my heart is a glorious machine;

First on my to-do list: stop procrastinating. (It is also the second item. And the last.) Next: wash clothes, begin packing for Alaska. Look up Greyhound routes to Pittsburgh airport (have tried, not really getting anything at all; also the Greyhound website is virtually useless), call bloke who might be able to give me a ride on Friday. Decide about snacks. (I think I shall subsist mainly on bread and cheese for meals. Why? Because it is magnificent. Bread and cheese and, er, chocolates.) Decide which books to bring. Oh dear. Make baked goods? Also must hole up at some point and listen to Patrick Wolf's new album, possibly in the book closet with candles. (This is important. Shut up.) And: play with tiny tiny kitten.

Yes yes yes! I have a wee fluffy kitten! Sarah and Hannah's cat just gave birth again last month, and I was promised a kitten, and she was dropped by yesterday. Good heavens, kittens never stop moving -- until suddenly they fall over and sleep for ten minutes without warning. Half the night she was hurling herself around my room, batting at bits of paper and candy wrappers and my shoelaces and the air, jumping here, leaping down again, pouncing hither and thither...


So yes. KITTEN. VERY IMPORTANT. Her name is Willow (or Pussy Willow, or Tib -- after the heroic cat in Dodie Smith's The Hundred and One Dalmatians -- or Great Ball o' Fluff -- Mum called her Fluffernutter, which is appropriate as she was a complete nutter last night -- or, hey, Miss Kitty Fantastico; let's hope there's no crossbow lying around), and she has broken our record of only ever having greyscale cats. No, really! First cat, Miss Mistoffelees (Misty for short): white and grey. Second cat, Roscoe: black and white. Third cat, Bartholomew: black. Calico is a very welcome change in the pattern. She is very dainty, but reasonably fierce when she wants to be -- she was accidentally introduced to Bartholomew when she leapt out of my arms and onto his back; they stared at each other for a moment, the air vibrating between them, and then Bartholomew let out some kind of indescribable horrible cat noise and attacked. Willow let out a series of tiny ferocious burblings in turn and fought back in the three seconds before I reached into the fray and attempted to extract her. She kept shrieking and clawing furiously after I had removed her, hissing like a pro (well, she does have big brothers), and clawing my hand to pieces before I finally calmed her down. So, hopefully the cats will come to an agreement soon. It took some time with Roscoe and wee Bartholomew, too. And it's really all on Bartholomew's side -- Willow is a sweet cat (if fierce, like certain of her namesakes), and as soon as Barty Cat, Jr. gets over his Alpha Cat complex, they should be fine. Oh, cats.

Today I put fairy lights up all around my bedroom. I have had no end up trouble getting them to stay up there -- the sticky bits on the backs of the hooks keep coming loose and then strings of lights go tumbling down -- but they look very magical, twinkling up there, especially earlier, in the dusk-light, looking out the window and seeing shadowy clouds behind the one great leafless tree that spreads over the panorama out my window. I love the view out my window: it seems so beautifully arranged, like a picture, the way the tree is positioned, and the Presbyterian church across the street, and the pumpkin patch at the preschool next door. Once I woke to find a brightly coloured bird sitting very visibly in the tree, the tree I want to call my tree although it isn't even in our yard and isn't really all that close to the window, just visible from it from all angles.

