The one thing about doing this new eating plan is that it’s forcing us to seriously rethink how we do our meal planning. Funny how many meals included breads or pastas, even though we were being careful with serving size before. Now we ration it out – high fiber, whole grain bread at lunch, whole wheat pasta or brown rice at dinner. We’re also having fun experimenting with new recipes. I went poking around online and found a lentil casserole recipe that was a cinch to make and was actually pretty good. I’m not a big fan of beans, but lentils I don’t mind. They’ve got almost a nutty flavor and texture to them, plus they come in a rainbow of colors. We’ll be eating a lot more lentils in the future, I can see that already.

I was telling my little sister about our new eating plan in an email, noting that we’re buying and eating more organic foods, and she asked if this meant we were going to give up ice cream. Ha! I may have to give up regular bread and the ability to eat cereal for breakfast and have pasta for lunch but there is no way we’re giving up ice cream. But oh, real cheese and processed white flour products, how I miss you!

I’ve been spending the evenings working on knitting a baby blanket for a friend who’s due in a few months, giving us an excuse to camp out in front of the TV and watch entertaining fluff. Richard now has me hooked on Family Guy and Futurama – both of which appeal to our warped senses of humor. Last week we caught the second episode of a new series called Lost, where a plane crashes on some mysterious island, leaving 48 people stranded. We were instantly intrigued, enough to forgive the Hollywood inconsistencies, like the fact that all the women on the plane are both thin and beautiful, even the woman who is 8 months pregnant (who would not ordinarily be even allowed to fly), while the men are still allowed to look rugged, dirty, and even slightly unattractive. If this is how Hollywood portrays the regular passengers on airline flights, no wonder the airlines still persist in their belief that the seats they provide in regular coach seating are actually an adequate size for the average human being.

I think the reason I like this show is that it reminds me very much of a Stephen King novel. Notice that I did not say a Stephen King miniseries, because as much as I admire and adore King’s writing and the way he can make words do amazing and unexpected things in a story, he should really have never been allowed to come close to a television camera or a movie script, because with few exceptions (The Shawshank Redemption and Green Mile being the only ones I can think of without cringing), his work on film is usually cringe worthy, and a sad and unworthy tribute to his work on paper.

Richard noted that, as a new, interesting and intelligent show, it is sure to be cancelled within a few episodes, because a television watching public which prefers the vile pap that is reality shows will never support something like Lost that actually requires thought. But I can remain optimistic, at least for now.

I’m not sure what happened to September. It’s not that there weren’t things to write about; it’s mainly that I just never could get around to writing them. And – much like a lot of other things – what I needed to write about just kept building up and building up until it was too overwhelming to think about playing catch-up any more.

So – September. We went to the State Fair and saw a life-sized Pegasus made from dinner knives. We went to the San Francisco zoo to check out the new Africa exhibit and saw a baby giraffe playing hide and seek with an ostrich (pictures from those trips have been posted every other day or so to Cat’s Eye View for the past few weeks – go there to check them out). We also saw a lot of lemurs and hung out and watched the meerkats for a while and in general had a marvelous time.

We planned, sold tickets and decorated for, and held a dance at the church (think high school prom, but with 95% less acne or angst). There were several hundred cookies and marvelous pink punch and a perfect picture spot. There was a very heavy tank of helium and possibly over a hundred pink and black balloons. There was music and dancing and for the very first time our little group ever did something like this it turned out really well.

We did some cleaning and rearranging in the house – clearing out the guest room in preparation for turning it into a library. I finally sorted through all my craft and sewing stuff and donated huge piles of it to my older sister. We planned a trip to Seattle to visit my little sister (we’re heading up there in a few weeks). We started a new healthy eating plan (based on the new Core plan from Weight Watchers). I did a lot of knitting, including my very first felting project (a cat bed, of course) and Richard did a lot of writing.We watched a lot of HGTV.

And now it is October, and I am realizing that I just need to let September go. I may or may not get around to writing more about any of those little highlights, but I’m not going to stress about it anymore. Time to focus on the things happening now.

