kittens

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Abundance

Is a Five for Friday by any other name just as sweet?

  1. Sara/hs: I was adding a new Sarah to my contact list and realized that I have an abundance of Sara/hs in my life these days. Growing up, I knew a Sara when I was in daycare and then a Sarah in high school, then I worked with a Sarah for a few years. That was it for a long, long time. Now, I am suddenly swimming in Sara/hs! I love how names sometimes come in clumps like that. Possibly there’s a regional element to it. For instance, I never knew a single Leah, Colleen, or Corrine until I moved to my current city… and now I know multiples of each. When I was in middle and high school, the cute boys were all named Josh; I can remember four in my grade alone and at least one in the grade above me. Yet I don’t think I’ve encountered a Josh since college. Was there a preponderance of Someones in your class growing up? What about now? Have you ever wandered into a cluster of Sara/hs? Which name has the most entries in your contact list?
  • Flowers: My flowers are FINALLY blooming. The best thing about the persistent cool/grey has been that my irises stuck around for a much longer time than they did last year, and really put on a show. Now, finally, my peonies and roses are getting in on the action. I am loving my walks lately, because there are begonias and clematis and dogwood and allium and salvia and it’s wonderful wonderful wonderful. 
  • Supplements: I mentioned this already, but I am suddenly taking so many supplements. Mainly in an attempt to address the sleepiness/sleep issues, although I’ve lost track of what’s supposed to do what. A doctor tells me to take something, I add it to the pile. With my allergy pill and my anxiety medication, I am now up to seven pills a day. I hate swallowing pills. I am terrible at it. Some people can throw a handful of pills into their mouth and swallow them all at once. Some people can – hork – dry swallow a pill. I have to have a whole glass of water at hand, because I require lots of water to get a single pill down. Still, often they get stuck, in my mouth or my throat, and I have to deluge them with water to get them to where they need to go. I abhor it, thanks. The very worst pill I take is not, surprisingly, the magnesium – which is a giant tampon-sized monstrosity. The magnesium is a capsule, so it goes down far more smoothly than the B6 tablet which I can almost never swallow on the first try. Yuck yuck yuck. My B12 vitamin is a chewable, so I use that as a chaser. It definitely helps eliminate the sour B6 taste. I feel like, at 44, I should be able to reliably swallow a pill. Alas.
  • Couches: Until we moved into this house, my husband and I had never bought a couch before. What a lucky, carefree time. My in-laws passed down a total of three couch sets to us over the years and since they were perfectly reasonable couches and also free, that’s what we used for the first 20 years of our life together. But they are old and also not really our personal style. So when we moved to this house, we promised each other we would get new couches. We got a new couch for our basement in 2024, and we finally finally got a new couch for our living room last week. The thing is, we still have the old couches. It is surprisingly difficult to divest oneself of couches, I’m finding. The old basement couch is ripped, so not appropriate to donate. We will end up trashing it. Our trash collection website says we can make an appointment for the collectors to pick up and dispose of a couch, but it also bafflingly says that all trash needs to be divided into four-foot sections. Does that apply to couches, too? How am I to apportion our couch in that matter? Using what implement? A question for the trash collectors, clearly, except they never answer their phone. The old living room couch is getting picked up by a thrift store. But while we are waiting for the question about the former to be magically resolved without a phone call and for the latter to be picked up, they are both living in my piano room. They’re not even usable, they’re so jammed together. It’s… a lot. 
  • Kitty Photos: My phone is jam packed with photos of the kitten. He is so very cute.
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Some Quick Bullets, Mainly About the Kitten

We have welcomed our new housemate!!!!!

By the way, it is Very Difficult to do anything at all when you have a kitten. He is quite darling and very distracting. Case in point: it has taken me three days to get this poor excuse for a post into WordPress.

He is what I consider to be the platonic ideal of a cat. He is playful and weird and does that thing where he will be walking sedately and then will suddenly take off for reasons known only to him. And yet he is also incredibly cuddly, and will sit on or beside his humans for hours, purring loudly. He has had no trouble identifying and using his litter box, he is already starting to come when we call him. He seems to prefer being in the same room as his humans, although he does enjoy exploring the house. He is friendly and cheerful and not easily startled. He loves to play with toys, especially these silly little crinkly mylar balls – two of which are already lost forever underneath our oven. He loves to look outside. He seems to prefer sleeping on his back, fluffy tummy bared.

When I called the vet to make our kitten’s first appointment, the (very kind and friendly) person I spoke to asked for his name, and then said, “Oh my god, my cat’s name is Leonardo, too!” And then he added, “We named him after ALL the Leonardos.” But then he could only think of two – DiCaprio and DaVinci. Are there other Leonardos? I mean, there’s the Ninja Turtle. But I’m pretty sure that’s a mononym in the spirit of Cher/Beyonce/Sting, right? Anyway, I’m trying to get the nickname Lenny to stick, but my husband and child are resisting with all their might and they might be wearing me down. I already have to scroll through my parents’ cat’s name and their dog’s name before I come up with Lenny, and with my kid saying her chosen nickname constantly… I don’t think I can keep it up. Lenny may end up being his blog name, which is a surprising benefit of having a blog. Perhaps I should have chosen a blog name for Carla instead of reserving them for potential future children.  (Edith and Eloise were my top contenders.) 

Pre- and now even peri- (intra-?) kitten, I have been sleeping pretty well – waking up only once-ish per night and falling back to sleep pretty quickly. Because sleep is normally a major challenge, I wanted to note for Future Me that sometimes it’s not. Is it because I am taking all the supplements right now? (Magnesium, B6, B12, iron, vitamin D – okay, so not all all but more than I was taking which was nothing.) The other thing I will note is that I am still tired. If I sit down, I will fall asleep. So either there’s something going on that we have not yet tested for (all my labs are totally normal, and my at-home sleep study showed no evidence of apnea), or – and this is my personal theory – being tired is just How It Is, and maybe I notice it more now because I am less busy.

 

My kid is still in school, but summertime is imminent and I Am Pumped. I am looking forward to more leisurely mornings, to spending time outside, to forcing encouraging my child to read through bribery the thrill of the vast literary canon.

On the cooking front, I am in one of those phases where I cannot think of a single food I want to eat, let alone make. We’re depending a lot on leftovers of the few things my husband suggests and/or takeout. To make matters more complicated, after such a long, damp, cool spring, we have suddenly been skyrocketed into the 80s and it’s too hot to turn on the oven. My air fryer makes a mean piece of salmon though.

Oh – okay, more about the kitten. 

So far, I have had itchy eyes but no other allergic reactions to the cat. And I could just as easily attribute my itchy eyes to the increase in pollen outside. 

Let’s see. Are there any negatives about having a cat? I mean, I can’t do anything unless I shut him away in his temporary room. But that’s not annoying as of yet. He does, of course, occasionally scratch the furniture which is not ideal. But I was expecting that, and we are also working on it. It took me all of two days to release my deeply-held conviction that I would never ever welcome a cat tree into my home; now we have a cat tree. He gets carsick, which is sad. Oh – he is obsessed with my houseplants, so I have temporarily relocated them to higher places and may need to re-home some of them. (Why are so many houseplants toxic???) He is also obsessed with climbing on the kitchen table, and then immediately shoving his entire head into whichever water glass is sitting there unattended. 

He has absolutely no grace. I thought cats were supposed to be agile and graceful and have good balance and land on their feet, but Lenny is unaware of these stereotypes. He leaps at things and misjudges the distance. He flops over on things with edges (cat tree, chair seat, ottoman) and falls off them. He trots along the back of the couch and slips off every few steps. I even asked the vet about it; she seemed unconcerned. Perhaps kittens are the equivalent of toddlers, lurching around drunkenly until they fully understand what it means to walk.  

