Delays and Considerations

After last Wednesday, I needed to step back and slow down a bit.  For the first few days, I did a lot of busy work, just to keep my mind off things, knowing that my creative moments would be filled with thoughts of kitties and loss.  I’m one of those people who rushes into the “make all the arrangements” side of grieving, because to stop and feel that soon, that close to a death of a loved one is too hard.

Let time do its part and soften the edges some.  Let me accept that s/he isn’t around anymore to see, spend time with…  Let the change in presence feel more gradual.

Though he wasn’t referring to grieving per se in his essay Common Sense, Thomas Paine was spot on when he stated:

But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

Change is inevitable and vital, but when forced to face it head-on, many of us balk.  We revert to old patterns.  We resist or deny.

I took pictures.

Not pictures of the sweet Mrrp, but of flowers.  When I started trying to develop some real photography skills, I worked mostly with flowers.  They were more agreeable to standing still for extended periods of time while I tweaked ISO settings and adjusted my white balance than my son or wildlife tended to be.

I used my old iPhone because getting out the Canon and kit just seemed to be too much fuss.  These pictures are not high art.  Just a moment captured, an attempt to slightly immortalize a thing of beauty that dwindles all too fast…

Exactly the type of thing that one needs to do at times like these.

So here goes:

Looking down into a Poem of Ecstasy iris

And though definitely less flashy, these classic “Great Lakes” irises have the most amazing fragrance. This page compares it to magnolias. I find them closer to a slightly spicy root beer float.

In the shadow and reddish hues of the tri-color birch, this blue beauty seems almost purple

I love irises. I think I could easily make a yard full of them. These and a carpet of creeping thyme and clover instead of grass…

My ROW80 Check-in and Assessment

Normally I would post a list of my goals.  Being so close to the end of the ROWnd, it seems all the more necessary to consider all my progress (and failures) so more consideration toward next ROWnds plans might be made.

Screw consideration…

I’m writing.  Since Wednesday, my daily total plummeted (I’m squeaking out my 750words a day, but little more) from often over 2500 to around 800.  I’ve only done my Five (handwritten) Sentences twice.  I typed in two pages for the first time last night instead of writing this post.

I’ve puddled in my languages, read books, and played dumb flash games.

And I showed up and put in my time for my JuNoWriMo sprints, but was too distracted to get words of my own most days.  I’m not sure now if it’s a good thing that I have most of this week off (our wedding anniversary is Wednesday, and so I asked for some family time)—as much as the distractions slowed me down, they also kept me involved in writing and people.

It’s not like this December and January where I drifted out of touch with the whole world because there was so much loss to deal with.  Love or not, Mr. Kitty was a cat, and as an outdoor, mostly still feral animal, I always knew he would not only die eventually but likely sooner because of his life.  But I also knew he was happier with his life as it was (except in the winter…  he’d have liked to have stayed inside during the winter) than deal with the other occupants of our house beyond me.

So…  there it is, a day late, but here.

Farewell Mrrrpp

Earlier, when I started this post, I had all sorts of snarky things in my head to say.  It was Wednesday, the world seemed to have gone mad yet again, and I was feeling …  well, like something was going to happen.

the Handsome Boy

I don’t want to feel that way anymore.  I just want to go back to this morning.   It’s wasn’t a perfect morning.  Heck, it wasn’t even the best morning.  It had good bits though, and I want those back.

Most of all, this morning, Mr. Kitty hadn’t been injured.

He didn’t need an emergency trip to the vet.

Most of all, he didn’t need to be put to sleep because he’d suffered severe spinal nerve damage and had lost all sensation (and function) from about the middle of his back, down.

The vet wasn’t sure if it had been the result of a blood clot or an injury caused by a car or some other violence.  Because of the damaged nerves and his heart murmur, she didn’t see a good chance of recovery from surgery.  He couldn’t eat or drink…  he’d lost function effectively below the waist.  He could purr and cry softly at me.  He could panic a bit about the overly friendly pittie at the vet’s office (who stayed well away, but was close enough to smell and therefore was a possible threat).  He was still able to be comforted by a scritch behind the ears and be pissy and unsettled when the vet or her assistant touched him.

He was himself right up to the end.

