The cat is dying

When Beautiful Wife and I first got married, each of us had two cats. Mine were Wayward and Astrophe, while hers were Syn and Claire. We'd pictured merging the two households as a sort of fuzzy Brady Bunch kind of thing, but in the event they didn't blend well. Claire and Wayward kept scrapping for dominance, and various cats were spraying all over the apartment trying to mark territory, and... it just didn't quite work out.

So Wayward went to live with my parents, in a life of luxurious indulgence that I can only admire. The other three stayed with us. Astrophe, apparently, was sufficiently unthreatening that he could bond with the other two.

Then we had children, and I can barely describe the looks of betrayal that the cats gave us as they aged. Cats and toddlers are natural enemies, as cats are very particular about how they get touched, and toddlers will touch everything and have no sense of restraint. But we mostly kept them separated, and everyone was mostly all right.

And, of course, we all got older -- though when the toddlers do that, it's called "growing up". So, y'know, they grew up. The rest of us, cats included, just got older.

Eventually, for health reasons, we put Syn down. A few years later, we did the same for Claire. Neither was easy. Shortly after Claire left us, my parents did the same for Wayward.

And somewhere in the past two weeks, I've realized that we're looking at the same thing for Astrophe. On one level, it's almost overdue; he was looking skinny and miserable two years ago, but we altered his diet to something much more gravy-intensive and got him onto a semi-regular dose of miralax, and for a fairly long while he was doing a lot better. But over the last two weeks or so, well...

He's amazingly skinny. His bones are all very prominent. He keeps wandering into the kitchen and looking at us, but no matter what we give him he eats very little of it. He walks slowly, almost (but not quite) limping. One day last week, he managed to poop and throw up over a huge portion of the house, basically tracing a path from Firstborn's room back to his litter box. It took me a solid half an hour to clean it all up. And as of today, he keeps settling on this one mat beside the litter box -- way closer to his own waste than a healthy cat should be willing to settle. He doesn't seem to be in pain, he's just... increasingly, relentlessly weakening. It's been very sudden. And so far, our every effort to bring him back from this has failed.

He's still a sweet kitty. He's still... I don't know, not comfortable but also not miserable, and we're trying to give him as much affection as we can in whatever time we have left. But he's quieter than I ever remember him being, slower than I ever remember him being, more careful in his movements than I ever remember him being.

He's twenty years old, and I'm pretty sure the cat is dying.

My Father Takes The Next Step And I Am Weird

My father is not a man who was built for solitude. He needs to have people around; he needs talking and touching and interaction. He's an extrovert to an extent my introverted brain frankly finds a little hard to understand.

My mother's death hit him very hard. I mean, Hell, it hit me pretty hard, too. But for him it wasn't just the grief. It was also the solitude. Despite the best efforts of family and friends, and even despite getting a renter to live in the house with him, he was just spending a lot more time alone than was really good for him. There were also some medical issues that interfered with several of his hobbies (playing and repairing musical instruments, for example) and left him even more cut off. It was bad enough to have us all pretty worried even as recently as last June.

Somewhere in there, though, he acquired a girlfriend. Or -- I suspect more accurately -- she acquired him. I'm not certain of the exact timeline, but then I don't think my dad really is either. But this was someone he'd known for years, who'd been part of his music-playing circles, someone who'd also been in a long-term marriage and (relatively) recently lost a spouse. And it seems to have grown gradually out of the two of them spending time together.

Y'all, for the past several months my father has been happier than I've seen him since my mom died. He's out of the house, he's doing things, they're doing things...

So this past weekend, they got married. It was a relatively quick ceremony -- they plan to have a big All The Friends And Family party later. Possibly more than one.

And I thought I was okay with this. I still do, actually. Think I'm okay with it, I mean. Like, I can't think of anything about this that really bothers me. I don't see it as a betrayal of my mother; I'm not worried about how this might affect finances or inheritance; I honestly like the woman; and like I said, my father seems to have undergone some sort emotional resurrection and I'm grovelingly grateful for that.

