Personal – Page 4 – Fascination Place

Fifty-Three

My birthday was Sunday, the middle day of a long weekend for me, as Apple gives us Martin Luther King Day off.

(Growing up in Massachusetts, we got MLK Day off every year starting – as far as I can find – in 1975. As a result I got my birthday off from school a few extra times. True to form I was completely oblivious about why we got it off. In hindsight it’s pretty spectacular that MA started observing it so early.)

We had a pretty quiet weekend, which frankly was fine with me. We had originally planned to go over to the coast on Saturday, but the volcanic eruption near Tonga triggered a tsunami warning across the west coast, and we decided to bail on that plan. For me, less due to worry about the tsunami – which wasn’t expected to present a danger unless you got too close to the water’s edge – as wanting to avoid idiots flooding (heh) the coast to see the tsunami.

We did watch a whole lot of football, seeing the Patriots and Raiders lose, but the 49ers improbably win against the Cowboys. My feeling about the 2021 Patriots is very similar to the 2021 Red Sox – rebuilding teams that surprisingly made the playoffs, and unsurprisingly lost in the early rounds. And Niners I are in the middle of a “still in contention, but kind of rebuilding too” phase, and I don’t expect them to beat the Packers this weekend.

We also went out to eat three nights in a row (Fri/Sat/Sun), which was nice. All outdoor dining – I think we’ve (still) eaten indoors exactly once since the start of the pandemic – but we hit a few of our favorite restaurants downtown. Sadly my traditional birthday restaurant has apparently suspended outdoor dining for the winter – perhaps a bit short-sighted as we’re in the middle of warm spell, with highs getting into the 60s most days in the last week, and likely to stay warm through the end of the month.

Debbi didn’t have Monday off, so I spent part of the day watching TV. I finished The Expanse, which as a series was okay. Started weak, got better, got exciting when they finally got out of the solar system, but ended with a fairly dull set of in-system politics and combat. (I’m not really into near-future in-system SF, so I was really hoping for a big ramping-up of the sense of wonder once the ring gate opened.) I thought most of the characters were pretty weak – especially nominal protagonist James Holden – so I wasn’t very invested in what happened to many of them. Overall, it was okay, but not something I’m likely to rewatch (unlike Babylon 5 and parts of Battlestar Galactica). I guess it only adapts the first six books, so there are three more they could do if someone else picks it up.

Anyway.

Three years in, my fifties feel like a blur. My face is getting those lines of middle age, with an annoying vertical one between my eyebrows. My knees are getting a little creaky, although they’ve been doing a good job lately where running is concerned. (A little weird to think that they’ve been holding up better through running than they did when I was biking regularly.) On the bright side, I still have all my hair, and most of it is still brown!

But time is starting to pass faster. The pandemic is obviously affecting all of this to a fairly large degree. I’m not a big traveler, but there are a few places I’d like to visit. I haven’t spent as much time with my friends lately as I’d like. It feels like everything is on hold, and is going to keep being on hold indefinitely.

Anyway, it was a good birthday, under the circumstances. I get a little less enthusiastic about my birthday each year, but I do look forward to the day that I can have people over to celebrate it again, someday.

2021 in the Rear View

Overall, 2021 was a step down from 2020 for me, which is saying something since 2020 featured the outbreak of a global pandemic, and living the whole year not knowing if you’d catch COVID and die or end up with lifelong health problems.

2021 did have a few good points. First, the U.S. government transitioned from being run by racist, fascist, corrupt, incompetent Republicans to being run by garden-variety politician Democrats, which has been a huge step up. Also, COVID vaccines got rolled out, considerably lowering worry for many people about getting seriously sick or dying from COVID.

On the other hand, COVID has continued to mutate (and will continue to do so, probably forever), so it’s unclear when or if the pandemic will ever end. And those same shit-for-brains Republicans have continued their efforts to topple American democracy, as well as spreading lies about the vaccines which have resulted in a third of the country not getting vaccinated – making it even less clear whether the pandemic will ever end.

And that’s just the big picture.

For me personally, 2021 was a rough year. As I’ve said before, I hate working from home, I hate not having my work and home lives separated, I hate not seeing my friends and cow-orkers regularly, I hate all of it. Vaccinations have helped, as we’ve been able to see some friends sometimes, but it’s a band-aid. It’s been a long slog, and it’s gradually getting harder for me to keep slogging. And we surely have at least another year of this to go.