Fluffle and Mr. Kitty

But, for the record, there is little that feels as wrong as those last loving touches that you give your pet as the vets are giving them the sedative and the barbiturate shots.  I know he felt no pain, but I also know he was mostly gone by the time I was able to say good-bye.  I know that’s standard procedure, I know our vet and she is wonderful and wanted him to suffer as little as possible (despite the nerve damage, he was suffering because of lost function), but…  I wish I’d been able to be with him before the first shot a bit longer.  I know he knew I was there for a moment–he tried to fight the sedative pretty hard, constantly opening and closing his eyes, trying to focus on me a few times when I spoke to him, his ears flicked slightly.  But the drugs are meant to be strong, and he wasn’t going to fight his way through this.

Why is it the animals that cause us the most grief are the ones we become the most attached to?

I think that as Flufflepuff comes over and begs for hugs.  I think both he and JuJuBee are missing their window companion.

Au revoir, Monsieur

Now onto normal Wednesday affairs…

The WIPpet

No fancy WIPpet maths today.  Six sentences.  It’s your choice whether that’s for the 6th month or for the addition of the 1&5 of the date.  And yeah, I stepped back a few more pages yet again in the Unnamed Story.  At this rate…  I’ll be reposting stuff.

Can any of you guess who Alanii is speaking about?

Alanii snorted. “I’ve seen what his lovers look like, Atyriia. That man doesn’t know anything about seducing a woman gently. His wife had been an ale wench. She’d been the only woman to ever share his bed and not leave it covered in bruises. And only because she could pick him up and throw him out of the room if she needed.”

Enjoyed that  bit?  Well, then head over to the WIPpet linky and visit other WIPpeteers. A shout out and hugs to Emily Witt for hosting the hop these days.

The ROW80 Check-in

I don’t have much to say today.  Things are…  well, until today, things had been on track.  This is the only writing or writing related activity I’ve done today though.  Studying up on what drugs are actually used in euthanasia  for cats is the only reading I’ve done.  Hanging out on Facebook and trying to lose my head in other people’s lives is the only interaction I’ve achieved.

Mostly it has worked.  I wrote this post.  I had other plans to write about today.  Maybe Sunday…  Maybe I’ll post a Friday Photo on my other blog…  I don’t know.  It’s too far ahead to plan now.

Got Time For a Quickie?

Short one today, all y’all.  The hubby and I have a lunch date with friends, insurance paperwork…yadda yadda. There’s all the time in the world it seems…

…just after everything else is done first.

So here’s it all in a nutshell.

This has been an incredibly crazy, yet oddly productive week.  I’m on track with everything except my new “creativity goal”, but since the Boodle is home from school this week and there’s been a shift of focus there, I’m not too bothered.

What is bothering me is that nagging surety I’ve lost a friend.  Mr. Kitty, the last of our feral cats turned to cuddle-bum and window serenader,  hasn’t come home since Sunday.  Worse yet, since I’d been desperate to sleep in on Sunday for some huggy-dozing time with the Leader of the Opposition Party, it was the Boodle that fed Mr. Kitty, not me—I’m actually not sure he was here on Sunday at all.

All I can do is hope that if he was caught by someone (some group has taken up catching ferals nearby because we had had the male version of the feared cat lady down the road for years, and he finally lost his home and the cats have run rampant).  I really hope Mr. Kitty was trapped by such a group and not taken by coyotes (so far the nearby roads shows no sign of a kitty-corpse).  He’s lovable, affectionate, wants to have a forever home (which is something I could have never given him because of… things).

But this, and so much of this past year when I wasn’t blogging because life was cray-cray, is why I picked the title I did today.  Maybe it wouldn’t have helped if I had gotten up on Sunday—maybe he was gone already—but I wouldn’t have this regret that I ‘wasn’t there’ when I could have been.

It was the same when my grandfather died in December…  we hadn’t gone to see him because we’d been fighting cold and sickness after cold and sickness, and he had a very compromised immune system.

One of my best friends died in December…  we’d set plans for a lunch date in January ‘after the holiday crazy was done’.  It was a freak thing, but…  now I eat sushi and cry a little (kind of happy tears, because they are great memories, but still).

And my grandmother died a few weeks later.  I got to spend some time around Christmas with her, but then Rod’s death and disasters at the Boodle’s school…

It seemed like so much to take a day trip to Syracuse just for an hour or two of visiting.  Maybe next weekend I’d have ‘more time’…

No.  There was no more time.  There is no more time.

So, yesterday…  when I invited Elizabeth Anne Mitchell to sprint with me and she couldn’t because she had a meeting in ten minutes at work, I decided I was making a change for myself at the very least.  I texted her back “Quick, write two sentences!”

I mean, there’s always time for a Quickie….