Rest in peace, little fuzzball

I thought I would only be heartbroken for a few days, but I was wrong. The amount to which a companion permeates your life and becomes a part of your consciousness is astonishing; no act feels complete without my little pet. I wake up in the middle of the night whistling to get her attention, which hasn't worked since before she lost her hearing. When I'm not thinking about it, I close the doors to make sure she cannot escape into the dangerous daylight. I wake up wondering if I have fed her. Picking a stray cat hair off my blouse makes me feel like a traitor, like I am plucking all evidence of her life out of the world, destroying a limited resource. Vacuuming feels like an act of war against love.

I'm going to get this party started again in a day or two. Things have been mad hectic and, for the most part, madly joyous. There's just this cat-shaped absence around the corners of every moment, and I didn't want to pick off another shred of cat hair from my clothes without saying something about her memory to balance out the slow erasure of proof that she ever existed.

People who have babysat her for weeks still don't believe she ever did exist, in fact. She was shy to the point of pathology before she went deaf, and hid from all strangers, even those bearing food and love. Why, I don't know; all her life, she lived with us, and never knew a harsh moment from a human.

She once got her head stuck in a Kleenex box. We laughed until we almost peed ourselves. She liked to knock things off the nightstand. Maliciously. She chose targets for their "excite the humans into doing what I want" potential: fragile things, electronics, full glasses of water. She was koo-koo for coconut, and would even drink curry "juice." She thought jerky was the bomb. She knew when I was upset and would come stick her face in my face and say "brrr!" I think she could smell the tears, but her perceptiveness and willingness to comfort a creature of another species was amazing.

I can't share her life with you, but this is her picture. She existed, even if I manage to corral all her sheddings and get them out of my clothes. And I loved her a lot.

See you soon, everyone.

We are experiencing technical difficulties: please stand by

I know it has been a long time since I have written anything. No, I haven't fallen off the face of the planet... but my computer has.

Pepe, my only "child" and the light of my eyes, passed away in her sleep on Tuesday the 6th from massive kidney failure. We caught it early and spent a great deal of effort and money trying to fight it, but it was blessedly sudden and only troubled her for about 2 weeks even so. She had a very good final day-- up and about, looking out windows and being sassy, making her usual trills and meows, eating and drinking well, and surrounded by love. Then she went to sleep and didn't awaken-- which is exactly the way I would have asked for this to happen.

But.

She took both our computers with her. Neither one will start. First Pat's, and then, as he tried to rescue the data from his hard drive by installing it in my computer, mine. We think they're the motherboards that have gone kablooey, but we aren't 100% sure why... perhaps his hard disk has an electical crisis of some kind that electrocutes anything it touches.

Anyway, if you don't see us, it's because we've been painting our house and supervising fractious contractors (oh, SO much more on this later), attending our dying furbaby, and too exhausted and po' to deal with our broken electronics. Otherwise we are well and reasonably content, and life is as good as we could wish it to be under the circumstances.

More soon. Please stand by.