Last year we lost our elderly cat Roulette, but also very suddenly lost our other girl kitty Sadie. Those were a couple of big blows to take in the space of just a few months. I still miss Sadie coming to tuck us in at night.

We’ve had a couple of unexpected big stressors, too. I don’t often mention our vacation house on the east coast, but the insurance company told us we need to replace the house’s siding to retain coverage. We decided to also replace the windows which were in bad condition, but once the siding was off we ended up in an ongoing cascade of additional things to fix (for example, the bathroom needed to be gutted for multiple reasons). Debbi has been handling most of this, and the contractor we’re working with has been great, but it’s still been an ongoing project with many decisions and no small expense. (And doing all of these remotely has been about as convenient as you’d expect.)

And then just before New Year’s my Dad fell, and while he didn’t sustain serious injury (for instance, he didn’t hit his head), he did end up going to the hospital. Coincidentally my sister was there and was able to help. But we’re still waiting to hear what the road forward looks like, and I imagine it will involve me flying back east during the winter or spring to help out, which is of course exactly what I want to do during a pandemic.

Last and probably least, we almost made it a whole calendar year without ants coming into the house. Fortunately the exterminator was able to come out and do a perimeter spray within just a few days, so the ants are gone. (I really, really hate ants inside my house. It’s not a phobia, but it makes my skin crawl.)

This past weekend we took down our Christmas tree and about half of our fairly ludicrous outdoor light display, marking the end of another holiday season. It’s always a melancholy moment for me, moreso these days since I take a lot of nighttime walks and now the lights I look at are coming down.

Another year of this. Maybe more.

It’s getting harder.

Christmas Munchies

Debbi’s eye was better yesterday, but still bothering her a fair bit. We had plans to have dinner with neighbors and were on the fence about going, since we didn’t know how many people would be there and it didn’t seem like a great idea to mingle with a group of people we didn’t know in these days of Omicron. Eventually Debbi decided to stay home since she didn’t feel up to socializing with a group of people, and I decided to go.

While this was arguably a poor choice, it turns out we had misunderstood the plans, and in fact we were the only people invited, so Debbi ended up coming after all, and we had a nice afternoon feast with the neighbors. They’re Swedish and their family celebrates Christmas on Christmas Eve, including a large meal followed by opening gifts. So we met their kids, and their dog and cats, and all had a good time. All of the humans are vaccinated, so it was probably about as safe as these things get these days.

In the evening we indulged our annual tradition of driving around to view Christmas lights. This was a lot of fun except for the one popular street in Palo Alto which is always overrun with cars and was as bad this year as ever. On the other hand a well-known street in Los Altos was nearly empty when we drove through.

This morning we got up in time for Debbi to take a video call from her parents, followed by her baking homemade cinnamon rolls she’d prepared the night before – one of our newer traditions. We opened gifts (the kittens were thrilled with the wrapping paper), I talked to my dad, and we spent a lot of time sitting on the couches. Then we went for our traditional midday walk, where we got rained on (which is also sort of a tradition).

I cooked my traditional dinner – meatloaf and potatoes gratin – and as also seems to have become a tradition, some of the meat I bought on Wednesday had spoiled and I had to run out and buy more ground chuck. It took longer to make than I’d expected, but it turned out yummy in the end.

I went for another walk after dinner, where I walked through a short but very windy rainstorm, and now we’re sitting on the couch (again!) watching Knives Out on television, with passed out cats around us. And happily Debbi’s eye is feeling much better today!

Holiday Update

Apple closes down its corporate operations between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day. I added a couple of days to either end of the break to give myself just over 2 weeks off, starting yesterday. And just in time, because I was pretty much out of gas a week ago.

So what’s new?

Debbi and I got our COVID booster shots in early December, which was a relief. The sites around here to make reservations are all terrible, especially the ones for pharmacies which require you to answer a long list of questions before telling you there are no appointments available. We tried a drop-in clinic near our house but the wait was at least an hour. It’s been bad. A friend says that Stanford Health has been a good experience – it’s just about the only site I didn’t try.

