October, I have decided, has it in for me. Or rather, it has it in for my cats.

First there was Rebecca, who keeled over on my head last Monday and died shortly thereafter. I’m not going to be over that one for a while, although I’ve at least stopped tearing up when I think about it.

Now, it’s Allegra. No, she’s not dead, but the key word here is ‘yet’. A few months ago I noticed she had a strange, hard lump on her lower jaw. We kept an eye on it – it didn’t seem to bother her at all but it wasn’t going away. So I took her in to the vet. $500 later (yes, I was wincing too) I brought her back home, minus an infected tooth, having subjected her to various and sundry indignities, including some x-rays of her chin. At that time the vet did suggest the possibility that the lump could just be a nasty abscess from the tooth, but then he tossed out a few other, scarier, possibilities. That was two weeks ago.

Today he finally heard back from the radiologist about the x-rays. It’s not an abscess. That would be too easy. She could *recover* from an abscess. She won’t recover from this.

She has bone cancer. Because it came on relatively fast he estimated we have about six months, more or less – as much of an estimate as anyone can give for a cat. Treatment options are pretty limited – we could put her through the hell of radiation and have her lower jaw removed (try explaining that to a cat who already has issues with being medicated, force fed, or otherwise manipulated against her will). But there’s no guarantee any of those treatments will ultimately be effective, nor can I justify doing something like that to her anyway.

I want to hit something, or someone. I want to scream and stomp my feet and yell at the top of my lungs that this is not fair, damn it; it’s not supposed to be like this; first Rebecca and now her. I want to know the exact number of days I have left with her so I can prepare myself somehow, some way, to be strong enough to make the decision I do not want to make.

Eventually she will stop eating on her own. Eventually she will start feeling pain. Eventually this thing that is growing in her jaw will win the fight. And eventually I will have to put my little musical cat to sleep.

My fingers are still all kinds of yellow-green lovely, but that is because I shucked the third bag of pomegranates last night, thereby not giving the stain from Friday night a chance to wear away. I am hopeful, however, that a bit of energetic scrubbing later on today will get rid of the worst of the stains, and glad that the next phase of this project – boiling the seeds down to juice – will at least not turn me any other funny colors.

I did, as hoped, manage to pass the fourth sack along to someone else to shuck this evening. This gave me the perfect excuse to go over to her house and gush over her kittens. They are long and lanky little things, with huge tufted ears and out-of-proportion bodies. Some kittens need to grow into their paws; these need to grow into the length of their legs. They were perfectly friendly and cuddly, except when there was food involved, and then it was every kitten for himself (and woe be unto any human skin in the way).

Today has been a fairly quiet and low-key day, compared to this past weekend. There was the tea on Saturday, and then Sunday was the usual combination of choir practice and church service. We hosted the coffee hour, so there was extra time spent washing dishes and wiping down tables afterward; then we rushed home to change into more appropriate clothes, inhale some kind of lunch, and went right back to the church to meet some of the others in the 20’s and 30’s group for our monthly outing.

It being October, we decided we needed to go to a pumpkin patch. Richard and I went to this place last year – the one with the corn maze – and had so much fun we really wanted to do it again. So we all piled into our cars and headed off to Davis. There was a brief detour along the way because there was a fire and the roads were blocked, but we eventually made it there (along with lots of other people) and had fun.

The website has an aerial view of the maze, so you can see just how huge it is. We all wandered around looking at pumpkins and gourds and various and sundry squash for a little bit, but eventually we decided to head into the maze. They gave us maps, but we were all determined to try it without guidance, at least to start. Of course, that only lasted the first fifteen minutes or so, until we got lost in a fairly long and windy dead end, and eventually met up with a few more of our group and decided to heck with free wandering; we were going to stick to the map so we could at least find our way to the various vantage points and then find the way out.

It’s a strange feeling wandering around in a maze like this. The corn is so high that you cannot see over the stalks, so you lose all sense of direction or distance. We made our way over to the bridge in the middle of the maze, which takes you high enough to look out over the entire thing. And then we meandered up and down paths to another vantage point on the far side, where we could see where we’d come from and were amazed by how far we’d walked. Then finally we wove our way through the maze to the exit. By this time I was holding the map firmly in front of me, one finger tracing the route as we walked, pretty much ignoring everything else but that little piece of paper, and the others just trailed right along behind me. Even with the map I think it took us a good 45 minutes to make it all the way through.

Yesterday I did not touch the pomegranates at all. Instead I got up early and dressed up pretty and picked up a friend and then she and I headed down to San Francisco for the bi-monthly tea. This time it was in a little tea house which was right across the street from the Botanical Gardens. We were rather glad of its proximity to the gardens because we ended up hitting absolutely no traffic at all on the drive into the city, and even after making a brief detour to browse through a weaver’s estate sale (where I exercised great self control and only spent $11 for an amazingly large pile of yarn of indeterminate type), we arrived about an hour early. Heck, not only did we not hit any traffic, but we also found a place to park within one block of the tea house, after only circling the block once, and even more amazing, it was free. Perhaps all that pomegranate shucking and tree wrestling on Friday convinced the gods that I needed a break – who knows.

The tea house did not even open until noon, which was when we were actually supposed to arrive, so to pass the extra time we decided to go wandering around in the Botanical Gardens. I’d never been there and she said it had been years for her, so it was a (mostly) new experience for us both.

That place is huge! I can see that we would have needed a lot more time to wander the whole thing; as it was we barely made a dent in the gardens and I fell in love with half a dozen trees and shrubs and flowers whose names I promptly forgot and which I probably could never grow in my area anyway. And then we spent the remaining fifteen minutes or so sitting on a bench in a tiny little courtyard, watching people walk by, before we returned to the tea house, and eventually met up with the rest of our group.