We buried Rebecca last night in the raised flower bed in the back yard. I had thought briefly about taking her in for an autopsy but I decided that it wouldn’t make any difference one way or another and most importantly it wouldn’t change the fact that she was gone. Richard got home before I did and dug a hole, and then I took her tiny little box out of the freezer and put her into her makeshift grave and we both covered her with dirt. I did a lot more crying, on and off, last night, and finally went to bed feeling drained.

It’s still hard to not get misty eyed when I think about her. I automatically do headcounts about once a day, just to make sure someone didn’t slip out a door when we weren’t looking (and even more so after someone else has been in the house) and it takes me by surprise when the count stops at six. I find myself having to take a quick breath when someone asks me how many cats I have, so that the tears don’t come back when I can no longer say ‘seven’. Today I was doing a little better – mainly because I spent the day in the San Francisco office and had other things to think about. But then I read what Richard wrote and it made me cry again, just a little. 14 years is a really long time. He’s not the only one who has a hard time letting go.

She came to me a little over 14 years ago as a scrawny little kitten, all random colors and fuzz and whiskers. She had a voice that could melt any heart. She would sleep in twisted positions you wouldn’t think any cat could form without having broken their spine. She wanted to be near people at all times; to be held at all times; to be under foot. She slept on my roommate’s pillow, draped around her head. She cried incessantly if she was being ignored.

She was a typical tortoiseshell personality. She was at times a horrible grouch, prone to swatting or biting, and then seconds later she would be begging for attention, purring, whiskers forward, so pathetically desperate to be held or pet that she would almost fall over. As an adult she slept on my pillow, often curled up, leaning on my head.

She was a grumpy old lady cat who was convinced she really should have been an only child. She had a glare she perfected over the years which she would lower on anyone or anything which did not meet her expectations – a group which encompassed most anyone and anything over time. She was jealous of Richard, to the point where she had to be between us whenever we were sitting next to each other, or laying next to each other in bed. She could stretch her tiny 8 pound body across any distance so that she could lay with her whiskers in my face and her tail end in Richard’s.

I felt her step onto my pillow this morning like she often does, and then suddenly she fell over on my head. At first I thought she was just off balance, settling in, but then she gave a horrible, sad cry, and she stiffened out all her legs and went suddenly limp, and as I put my arm around her in sudden panic I felt the result of all her muscles letting go. I grabbed a towel and wrapped her into my arms and held her while she gave a few more long shuddering breaths, and then she was gone. I kept feeling for her heartbeat, listening for her breathing. I tried to convince myself that she was still there. I wanted to find some sign that this was all just some bad dream and she would wake up again, any second now, she would raise her head and I wouldn’t really be holding my dead cat’s body. I couldn’t stop crying.

She was my first cat of my very own. She was grumpy and desperately affectionate and quirky and often high strung and I knew I would have to someday let her go, but I thought I would be the one to pick the time. I thought I had more time before I would have to make this sort of decision. I never expected that she would be the one to make it instead.

I still can’t stop crying. Oh Rebecca, I am going to miss you so much. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

With Labor Day weekend approaching, I started pondering a few of the pending projects around the house and decided that we should set ourselves a goal – mainly that we had to try to get them done so we could then reward ourselves with another trip to the San Francisco zoo. We did do our best to get a few of them accomplished in the weeks leading up to this weekend, like loading up the car with all the recycling that’s been overflowing the containers for weeks and driving it over the recycling center, and getting rid of the weight bench (in preparation for turning the guest room into a library). But there was still one more project we needed to accomplish – something we’ve been putting off and putting off for months.

Some time this past year I bought a bunch of shelving units and put them all together all by myself on a day when Richard was gone somewhere. Then I dragged them around and got a pretty good start on organizing the garage. But the effort stalled at that point, and the workbench quickly became someplace to just deposit clutter; the bike rack remained in its box, unassembled, and the new shelves remained half full, while all the stuff that should have been on those shelves remained in untidy piles around the garage.

So today we finally did it. Richard was supposed to do some work at the church with a few other guys, but he and my dad were the only ones who showed up and for some funny reason they didn’t feel like tackling cleaning and repolishing the floor of the social hall all by themselves. So they gave up and went home, and as soon as he got home, we got started.