I’ve actually had 7 vaccine shots this year: 3 COVID, 1 tetanus, 1 influenza, and two shingles shots. I had negligible effects from all of them, except for the shingles shots, each of which took me out of work for the next day. It wasn’t a horrible experience (I have friends who said they were flattened for several days, especially after the second shot), but it was a bit rough.

Meanwhile, Debbi has been having occasional eye problems, which came to a head this morning and turned out – after a trip to the ophthalmologist – to be a bad case of dry eye, essentially her eyelid chafing on her eyeball. She’s slowly getting better, but it’s been a rough day for her. We’re glad it turned out to be a common and easily treatable problem and not something exotic or chronic.

We put up our outdoor Christmas lights the weekend after Thanksgiving, over 3 days. It’s getting a bit harder to put up the lights each year – for me, anyway, as I go up and down the ladder – so spreading it out over 2-3 days is nice. We’ve been seeing more and more lights going up around the neighborhood each year, which is nice. We probably have one of the larger displays – especially since we don’t have any inflatables – but we don’t compete with anyone. We just do what we want to do.

But then we started to get rain last week – our first rain since the big storms back in late October – and the circuit breaker for our lights started tripping. Strange since that’s almost never happened in the 10 years we’ve been putting up lights here. I had figured I’d need to unplug things to systematically figure out where the problem is, but as it turns out I went out to rake along the boxwood yesterday afternoon, and decided to raise up the net lights on those bushes so they weren’t so low to the ground, and the breaker didn’t trip during the showers last night. So maybe that was it somehow. Who knows.

We also put up the (artificial) Christmas tree, which delighted the kittens, who have been happily playing under it (and one time in it) since then. Until.

So Debbi’s wanted to replace our laundry baskets for a while, but we haven’t been able to find stackable baskets which fit in the space we have for them in the stores we’ve checked in the area. So she finally ordered them from Amazon. And they arrived.

In. Four. Separate. Boxes.

Obviously Amazon’s packing machines don’t have the concept of stacking four laundry baskets in a single box, they just grabbed each one, packed it in its own box, filled the extra space with brown paper, and shipped it to it. (It’s entirely possible that humans did this but didn’t notice the full order – possibly because depending on how the system works, four different people might have packed the four baskets.)

Anyway, aside from four large boxes (promptly recycled), we also ended up with a huge amount of brown packing paper, which drove all three cats bonkers for a couple of days, even Jackson, which has been pretty hilarious. And it’s distracted them from the tree.

(I imagine the pandemic is really testing the efficacy of our recycling programs, since our household is generating at least 50% more paper recycling than before the pandemic. No doubt many households are generating even more.)

We are not going away for the holidays again, and wouldn’t be even if Omicron hadn’t reared its ugly head. (Omicron looks like it should substantially accelerate the endgame of every human on Earth contracting COVID in the next few years, so that’s fun.) Hopefully next summer we’ll feel safe enough to go visit our families for the first time in over two years, but we’ll see.

Anyway, over the next couple of weeks I plan to have some downtime, do some house chores, hang out with Debbi, and get some kitty snuggles. The rain is supposed to stick around through early next week, which is nice – not only do we need it (ho boy do we need it) but I love rain. In particular it looks like it’s going to be a Wet Christmas, just like the song says.

Memory Lane: Audio Equipment

Earlier this year I finally got rid of something I’d owned for over 30 years, an Aiwa AD-WX808 dual cassette deck.

Growing up my parents – well, really my dad – had a component stereo system with a record player, receiver, and speakers. At some point one of them bought me an all-in-one record player/radio/tape deck which I used through high school. I remember the first LP I bought was the Return of the Jedi soundtrack. And during high school I bought a lot of 45 RPM singles, and a few LPs. As I say occasionally, I wasn’t really into 80s music, so I was more likely to have MTV or a local radio station on in the background than listen to music that I owned. I also had a few Walkman and competing products for playing tapes and listening to the radio, which I used pretty regularly. And at some point we got a boombox which we mostly used downstairs.

All this largely changed in college, when I discovered 60s and 70s rock music. My gateway drug – oddly enough – was Styx, but I soon moved on to The Who and various progressive rock groups. A guy down the hall from me had a boom box with a compact disc player, and I bought a few CDs that year.