Speaking of the view outside, and the pumpkin patch -- Bartholomew, our black cat, has become the pumpkin patch's mascot. Because he is a cat, and a particularly vain one even by cat standards, he has been going over there every day, lurking amidst the pumpkins and curling up by the sign and generally looking as though he's a purposeful part of the display. The preschoolers are apparently in love with him. I was told by the lady selling pumpkins that Bartholomew had caught a mouse in the backyard several days ago and was playing with it, tossing it in the air, as he will do (he is a great scourge of wildlife wherever he lives) -- and a whole flock of wee kidlets were pressed up against the preschool window, watching him with delight. Morbid creatures! This afternoon a little five-year-old girl came running up to me as I was getting the last of Mum's groceries out of the car, her curls bouncing, and presented me with a pumpkin: the lady behind the table, who I believe was the little girl's mother, had painted up a pumpkin for us, beautifully, with Bartholomew licking his paws, and the pumpkin patch, and it said BARTHOLOMEW, THE PUMPKIN PATCH CAT. Which may be the sweetest thing ever, and it is now sitting in a place of honour on the front porch. Of course now the ridiculous cat will only get all the more vain. (I have some pictures of him which I will have to put up soon, once I get one of the pumpkin.) 

Anyway, my bedroom is nearly set to rights -- and also nearly ready to be photographed for you eager lot. My very pretty Victorian-wallpaper message board is on the wall, and while it was bare for quite some time, it is now full of postcards. I got one from barefoottomboy two days ago, and this morning two from England -- one from lady_moriel and another from midenianscholar. So I look cheery and cultured and suchlike, and I love having Reminders of People where I can see them. (I have also stuck up the business card my Future Employer gave me, so that just the half shows that says Waldenbooks on it, because I am silly & sentimental. My job training is in three days!!) 

Today was actually Not A Good Day, mentally. I keep feeling restless and sort of wretched and have to keep making myself busy so I don't feel so listless and wrong-headed. And I have this low feeling of dread or nagging worry or something; the sort of awful feeling you get when there is a Very Bad Thing you cannot change, or something that is about to happen that will be a Very Bad Thing, or something very important you have left undone, not a thing that will be Inconvenient, but a thing that will Hurt. Only I can't find the cause, so I keep trying to be busy instead, because that helps a little. I've been trying to work out causes from all the tangle of messy, barely rational emotion lately -- I am beginning to get a little better at, instead of brooding endlessly about something, or brooding endlessly about nothing, trying to find the reason for the bad-feeling instead, and trying to rationalise it away, or do the thing I left undone that is bothering me so. It works sometimes, anyway. So that is why I put up the lights, and finished my closet organising, and did some straightening about the house, and things.

I do need more posters and things however. Must get to work on that collage for the door, only I haven't actually found any magazines yet. Perhaps I can see if the library will give me any for free.

Oh, also, I have a Thing tomorrow -- a church that our church is sort of affiliated with is having a Halloween Alternative (...yes. two weeks before Halloween. sigh.), and I am singing at it, because this one bloke who does music there was at My First Gig and...kind of likes me a lot, I suppose. So he invited me. I think there may be food, and possibly a bonfire? I am sort of looking forward to it -- celebration of autumnery! -- but also it is one of those things that my brain only barely registers until it is actually happening. Odd how that works. Perhaps it is only my brain. Then again it has only been me recently in the last year or two that has been so botheringly disconnected from nearly everything.

Well, it's over. Roscoe died around noon today. We were all with him when he went, touching him and loving him and we knew he was loving us. He's always been an astonishingly loving cat -- even when he could barely stand these last weeks he made a point of coming to sit by the table while we ate dinner every evening. We discovered that last night he crept into each of our bedrooms to sleep for a while -- I know he cuddled with me on the bed for half an hour before he moved to the foot of the bed, then to the floor. He must have known he didn't have another chance and wanted to say goodbye to his family. (He didn't want to be an invalid, either -- after I cuddled with him on my bed for a while this morning, I brought him down to be with everyone else and put him on his favourite chair, the one he and Bart -- mostly he! -- have rent to bits with their claws. He lay there for a while, but after about half an hour, when our backs were turned, he tried to stand up and tumbled limply off the chair. After that, we filled his cardboard box -- he's always loved cardboard boxes, and laundry baskets, and other things he's not even supposed to fit in -- with soft cotton from the chair, as it's all tumbling out the back, and settled him down in there.)