Which makes it deeply weird to me that this one, relatively brief ceremony (with a nice meal afterwards) seems to have completely consumed my emotional energy for the weekend, but it did. I mean, I wasn't completely useless for the rest of the weekend, but there was an awful lot of I Shall Sit In The Back Room And Play Video Games and at one point I actually fell asleep while still holding the controller in my lap.

I suppose it's just the intensity of it. I suppose good emotions can be just as draining as bad emotions, if they're strong enough. But I really didn't expect to react this way, whatever "this way" actually is, and I'm bothered both by the reaction itself and by the fact that I don't really feel like I understand my own reaction.

Anyway. My dad is married again, and enjoying life again, and I'm deeply grateful for that.

Dad news, not bad news

Sorry, it seems to be a theme this week, but it's what's on my mind and this blog has always been whatever happened to be on my mind. (Admittedly, skimming back through it, it does seem like I used to have more humorous/whimsical stuff on my mind than I have in recent years.) And I don't know what's changed, exactly, though the dark gods know there's no shortage of possibilities, but... Well, author Seanan McGuire posted on Twitter this morning:

Please be kind to yourselves. Please be kind to each other. And please, I am begging you, never ask anyone "what do you have to be insecure about?" Everyone has the same thing you do.

Everyone has the world.

— Seanan McGuire (@seananmcguire) June 8, 2018

...So maybe I'll just leave off thinking about reasons why I might be a lot more discouraged now than I was, say, a couple of years ago, and I'll promise to do some serious self-care this weekend. (Like, get All The Sleep, exercise, eat good food, read good books... Yeah, that sounds like a plan. 'Cause seriously, I feel like I've been pretty useless this week and honestly I just wish I'd taken the week off. I did put in for some vacation time soon, though, and that should help too.)

Anyway, Beautiful Wife went and collected my father yesterday, and brought him back to our house for the afternoon. Firstborn sat with him and worked on one of those Science Kits you can order -- Tinker Crates, I think they're actually called -- and my dad helped him out and explained concepts like "fathoms" and I don't even know what all else, but when I got home from work my father was looking better and more content than he'd seemed the last couple of times I saw him. Even the slur in his voice had gone down, though he was still having a little trouble putting words together. I'm sure some of that was just that he was making an effort, but I also think that being relaxed improves his condition and being stressed makes it worse. And my father is one of those people who really craves human contact -- interacting with people recharges him, where it just exhausts me.

My wife is brilliant, y'all.

Anyway, I'm still not sure where all this is going, and I'm still pretty worried, but there's good stuff happening too.

Still worried...

I realized last night that I'm actually completely stressed out about my dad having his second stroke in six months. I mean, it's a couple of other things, too -- the boys making the adjustment to their summer vacation and how we're handling that this year, a dental issue that's pretty mild but is still One More Thing I Have To Deal With, and the usual house cleanup and maintenance. But mainly, it's this thing with Dad.

And I've been doing that thing where I'm completely freaked out but pretending even to myself that everything's okay, or at least that it isn't that bad and we can just keep going through it, and... yeah, that's not so much what's happening. And, of course, I've been telling myself that we really just need to wait and see how this plays out, because there isn't really all that much we can do about it -- which is true, but apparently does nothing to settle the underlying sense of panic. Which means that I'm weirdly unfocused and not making the best choices, when I really need to be working on the things that I can work on.

I think I need some time off, but I need to get some stuff back under control at work, first. (Oh, yeah - there's yet another reason why I'd be, um, unaccountably stressed...) I think I'll see if I can put in for a couple of days around the July 4th holiday - that would combine for a nice extended weekend. And while I'm at it, I should put in now for the first couple of days of school in the fall. I've been meaning to take those off for a couple of years, now.

No new tale to tell, really. Just feeling unproductive, out of control, and really ready to just take a moment for myself.

Long Week

I spent most of Monday with my father in the hospital. This wasn't because he was having a medical crisis, exactly; it was mainly to disseminate information and keep everyone else from panicking.