That summer – 1988 – I researched and bought my own component stereo system. If I recall correctly, I bought the four components at two now-defunct stores, Lechmere and Tweeter. Tweeter was an audiophile store and they recommended a receiver and speaker set, while at Lechmere I bought a CD player, and the Aiwa tape deck. I shlepped this set back and forth between home in Massachusetts and college in New Orleans every year, first by shipping everything (along with my Macintosh SE) – amazingly nothing ever got damaged – and in 1990 by driving them in my new (to me, it was a 1987 Honda Civic) car. The Aiwa tape deck was great for copying tapes that for some reason I didn’t have on CD, and its recording quality was quite good (or maybe my hearing is just bad, hard to say). The going rate for a component stereo at the time was around $300 per piece, so I probably spent $1,200 on the whole system. Seems kind of ridiculous today, when you can buy a powerful laptop computer for less.

Over the next ten years I bought hundreds of CDs – and custom-built cases to hold them. My car also had a tape deck, and I regularly put together mix tapes to listen to in the car, while I usually listened to whole albums at home. At some point I replaced the CD player with a 5-disc changer. I remember there were also 6-to-12 disc “magazine” models, which were supposedly less reliable. In hindsight I bet that was technically true, but probably not enough to matter.

(My vinyl records from high school didn’t make the transition to the new media era, but there wasn’t much there I missed. I’ve always thought vinyl was a cumbersome and mediocre media format anyway. CDs are a thousand times better.)

At some point I bought a Discman, and an adaptor to be able to use it through the tape player in my car, but portable CD players were pretty clunky and skipped easily (this got better over time, but was never great), so I didn’t use it a lot.

Of course, all this changed again between 2001 and 2003 with the advent of iTunes, iPods, and eventually iPhones. I ripped all my CDs into iTunes – several times as the encoding tech got better, actually. I kept the CD player for a long time, but it didn’t get much use after that. I did buy a new receiver and speakers since the old ones were nearing the end of their lives. Once I bought some Airport base stations for wi-fi in my house, I connected one of them to the receiver and then if I wanted to listen to my music library I would play it from my laptop to the receiver. I also played our television’s sound through the receiver.

In 2009 I bought a new LCD television with much better sound, and then using the receiver for the TV sound was just a pain in the ass. We still used it for the radio, until 2017 or so when Debbi got a Google Home and we started using that instead since it was so convenient. A few years later we bought a HomePod, and the Google Home took an accidental spill onto the floor and never recovered. The HomePod’s radio streaming capabilities were a bit iffy at first but they’ve gotten a lot better.

A few years ago I went through my CDs – which had been sitting in boxes since we moved to our current house in 2011 – and sold over two thirds of them to Rasputin Music, getting quite a bit more cash for them than I’d expected. I kept some by my favorite bands, and have bought a few more since – maybe three or four per year, many of them the spiffy remastered editions of Jethro Tull‘s albums. But usually I just rip them and put them in a bookcase. At time point if I do another purge I assume I’ll just throw them out unless it turns out some of them have significant resale value on eBay. I got rid of one of the custom-built cases, and the other is sitting in the garage holding random crap.

Anyway, I kept the Aiwa tape deck for years, planning to eventually digitize a number of old audiotapes I have, most of them bootleg concert recordings that I bought at the Cape Cod flea market in the late 1980s. In particular, a few Jethro Tull (that name again!) concerts which are quite good. But I never got around to it. I did loan the unit to a friend who wanted to digitize some cassettes that he owned, though. Otherwise it’s mostly sat in a closet, literally gathering dust from the pan of cat litter in the same closet.

Finally I decided that I was just never going to use that unit to perform the digitizing – who knows if it even works anymore? Instead I bought a handheld unit from Amazon which I’ll use sometime (if I can remember where I stored the cassettes), and dropped the Aiwa unit off at the e-waste center.

There’s always some old junk lying around to get rid of. We hang on to things because we think it might still be useful, or because we have fond memories of using it, or because we can’t be bothered to get rid of it. Or all three. But for most things, sooner or later its time comes.

Lurching Into Autumn

It’s been a little while since I last wrote here. Well, of course I have two or three mostly-written entries which maybe I’ll put up sometime, or maybe I’ll decide they’re kind of dumb since I don’t have the forward progress which made me write them in the first place. We’ll see.

