It's Late But...

Tonight we mourn the loss of a beloved family pet. Tank passed away sometime today or last night. As I was cleaning up the house today, I noticed he was sitting in one corner of the tank and not really moving anywhere, but I thought nothing of it. Then I sat down tonight to play the piano and Chad pointed out that it looked like he was watching me play. He was in the exact same position I noticed him in earlier today. I reached in and touched him and he didn't move. I turned him upside down and his neck twitched a little so we thought he might be hanging by a thread. About half an hour later we were still trying to decide if he was dead or not, so I was slowly stretching out his head, and it pulled back into the shell. I definitely felt it pull out of my fingers. So again, we thought he might be barely alive. We called a 24 hour pet clinic, and took him over around 9:00pm. As we filled out the paperwork, they took him in the back and determined that he was, in fact, dead. The assistant said something about the corneal reflexes being the last thing to go and he didn't have any. Which I'm pretty sure is code for "I poked him in the eye, and he still didn't move." So, we took our little turtle home, set him up in a little cardboard box, buried him in the garden and sang Taps. We would have had him for 1 year as of July 24th. We have quite the pet graveyard going on, what with the baby bird, my little Pig-Pig and now Tank. Fish was flushed. But in 3 years, we have lost 4 little animals. Hopefully humans are a little more hearty....

We will miss you Tank!
When we first brought him home (about the size of a quarter):
Post-mortem:

(Other updates to follow tomorrow)