So what happened? Well, sometime around Friday evening, he had a very minor stroke - so minor he didn't even notice it. Over the weekend, he reported that his balance was a little off, and that he was having a bit of numbness inside his right hand: his sense of touch was fine, but the hand kind of felt like he'd slept on it funny. Plus, he was having an odd bit of numbness inside his cheek, just at the base of his tongue. It wasn't until Monday morning that he connected the dots, and realized that the balance issue might have to do with reduced feedback sensitivity from his right leg, and that all three of these (fairly trivial) symptoms were on the right side of his body.

So, after a bit of internal debate, he decided to visit a hospital and get himself checked out. So he called up a family friend (one of my mother's oldest and most steadfast friends) and explained the situation and asked her to drive him to the hospital.

She promptly called me at work and said, "Your Dad had a stroke, meet at the emergency room at the hospital." This, while absolutely true, was perhaps not the most detailed or reassuring way to explain the situation.

But, okay: I drove down, met her in the emergency room, and spent the next eight hours sitting with my dad. Most of that time was spent waiting for the doctors to run tests, or to get back to us with the results of tests they'd already run. Once an hour or so, one of the nurses would come by and ask a lot of questions: Do you know who you are? Do you know where you are? Who's the president? Who was the president before him? What year is this? What's the date? Then they'd make him do things like lift one leg and hold it up, or push and pull with his arms.

Occasionally, when we actually got information, I'd text it to the immediate family and a couple of close friends. But mainly it was just sitting there, chatting and waiting.

The CAT scan revealed something that looked like some bleeding at the back of the skull, but the MRI (which gives a much more detailed picture but consequently takes much longer to read) showed that as a cluster of veins, and not as any sort of intracranial bleeding. The stroke itself was apparently visible - a tiny thing way down on the left side of the brain. They decided that they were definitely going to admit him to the hospital (all this was taking place in the emergency room, rather than the hospital proper) but then took several hours to find him a room. We were kind of expecting that; hospital visits almost always consist of a great deal of extended waiting, broken up by occasional periods of more waiting. And the staff was thoroughly professional and even quite nice.

There was some discussion of having him looked over by physical therapists and occupational therapists, but his symptoms were so minor that I doubt there's much they could do; I don't know if they ever actually came by. Dad was alert, perfectly well oriented, and quite capable of say, walking or feeding himself (when they finally let us order him some food) or drinking his tea (ditto). So, again, definitely a stroke, but just about as harmless as a stroke can ever possibly be.

And they didn't even find much in the way of probable causes or contributing factors. He doesn't smoke; he drinks, but very moderately; his blood pressure is fine. He had a heart bypass years ago, and some stents put in more recently, but they did an echocardiogram (I think? And I've probably mangled the spelling horribly...) and apparently didn't find any significant issues there.

So they released him yesterday, and I drove back down to the hospital and then drove him back to his house. He's due to go on a mission trip in two weeks (a medical mission, so he'll be in the company of doctors and dentists and suchlike, but also in the middle of nowhere) and the hospital-doctors didn't have any real objection to that. (We're still waiting to hear back from the going-on-the-mission-doctors, though.) They've upped his daily aspirin intake and the dosage on one of his anti-cholesterol/blood thinning medications, but that's about it.

You wouldn't think that sitting around for a day or two would be that tiring, but the whole thing has worn me out. I really want to just crawl into my bed and stay there for a day or two, but we're a bit shorthanded at work and I really can't. So I'm off, but I've promised myself that as soon as I get back home I am Going To Bed. And I hope the rest of you are taking good care of yourselves out there, too.

A Well-Planned Midlife Crisis

Every life has a handful of turning points: times when, due to choice or luck or circumstances, things go one way instead of another. People, being people, often like to quantify these moments - to mark them, and celebrate them, and ritualize them: birthdays, for example, or graduations. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, except that some of the most significant turning points are only recognizable after the fact - while some of the points that we have rituals to mark turn out not to be terribly significant at all.