The first half of October has been the Bay Area slowly lurching into Autumn. Some cool weather, then the last two days temps in the 80s, and today it cooled off into the 60s, and tonight we got out first light rain of the season (with a couple more days forecast over the next week). It wasn’t much, but with California in the midst of another terrible drought, anything helps.

We put up our Halloween lights a couple of weeks ago. I picked up a little smiling grim reaper to add to our (honestly rather small) display- I enjoy Target’s assortment of Halloween decor. Other homes in the neighborhood have been putting up lights too, but there are fewer than there were last year. I think we’ll be able to do a closer-to-normal Halloween night for trick-or-treaters this year, though we’ll likely still take some precautions.

Speaking of normal, we’ve been acting a little more normally lately. For most of the pandemic I was doing the grocery shopping, usually going to the store at 2 pm on a Tuesday to avoid the crowds. Now we’re back to going on Sundays after going to the farmer’s market. We’ve also gone out to eat a bit more, though always eating outside, and trying to avoid the craziest times for the crowds. Last night we had an early dinner at Cascal, which was great.

We lost another local restaurant, although this was a branch of a chain, Opa!, which was a place I enjoyed ordering lunch. They’d had a Help Wanted sign up for a while before they closed, so I wonder if they closed because they couldn’t get staff. And today our nearby Starbucks closed at noon due to staffing problems. Hopefully we’ll see businesses raising wages more soon to attract workers. They’ll have to, because I think there’s a worker shortage because of people who have to stay home due to COVID.

We’ve gotten together with friends a couple more times – including a last-minute visit to some friends who brought out their copious selection of gin for us to try. We also bought new patio furniture which we were able to enjoy for a few weeks, but we’ll likely cover it up soon with more rain coming up.

And my nemesis, the sycamore tree that shadows our front yard, is starting to drop its leaves. Which means I’m going to be raking through New Year’s. I do like that tree, though.

So that’s the news here, such as it is. I hope the couple of dozen people who stop by here when I post are doing well.

Memory Lane: Hurricanes

Last week Hurricane Ida slammed the Louisiana gulf coast, New Orleans, several other southern states, and then the eastern seaboard, damaging infrastructure, flooding New York City, and killing dozens. While infrastructural improvements prevented the devastation that Hurricane Katrina wreaked on New Orleans in 2005, I wonder how many more such hurricanes the city can absorb before humans are forced to abandon it.

I don’t have more significant thoughts about it than that, other than those which any climate change forecast could tell you. But I have experienced – or almost experienced – a few hurricanes myself, and thought I’d write about my memories of them.

The first Hurricane I remember was when I was growing up in Newton, MA, because I had to take our Welsh Corgi dog Punkin out for a walk in it. Since she lived from 1976-1988, that likely means it wasn’t Hurricane Belle, but rather Hurricane Gloria in 1985. But I don’t have a strong memory of it other than walking the dog, who I took maybe 3 blocks away to a mailbox (which hasn’t existed in that spot for decades now) and back home again. It was windy, and rainy, and kind of unpleasant to be in, and I mainly waited for Punkin to do her business so we could go back. I don’t even remember if we lost power, and the Wikipedia entry makes it sound like it was just a really strong storm by the time it reached Massachusetts, but not really anything special.

My next hurricane was an even bigger nothing, and I’m not even sure which one it was. My memory is that I was a freshman in college in New Orleans, and that we battoned down the hatches – including many buildings on Tulane University campus boarding up windows – expecting a hurricane to hit overnight. When we woke up the next morning we learned that it had turned at the last minute and hit Texas (Galveston, maybe?) instead. However, this would have been in the fall of 1987 – September or later – and no hurricanes from that season match my memory. The closest one I can find from my 4 years in New Orleans is Jerry in 1989. So it’s likely my memory is faulty.

(I also recall New Orleans getting socked with enough rain in the summer of 1991 to cause St. Charles St. to become a river running from uptown to downtown, and a heck of a lot of flooded-out cars around the city, but that doesn’t match up with any hurricanes, either. Fortunately my apartment had a well-elevated-and-drained driveway so my car was fine. It seems 1991 was the rainiest season in New Orleans on record, and the storm I remember was probably the June 10 one.)

