Musings of a marginally sane feline-appreciating female.

We had to say goodbye to my sweet Lily last night.

She’d been a bit off yesterday and I suspected a UTI – we took her to the vet and they took x-rays and she had multiple masses in her lungs. That would have progressed very rapidly and been very painful for her, so we decided it was time.

She was the fucking best, most awesome, goofiest, and most talkative cat I have ever had. She was the best pandemic buddy – once she got past the first few Friday nights where we didn’t leave the house, LOL. At the start, she was rather, “Why are you here? I have things to do!” I still wonder if she was hosting a floating craps game when we were out.

I think we did right by her with the three months of kitty hospice – spoiling a cat rotten who is already spoiled rotten is the best challenge you can have.

I don’t know what is on the other side, but I know she had a hella welcoming committee – Carmen, Patches, Ashley, Snoopy, Target, Murphy, Grey Kitty, Cringer, Pepper, Miss Kitty, Doc, Sandy, Snoodle, Moxley, Dad’s boxer, and multiple Whiskers to show her around and introduce her to everyone.

I am heartbroken and I will miss her terribly – the house is too quiet today.

I’ll be donating her prescription food to the shelter, but keeping everything else – she was the best cat ever (as they somehow all are – it’s amazing how that works) but I cannot fathom being without a furry friend for very long.

When Target passed away in 2008, it was over a year before I could bring myself to go to the shelter – it somehow felt like a betrayal and I kept hoping Moxley would just find kittens when we were out walking so I didn’t have to make the decision, it would just happen. (Kind of a big fail on the cat distribution system there.)

This time, it feels like I owe it to her to make sure there are other kitties who get as spoiled rotten and loved to pieces as she was.

Love you to the moon and back LilyMonster.

Er, um, afternoon at this point. A week and half a weekend sure whipped by – I was sure I’d written something between last Saturday and now, but time flies and all that.

Had a blissfully calm week at work this week, no repeats of the “let’s delay moving files until 5:30PM” nonsense or anything like that. Topped off with margs and tacos Friday afternoon with a buddy who also had a half day Friday and the weather held and that was awesome.

Plus we have short week this week with Juneteenth hitting on Wednesday, fingers crossed for another nice, calm week without the CTO making some announcement that puts everyone completely on edge. Realizing now that we have the second half of our all hands on Tuesday, that may be a pipe dream. Dude has that amazing C level inability to read a room and just stress everyone out.

But eh, it is what it is, and I just ignore him as much as I can, LOL.

The LilyMonster had another good week, taking her meds, eating lots, and generally being awesome. I know things could change at any time, but I’m honestly amazed that she is still with us and doing so well. However, right now it also looks like I’ll not be heading to the beach – 2x a day meds, plus monitoring that she actually takes the meds & is doing OK in general – not something I can put on a petsitter.

But honestly – it’s OK and pretty much a no-brainer if she is still here. The beach will be there later, and I’ll still be taking the time off work for my sanity, and there is all kinds of stuff I can do around town. It’s the very least I can do for a kitty that has given me near 15 years of love.

I will still be going to Baltimore for a couple days at the end of July for baseball – at my brother’s insistence. Yes, he is absolutely capable of taking care of her. (I do have to remind myself of that.) Also getting some transdermal gabapentin, which should be easier to administer for him. So, even if I can’t get to the beach, I can get some crabcakes, hotel time, and not have to wait a year before actually getting out of town for a bit. And I’ve got some time off scheduled in the fall – could pop down to the beach then, too, if I want to.

I’m just glad I still have her here to love. Today should be a reset day around the house, but I think it will more likely just be laundry and marveling at my kitty on borrowed time, who has woken up from her nap and is happily chowing down on lunch.

The chores can wait.

It is a glorious sunny day out there and I was at the farmers market getting my weekly dopamine hit, and I had my hair down, and damn, the sun makes that purple POP. Got multiple lovely comments and I was very, OMG THANK YOU, I LOVE IT SO MUCH. Like this is pretty much my energy when it comes to these bits of purple:

Seriously, if you’ve been waiting for a sign to toss some funky colors in your hair – this is it.

The LilyMonster is doing pretty great considering everything – taking her meds like a champ and eating and snoozing and generally very content. I think we’re managing this pretty well.

Work was pretty chill this week, but Thursday reinforced the fact that none of us get enough credit for not drinking on the job.

