End of Summer Update

[ Mom: Sorry to hear about Oscar. We haven’t been checking R&K much this year, and I only saw your comment about his passing this morning. I know it’s now months later, but thoughts and prayers. We know it’s hard. ]

So I’m sitting here at my desk this morning waiting for the first of the day’s vendors to arrive. Sometime this morning our new pest control service is going to arrive and hopefully nuke the everloving bejezzus out of our growing ant population. Because seriously, we’ve had enough. Enough of the marching armies. Enough of the ants floating in our drinking glasses. Enough of the great and almighty swarms every time one of the cats happens to leave a piece of kibble on the floor. ENOUGH.

Following that, this afternoon, the A/C guy shows up. Because, well, we don’t have A/C right now. Went full non-op yesterday afternoon, which is a fairly traumatic event for a former Floridian. Luckily we’re not in a heat wave right now: it’s currently 70 degrees here this morning, which isn’t bad at all for late August.

Otherwise, it’s the usual mix of annoying client situations, pot watching and such and such. Another day in the office.

So the summer of 2016 has been pretty eventful. We’ve been meaning to update here, but just haven’t had the time to sit and focus. So while I’m sort of parked and waiting for people to do their things, here’s a general recap for the interested.

Kristi is teaching again. This is the big one. On a lark one day, she sent her resume in for a couple of local teaching positions, not really expecting any of them to land. It was late summer, just before the start of the school year, and she’d been out of the classroom for seven years, so we were both shocked when the interviews started pouring in. Shortly after that she accepted an offer to teach English at nearby Roosevelt Junior High, a five minute drive from our house. I think she’s still a little overwhelmed by it all – there’s been a lot of adjustment for us both, and in a very short amount of time – but she loves it and we’re both pretty happy about the whole thing.

Zion passed away in July. July was a chaotic month for us – it ended with Kristi getting hired at Roosevelt, but it started on a much more tragic note. Our much loved Siamese, Zion, contracted a blood parasite and went downhill very fast. After several days of emergency care, steep vet bills, a blood transfusion, and round-the-clock worry, we had to finally accept that she wasn’t going to recover. We let her go and got to grieving. I wish I could say that this gets easier after you’ve been through it a few times, but it doesn’t. Or at least it shouldn’t. For us, losing a pet only reopens all the trauma of the loved animals that went before them. Tucker, Sam, Ruca, Mel. We got Zion’s ashes back and her box has joined the Warren Wall of Honor.

New Feline Faces. We certainly weren’t expecting to lose another pet so soon after Ruca. Both Monkey and Zion were nine years old, so we’d hoped for another five to ten years before having to go through this again. Alas, fate doesn’t really consider one’s plans as it makes its own choices.

We’d also told ourselves that when we lost another animal, we would take a grand long time before lifting the pet population again. Unfortunately, we discovered fast that this wouldn’t work out after Zion, because Monkey and Zion were really damned close, and pets grieve just as much as we people do. We saw it happen to Ruca after Tuck passed away, and Monkey was doing all the same things: being excessively clingy, wandering the house and crying to find her friend. So we started checking the Humane Society rosters.

We adopted two new male cats, whom we have named Finn and Sawyer, both less than a year old. I’ve no doubt that there will be plenty of stories here about their antics in future days, because oh my god. I’d completely forgotten what it was like to have an active eight-month-old cat in the house, much less two of them. But Monkey’s certainly not lonely anymore. Regularly annoyed, yes. But not lonely.

Eden is a machine. Our 20-month-old Lab continues to do great. As a result of good food and lots of hard exercise, she’s now kind of ripped. But as Kristi repeatedly tells me, a tired dog is a well behaved dog. So we do our best to keep her tired. Eden seems to be highly approving of the attention and tons of hard play time. We’re now waiting for her next heat cycle to begin, which honestly we’d expected a month ago. No sign of it as of yet.

I think those are the majors at the moment. Job and pets. My own work is still going well – with Finn and Sawyer on the loose, I’ve been doing a lot of hiding in the home office during the day, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing because in recent months I’d gotten into the bad habit of just parking on the the couch to work. Staying at my desk keeps me a bit more honest. So I’ve been getting more work done while doing my best to not think about the crashes and thumps I’m hearing out in the living room all morning.

Ah, another day. Living the adventure, indeed.