Hurricane number three was a different beast, that being Hurricane Bob in August 1991. Every summer my family would vacation on Cape Cod, with my (divorced) parents each coming down for a week, and my sister and I staying for two weeks. This was the summer between college and graduate school for me, and my plan was to drive up from the Cape on Wednesday and spend the night with my father before driving to Madison, Wisconsin on Thursday. Bob, however, made landfall on Monday, August 19. Overall we were pretty lucky, since our vacation cottage wasn’t damaged, although it did lose power. At one point I walked down to Skaket Beach, a bay side beach which more-or-less faces Boston, and saw the dark clouds of the storm passing in the distance, with a lighter patch which I assume was the eye trailing it. This was during a period where the rain and wind had died down where we were, so I don’t know if the storm was huge and the eye was also huge, or if it was just coincidence.

Anyway, the next morning we walked out to the main road and saw downed trees lying across it as far as the eye could see, so it looked pretty grim for my ability to leave the next day. I don’t remember what we ate that day, but without power it was probably just sandwiches and chips or something.

To my surprise, the next morning all the trees had been chopped up and cleared off the road, so I was able to get out and drive all the way up to Boston. I don’t remember encountering any difficulties at all, and my dad had power and we probably even went out to dinner. And the morning after that I drove off to Madison as planned.

I remember calling my mom sometime later – probably the next Sunday after they’d driven home – and she said the power didn’t get restored until Friday, so I guess it wasn’t much of a vacation for her and my sister. Wikipedia says the Cape got the worst of the wind, but not a lot of rain, so I guess we got off easier than we could have.

And I think that’s it. I haven’t been back to New Orleans since I finished college, and our two trips to Florida (March 2007 and November 2015) have been hurricane-free, and none of my trips to Boston since then have involved hurricanes or their remnants either. As much as I enjoy rain and some wind – and I got both via some pretty big storms in the midwest when I lived there, along with some impressive lightning – I’m fine with having missed the big storms.

So How Are Things?

Having written an entry about how the cats are doing, it feels like I should write one about how I’m doing.

I’m okay. I’m not great.

After a year and a half of working from home I am so done with it. I’ve always felt like I’m an introvert at my core, but I hate not having people and activity around while I’m working. (I’ve always positioned my desk at work so I can look out the door to see people going by in the hallway.) I miss the random conversations we’d have in the office. And I really hate the mixing of my home and work lives, which I’ve always worked to keep sharply separate. Going up to our study and having my work machines there is disspiriting.

I also have bought lunch at the cafeteria at work almost every day since I started at Apple, which I realize is a really privileged thing to do, but figuring out lunch every day is a drag.

Once the vaccines started rolling out we got vaxxed pretty quickly, and I was hopeful that things would return to normal. Apple had tentatively planned a return to the office in early September. Well, it’s now early September and the return has been pushed back to 2022, and that’s not Apple’s fault, it’s a combination of the Delta variant of COVID, and the amazing number of stupid people who are refusing to get vaccinated. And also the slow roll-out of vaccines to the rest of the world (last I read about 25% of the world is fully vaxxed), which will prolong this until we can massively up that number, as unless we develop an even better vaccine, we probably need 90% or more worldwide vaccination to beat this thing. (I think the worldwide vax rate is a greater long-term thread than the antivax shenanigans in the United States, because the opportunities for the virus to mutate are so much greater outside the U.S. That may change, but we’re not nearly there yet.)

Anyway, some things have improved for me. I scheduled a weekly coffee meeting with some of my cow-orkers at the Philz near work – outside, and yes, unmasked. The eight or so of us who have made it (not all at the same time) are fully vaxxed, and I think only one has children who aren’t vaxxed. I’ve been letting parents decide their level of risk tolerance for getting together with others, and by ‘letting’ I mean trying not to put any pressure on them, because they have enough to deal with.

Debbi has been way more cautious than me during the pandemic, so we haven’t been going out to eat, and I’ve done the grocery shopping – usually during the week when it’s quieter – and picking up take-out. Now that we’re vaccinated she’s been doing a few more things: We’ve switched grocery shopping to Sunday after the farmer’s market, and we’ve gone out to eat several times, though only once inside. We’ve also gotten together with friends, both at their house, and having people over for barbecues at ours. We’re masked during our errands, other than eating, of course. We’re not yet ready to fly, and I don’t know when that will happen, the way things are going. I don’t especially relish wearing a mask for 6+ hours to fly to visit family or go to Hawaii anyway.