One of my writing partners came over to meet Lenny and, ostensibly, to write. Focusing on our projects was… bordering on impossible. She suggested I get him his own computer. 

If it’s not entirely clear, I love him. He is perfection.

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Saturday Randomosity: Mayhem in Full Swing Edition

Why does May feel so busy? It’s not even THAT busy, and yet I am SO BUSY. Why? What am I even doing?

For one thing, I am FREAKING OUT ABOUT THE KITTEN. We are getting a kitten, have I mentioned this? It is my understanding from such reliable sources as Twitter that cats just randomly show up in people’s lives and the people simply adjust to now having a living creature they need to take care of. On the other hand, there’s me, who has dreamt of owning a cat for decades now, and who has been planning this specific cat since February, and I do not feel ready! Our house is too big for a kitten with far too many places for said kitten to get lost! How does one ensure a kitten gets enough but not too much food? What if I am allergic to the kitten and spend the next twenty years feeling like crap? THERE ARE TOO MANY LITTER OPTIONS.  

I hope anyone reading this understands that the kitten is A Done Deal. Next week at this time, we will have a kitten. In our house. That is ours. I am a little hyperventilatey, can you tell?

As you know, I tend to channel my anxiety into buying random shit. Or at the very least, ogling random shit, adding it to my online shopping cart, and then never buying it. Sometimes adding a thing to my shopping cart scratches the same itch as hitting the “buy now” button, without the attendant “OMG why did I just spend good money on that” feelings. I am trying very, very hard not to buy this faux-velvet chaise longue for the kitten. (I did not manage to avoid buying this mid-century modern pet bed for a friend slash dog owner who just moved into a new house. But I am only human.)

Speaking of spending ridiculous money, my husband got me a cat book (bookshop.org / amazon) for my birthday… and then I accidentally “returned” it to the library, along with a stack of other books. So we just repurchased it. 

It is Memorial Day weekend here in the US, which means three consecutive days at home with my family. Although I am ditching them today to go spend time with friends, and I am PUMPED. The weather has been so soggy around here lately that I am raring to get outside. 

My mom and I got pedicures as our Mother’s Day activity, so my feet are ready for sandal weather. But sandal weather is so far eluding us. I have been wearing CLOSE TOED SHOES and JACKETS. I am not opposed to either, but it feels wrong. It’s the latter third of May for Pete’s sake! I suppose this gives me a teeny bit of extra time to get new sandals. My old, well-worn and well-loved sandals are a bit frayed, so I’m eyeing these wedges as replacements. Or maybe these ones. (The old sandals no longer come in the colors I like, otherwise I would absolutely buy them again.)

One thing that I have yet to do is ANY GARDENING. I am so behind. My pots from last year are all outside, looking empty and sad. Well. The tomato pots have fresh cilantro growing in them, which is a fun surprise. I guess the seeds I planted at the end of the season last year waited until now to make an appearance. I’ve already harvested a bowlful to make it into sauce. Yum. I bought some new planters last fall to take the place of the old, falling-apart planters we inherited from the previous owners, and I really want to fill them with pretty flowers. Maybe this weekend????

Adding to the sense of frantic busy-ness is the bunch of unusual activities we’ve had this month, like recitals and concerts and tournaments and class trips and special lunches. They seem to ramp up exponentially as the month progresses, as though no one realized it was May already and we need to schedule the things before the year ends. For instance, I am supposed to bring food for a sixth grade party next week and I have no idea how much food to bring. I know how many kids are in Carla’s grade, but surely I can’t be expected to provide something that feeds ALL of them, right? If I bring something for about 50% of them, that should be fine, right? (The teacher in charge is not responding to requests for more information.) 

I have no good way to end this post, so I will leave you with a photo of my irises, which, despite the lack of sunshine, are finally blooming!