It was a slightly smaller group than last time, but still just as lively and fun. As I expected, even after a two month reprieve, I was still the only one who had actually read Anna Karinena, so I think the book club part of the tea group has officially fizzled away. We each got a different type of tea – mine had delicious overtones of spearmint, which I adore – and munched our way through an assortment of the usual type of tea sandwiches.

Now for the not-so-fun and a little scary part of the adventure. While leaving the estate sale earlier I was sneezing pretty badly, and figured there was probably something there I was allergic to. So I ended up taking an allergy pill – one of the Zyrtec samples my doctor gave me when I went in for the allergy testing. By the time the tea was over I was feeling pretty tired, but luckily everyone else was ready to head out so we found the car and headed home. And by the time I had reached our little town and dropped off my friend it was all I could do to remain focused and alert. I drove home, parked the car, staggered inside, mumbled some kind of greeting to Richard, and then went upstairs and promptly fell into bed. I got up a few hours later to have dinner, but I was still pretty drained and gave up and went back to sleep shortly thereafter. It wasn’t until this morning that I started feeling more myself again.

So maybe I will avoid taking the Zyrtec allergy medication again – at least if I am going to have to be driving, or even remotely coherent at any point during the next 24 hours. In the meantime, I probably needed the sleep, and curling up into a big soft comfy bed, surrounded by lots of warm and snuggly cats was not so bad a way to end the day.

I love pomegranates. I love them so much that when we were doing our garden plan I insisted that it had to include at least one pomegranate tree. And this past spring our tiny little tree produced exactly two blossoms, both of which fell off shortly after they appeared. But that’s okay – I wasn’t expecting to get actual fruit from any of our trees for a year or two. Besides, we didn’t need pomegranates from my tree for our yearly jelly making party. One of the others in our group has a whole slew of trees and had more than enough of them last year.

Except that this year there were issues with her trees, and suddenly we were faced with a serious shortage of pomegranates. We discussed buying juice, but somehow that seemed like cheating. After all, there are people out there – strange people, to be sure, who have pomegranate trees and do not like pomegranates. I figured surely one of them wouldn’t mind us taking their unwanted fruit off their hands.

So I put a call out to the local Freecyclers group, and within a week I had a response. A very nice couple noted that they had a huge tree overflowing with fruit and I was welcome to come and pick as much as I wanted.

I have already noted that I love pomegranates. But, our tiny little fledgling tree aside, I have never actually had to interact with a pomegranate *tree* before. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Luckily I had the foresight to put on jeans before I headed off to divest their tree of pomegranates, but I should have also put on long sleeves, and maybe even full body armor.

The problem, you see, is that pomegranate trees are not friendly trees. They are, in fact, quite nasty little trees when it comes to harvesting time. Not only are they full of sharp and prickly points, they also refuse to give up their fruit without a fight. Most fruit, when ripe, tends to come off the tree easily, and in fact if not picked in time, will fall off on its own. Not so with pomegranates. When ripe, the fruit remains firmly affixed to the tree, and instead of falling to the ground like any other self-respecting fruit, it simply splits open at the bottom, allowing all the seeds to spill out. Removing the pomegranates themselves takes great strength, determination, and one or more extremely sharp cutting objects.

I did manage to battle the tree long enough to fill four grocery sacks to overflowing with some of the largest pomegranates I have ever seen, and last night I began the rather tedious task of shucking them. There are cuts and scratches all over my arms and even a few on my face, and I was still picking tree parts out of my hair long after I came home from picking the fruit. And my fingers are stained an oh-so-charming yellowish green from several hours of shucking them last night. But there are four gallon Ziploc bags stuffed full of pomegranate seeds in my freezer and only two grocery sacks remain to tackle – one of which I think I may be able to pawn off on another of the jelly-making group to prepare. And after next weekend there will be much making of jelly and I will look back on my encounter with the pomegranate tree and I will decide that it was all worth it.

And I will keep a very careful eye on my own pomegranate tree and maybe invest in some very long-handled gardening shears so I can remove fruit from my own tree with a few less battle scars in the future.

It’s been two weeks since I started the allergy shots and with only two exceptions I’ve gone in religiously, twice a week. I’m still finding the whole experience vaguely amusing, although for a few weeks I was getting this weird side effect where my entire body would start itching insanely after the shot, and that really started to push my tolerance for what constitutes fun. But that’s thankfully gone away, and in fact last week the nurse told me that one of my three shots now is only once a week. Of course the other two are still twice a week, but she also noted that I’m showing great progress on those as well.

This is actually a rather large relief. There was this small part of my brain that was sure that somehow the allergy shots just were not going to work for me. Never mind that they are highly effective and work in every other person that has taken them; somehow I would be that .0001% of the population that wouldn’t respond and I’d be stuck with the sinus infections from hell and the constantly stuffy nose and the exploding into hives and closing-off throat every time I happened to be in the vicinity of where some small fuzzy creature had breathed in the last few days. Silly, I know, but I can’t help it. Worrying is, after all, a genetic trait in my family, especially for things that may not necessary be the most logical to worry about.

But, worries aside, the shots *are* working. The rashes that appear around the shot sites are slowly diminishing in size each week, and the itching and the swelling is starting to subside. I’m hopeful that maybe in another few weeks I’ll be able to only go in once a week for all three of the shots. And maybe by the time Christmas rolls around I’ll be able to go to my friend’s house – the one with the guinea pig – without having to load up on allergy medication beforehand.

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.