So it’s been a long road, and it’s been gradually wearing me down. It feels like everything just gets a little bit harder as the pandemic slogs on. Even though I take the occasional time off, I never get away from it all because I can’t actually go away.

Where do we go from here? It seems clear that successful vaccination is the only path out of this, but the vaccination failures means that even if our vaccinations remain effective and there aren’t new variants that get past them, we’re going to be in this situation for quite a while.

I know a few people who are living lives of hermits (or so it seems), and maybe that’s the smart thing to do. But it’s also very, very hard. Probably harder for many people than it is for me, but it’s hard for me too. I understand people flying on vacation, flying to visit family, trying to return their lives to normal. I really want that too, but not enough to loosen my own level of caution more than I have so far.

I try not to think about how much longer this might go on, though. I just hope everyone will get vaccinated so we can shorten that time as much as possible.

What’s He Thinking?

It’s been a few weeks since Sadie passed away, so it’s past time for an update.

Sadie was the bedtime enforcer, so we went to bed late for a few nights after she passed. Simon is also highly interested in bedtime, but he passively-aggressively heads upstairs and waits for us, which doesn’t help at all.

We’ve been trying to give extra attention to her brother Jackson, and it seems to be going well. Of course you never know whether cats know what happened when one of them passes: We’ve never had a cat pass away at home, so it’s not like any of them experienced it directly. Maybe they know the other cat wasn’t feeling well, but maybe the other cat just disappears and doesn’t come back one day. I don’t know. Jackson and Sadie never appeared to be especially close, partly because Jackson is a jerk and something of a bully, but again, who knows what was going through their heads.

But surely he knows that something is different, and probably he recognized that we were sad. So we’ve been giving him extra pets – he enjoys getting pets while we go up the stairs – and trying to give him some extra play time. The best play time has turned out to involve a cheap cube we bought a few months ago. I can play with him with a mouse toy and he’ll go to town in it, especially if I rustle the other side of the fabric. And after a little while the other cats will come over and try playing with him. He plays a little too hard for them, though Simon is game to keep trying for a while. Eventually he runs out of gas and often just curls up in the cube for a while. But it seems like the game that makes him the happiest.

Simon and Edison have been more resilient, since they’re both young and have just had a lot of change in their short lives already, so who knows what they think of as normal. Edison went around for a few days looking for Sadie, because I think he liked to hang out near here while he was trying to win her over. And he’s also started sleeping with us from time to time. But those are the main changes. I think Simon wasn’t as affected because he’s so attached to Jackson.

As for us, it’s been a sad time. Sadie is the first cat we’ve owned who lived her whole life since adoption in one house, so the house is full of memories of her, including recent ones since she went so quickly. Debbi misses having her girl kitties in this house which is now full of boys. But she’s been enjoying having Jackson snooze near her during the work day.

I still look a him sometimes and wonder what he’s thinking.

Remembering Sadie, 2012-2021

This one really hurts: Sadie passed away today. She was not quite 9 years old.

It was very unexpected. We’d noticed last week that she seemed to have lost some weight, and I saw her try to jump up on the kitchen counter and miss. Over the weekend we debated taking her in to the vet, and called on Monday to make an appointment. Our vet is so backed up that we couldn’t get her in until the end of the month (apparently everyone is catching up on vet appointments they’d postponed during the pandemic), so we decided to wait and see. Well, she spent most of the day under our bed, and we noticed she wasn’t eating and was licking her lips a lot. So we arranged to do a drop-off on Tuesday.

The doctor who saw her said that Sadie had several masses in her torso – one quite large – and that she was showing extreme kidney failure. Apparently her kidney numbers actually exceeded their machinery’s ability to measure it. We left her there overnight, expecting to take her to a pet hospital for further examination today.

Instead, our regular doctor – who doesn’t work Monday or Tuesday – called this morning saying she’d seen Sadie had been in on Tuesday. We told her that she was still there, so she checked her out, and after a few calls we decided to put her to sleep. Sadie probably had lymphoma or some other form of cancer, and we felt that treating both that and keeping her alive despite her failing kidneys would probably just lead to her living for only a few more months, likely in discomfort and declining quality-of-life, and that it was probably best to let her go while she was still comfortable. So that’s what we did.

