KITTIES!

Meet the Kitten

BY bonnie

We’ve wanted to get a buddy for our cat, Leia, for awhile now. And what better way to make life easy after a stressful and busy couple of months than to get a kitten!? (Don’t mind me. I have no mind left.)

Right now the San Diego Animal Control shelters are having a $5 sale on cats. And I reminded the kids that we weren’t there just to get a $5 cat – I’d rather pay the full fee another time for the right cat for our family than just grab any old cat cause it’s cheap. But we went to just go look. JUST TO LOOK. And then we adopted a kitten. Cause that’s how I roll. Surprise cats.

My daughter named the kitten Khoshekh after the floating cat in the Night Vale podcasts (although our Khoshekh is a girl kitty) (and also she’s not floating). I was really quite nervous about how she’d do with Leia since she seemed to hiss at all the other cats in the shelter, but I was banking on the fact that kittens tend to be more flexible than adult cats in forming friendships.

So we brought her home a few days ago and kept them entirely separated for awhile, but then it seemed as though they might be ready to meet each other. I started with just a few minutes here and there but they handled it really pretty well, actually. Soon they were playing in the same room. Today they sat in the same window and ate out of the same bowl together. Consider me impressed.

Khoshekh has come down with a cold, though. It’s pretty common in shelter cats. She’s a complete mess right now, actually. Still recovering from her spay surgery last week, and now feeling low with a cold and suffering with a chapped nose that’s quite bloody actually. She’s on antibiotics now, though, as well as some lysine to help boost her immune system and some Neosporin for her nosey. So here’s hoping she’s back up to full speed soon. Because Leia is really looking forward to having a playmate. Maybe then she can stop battling the bathroom rug. (Probably not.)

I have no idea what to title this one. It’s got everything. Pictures of the new place, hoarding trauma, procrastination, cleaning tips. I need a cookie.

BY bonnie

We’re getting settled in our place. I mean. I haven’t even begun to unpack the kitchen yet because shelf liner paper. And I can’t even unpack the office yet until the new desk I ordered gets here (my last desk literally fell apart when they picked it up to load it on the truck). But the living room looks mostly like a living room and my new bed came today and IT’S JUST SO LOVELY.

And I’m supposed to be studying the neurons of the visual system, but instead I’m thinking about how the hell am I going to keep the house as sparkly as it is right now after the Merry Maids were here last week? The answer is I probably won’t. But I’m going to try. Because clean = sane for me.

One of the things I want to write about here at this blog is being the child of a hoarder. And I’d like to write a big introductory post before I start adding in little details, but Life Is Messy and these little details are what’s on my mind right now.

Way back in the dark ages in like 1991 my mom wanted to try to keep the house clean. I don’t remember which era of the house this was. Maybe she was hoping to start from scratch, or maybe it was after my friend’s mom came in and cleaned up for us and bought us fancy peach towels with seashells on them that we weren’t allowed to use. Anyway, my mom found this book about an index card cleaning system. It’s what Flylady is based on, actually. And my mom got as far as buying index cards and a card file box.

Anyway, a couple of years ago when we were cleaning out my mom’s house, we found the book. And I donated it to a thrift store or something. Because like hell I had time for that shit right then. And now that my new place is all sparkly and lovely, I was thinking that maybe it would be nice to find a copy of that book and see if the system might work for me (because another “perk” of being the child of a hoarder is that you don’t know you are supposed to clean certain things like the top of your refrigerator). Only, I realized that I felt very sneaky about this. I felt like I had to keep it a secret that I was thinking about looking for a copy of this book. Because I made the grave error of getting rid of it once and now I’ll have to admit that I’m the wrongiest wronger to ever have wronged. Because hoarders keep things, in part, so that they can always be fully stocked. Some hoarders enjoy sharing the things they’ve kept, and that is part of why they hoard things – to feel useful. (Others don’t want to share the things they hoard. At. All.) But, in my experience, hoarders tend to be very I-told-you-so when you get rid of something and then later need it again. (I’ve also developed a sense that I have to be sneaky about throwing things away because I’ve been yelled at so many times in my life after one hoarder or another picked through my trash and got mad at what I got rid of.)

But the thing is this: YOU CAN ALWAYS FIND THE STUFF YOU NEED. Sure, you might have to buy it all over again, but for most things in life that’s not going to be much of a big deal. And spending the extra $10 to get a new copy of this book is well worth the sanity that not hoarding affords me. I live in a little home. I don’t have space for Stuff I Might Need Someday. I keep the things I definitely need, the things I love, and, if I still have room, the things that are too valuable to replace but will realistically probably be used someday. The rest I can replace.

So the point is that I’m going to look into buying (or borrowing from the library) another copy of this book to keep my sparkly home sparkly. And if it doesn’t work for me after all, that’s okay, too. The other point is that identifying the issues I carry with me from my life with hoarders helps me to isolate it, and remind myself why I’m safe now. The other other point is that I need to go study the neural basis of visual perception now.

See? Sparkly: