Allegra and I are competing for the mousepad. When I move my hand away, she oh-so-slowly stretches out so that she is completely on it, pushing the mouse off in the process. I, in turn, gently shove her across my desk just the few inches necessary to reach the mouse and be able to use it, and she stays there, pretending indifference until my hand is removed, and then the whole dance begins again.

I’m not complaining though. At least she’s on the desk, which means I can type easily enough, instead of her usual perch – my lap. When she is on my lap, if I do not keep my legs perfectly level, she will dig in with claws, trying to hold on. Don’t even suggest simply pushing her off. She doesn’t take no for an answer, and will continue to jump back on with that soft little trill of hers until I admit defeat.

It’s odd to be home this early in the day – a sort of unexpected vacation. I’m home, however, because at 8am this morning, the axe fell and the project on which so many of us have spent over a year of our lives was suddenly and immediately cancelled. The newest management team finally got a harder slap of reality than they were expecting, and as the crowd of us stood around the phone in silence, they made their decision. Most of the lower levels of management didn’t even know this was going to happen, but despite the suddenness of the decision, it came as very little surprise. This project has spiraled through too many cycles of the same problems – inability by higher management to make decisions, effectively manage scope, or even grasp the true depth of the task we were given. So in a way, this has sort of an amusing twist. They finally made a decision they’ll have to stick with. There’s no backtracking on this one; no hasty last-minute discussions to ultimately reverse it. It’s done. It’s over.

I am a consultant, and thus shielded from the true impact of this decision. Those of us in my shoes will simply be placed on other projects by our own managers – this is the nature of the job. You win some; you lose some, and you simply go on to the next one without looking back. It may sound callous, but it’s better this way. Consultants cannot afford to get too emotionally involved (whether we do or not is entirely up to each one of us). I feel for the actual employees though – the ones who stuck it out through the mandatory pay cut and the long hours and missed vacations, only to stand around a conference phone and be told that most (not even all, just most) of them should hopefully be absorbed into other projects and positions around the company, but that even the managers who were speaking didn’t know exactly how this would take place.

I’ll go back tomorrow to see what is left to do. There are rumors that some of us consultants may be asked to stay a bit longer to help shut things down. I do not doubt that there will be some sort of effort to wrap up the code in tidy packages and store it away in neatly labeled boxes on a shelf somewhere, where it will gather dust and never, ever be used. Even those who will request this will understand the true futility of the effort, but ‘business’ demands that this kind of thing be done. It is its way, and always will be.

And after that, the window of opportunity opens wonderfully wide. I am forced to rearrange plans a few months earlier, and am actually beginning to gather a bit of excitement over the concept of finally being done with this – being able to relax at my own office and take advantage of all the free training that the Big Fish offers to those consultants unlucky enough to be on the bench. Because of the timing, I have already made it clear I will not take any new project that might require me to travel between now and the wedding (less than seven weeks away!), but the reality is that I will not take any new project at all. As I spoke with my manager, I was already announcing my availability on a few job sites. Nothing may come of it, but there is now no better time to try.

I will not bemoan what is lost. I hoped for the project to succeed, even when it seemed that nothing could possibly save it. My only regret is that this had to happen at the time when it seemed that we were finally going to actually do it right. And it is always hard to leave things unfinished, despite what relief there may be that it is ended, one way or the other.

I’ve been counting down the days til Richard came home. One week, and then three days, and then it was tomorrow, and then it was finally today – Sunday – and the counting turned from days to hours til I could leave the house. I tracked the flight online, heaving a relieved sigh when I saw it had arrived safely in Washington DC (apparently he took my mother’s admonitions of no ocean crashes seriously). I pondered how long I should give myself to get to the airport in San Francisco, calculating approximate traffic density, actual distance, and the time it would take for me to find a place to park, and then find the gate.

As it turned out, I showed up with plenty of time – time enough to sit for a bit at the International gate, and then finally catch a clue and figure out that since the plane made a stop-over in Washington, it no longer classified as an International flight, and I needed to hoof it down to the absolute other end of the terminal if I was going to actually meet him when he came off the plane. I should have expected this, considering that I dressed up nicer and chose to wear heels, thinking I wouldn’t be doing much walking. Silly me.

There was an incredible glare at the end of the terminal from the sun shining right through the windows, and I could barely see anything, but I found the gate. A little crowd of us started to gather around the path where they would disembark, and when the door opened, I wasn’t the only one who leaned forward, straining to see down the jetway to find that familiar face.

He walked off the plane looking tired but happy, straight into my open arms. I held him tight for a moment, glad to finally have him with me again, and then dutifully pulled out the phone and called both sets of parents to report his arrival safe and sound to the San Francisco airport. We drove home, both of us talking back and forth, filling each other in on little tidbits of things we’d never managed to say in the emails and phone conversations with which we’ve communicated this past month during his absence.

Getting ready for work this morning, he picked up his keys from the table. Rosemary and Azrael materialized by his side, drawn by the familiar jingle. A month away, and yet they still remember that the sound of his keys is quite often accompanied by that fascinating red dot which dances all over the floor. I’d not touched his little laser pointer the entire time he was gone, but still they remembered. It’s one of their favorite toys, after all, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, but still, sometimes it amazes me what cats keep in their heads.

If Collab – June: If you had all the money you would ever need… and more, what would you do with your life? What would be your motivation to get out of bed everyday?

I once told Richard that he needed to get a job that paid him twice as much so I could quit working and be a stay at home cat mom. Not, mind you, that I was serious – we’ve got our plans, and they require both of us to work full-time for at least another decade or two if we’re going to retire as early as we want.

Still, the thought crops up in my head every once in a while – how nice it would be to not have to go to work. It doesn’t matter how much I might like my job (and despite the occasional whining about both my own company and the project I’m on, I really do honestly like my job) – if I didn’t need the money, I’d quit in a heartbeat.

I’m not the type of person who can be idle. Oh, granted I can sit on my rear a few days and be absolutely completely lazy, but by the end of the second day I start to get antsy, and by the end of the third I’m more than likely to either be puttering around, cleaning something, organizing a room, or pestering a friend to go out and do something – anything – with me.

What I wish for most of all, is simply to have *time*. If we somehow won the lottery (a phenomenon which would be pretty much impossible, considering we don’t even play, but bear with me here) and woke up tomorrow knowing that we had enough money to do whatever we wanted, oh, what things I would do! The possibilities are endless, and I’m not sure that even if I wasn’t working for a wage, I would have enough time to do them all.

If I had time, I would take classes. I would learn to quilt, and to make paper, and how to create fantastic animals from your common every day green leafy bush. I would take Tae Kwon Do, and join a Master’s swimming class to see if I might finally be able to get the hang of that whole butterfly stroke thing that’s stumped me for years. I would volunteer for literacy programs, sign up to tutor elementary kids in math, and show up to read stories at the local library. I would bake – hearty, comforting, healthy meals – all the recipes I ever wanted to try but never have time for now. I would garden, expanding it every year until it took over half our backyard – melons and peppers and green beans – and then I would can them with my mom, lining walls in the garage with glass Bell jars of jams and jellies and vegetables only hours from the vine.

I would travel. I would take trips down jungle rivers and learn how to identify all the birds in Africa. I would climb the pyramids in Egypt and learn how to speak French by living in Paris for months and soaking up the culture. I would finally figure out how to work all those tricky little gadgets on fancy cameras and put aside my ‘point and shoot dummy’ version for good. I would go to Rome and pay someone to teach me how to draw, and then give the poor artist extra money when he failed because I know better anyway.

I would attend catholic masses in Europe just to listen to the sounds of latin echo in the stone cathedrals, and slip into tiny gospel churches in the southern United States to join in the praise singing. I would humbly request permission to enter mosques and temples and synagogues to listen and feel and perhaps finally figure out what this faith thing is that so many people have and I’ve never found.

If I had all the money I ever needed, what would be my motivation for getting out of bed every day? Heck, if I had the *chance* to do even half of what I wanted to do if only I had the time, I’m not sure I’d even have time to sleep in the first place?

Richard called me this morning to wish me a happy birthday, and to tell me that he was going to stay in Stratford-Upon-Avon another day, resulting in him only getting to spend one day in London. I think he was looking for pity; unfortunately he didn’t get it because the reasons for his staying (as you’ve already determined if you followed that link) were based solely around the fact that he’s getting the unique opportunity to see Shakespeare performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Luckily, everyone I’ve told about this agrees that he deserves no pity. Poor man. Mmm hmm.

But it was still a lovely way to wake up – a phone call from the man I love – and a reminder that he’ll be coming home in less than a week (I’m very much looking forward to Sunday for that very reason!). He’d sent me a hand-knit wool sweater from the Aran Islands in Ireland so now I have yet another reason (aside from the rather obvious one of the simple fact that I truly despise this hot weather) to wish for winter to come early this year.

Gifts have trickled in throughout the day – wonderfully lovely and thoughtful gifts – accompanied by emails, e-cards, phone calls, and wishes in person. In amusingly typical fashion for this project, my coworkers very sweetly bought me a birthday cake, and then we had to go scrounging for something with which to cut it. I doled out slivers of cake on an assortment of plates, napkins, and anything else we could find on which to put it. The development team did *not* sing the birthday song for me this time – a fact which I am particularly grateful for because, while they’re the nicest bunch of guys I’ve had the opportunity to work with, singing is simply not their forte, and as we’ve been on this project now for a year and a half, I’ve winced my way through that song more than a few times.

D and I made plans to meet for our usual birthday meal this Saturday. She and I share the same month for our birthdays, and years ago, we gave up trying to second guess what the other wanted. At first, we would simply go out together and buy something for ourselves at the same time…that eventually dissolved into simply meeting for lunch or dinner and having a fun time out. We’ve been the best of friends for about 13 years now, close enough to the point where we refer to each other’s mothers as ‘mom’, and finish each other sentences, but birthdays have always managed to confound us. Our tastes (aside from the unabiding addiction to all things feline) have always been undeniably different, and so it was with mutual relief that we finally hit upon the dinner idea.

The day ended beautifully – a birthday dinner with most of my family. My little nearly-three-year-old nephew was quite excited about the entire concept of birthday cake and presents, and kept chattering about it all through the meal. I asked him to help me unwrap – more for self-preservation and amusement than because I needed any help – and he happily tore paper and pulled ribbons when I asked him to. He wasn’t much impressed by the gifts I received, but then adults don’t often get stuff that’s all that exciting to three-year-olds. I offered to let him help me blow out the candles as well, but he told me ‘no’ quite soberly, insisting that I had to do it alone.

A duet with piano and organ, my father proposes. Even as I inwardly wonder why on earth I am doing this, I have agreed to it. I have one week to get ready. I will have to practice, probably every night. I get home from work late enough as it is – now I must throw in a trip to my parents house, since practicing requires an instrument, and it’s been far too many years since I had free access to a piano.

He hands me the music to look at and I give it a quick glance. Only two sharps and nothing too scary, it seems. I sit down at the piano, hunched over the keys, peering at the music. My fingers curl and stretch clumsily into patterns nearly forgotten. I fumble through the music, inwardly wincing – my fingers may be rusty in the skill but my ears are still sharp enough to hear and recognize each mistake. I resort to tricks learned long ago – play half the chord, not all. Counting under my breath, one foot on the pedal, slowly finding my confidence again.

He sits down next to me and I scoot over to the left. We both spread out our music and he counts off a measure and we start; his fingers flying over the keys as if there is no effort; mine still searching for the right notes. We start and stop a half dozen times but make it through. The music comes, haltingly at first but then with more surety.

We have done this in the past, he and I, beginning when I was too young for my feet to reach the pedals. He taught me the keys and the time signatures and the music, and awed me with his own ability. He can pick up a piece of music and play it cold. I did not inherit this talent from him. I am still in awe of it – his strong sure fingers drawing music from the keyboard, changing key signatures, adding in harmonies and descants. I can do simple arrangements from a tune, painstakingly creating harmonies only if I write them down first. He can compose music.

It is not the same, playing with my father, as it is with my sister. Older than me, she got that knack of sight-reading, and so we would pull out the duet books and I’d take the lower part, knowing it was going to be a bit simpler for me to muddle through. Sometimes we would sing in silly voices, sway back and forth on the piano bench in time to the music, collapse in giggles. With my father, it is somehow more serious. My sister and I are closer in skill – he is far beyond, and I find myself wanting to prove myself – show him that I can do it.

My family gathered around the piano, one or two of us on the keys, while the others sang or accompanied on any other instrument we happened to be playing at the time. Growing up I didn’t know this was anything but ordinary. Now I know how odd it seems to everyone else, and yet it is something I still look forward to when we are all together. My nephew is learning the tradition, and when my niece visits, she will learn it too.

My fingers, given the taste of the keyboard again, itch to play, and it only makes me miss having a piano even more. Music is a bond between the members of my family just as strong as blood, and how can I refuse?

I did laundry today. I pulled the sheets, damp and clean, from the washer and draped them over one shoulder, then rummaged around until I found the bag of pins and went outside. The ground is hot beneath my feet and I have to strain to reach the line but I clip the first pillowcase up and the wind lifts it out before me, twisting the sheets as I try to attach them next to the line and I remember –

I have barely begun elementary school. It is summer – the grass is brittle beneath my bare feet – and I am helping hang the clothes. I cannot reach the line, but I can hand my mother the pins and the clothes, and sometimes when the sun gets to be too much I go between the two lines and let the wind blow the shirts into my face and I take a deep breath of the still-damp sweetness of clean.

Later on, looking through the windows in the breakfast nook, I can see the sheets blowing in the wind, swinging in gentle rhythm. We get a lot of wind in this new neighborhood – breezes which help to cool down the house. The cats watch from window sills, but quickly lose interest.

My mother still tells the story of hanging laundry many years ago. We were living in Texas, or Arkansas – one of those hot, dry states we had brief uneventful lives in during my father’s career in the military. She heard a rustling and looked down to see the armadillo careen through the dead grass and smash head-first into the basket. Proving that the intelligence of armadillos may quite possibly be on par with your average kumquat, the poor creature backed up, and then ran straight into again. It finally figured out that it couldn’t go through the obstacle, and so shambled off in another direction.

The line takes some adjusting. My dad helped me put it up, demonstrating the knot I need to use to tighten it. I try it when he is there and am able to do it; now, alone, it comes more clumsily and the knot looks nothing like the neat turn he created.

I take down the sheets, now wind-dried and smelling of sun. As I gather them into my arms and take a deep breath of the fresh scent, I hear a sound. The wind has blown open the back door and cats are spilling out onto the porch, some cautious, unsure of this unfamiliar outside; others knowing exactly what to do. I dash for the door, shooing them inside, all but one, whom I let roll in the dirt a few moments more before reaching for her. With typical tortoiseshell attitude, she does not let me pick her up, instead stalking toward the door with offended dignity, one step ahead of me.

If Collab – May: If someone close to you was in failing health and only by offering one of your vital organs could they be possibly saved, would you do it? Would you risk your life on the chance that another might survive?

This question is too easy. If one of my family members or a close friend were in desperate need of something that I could provide, of course I would give it. I’ve been donating blood for over ten years now – switching from whole blood to platelets a few years back – and I’ve been on the marrow donor list for probably half that time. It didn’t take a second thought for me to donate blood, and I didn’t hesitate when asked about the marrow. Should I be called as a match, I’d agree without hesitation as well. Why should I bemoan a little discomfort – a few lost hours from one day – if it can save someone else’s life?

The problem is that this question stops at the easy part. Of course you’d donate for someone you loved. Who would say no?

The real question – the hard question – is ‘Can you let it go?’

When I donate blood, I never know who gets it, nor do I want to. The recipients of that blood are nameless and faceless, and I’m perfectly happy to let them remain so. I would be uncomfortable if faced with one of them.

An organ, however, isn’t something you just donate at your local clinic every eight months. An organ goes to someone that you will meet – someone that you probably already know. You are giving up an integral part of yourself so that this other person can live. Will you give it completely, without hesitation, renouncing all ownership? Or will you then expect something in return – that the recipient live a ‘better’ life; that they focus more on their health; that somehow they now have to ‘earn’ your gift.

The best comparison for this question I’m posing is loaning money to a friend. Most of us have loaned money more than once – a few bucks now and then – and it’s no big deal. No big deal, that is, until it’s a lot more than just a few bucks, and you know even before you loan it that it will take that friend a while to pay you back.

It’s easy to start to watch that person’s spending habits once the loan is made. It’s easy to start passing judgment on how they save (or not), as long as that debt exists between you. It’s very difficult to put it aside and remind yourself – again and again if necessary – that once a gift (or a loan) is given, you have no rights to how it is used.

So it would be with the donation of an organ. If my sister needed one of my kidneys and I gave it to her, I would have no rights to demand how she take care of it. I could cheer her on when she remained in good health, but I would have no rights to complain if she didn’t.

It’s a very difficult thing to give a gift completely freely – and I can only imagine that the gift of a vital organ would be even more difficult. Could I do it? I’d like to think so, but it’s my most fervent wish that I’m never actually put to the test.

Our new house, unlike the old one, has no carpets. Everything – floors, stairs – is hard surfaced (either hardwood or vinyl).

While this is visually appealing, and quite lovely on hot days because you can walk around barefoot on the cool floor, it has a few downsides. I’m not counting the fact that I’m still nervous about slipping so when I’m in bare feet I tend to hobble slowly down the stairs like an old lady. That’s not a downside, that’s just funny. No, the downsides I’m talking about are directly related to the relationship between bare floors and cats.

First, let’s discuss hairballs. I suppose I should have left this particular topic til last, but…well…

When one has carpet and cats, one learns a few things very quickly. The first is that if this is a carpet you actually care about, you should never feed a cat anything with red or orange dye in the food. The second is that hairballs on carpet should be left alone. The simple fact of the matter is that they are much easier to peel off the floor when they’re dry, instead of scrubbing them further into the rug by trying to sponge them up when wet. And of course there’s the added benefit of certain types of hairballs which, if left all by themselves, tend to just…er….disappear. You people with multiple cats know exactly what I’m talking about. Don’t pretend you don’t. Ahem.

This practice usually works out well, mainly because most hairballs aren’t seen til much later (unless you step in them…and I’ll just leave you with *that* little slimy mental image for a moment). Hairballs on bare floors, however, are a completely different story. As I am learning, if left alone for any length of time, they adhere themselves permanently to the floor, and require a chisel, sander, and a lot of elbow grease to remove.

And while we’re on the topic of cat hair…

Carpet, you see, has this lovely quality of catching everything you drop on it and cleverly hiding it among its fibers. Eventually the floor gets dirty enough that you can no longer ignore it and so you have to vacuum. But the important thing here is that carpet is polite enough to give you a grace period.

Not so with bare floors. Even less so when there is an entire house full of bare floor and seven cats, some of whom can shed their entire weight in fur on a daily basis, given the opportunity. And unlike with carpet, on bare floors all that hair has nowhere to go, so instead of working its way into the carpet, it collects along the baseboards in long wisps of gray. The very act of gathering together into one clump creates a chemical reaction that turns any color cat hair to gray. It doesn’t matter that my worst shedders are orange and white – those lurking dust bunnies composed of cat hair are one color. Grey.