To pick a personal example: the Beautiful Wife and I have passed our Ten Year Anniversary as a married couple. This is, for some people, a very deal - an entire decade together! For us, well, it wasn't that big a deal. We might have missed it entirely if something else hadn't reminded us. (In fact, I think that part of the reason we're still together is that we both have a very One Day At A Time approach to being married. Well, that and a good sense of humor.) For us, the really big one was our third anniversary, probably because that's almost exactly how long my Supposed Former Marriage lasted.

Sometimes, though, you can see one of these moments coming. Right now, for example... well, I'm about to turn forty; the Beautiful Wife and I have decided that we are absolutely not having any more children; I still have a steady job, one that barring some sort of catastrophe I'll be able to retire from; and the boys are getting old enough to be involved in school and other outside-the-house sorts of things. So, clearly - unmistakeably, irrefutably - it's time to start planning my midlife crisis.

Now, I know what you're probably thinking: there are plenty of people who have their midlife crises without any sort of planning at all. Well, I don't hold with that. If I'm going to have a midlife crisis, I'm gonna do it right.

The first step is to get a new vehicle. It will need to be something sleek, fast, and sporty - something purchased in complete defiance of the possibility that I'll ever need to take the kids anywhere. Also, ideally, it should be something that really isn't designed to be driven safely. I've checked to see how much my bank is willing to loan me, and together with the savings in my account it looks like I can afford a very nice, brand new, top of the line skateboard. So that part is covered.

Step Two, traditionally, is to trade in your wife or girlfriend for a better model. I kind of cheated on this one, since I married the perfect woman in the first place; if you start at the top of the line in the first place, there's no such thing as a better model. So I'm already covered on this one.

Step Three is where it gets tricky. At this point, the goal is to recapture my youth, or get in touch with my Inner Manliness, or reinvent myself as someone new, hip, and radical. Possibly all three at once. So, for the next year, I'll be living in a cave in the woods with nothing but my wits to rely on, eating only what I can kill for myself, wearing only my own hand-crafted clothing, and learning to commune with the bats. (Catching rabies is completely optional.) I'll also need my laptop, so I can use this experience to become a famous author. Oh, and I'll need alcohol in order to get any writing done, so it'll probably have to be a cave in the woods near a particularly charitable brewery.

Finally, of course, I'll return home having recaptured the primal essence of myself. I can picture the triumphant return already, as I come zooming fearlessly into the driveway on my sleek and powerful skateboard, hermit's beard flapping in the wind behind me, wearing a loincloth that I painstakingly crafted for myself from tree bark and poison ivy, with bats nesting in my hair and my soon-to-bestselling manuscript tucked lovingly under one arm. There I'm met by my adoring wife and beaming children, who have naturally spent our year apart pining for my return; while reporters and literary agents circle the yard, hoping for the barest moment of my time.

Trust me. That's exactly how it will go.

Why Adults Can't Play Minecraft

On a strictly personal level, this may be the most depressing thing I've read in a long time:
The Hardest Game. For Adults.

I don't really miss being a kid. I like the adult I grew up to be (and, quite possibly, am still growing up to be). But there are things that I miss, and being able to just sit down and lose myself in a world of my own creation is one of them. I don't know how much of that is neurological, and how much is lack of unstructured time (and energy), and how much is lack of practice, but I miss it.

I Am Not Making This Up

My job includes a fair amount of random weirdness. These are usually things that make perfect sense on their own, but at first glance have no apparent connection to my actual job. (I will mention, again, just how much I fear the phrase "other duties as assigned".)

One of those tenuously connected duties is this: I put up the scores for a golf league for senior citizens. As a result, I'm on their mailing list.

So this morning, I opened my e-mail to find a letter from the President of the league. I was expecting the latest set of scores. Instead, I find a collection of notes and announcements. Heading the list is this:

Big mystery that needs to be solved. At the awards banquet, somebody won tickets to a regular season Stars hockey game. The problem is that nobody remembers who it was. [Name Omitted] won the pre-season tickets but we don’t know who won the regular season tickets. If you were the winner, or know who it was, please tell [Name] or [Other Name] at [e-mail] or call him at [phone number].

This probably shouldn't be quite so funny to me.