As most projects like this usually go, it didn’t take all that long once we finally got started. Our garage was never a nightmarish mess like some I’ve seen, since after all, we’ve always been able to get both cars in with room to spare. So it was mainly just an hour or two of dedicated sorting and rearranging. We dragged the little cabinet I use to store paint and painting supplies over to the other side of the garage, along with the old chest of drawers that now serves as a repository for all temporary eating (picnic) supplies and all my miscellaneous canning equipment. We sorted through the huge box of stuff that’s been accumulating since we moved into this house (over three years ago) and put it into many boxes and bags, and then took all of that and our first pair of bikes (bought for about $50 each at Wal-Mart) over to Goodwill. Then we put together the bike rack, which is a tall pole type contraption with little adjustable hooks, on which we could hang both of our (much nicer, more expensive) bikes, thereby
not only getting them off the floor, but also removing much of the bike-related clutter. We emptied out both of our tool boxes and tracked down all the miscellaneous workbench clutter – sheets of sandpaper from when we finished our end tables, the cordless drill, a plethora of screwdrivers and wrenches and other tools – and we set them all up neatly on the workbench. We then immediately put two fix-it projects on the workbench, but that’s the point of having that bench in the first place and it’s so much better than having it be covered in random clutter. We also threw away a ton of stuff – enough to fill up our big grey city-issued garbage can. Not such a big deal, perhaps, except that trash day was yesterday and now there is no space to stick any more trash until after they come to empty it next Friday. Somehow, however, we will manage.

It took only an hour or two, including the time to load up the car and drop off all the stuff at Goodwill, but when it was done it felt like there was a big weight off my shoulders. I am oh-so-good at starting projects with all sorts of enthusiasm, but I have never been as enthusiastic at finishing them. So to see our garage looking perfectly organized and neat, and know that at least this project can be considered complete feels good. We’re going to the zoo on Monday for our Labor Day treat, and we earned it.

If you ever go to buy a new car and you happen to have had personalized license plates on your old car, and the dealer very cheerfully tells you that they can take care of the transfer paperwork for you, do not believe them. They know not of what they speak. Sure, they may have the correct form to fill out, and sure you and they may both make very sure that you sign on all the correct dotted lines, but in the murky and incomprehensible world of the DMV, this is all irrelevant. And when, after nearly six weeks of waiting, you finally receive your registration for your new car – a car which you have been driving around for the aforementioned six weeks with your old license plate on it because you were under the impression that the transfer really was taking place as promised, you will discover that it was all a big fat lie. You will discover this because not only will they send you a lovely new registration form and sticker, they will also send you new license plates. New, boring license plates that have no personalization at all.

This will then require you to track down the nearest DMV, and then take an hour or six out of your busy work day (because DMV’s are, much like post offices, allergic to ever being open during useful hours) in order to take care of the license plate transfer yourself. This will also require you to track down a screwdriver and wrestle the old plates off the car, thereby getting grease and gunk all over your fingers in the process, so that you can bring them in to the DMV in order to show them to the person behind the counter so they can charge you money for the privilege of putting them right back on your car again later.

If you are very, very lucky, you will stumble across a newly built (or renovated – I’m not sure) DMV office which, unlike every other DMV office you have ever encountered, is clean, quick, and efficient, and even more amazingly, staffed with people who actually seem to *want* to be helpful, and also do it while smiling and being pleasant. You will check several times to make sure that you really *are* in a DMV office, because surely there must be a mistake because there is a distinct and noticeable lack of surly, but sure enough, it really is true. And they will commiserate with you for having to do this, and hand you a new little registration form and a new little registration sticker and will send you on your way with a smile and a cheerful farewell and then you can finally remove the stupid temporary registration thing from the window of your new car and feel confident that the license plates you have on your car are the right ones. And you will also remind yourself that next time a car dealer tells you anything, anything at all, that you must not believe them because if they will lie about something so obviously easy to dispute like transferring your license plates for you, they could just as well lie about anything.