I have pondered – purely in the interest of scientific advancement, of course, and not because I absolutely hate vacuuming – simply leaving the hair-bunnies alone, just to see how big they would get. After all, while Richard is off gadding about in Europe, I’m the only one who would ever see the mess. But then I ponder if it would be a wise experiment to undertake. Cat hair, I’m convinced, is by its very nature magnetic (how else do you describe the spontaneous appearance of cat hair dust bunnies in the corners), so if I let them grow big enough, it is quite possible that eventually they will reach a critical mass and swallow the cats themselves whole. And so I always end up dutifully dragging out the little floor sweeper and sucking the dust bunnies into oblivion, comforting myself with the fact that the world just isn’t ready for this knowledge anyway.

I worry too much or not enough – it’s always one extreme or the other, but lately it’s too much. ‘Nine weekends left to the wedding!’ my mom’s latest email read, and there is this voice when I see things like this that sits inside my head and tells me that something will happen between now and then – something *has* to happen because it can’t possibly keep being this nice, this beautiful; something must go wrong and soon. I am far too lucky for one woman – I know this, really I do. I remind myself often of this when the worry strikes, but it only adds to it because luck is never one-sided.

I don’t know why I’m so hard on myself. Why can’t I just accept what I have without constantly expecting the worst to happen to take it all away from me? What will it take for the practical side of my brain to convince the rest of my head that it’s all right for things to be this good.

I know that part of it is because I’m sitting on the brink of so much. My dreams are coming true all around me – maybe not all of them, but the only ones that ever mattered. My beautiful house is finally done and we are living in it. And somewhere in Ireland is this amazing man who somehow loves me just as much as I love him; who sees beauty in me that I cannot be entirely convinced is there; who treats me better than sometimes I probably deserve to be treated…and here I go again, my worrywart brain refusing to accept that this can all be truly real.

It is going to be fine, and I have every right to be this happy. I can not fret about the unfairness of it all – that I have all that I want and so many do not. I can only embrace and be happy and try not to question.

It’s just that sometimes it’s hard to remind myself of that.

Years ago while in college I joined an email list dedicated to cat lovers. It’s gone through a few iterations since – moving from server to server; changing ownership and even names – but it’s always had only one goal – to provide a forum for people to talk about and share their love for cats. The list fluctuates in membership and make-up, but on average, there are several hundred members who span not only the country, but also the globe. Age ranges from teen to grandparent, and most of us would probably never have met and have nothing else in common with each other except for our cats.

While local members have had impromptu regional gatherings all along, the list owner has planned a yearly gathering at her home for everyone who wants to come. We all fly in, wearing cat shirts, carrying cat books, toys, and other paraphenelia to share, toting pictures of our cats, and prepared for fun. We play games like Cat-go and Cat-centration. We eat chocolate and pizza; chips and dip; homemade breakfasts loaded with sausages and bacon and eggs. We sleep on the floor of her house, crammed into nooks and crannies, staying up til the wee hours of the morning talking and giggling like school children on a sleep-over. And then when it is over we hug our goodbyes and return home, to post cryptic hilarity to the rest of the group who couldn’t come – stories of pewter picture frames mistaken for handcuffs at the airport security gate; pictures of members frozen in cat grooming positions; continued reminders of gatherings from years before, referred to by the outing: the year of the butter cow; the year of the cat store.

And so it was this weekend, as I returned from Des Moines this afternoon after two and a half days of not enough sleep and more than enough fun, laden with treats and toys for the cats, and a few for me as well. After being surrounded by so many people and two adorable puppies and three shy cats to entertain and spoil, it was wonderful to be home with my own cats once again. I dropped my suitcases on the floor and leaned down to pet all of them as they crowded around me like abandoned children, telling me stories of loneliness and neglect until I had appeased them with all the attention they desired.