If you need more information before contacting your critter, http://sopastrike.com/strike/.

Thanks.

It seems the fight part has begun. I hope we hold out long enough to win. #99%

In some ways I am afraid I’m not giving any one team enough attention, in others, I think I have good leads in place where I need them, I just am learning about the next level of management — what happens after immediate front lines of management? I’m not sure that has ever been something I’ve thought about in great depth. I’m not sure until about two months ago I ever necessarily thought it was something I’d be considering. I mean, sure, I have made jokes about being a director, but actually putting thought into managing multiple layers? Not so much, yet here I am, and thinking damn hard about how to do it in a way that supports all those levels. I’m glad my team is comprised of who it’s comprised of. They’re all pretty dang awesome and they all work their asses off considering the limitations they’re, we’re all presented with.

*side vent about the state & quality of meta/data, both publisher and library, deleted*

So yes. Work has been keeping me busy.

Also keeping me busy: our house finally sold. I feel like I missed out on fall — there are rumors of first snow on Friday. The leaves are about half way off the trees and… it feels winter-ish to me. Which is fine. I like winter, but I really like fall, and in the crazy of the house stuff, I feel like it passed me by somehow. I imagine at some point schedule will reinflict itself, and I’m looking forward to it. We are sometimes too tied to it, but it gives our lives structure and we can roll along knowing that if today is Monday, I’m going into work before Paul whose day it is to drop the girls off at school, and if it’s every other Monday, then there’s Girl Scouts.

I am not doing enough gyro & yoga, this summer’s stint into pre-teacher foundation training and update workshop aside. I need to recommit to that. Tomorrow instead of scheduling a lunch at noon and bailing on yoga, I scheduled lunch at 1:15. I feel like a better person when I get more yoga and gyro in. I’m more patient, I think more clearly. You know — all the benefits of exercise.

M1 is on swim team now. M2 desperately wants to be. On Friday afternoons, during swim team practice, M2 and I swim and she practices hard so that she can get to the next level. She taught herself flip turns… well, with life guard input — she was trying so earnestly and since most of the life guards also help out with lessons, they will frequently have a helpful word. Especially since in her earnestness, she’s also usually wearing the team suit that was meant for M1 but in the wrong size but fit M2 perfectly, so we just kept it. In the next level, she can be considered for swim team, I think. She wants so badly to be part of the team. Perhaps next time I’m there, I’ll mention that to Jenna and see what the requirements are. Maybe it really is that she needs to be in Fish, but I think M2 does as well as some of the other littler swim team kids. Something to ponder, anyway…

It would take me an eternity to catch everything up and that wasn’t really the point of this post anyway, although that seems to be what it has devolved into.

To say this year has been one massive growth opportunity is almost an understatement of epic proportions.

Came home to the week from hell. I hate that this week overshadows what was truly a desperately needed few days of vacation. Bitch slapped by the universe. Living in my body means I tend to not frame what I need to say for other people’s parsing requirements as well, so I didn’t frame something in a way that it needed to be framed and kinda blew some stuff up that I didn’t mean to blow up. Oops. We worked through it all and came to an understanding so all’s well that ends well, but… my bad, gotta be careful.

Also, our beloved TimTheCat died. We came home Monday & they’re usually annoyed at having to go back on the regular food, but… it was clear by Tuesday that there was something profoundly, dreadfully wrong. He’s a feral rescue dude, we got him at about 4 months, and while he’d been fostered and socialized before we got him, he never got over his instinctual people=big predator instincts except for M1, who was His Person. If I came within five feet of him and made eye contact, you could see the gears turning in his head calculating what he was going to do. He’d freeze, look up, and you could practically hear him thinking ‘she feeds me, pets me, loves me… but she’s a person and she might be bad news *this* time… Better safe than sorry, I’m bailing.’ And off he’d go. In the last two or so years as long as I didn’t make eye contact, I could walk past him within about two feet, but eye contact? Outta here. Except for M1. She could walk up to him, pick him up, carry him around, make him do silly dances. If we’d had doll clothes that would have fit him (he was 15 lbs of muscle-y feline), he’d have let her dress him up. That Tuesday night I picked him up & carried him around for a bit was a horrid, bad sign. So at 9:30pm, I loaded him into the carrier (a first — we’ve never been able to get him into it before), and went to the vet ER.

Diagnosis there came back not great. Diabetes & DKA with ultrasound and additional blood work to follow next day. Wednesday brought pancreatitis, fatty liver disease, and some degree of kidney involvement. Thursday morning brought fluid in the lungs, increasing kidney issues, & the possibility of cardiac arrest. Any one of the things TimTheCat was fighting would have been an uphill battle. I asked the obvious question, and got back what was rightly the obvious answer. The final consultation the vet had with the critical care vet said that we were making definitely the right decision.

