I came downstairs for something, and saw out the window, a little chickadee, and then a lot of chickadees. I came into the rec room and there were a Whole Lot More Chickadeeees! And sparrows! Eating bugs in the leaf layer that we haven’t raked up yet from the maples. In our yard! I was afraid we didn’t have any little critters, but we do! and then there was this brilliant red streak flashing past and landing on a log — I didn’t realized pileated woodpeckers were that big! And at the very same time as the flock of chickadees, sparrows, and Woody, in swoops a flicker!

Best part of my day.

Back to the office for the first time in a week tomorrow. Ugh. My hours & sleep schedule ended up a little feral again. Monday morning will be not all that much fun, but is an excuse to get around to trying to reign in the creeping late nights.

We’re officially out of the storage unit now though. All our stuff, for the first time since around April of 2007, is out. All our stuff is in our new house. I don’t know how we fit all that stuff in that tiny house. I think a lot of what has come home should probably be donated. Discardia, baby, oh yeah. Actually, I’ve been pretty good with getting rid of a bunch of stuff. Now it’s just down to the hard stuff. Except for what will really, really not be hard.

Out front I saw a fat varied thrush and a smallish looking robin.

I may have bit off more than I can chew on something at work, but I think… It’s not that I can’t do it, I’ve just never done it and it’s a fairly ginormous recommendation for someone in my position to be making. The VP and Sr. Product manager leading the project are working together to figure out the other recommendation coming out of this initiative. I wish I had a buddy too. I think I have good resources that will be able to provide me with some guidance so I’m going to see what I can do and if i can’t get where I need to go because I don’t have visibility, I’ll have to (gah!) ask for help. Learning opportunity.

Watching Man, Woman, Wild. Missing half of it, so distracted by what’s on my mind and the cabin fever setting in with the snow. Oh. And it’s over. Time for the babies to go to bed, and then me to putter about a bit longer.

With the snow the last few days, I put out bird food on the deck. No one. This afternoon as I was shoveling our walk, I noticed two tiny footprints at the edge of the front step so I put another little bowl of food and warm water on the front step. I peeked out the window a while later and had two robins. I think they’ll be back tomorrow. I hung the seed bird feeder in front of the kitchen window instead of out the back window. The food is also still on the deck, and the front step.

I think until the little hummingbird, the only bird I’d seen in our yard since we moved was a dead varied thrush that we buried out in the only small bush in the back yard. I’m glad to see some birds. There have been a few squirrels too, but not many. I think better landscaping will help. The fellow that was the landlord here before we bought the house let the ivy go kinda crazy and then round-upped the place. There is almost no underbrush. I think we might want to have someone come out and help us with what to do with the yard. It’s big and has awesome potential.

Up too late. Again. Listening to Mark Lanegan. Again. So beautiful. If I lived alone, I’d play along, but I don’t and everyone is asleep & that’s ok because I would probably more think about it and not quite get around to doing it. Maybe. But it sounds like a good idea, like so many things this time of night. Gardening, going for a bike ride, candle lit bath, playing one of my guitars, singing…

Time to suck it up and go to bed though.

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.

What’s up is that she wanted back upstairs to sleep in her favorite comfy chair right in front of a heat vent because TimTheCat had claimed the apparently comfy office chair already. Poor old creaky thing. I pulled down a big old throw pillow that looks rather as though it was made of Cookie Monster & put it on the wooden chair in sort of a nest-y shape. She protested and acted annoyed because that’s how she is, but she’s been quiet ever since so I think she’s secretly quite pleased with it. Or at least it will be sufficient. Silly ‘Spew Cat…

Silly people are naming different products with virtually undistinguishable names again, and then the product groups who call these things even *less* distinguishable names freak out when customers get confused about the difference between the virtually indistinguishable *other* product & demand name changes. You’d think someone in legal & brand would catch these things, no? You know, when you manage to confuse the taxonomist for two hours about the difference between two different products because the names are so similar, that’s *bad news* for your brand identity, people.

M1 is hemming her own pants these days. Or rather attempting to. I still have to pin, thread, knot, tie off, but she’s content to do the basting stitch that holds the hem in place. This latest pair of pants is boot cut & she wasn’t happy with how the hem was turning out. I convinced her to just roll them up though, I think. I know, dorky, but her legs are growing so fast that the pants we hemmed at floor length five months ago are now distinctly high waters.

TimTheCat seems to have forgiven me for clipping his fingernails yesterday. I don’t do it often because he really hates it, but… dude gets scythes & he’s a burly dude. I still have scars from the first time I tried to clip his nails when he was about five months old on the top of my hand. The span of his paw then with everything extended was nearly as wide as my hand. My father-in-law said while they were fresh, “Looks like the cat won.” Nope. I won. I got my way & kitteh didn’t. Heh.

Yada yada ya. Woo!

He’s in the litter box right now (well, he was when I originally typed that), he’s eaten well, I’ve seen him drink. He’s let all three of us scritch him under the chin & behind the ears. He’s exploring. He’s *totally* ignoring ‘Spew who is being a raging bitch about the strange smelling TimTheCat in the house…

Cats may have nine lives, pretty sure Tim has at least eight left, but I only have one & I’m pretty sure that whole ordeal took a few years off it.

From TimTheCat

Tim, dude, we need a little help from you to bring you back inside where you’ll be warm and safe. I know it’s cold and wet out there & you’re miserable, so a little intestinal fortitude & trust in us would go a long ways here. A little help, eh?

Hopefully our timid big guy will find some intestinal fortitude in the near future (like tomorrow at breakfast) and come running to the sound of a little girl’s or little girls’ voice/s trying to make kitty food noises. On the upside, of all the cats we’ve had, he’s probably the most competent at getting by outside. He’s likely a good hunter having been feral until he & his litter were trapped (though terribly out of practice other than play, but he’s a fierce feather catcher). He’s not likely to approach humans or allow them to approach him so it’s not so likely he’ll be mooching & working the neighbors. Unless he’s trying them on for size…

Bleah. Not a good way to end what was more or less a very nice weekend. Really puts a damper on things.

TimTheCat airing out teh harbls.

From TimTheCat