Came in to a whacked out email chain – with the bonus of subject line having nothing to do with the content – but it was “that bug you got yesterday (that couldn’t be tested just yet because it had to go through the build) it needs to be packaged and tested for on-demand distribution for an internal client, today.”

Not ideal, but OK, cause my director said to just skip preliminary testing, get it packaged, test in on-demand environment. Cool. Can’t do prelim tests anyway cause that build has failed repeatedly all week. Still, no problem – just need my dev to merge one file, have dba’s confirm that a patch truly got applied, package the files, move them, test. Like, this could be done by mid-afternoon!

Dev gets file merged by 7:30AM, cause she’s fucking awesome. Then it takes 3 hours to get an answer about the patch.

OK, let’s move those files!

No, someone decided to go ahead with the build for the prelim environment and they don’t want to move the files until that is done – and the build failed AGAIN, and had to be run yet again. (This is where I may have copied & pasted exactly what the director asked us to do into the email chain.) Pointless delay, but whatever.

Great, move those freakin’ files! No, can you do a quick test in prelim? FML, fine – in a system where the performance has degraded so badly that a 10 minute test took AN HOUR. (I have put in a ticket about this…)

LET’S MOVE THE FILES! Hour and a half to get the files moved, because file move magician is in the midst of a family emergency and only online intermittently. (I was livid that he had to work – someone else should know how to do that.)

By the time I can start testing, it’s 5:30PM. 3 hours of full-tilt testing, it’s solid. More testing to be done, but just repeats of the same stuff in different environments, but certainly enough to say “Yes, pass the files on.”

The files had been given to the internal client at 1PM anyway.

Now, these things happen, I wasn’t happy about it, but I didn’t cuss anyone out or get a bottle of wine and a straw, and at least this nonsense isn’t happening as frequently as it used to. But damn, that shit sends me into fucking high alert mode, and my Fitbit was like, “Damn girl, you’re getting a hella workout today!”

And when Friday came around I didn’t rush a damn thing, and I didn’t even stay late to make up the extra hour I took midday to go to the dentist. They only get one bonkers stupid day a week!

Hopefully next week will be chill all 5 days, LOL.

Off to a good start with getting booted out of work early for the holiday weekend, albeit with a whopping 2 hours notice. (Someone forgot to tell the new CEO it is SOP to announce this on Wednesday, especially when timesheets are due early…) But, better late than not at all.

Got my happy time in at the farmers market this morning and they had fresh shelled peas – I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in my life before – fresh unshelled yes, but not shelled. Got some and had to look up how to store them and gotta figure out how to prepare them – I’ve had a lifetime of frozen peas only. I’m thinking butter and garlic are going to come into play for sure.

The LilyMonster is still doing well on kitty hospice – had a bit of a rough day yesterday and I realized we probably needed to have more of the heavy duty meds on hand – she’s been doing great with the gabapentin, but it’s kinda dependent on her wanting to eat a special snack, which she was not in the mood for last night. We still had a couple doses of Buprinex left from her biopsy and it did the trick – it’s great cause it’s a small dose and she doesn’t have to swallow it, just get it in her mouth. Transmucosal meds FTW and we’ve got a call in for a refill.

I gave her a dose this morning and thought maybe it had lost its potency since she just wanted to be in her hidey hole afterwards, but I lured her out a bit later with some brushing and oh yeah, it has kicked in and she has had two packet snacks and is high as a kite. (She also ate overnight and apparently went down to the basement to see my brother at 1AM and he said she was feeling gooooood.)

Overall the most important thing is that she is comfortable and I think we’re succeeding in that.

Enjoy your weekend and hug your pets.

We had a great time at the local beer festival yesterday and I got some art!! Love that this is at the Workhouse Arts Center – you can try all the beers AND walk through the galleries and see all the wonderful art.

They also had an art battle – 3 rounds with a theme and the artists had 45 minutes to create something and my god, they made some amazing things. And you could get raffle tickets and enter for the art you liked – AND I WON! The photo doesn’t do it justice, I just love it.

It’s by Serina Chowdhury and the fact that she put this together in 45 minutes is still astounding to me. I just love it.

I also picked up a piece by Helena O’Neill – I love all her work and I have another small piece by her as well. She is the featured artist at the Arches gallery, and it’s so well deserved.

And in shocking turn of events, I even know where I am putting both of these!

Be sure to tell your kids that I’m pretty sure that Darth Vader never ate his veggies.

In true DC Spring fashion, yesterday we had “outside tacos & margaritas” weather and today it is 53 degrees and raining.

