Farewell to the Warrior

The exact timing of her passing is unclear. My sister and her family headed out late Thursday night and didn’t return home until late Sunday. They found her dead.

Boo showed up in my life in late 2004, and by the next year was already turning up in my fiction. I have this long series of stories that rewrite the same basic premise involving a boy and a dog. I inserted her into the second version, which can be found in Monorama, the collection I put out when I started this blog in 2012. And this way and that, she would leave a trail in my work just as surely as she shed copious amounts of her white fur.

The last time she appeared was actually last year’s George & Gracie, where she makes a random cameo, straddling the real and dream worlds.

She had been losing worrisome amounts of weight over the past year. The problem was curtailed once, but it resurfaced. She was indeed an old kitty, but when I last lived with her two years ago she was still doing quite well. She didn’t quite have her old spring, but she was very much herself. At that point she would regularly cuddle beside me. She was never really a lap kind of cat, but she always knew how to have her people time. Sometimes she would demand affection. I guess maybe that will be one of my happiest memories.

Well, pretty much all of my time with her. She was the best. She’ll always be with me, and she will always be greatly missed.

A Journal of the Pandemic #26

 So, about an hour ago now, I got my second shot.  

I would've gotten done with this slightly sooner, I really would have.  I admit I hesitated when the shot was being offered at work earlier this year, but by the time I had second thoughts, the machine had ground in other directions, and sort of left me behind.  So I finally took matters into my own hands, and got it done with CVS.

Things are very slowly returning to a sense of normal.  At least for me, my tiny corner of the world.  Even the neighborhood library is technically open again, although for some reason all its lounging chairs went missing, or something.  I'll try again soon to see where that situation's at, but this one's a big deal because it was one of the last things to hammer down the lockdowns last year, and it was the singular change to my pre-pandemic routines, altering the regular course of my weekend activities (yes, going to the library; a regular social animal I yam).

At the box office, A Quiet Place Part II was the first domestic release to cross the hundred million mark in the pandemic era.  Godzilla vs. Kong came within a tiny, tiny hair of doing it first, but having one film, let alone two, at or near that mark had been impossible to conceive until this summer.  The major releases that tested the waters before this point didn't even come close.

UPDATE: I guess they let Godzilla/Kong back in theaters to cross the finish line. I checked in with Box Office Mojo a moment ago. So officially two!

People technically don't need to wear masks all the time anymore.  At work, we do, because there are tiny babies ("tiny" apparently the word of the day), who aren't eligible for the vaccine, so we've got to maintain the status.  I kind of like wearing my collection of mustache masks.  I imagine it's become a signature.  Anyway.

Quietly floated the idea of resuming the possibility of a family reunion with the siblings, for next year, but no one picked up on it.  There will need a lot of planning, completely different from the negotiations that resulted in the one that was cancelled last year.  Part of this was made easier a few months ago, when my sister and her family transplanted to New Jersey, which is a reasonable car trip's distance from Maine, which they're demonstrating on Thursday, so our dad can finally meet his new grandson.

And life goes on.

Aronnax, Space Colony Bactria

Haven’t actually written about what I’ve been busy working on, so here’s a quick update:

Aronnax is an interesting project I’ve been meaning to do for some time, but only just gotten around to starting. It’s an edited version of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I think there’s a really interesting story in there, but it’s been buried for years under a lot of forgettable Nemo material. I know this sounds crazy, as Nemo is literally the reason anyone cares about the book. Well, what can I say? Sounds crazy. Probably is crazy. 

Space Colony Bactria is my latest comics scripting project. It’s an entirely original idea (…somewhat, ah, riffing in Star Wars), and so it’ll be the most ambitious one I’ve tackled yet, and longest. At the moment I’m plotting the whole thing out.

And as I’ve been doing for a quarter century, I’m still working toward writing Collider. In a few months I will probably have a different set of free time to play with. I’ve found it difficult to concentrate as I have when tackling book-length manuscripts in the past with the arrangement I have now.

Bizarro Kitty (Sally #4)

Every time I blog about Sally, she ends up doing the opposite of what I just wrote. So I won’t give further updates.

(Ha!)

She’s Bizarro Kitty. Bizarro, in Superman lore, has among his many quirks the speech pattern of always saying (as crudely as possible) the opposite of what he means.

Sally is Sally. She’s a stray cat and as such calls her own shots. She comes and goes as she pleases.

I just happen to love it when she’s around.

Listen, and I certainly don’t want to jinx it, but it’s just terrific how she avoided snagging a claw on a winning lottery ticket that ended up at my doorstep. That would’ve been awful!