Solo

Meet Solo.




It was not my intention to get another cat after we lost Pie.  Our pet losses have been high this past year: Hope adopted abruptly just before we left Texas, Emma left behind, Elliott and Lili succumbing to a hereditary heart defect, and then Pie giving in to his age.  I kind of thought we'd give Chin a go at being a single kitty, keep our hearts open and if the universe decided that we needed another cat, we'd take it in.

Enter the three year old.

Not long (at all) after Pie passed away, Bug floored me.  We were playing with a very affectionate Chin when Bug told me "Miso needs a friend who isn't dead".

...ouch.

I put in a call about a cat I'd seen on craigslist that spoke to me, and the kids and I took off to meet him.  Solo.  So named because he was all alone in the world when the family we adopted him from found him.  Though lots of people prefer to think it's a Star Wars reference. ;)

He was a pathetic little baby kitten when he was discovered.  The family he'd been living with already had a cat and a dog and had no intention of keeping him, but took Solo in, fed him, cleaned him up, got him to the vet, etc.  He was ten months old when we met him (and there goes my "no more kittens!" rule, right out the window) and the three boys in the family had gotten quite attached.

The woman we adopted him from felt that we were a good match for Solo (Bug took to him instantly and was very gentle - yay!), but I wanted to talk to Richard about it, and I hated the idea of taking the cat while her oldest son was at school.  Not getting to say goodbye is hard.  I wasn't going to do that to someone else's kid.  We went home, I talked to Richard, she talked to her son, and we went back that evening.

Solo has been a real sweetie, and fit into our house very quickly.  I expected it to take a few weeks before Chin and Solo were okay with each other, but they'd stopped hissing at one another by the end of the second day, and were tentative buddies the day after that.  Now they're inseparable.

Solo is still very much a kitten - very active and playful - but also quite mature and thoughtful.  He'll attack anything that moves (so he's not a good bedroom kitty at night), but if he knows that there's a person beneath the movement, he will NOT put out his claws.  Bug can use him as a pillow, and Solo's okay with it.


(That's an early morning sleepy-face, not sad.)

I'm glad he's here.

Pie

At the end of March, we lost our beloved kitty, Pie.  He would have been seventeen years old in April.



This has been particularly difficult for me to talk about.  Probably because it's May and I have yet to really let myself grieve.  Probably because we've been in Arizona for almost a year and I have yet to really emotionally handle much of anything that's happened over the last year.  There is a lot of grief and anger for me to deal with and I've kind of put my energies into dealing with what was in front of me, instead of why it was there or how I felt about it.

But we're talking about Pie.

Pie came to us the summer of 1994, when Richard and I moved back to Houston.  We sublet a little apartment for three months while we looked for someplace to live and volunteered with the Homeless Pet Placement League that summer.  They brought Earl Grey into our lives.  He was 2.5 years old, fluffy and full of awesome.  He also adopted a tiny, flighty, homeless kitten...Pie.  And I do mean that Earl adopted him.  After a good bit of time and a whole lot of coaxing, I was able to get close enough to the kitten to snag him and get him into our apartment, but he didn't let anyone else near him.  Just Earl.  Earl, who cleaned him and cuddled him and played with him.  I'd never seen anything like that before.  It was amazing.

Several months later, Earl came down with a bug of some sort.  He was still owned by HPPL at the time (though I was fairly certain that we were going to be keeping him at that point), so they took him for a whole week to get him to the vet.  Pie freaked.  That poor kitten was lost.  On the sixth night, he finally approached me, and I sat on the kitchen floor with him for a very long time.  After that, he was my baby.  It took another year-and-a-half before he let Richard touch him.



Fast forward.  We had many cats come into our lives and leave again under various circumstances.  Earl had obviously been an outside cat at some point and eventually turned into and indoor/outdoor cat at our house.  When we took in a litter of kittens (he was about ten at the time), he started spending more and more time outside and finally took up residence (on his own terms) with a family who lived down the street.  I still put food out for him and he'd come over and say hello when I was outside, but he let it be known that he was his own cat thankyouverymuch.  Pie became our old man.

When we moved to Arizona last summer, he was showing his age.  He'd had a tumor of some sort in his tail for years.  We had it checked out and it wasn't cancerous, but he was going to lose his tail if they removed it (which they wanted to do because it had a tendency to swell and then explode like a giant blood blister, which is as disgusting as it sounds), but he was getting more frail and there was a fear that he wouldn't survive the surgery.