But I was undeterred, because I missed the market last week, and that wasn’t gonna happen two weeks in a row. I’ll admit I hauled ass through it, but now we have breads, lettuce, tomatoes, radishes, green onions, cookies, peanut butter truffles, paella, and empanadas! So happy to see *small* bunches of radishes – the smallest I can get in the store is a pound of them – and I have never in my life needed an entire pound of radishes. And there were more tomatoes than space on the plate, so oh no, tomatoes for breakfast!

Oh, and I am feeling so smart about my farmers market gear. Couple years ago, the county started requiring vendors to have compostable grocery bags, which isn’t a bad idea at all, and then last fall I heard or read somewhere that vendors didn’t know what the bag situation was going to be, if they could get them from the county again or if the county wanted everyone to bring their own and the vendors not have them at all.

Thing is, you do need bags of some sort – even though I have my cheery market tote, I need smaller bags as I don’t want to upend a whole basket of lettuce into my tote, or have cherry tomatoes just rolling around. So, hopped on Amazon and got a pack of like 100 of them, and I’m glad I did. County does appear to be providing bags again this year, but they don’t have handles, which is no big deal, and they *look* like they’re about the same size, but they’re not pleated on the sides or bottom, which makes them very damn small. So I’m walking around the market with my properly sized compostable grocery bags LIKE A BOSS. (Yes, I am old that this has me feeling smart.)

Not even 11AM and I had the marketing done, everything put away, the tomatoes washed and ready for drive-by noshing, the radishes chopped up for salads, and the dishwasher running. Go me!

Will I keep this momentum up? Highly unlikely, as I made the critical error of sitting down, LOL. It’s also just such a grey and gross day, it seems perfect for curling up on the couch and watching British murder mysteries. And eat tomatoes.

Have a great day.

And play games on my phone and probably eat quite a lot of cheese. My friends funeral was yesterday and it was just very emotionally draining. Probably not helped by the fact that I don’t find the vast majority of rites & rituals surrounding death to be even the slightest bit helpful. (Yeah, pretty sure this makes me a psychopath.)

The eulogies were lovely, though. I know being a funeral home pastor is challenging cause you’re often leading services for folks you don’t know, but I would petition for funeral homes to get rid of pastors and replace them with professional grief counselors to lead services. They’d probably have more helpful things to say, and wouldn’t leave me thinking, “Dude, he was a gay, hispanic, extremely lapsed Catholic, I don’t think he had the relationship with God you think he did.”

And of course this week we had a presentation at work on “Resilience in Grief and Loss” and honestly, could we just not? Why do we always have to be resilient? It’s fucking exhausting.

So for today, fuck resilience.

Damn if the world doesn’t keep spinning on its axis, despite everything. Bunch of us got together last night to remember Allen and laughed a lot and said I love you a lot. It was far more cathartic than I expected, and it was good to know that I am not the only one going “JFC, this world is just too damn much.”

And while I’ll absolutely engage in some angsty days and will probably be mad at the universe forever – spiraling into full on despair isn’t a particularly good option. So, onwards it is, even if it is just out of spite.

So, seems the plan is grab joy, try to escape capitalism before it kills me, and IDK, maybe start a cult along the way – that could be fun.

Today’s joy came in the form of a banger of a farmers market salad, and cherry tomatoes.

Look, I’m not gonna put rocks in my pockets and walk into the sea, but I am seriously considering selling everything I own and becoming a bog witch, because JFC, this country, society, and world.

Still taking all your Covid precautions? 1,000 still dying every week, including one of my best friends.

Been thoughtfully working on reducing your carbon footprint? Undone in minutes by corporations & billionaires.

Vote in every damn election? Fascists have the courts.

Economy doing great? How ya doing with annual increases that haven’t kept up with inflation in years and the constant threat of layoffs? Or just trying to find work?

Trying to be an informed citizen? My god, the unrelenting firehose of bad news out there.

It’s all so much. It’s not your imagination. I know so many folks who are having to put all their energy into just surviving – thriving left the chat a while ago.

Grab any and every bit of joy you can. Don’t feel guilty about it. Big, small, medium joy – grab it.

Today it was the farmers market and cherry tomatoes for me. It’s small and silly, but I love it and dammit, we need joy. And I even had a laugh – wherever my late friend is, he’s mad he missed 4/20.

Hang in there. I know it all seems futile, lord knows I do, and I’ll admit I’m still going cause I don’t know what else to do, LOL.

But I’m still keeping the bog witch option on the table.