We adopted Sadie and her brother Jackson in November 2012, when Blackjack was in what turned out to be the endgame of his own cancer, and Newton was 18 years old. Both would pass away within 8 months. We didn’t want to be a one-cat household, and we figured Roulette would want some company. As it turned out, Roulette would have been happy being an only cat, but she tolerated Sadie more than Jackson. We also adopted them shortly after my Mom moved to assisted living and I was traveling back to Boston regularly to handle her affairs and clean out her house, so the kittens were a welcome break from that.

They were two of a set of three, but apparently they beat up on their sister a lot in their cage, and the Humane Society staffer said it was probably good for their sister to go to a different household. As a new adoptee, Jackson was bold and adventurous and cuddly, while Sadie was more reserved, and liked to play with toys on her own. Over time she became very affectionate, loving her head rubs and purring easily. Sometimes she liked belly rubs, and if she wasn’t in the mood she’d just get up and leave.

Jackson and Sadie as kittens — This has been my iPhone Lock Screen image for over 8 years

Debbi came up with the name Sadie because as a kitten the marks on the outer edges of Sadie’s eyes gave her a sad expression. She outgrew that and had a naturally bright, inquisitive expression as an adult.

Sadie did her best to become my special kitty, filling the void left by Jefferson’s passing in 2010. I’d been calling Roulette “little girl” for a some time by then, so I started calling Sadie “little miss”. Debbi referred to them as the queen and the princess.

She loved Newton for the 8 months she knew him, lying with him even after he wrapped her on her head when she went after his tail.

But her signature trait was that she surprisingly grew from a short-haired kitty to a medium-hair cat with pantaloons and a big goofy tail, plus short legs for her body (sort of like Simon has now). Every so often she would spaz out and run around the house, a white mop of fur running down the stairs or jumping on the table by the garage door. Alas, she did not enjoy getting brushed, so we ended up with white hair all over the house. Sometimes I’d play with her with a mouse toy on a couch, and she’d leave tufts of white hair across it.

When I had people over for gaming, she would often hang out with us – sometimes on the table – to keep up with what was going on.

"I'm all in!" - Sadie at our home poker table — “I’m all in!”

She became “the bedtime enforcer”, sitting by the hallway to the stairs or even meowing at us if we stayed up later than we were supposed to. And she’d jump up and tuck us into bed for a few minutes after we turned the light off, before heading off to do whatever she did at night. Sometimes I think she just sat at the foot of the bed or the top of the stairs to guard us against threats.

She was a very well-behaved kitty, using scratching posts rather than furniture (something Simon and Edison have not learned from her). She loved her treats, especially Greenies. And this past year she became my meeting buddy, sitting with me in the library where I take many of my video meetings while working from home. She also liked sleeping in the baskets of clothes on the top shelf of our walk-in closet, and the kittens would sometimes follow her up there.

And, she was a world champion lounger. She would lie down and get comfortable almost anywhere, whether or not she was underfoot.

World champion lounger: Sadie at our wedding in 2015 — Sadie at our wedding in 2015

Her last few days were comfortable, I think. She ate through Sunday, and I gave her some extra treats while she ate them. She sat with us in the living room Monday night, sat on the dining table Tuesday morning while Debbi worked, and then went upstairs and sat inside the door to our bedroom before going under the bed. I put her on the bed for a bit and we had a pet-fest, and I got a few final photos of her. We didn’t know this was the last time she’d be home – I’d been holding out hope that she had a couple of rotten teeth that were making her not eat – but we knew there was that chance.

Edison has been trying so hard the last few months to win her over, and unfortunately she just never did more than tolerate the kittens. I’d hoped she’d become motherly towards them, but it wasn’t to be.

After Roulette passed in March, I figured it would be another 6 years or more before we had to worry about one of our cats reaching the end, so this was quite a shock. Of course we wonder what we could have done, but she and Jackson had a routine physical just a few months ago and there was no sign of this then. The speed with which it happened was also a factor in our decision to let her go.

Like Blackjack, she deserved better than this. I guess we’ve just had a couple of instances of extremely bad luck with our kitties.

But I’m grateful for the time we did have with her. She was a sweet, loving kitty, and brought a special warmth to our household. And I’m gonna miss her a lot, and will always wonder about the moments we’ll miss out having with her.

Goodbye, little miss. My Sadie girl.