Now that the satellite TV is installed, we have turned into what I feared all along – two slothy couch potatoes. The biggest reason has been, of course, the Olympics – although admittedly this week we’re not watching it as much because gymnastics is now over (except for the petty whining and moaning by the IGF). The main exception on my part has been synchronized swimming, except that somehow we did not read the schedule correctly and so did not get the duet finals or the team technical routines taped. So the only synchro I was able to see at all this year was the team finals, which were amazing to watch since of course they *are* Olympic swimmers for a reason, but a bit disappointing because I know how much more I missed.

On the plus side, I am doing huge amounts of knitting lately, since camping out in front of the TV is the perfect time to drag out the yarn and needles. I fear I have become addicted to the Home and Garden Network, and have been watching episode after episode of all the ‘remodel your house on a budget’ shows, followed by some not-so-idle poking around on their website. I did stumble across a picture that is perfect for our bedroom. Isn’t it gorgeous? Now just imagine those chairs a dark green, and the bedding green and blue, and dragon head lamps instead of those cute little white ones, and I still think it could work. Of course our bedroom has crown molding all around the ceiling, and a high peak in the bay window, and if we were going to do this I would really need to paint the ceiling a pale blue to draw it all together, and there is no way in the world I would be able to do that without having to perch precariously on a ladder and somehow try to climb around the ceiling fan which is situated rather inconveniently in the middle. But for now, I am remaining optimistic that it can all work out somehow, insanely high ceiling, dragon head lamps, and all.

We really have done nothing at all productive this week, for the most part. Every evening has been spent sitting in front of the television, watching the Olympics. But really, can you blame us? It seems as if this year they are showing more of the sports than they have ever shown before. It’s all gymnastics all the time in our house lately. Those people are amazing.

This week I did break down and suggest we get cable or satellite TV installed, despite my reservations. So we called and amazingly they were able to schedule an installation for us this morning. What was even more amazing is that the installer came within the time constraints provided – and best of all he came before I had to leave, so I got a chance to get a quick preview.

I left Richard camped out on the couch, his laptop on his lap and the cable remote in his hand, and I reminded him that he should actually think about getting up every once in a while, no matter how many channels he now has to surf. And then I picked up a friend and we drove up to Napa to have tea with a group of women in what has apparently become an official monthly gathering for them. One of the women really likes doing tea, so she does lots of research and finds various places for the group to go, and one Saturday a month they all dress up and go someplace and eat tea sandwiches and tea cakes and delicate little finger foods, and drink tea from china cups and be very girly.

This is the same group for which I was reading Anna Karenina. Although as it turns out I was the only one who actually *read* the book, so any discussion was postponed until the next meeting. Somehow I agreed to read a second translation (because as much as I hated the stupid book I am still willing to give it another chance, except that this time I am going to look for one where the sex wasn’t left out, because I have to have something to look forward to. So instead of the book we talked about decorating our houses, and we talked about tattoos, and we talked about pets, and we drank tea and I had a marvelous time.

Today was the first day of my very own version of Pianopalooza. We’ve got a rotation of pianists who act as accompanist for the church services. It being summer, a number of the pianists were off on vacation or otherwise unavailable so somehow I ended up signing up for two weeks in a row. And then, just because I’ve been feeling far more competent in my piano playing abilities lately, I suggested to my dad that we try that piano and organ duet again, so there will be three weeks straight of me and the piano this month. I am not on the schedule at all in September, which I think is probably for the best because by then the congregation will all probably be sick of me. Heh.

I was actually quite pleased with myself. There was one hymn that was a little more difficult but overall it went far better than it has before. I think I’m getting the hang of playing hymns – it’s not just playing the song note by note; it’s being able to look at the chords and make a last-second decision as to which notes need to be played and which can be left out in the particularly difficult parts.

I had brought my knitting with me, intending to work on that while Richard went to a meeting after church, but one of our friends noted that they had finally caught the litter of feral kittens in their backyard, and so what else could I do but walk down the block with her to her house and play with kittens instead?

