Muddling through

Wordle 592 4/6

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Yesterday I dropped the kid off at school and T. off at work, as usual for a day she has to work.

The day was productive. Work focused mostly on the general effort to update our old documentation. One meeting with a relatively long agenda plus a few emails. Lunch was big but healthy. Afterwards I walked to Union Market to pick up the knives. 

The afternoon was busy. Around 3:30 I went to the post office to mail the holiday card to my aunt in France. (It was returned the first time because I wrote the address wrong. Whoops, I'm out of practice with French conventions.) Then to the grocery store nearby to get the kid a replacement balloon. Then to Costco, to put in an order for some sandwich platters for an upcoming teacher appreciation event. This required texts to T. and another parents to straighten out. Then to my credit union nearby for cash. This required automatic texts and phone calls. Apparently there's more fraud protection there than at the ATMs I usually use in 7/11s. Weird and annoying. After that, to Dick's Sporting Goods, to return an ill-advised Christmas present.

While at Dick's the vet called me about the cat to follow up on the respiratory issue. To summarize, they're worried about cancer and recommend more tests. Uh oh.

After that, home very briefly to drop off what I had picked up while out and about and pick up the kid's swimming bag, and then I attended the swimming lesson. It went well. Last week was actually too much for her and she asked for a break, which never happens, she loves swimming, so this week they toned it down a bit and she was excited about a new achievement. (Touching the bottom of the deep end, I think.) 

T. did most of the work of cooking dinner while we were gone. Orange chicken from Trader Joe's but with some veggies added. It came out well. I prefer my version but the variety is nice and I'm happy to encourage her cooking.

I stayed up later than planned playing WoW. Only until around 10:30, which isn't that much later than usual, but it's noticeable.

Good but not good enough

I feel like I'm kind of running in place on several fronts. Working hard but not getting enough done. Yesterday was busy and productive by several metrics but it doesn't seem to matter. I didn't find the time for art, which might be good to get back into and/or therapeutic. Or exercise, which definitely would be. In WoW KSM requires 2000 points, I started the day at 1970, and ended it at 1976, which I wouldn't mention at all except for the fact that (a) it wasn't totally crazy of me to hope to finish it yesterday, and (b) it's why I was staying up late.

The cat's obituary

He's not dead as I'm writing this but I can't help but feel like it's close. Maybe I'll be glad I did this in a week, maybe I'll laugh about it in a year. 

T. and I both grew up in rural areas, and so the idea of a friendly stray cat seemed silly. Either we didn't see strays at all or they stopped being strays quickly and got adopted. So when a cat introduced himself to us shortly after we bought our house, the friendliness was remarkable, even though it may be more common in cities. We called him Buddy.

He's a good pet for us. I'm more of a cat person, T. likes animals but has allergies, and the house is small, so pets inside would have been a problem. He rarely made that an issue.

We officially got him a microchip and made him "our" cat after about a year, when our second winter in the neighborhood came. He still preferred to spend most of his time inside, but he was happy to come in to eat and on winter nights. 

He's a funny guy. Some days he'd go in and out 10 times if we let him. He's friendly to people but would studiously ignore dogs and get territorial with other cats. We sometimes had to break up fights with him and other neighborhood cats. One time, someone brought their cat to the park around the corner in a little mesh canopy, sort of like this. He stalked the other cat from 10 feet away, curious about the pen but on guard against the stranger in "his" neighborhood. Had to show it who's boss.

He was never a lap cat but he let people know that he enjoyed their company in other ways. He'd ask strangers to pet him or scratch his ears. Neighbors often had to let people know he belonged to someone so they didn't take him. We weren't the only family that fed him. He made himself at home on the whole block. One day a house was for sale and having an open house and we went in just to see what it was like. He followed us and lay down under the dining room table like he had always lived there. The next time we went to an open house, he wasn't allowed in the door, so he jumped up on the windowsill and watched us, offended.

The kid has always been a little disappointed that she never got to see him as a kitten, or that he's simply not a dog, but I think she understands. Maybe someday we'll have another cat like this, but probably not right away.

As he aged, he spends more and more time inside, but we didn't think anything of it until this past December. This post is one of several that discusses it. I don't really regret how we handled things at the time. At worst it was tragic, or bad luck, but I think few pet owners would go through that much expense and hassle all at once. I do regret not getting him looked at again when we got home around the New Year's, or at least not trying to do something about it. Now, I don't know.