We broke the news to the girls. M1 got it, it took a while and a little further explanation later on for M2. Both of them cried hard for about 45 minutes when they grasped the situation unfolding. M1 was asked if she wanted to be there at the end. She said, ” I can’t stand it! I don’t think I can bear it!” amidst sobs. I stayed home with the girls, P went & took with him something that smelled of M1 & Tim’s favorite catnip toy filled with fresh catnip. He said it was very peaceful and the hardest thing he’d ever had to do. When the reality finally dawned on M2, I was surprised (and yet not) by her questions — she wanted to know how the vet did it, if it hurt, why he couldn’t get better, if we were going to have any more kitties, all asked through sobs.

TimTheCat “comes home” in a little cremation jar sometime in the next week. But it won’t be the same. There’s a place on the mantle for him by Siobhan, he has friends waiting to show him the great people-free catnip patch in the sky.

For now we’re down to the cranky old lady ‘Spew. As soon as the vet is back from vaca, I will make an appointment for her to go in and scream at him about the indignity of a physical… Eventually maybe we’ll have a space in our heart for a couple of new kitties, but the holes are too raw yet, and the ghosts too vivid to go there just yet. RIP, big Tim dude.

As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women’s children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for — but we fight for roses, too!

As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler — ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!

–James Oppenheim

In other news:

• I love my new job. It has it’s challenges, but they’re good challenges and I work with good people.
• M2 is finishing off the last of her medicine for a strep throat diagnosis that turned out to be staph instead. Not the whatsit resistant one, “they usually tell us when it’s that”, just run of the mill. Makes me wonder if that’s what it was the times last year when it was diagnosed as “Not Strep.” I might have to ask from here on out assuming treatment is required for it. It looks and hurts suspiciously similarly…
• Our back deck is now finished and stained. Hoorah! It looks so nice. Now that we’re past the dog days of summer and starting into my favorite season of fall. Not that I didn’t get a massive sunburn on my shoulders. UGH.
• Mmmmmm, fall…
• We went and saw Julie & Julia. It was lovely. We followed it with dinner at Persimmon where we were the only people in the restaurant until about five minutes before we left. The lovely owner brought us two candles to sit at our table with us, since we were re-attempting our anniversary dinner. The dinner was perfect & tasty. It really could not have been lovelier.
• The prior weekend I had a gyrokinesis class with the ever charming Mia. There wasn’t really any doubt in my mind that I would love it. Now I’m just plotting how to get a regular fix. The length of class I want is at the same time I *should* be sitting/exercising at the Y while the little girls take swimming lessons. I could take a class half as long, but… it’s half as long! Anyway. LOVE. No surprise. I am what I am, for sure.
• I gave the tortle a new home this weekend. She has responded by burying herself gleefully in the dirt. She comes out to eat, wade, bask, & wander around, and then buries herself under her little log again.
• Aaand, I think that’s about it. Probably stuff most of y’ins reading this already knew…

/as you were…

The formalities seem largely to be over. Mr President, it’s time for us all to get to work. Get a good night’s sleep tonight, tomorrow’s going to be a busy day!

And now for something completely different:

When I put it on this afternoon, as I wrapped presents, it pushed me unexpectedly into year end reflection mode. It seems a little early for it, yet there it was. I thought about how my life has changed since a decade ago when I was learning to balance work, learning to be a parent, trying to figure out so much about how I was going to structure a life, a family life and how much I’ve done over the last decade. It seems like I’ve come a long ways when I listen to Vespers and breathe for a moment.

I’ve always taken this time of year off, from Xmas eve to New Year’s Day since M1 was born. Partly because my birthday falls in that time, partly because there’s just so much family stuff that happens (and now with my s-i-l’s b-day two days before mine, there’s even more), and partly because it’s my time, a gift to myself to pause, reflect, take stock in the past year & take a deep breath before jumping back into the fray to push through another year.

This year I’ll be actively checking in on work more than I have in the past. Everyone on my team wanted to go home for Xmas (I hope everyone gets to where they’re going to safely!), so the deal I made was that it was fine — but we *all* needed to check in just a couple times a day & make sure the immediate stakeholder requests were getting taken care of. The other stuff can wait until the new year. I will fully take my birthday off. I have no intention of looking at work on that day. Hopefully the work intrusions over the next two or so weeks will be minimal.

But reflection has definitely set in early. I think at least in part because of the snow. It comes and goes and comes again. I’ve never seen the snow here so deep. It just keeps coming and every now and then the news says, ‘oh, it’ll warm up…’ and then the next forecast pushes the snow out even further. And I’m in reflection mode and the most I can muster up about it is that it’s just how it is right now and I turn to reflect on other things.

It feels strange to realize, again, that I haven’t been breathing. Enough to keep propelling me forward, but not whole breaths. It’s nice to breathe again, at least a little more frequently. And to watch the snow drift down into little boot prints outside.

But now, before this reflectiveness becomes an all-night vigil for me, though I’d like to sit and just sit and listen to nothing and look at nothing and just breathe… it’s time to shift to bed. Matins always comes too early for this night owl…