They are quite possibly the cutest little kittens I have seen in a while. Momma is a rather scrappy looking medium haired tortoiseshell (she was lurking around outside), but they all look as if they are going to end up shorthaired. However, they were simply covered in a layer of kitten fuzz. They’re just about six weeks old, eyes changed from the gray-blue of babyhood to their ‘adult’ colors. There’s definitely some siamese in the mix, from the tipping of gray on some of the ears and tails. They are still young enough to fall over when they wrestle, and to fluff up their tails like bottle brushes when they stalk fingers and sibling tails, and their ears are too big for their heads, giving them a ridiculously unbalanced look. I did my best to take pictures but they weren’t very interested in sitting still or posing. I could have easily stuffed them all into my purse and taken them home but the last thing we need is more cats, no matter how big their ears are, so I contented myself with just sitting there and letting them climb all over me and trying to convince them to eat their own tails.

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I realized that I forgot to mention this in earlier entries (probably because I was so busy blathering on and on about my allergy tests), but a few weeks ago my knitting-enabling friend mentioned in passing that there was a new knitting group being held at the library in Vacaville and was I interested in going. It was pretty much as if she had asked me if I was interested in going to visit cute fuzzy kittens (the answer was a big and resounding yes). So that Tuesday night I headed off to the library and took part in my very first knitting circle.

It was amazingly cool. There were probably 15 or 20 women of all ages. I think the little 11-year-old sitting next to me, working on her very first scarf, was the youngest, and quite possibly the sweet grandma type fussing over a Christmas stocking was the oldest. There was also every range of knowledge about knitting – from the lady across the group who was whipping up a raglan with an intricate pattern of cabling, to the two women who had bravely purchased yarn and needles and came to the group hoping someone would show them just what the heck to do with it.

We sat around in a circle and we chatted and knit and those of us who have a vague clue what we’re doing did our best to help out those who didn’t. There was a lot of laughing and sharing of projects and talking about yarn stores and needle preferences and it was just the most marvelous thing. This is definitely going on my calendar for a regular monthly appointment. It was so nice to be surrounded by so many other people – people who all fully understood my latest obsession and who wholeheartedly share and support it.

When I got the first round of allergy tests I made an offhand comment about them testing me for small fuzzy critters. However, I already *know* how extremely allergic I am to mice and rats and guinea pigs and all of that type of creature, so it didn’t occur to me that I would need to get tested for those again. Ha. Turns out that if I want those in the shots they have to test me anyway – and I want those in the shots very badly. It would be oh-so-nice to be able to go to the friend’s house where there is a guinea pig, for example, and be able to spend time there without having to dive for the inhaler and have my voice go steadily hoarse as my throat closes off within the first half hour of exposure. Even more important, it would be nice to be able to go anywhere and not have to worry about exposure to rodents I wasn’t even aware were there.

They dragged out a new set of little testers and set up one arm and poked me full of yet another line of spots (alas, not enough to make more alien nipples, since I know you were all dying to know) and sure enough, they all exploded rather dramatically. So dramatically, in fact, that when one of the nurses came in her eyes got really big and she called in the second nurse to see just how quickly I was reacting, and really, it is not at all comforting to be sitting in a clinic where their main business is the diagnosis and treatment of allergies and have a nurse call in another to look at your arm and say something to the effect of ‘check this out, I’ve never seen anything like it’. The one who was administering all my skin prick tests just grinned and noted that apparently I really did know what I was talking about when I said I was allergic to pretty much every small fuzzy critter out there. I’ve known about the mice and rats and rabbits and guinea pigs for years, but now we can add gerbils and hamsters to that mix, by the way, which I hadn’t been sure about because I haven’t been around either in a very long time. So that grouping of allergens will be added to the mix for my shots.

In the meantime I got my first set of shots for all the trees and molds and oh yes, those nasty little dust mites, that I tested positive for last week. My arm erupted in a lovely rash almost immediately and I somehow managed to avoid scratching at both shot sites to stop the insane itching that resulted. I am crossing my fingers that this rather special side effect of the shots (that would be the rashes and the itching and did I forget to mention the lumps?) will eventually subside. I got two shots today, and when they add the small fuzzy critters I will get three each time (although Richard was quick to point out that he gets four each time, since he is basically allergic to the world), but they’re quite good at sliding in the needles without much more than just the teeniest of pinches, and I am telling myself that it’s a good thing I don’t mind needles or shots, and that in a few years this is all going to be worth it. By golly, it better be.