind of all happened at a really bad time–I can’t afford therapy, and was actually doing therapy over zoom for about 6 months. I can’t apply for more free sessions at Rainbow Health for at least nine months, and my final session was, hilariously, the week before all this went down. We ended the session with me jokingly saying, “watch now that our sessions are over, something catastrophic happens like…tomorrow and I end up back at square one! I don’t think I’m that unlucky, though, so fingers crossed haha.”

Haha. Yeah. So, I didn’t have a complete and total breakdown after this happened like I think I would have before therapy, but this did unexpectedly launch me directly into burnout, a thing I have not experienced in a very long time. I couldn’t look at my computer, I couldn’t even turn it on until some time last week, and even then, it was just to let my kid use my steam account to play Don’t Look Outside.

Anyhow, now that things have calmed down again, I am at my desk. Do I feel like I am entirely back in the swing of things? Nooo. Am I feeling better? Sort of! Still not at my best, but no longer feeling the crushing despair of burnout. Do I desperately want to be working again? Yeah, absolutely. Next batch will be up on October 15th, a day before Rabies Quarantine ends, and I will see you all then. Sorry for the unexpected break, and thanks for being patient.

NOTE: Thank you to the person who messaged me on bluesky to let me know that something weird was happening with the cookies. I *think* I fixed it? But if anyone else is experiencing weird stuff, definitely let me know and I will do some more digging.

I’ll have another news post going up some time soon, but for now, gonna end this here.