I think it's safe to say that pretty much everyone was shocked at how well he'd handled Bug.  I mean, Pie was pretty much the center of my home universe and he was kind of used to being king of my heart.  He didn't care much for change, and certainly hadn't cared much for the various kittens he'd been exposed to.  That Bug latched onto him and they became buddies was somewhat amazing.

Pie was awesome with Bug.  Just awesome.  Bug could do anything to Pie, and Pie would take it.  Body slams, using Pie as a pillow...whatever.  It would make my mother cringe to watch, but Pie loved Bug and Bug loved Pie.



When we moved into our own house, Pie got to start spending some time outside.  Really, only because he was too old to get over the fence, so we knew he'd have to stay in the yard where we could see him and where he couldn't get into too much trouble.  He loved eating the weeds, keeping tabs on what Bug was up to, and acting like he could take on the neighbor's giant, barking dog.  It revitalized him.

(Hovercat!)

And then...he got sick.  Fast.  We woke up one morning and he'd been throwing up.  The best I was able to tell, he'd jumped up on the counter and decided to drink the sugar-water that Bug and I had mixed up as hummingbird food.  I thought it had just upset his stomach, but he just didn't get better.  Even when he stopped throwing up, he just never got his strength back.  It wasn't much of a surprise when we came home from Mom's one night and found him.

I miss him so very much.



Pie (1994-2011)

Bug's Adventures and a Sashiko-Inspred Sneak Peek

Having a two year old is awesome.  Bug is not-quite-27-months old and is SUCH a personality.  He talks pretty much constantly and has a wicked sense of humor.  It's amazing to see so much of his own personality showing through now that he's voicing his thoughts so very clearly.  (People stop us quite often to ask how old he is because he's been speaking in sentences for awhile now.  It didn't occur to me that that might me odd at his age.)

One of Bug's favorite things to do right now is drive.  Or ask to drive.  Every time we leave the house, he smiles his charming little smile and asks in a hopeeful tone "I want to drive?"  He's not deterred at all by the answer always being some version of "I don't think so".  He always restates the desire when we fet home again.  "I want to drive a little bit."  On our way back into the house, it's generally easier to accomodate the request.  He'll hop into the front seat (keyless, lest anyone thing we're terrible parents), readjust theseat settings, turn the radio and a/c knobs for a little while, flash the lights, open the trunk, and generally have a grand old time.

Today, I stepped away to toss ourbags into the house while he was 'driving'.  I didn't shut the door very well when I stepped back to the car and two of the cats got out.  They're big chickens so this wasn't really a big deal, but it did cut Bug's driving time.  He hopped out to help  me shoo the cats back inside.  Pie, our old man, had been eating grass so we stopped to pick some more grass to take inside for the cats.  Bug very nicely handed a little bit of grass to each cat, then exclaimed "I eating grass!"  And he was.  Ew.

Being the good helper that he is, Bug ran to grab the broom when he was done chowing down on his greens, to clean up the scattered grass bits that the cats had left behind.  I was downloading the camera.  Silly mommy.  The grass wasn't quite enough of a mess for the sweeping to continue a pleasing amount of time...so Bug dumped the cat food bowl and swept that up, too.  I like to think that if I hadn't been distracted the cat foodwould haves stayed in the bowl, but probably not.  And at least he swept it up, right?

Now, to completely change gears...let's talk about sashiko!

I've seen sashiko before and always thought that it was beautiful.  I wasn't terribly inspired to acutally give it a whirl myself until I saw this pillow over at The Purl Bee.  (They have several nice tutorials.  Search for 'sashiko' and take your pick!)  The non-traditonal color choices grabbed me immediately.  I did some reading on the history of sashiko, looked at a bunch of tutorials and a boat-load of pictures (check out Flickr's Sashiko pool for some great photos) before deciding to try it out myself.

Going completely against type, I opted to work on my hand stitching before taking on a huge project.  Once upon a time, I could do really beautiful hand stitching.  But that's a use-it-or-lose it skill, and I haven't done much with it since getting pregnant with Bug.  I pulled out some fabric that I'm not overly fond of, some emboridery thread, and got to work.

Here's a little peek of the peice that I've been working on.


Obviously, the stitching needs some work.  But I'm absolutely thrilled with how it's coming together so far.  And I find it really interesting that while this particular bit of fabric didn't really do anything for me before, I'm kind of falling in love with it now that it's embellished. I'm excited to keep working on it and looking forward to seeing how the project comes together.