I must have sat with him for three hours -- Mum woke me up at eight this morning to tell me that she thought he didn't have very much longer, and we all gathered around and stroked him, but after everyone else drifted off for a while to attend to general morning needs, I didn't leave -- I couldn't, I suppose. He was always my cat, by and large. He picked me, as we often say. Later Mum and Dad and Timmy and Heidi drifted back (Leandra too, after a while -- she was sleeping upstairs but later she wanted her breakfast so Mum went to get her and brought her down), as he worsened -- started gasping for breath, and twitching every now and then. We stroked him and stroked him; every so often we might stop and he would lift his head to look at us. That would drain all of his strength and he'd flop down into his box again. He loved having us near, I know. I'm so glad -- we're all so glad -- that he died in the morning with his family all around him instead of in the middle of the night, or outside someplace where we mightn't be able to find him for a while (he loved hiding under the house, for one thing). Dad was home, too -- he wasn't supposed to be, but his morning school client called in sick, so he didn't have to go in. We held our darling kitty and loved him and reminisced and wept, and took one last photograph of the family -- Dad, Mum, I, Timmy, Heidi, Leandra, Roscoe, and Bartholomew.

Finally, he started gasping for breath urgently -- that went on for a while. He'd gasp and then subside for a while and then give another great gasp. His legs kept twitching restlessly and spasmatically. He hadn't seemed to be in much pain before then -- he'd just been very solemn and sad, as he'd been for the past several weeks. Grotesquely, tufts of fur fell off in a few places -- his skin was seperating, or something; there was blood and it was horrible. There wasn't very much of this, thank God. We kept feeling for his heartbeat and it kept beating more and more faintly until finally there wasn't anything to feel. Mum had shut his mouth, which kept lolling open as he tried to breathe; Dad shut his eyes; Timmy and Heidi and I each held him one last time, and then we straightened his box and later put a cloth over his body. 

I feel very queer; I'm not quite sure what to make of all of the things going on my head and body just now. As I said, I've never watched anybody close to me -- anybody at all -- die before, and even if he was 'only' an animal, he was a very dear friend of our family, very kind and loving and giving even to the end. He was alert almost to the point of death. He just wanted his family with him. I've never seen death before, and I don't know what to make of it. I feel a bit numb, I suppose -- very, very odd, full of things I don't even know how to put names to. Sort of shaky, and quiet, and pulled into myself a bit, I suppose.

It's a rainy day, the sort I like best. Funny, this would be a beautiful, near-perfect day, I think, if Roscoe hadn't died. Dad took Timmy and Heidi and I to the library a while after lunch (I was hungry and yet I couldn't stomach much, so I had toast and orange juice and felt a little better), and that was nice, even if I can't get anything out that Dad does not charitably check out on his own card for me. I am reading one of my books now, another book by Madeleine L'Engle about life and love and living and God and ourselves. (I wish I could meet her. I feel like I know her, a little, and I think we would like each other. We think the same ways about astonishing little things -- about words, about writing, about love, about art, about God -- so many little things, the little things that turn out to be the big things. There are some writers, you know, whom you love to read, and maybe you live in their books sometimes, and maybe they mean something -- but then there are other writers whose writings are bits of you -- they're writers of your heart and they get into your soul and take roost there gently and irrevocably, and something about them is like being home, except it's a home you didn't know was home and it turns out it's more widely and fully home than the house you're living in, or the last house, or even a succession of houses. I've been feeling a lot of that, lately -- finding vivid familiarity, a sense of having been there before, in unfamiliar places. I'm trying to understand what that means, why it is.) All of the books I got were unfamiliar books by familiar authors, which is nice when one needs comfort -- there's always a risk with a wholly new book. You mightn't like it at all. It might offend you in some way; it might present ideas that are much too alien to the way you see the world. It might even, heaven forbid, turn out to be dull. Unconsciously I think I must approach most books this way. Some authors are like friends, though, and with a new book by an old author, you have both the sense of familiarity and the sense of discovery, which may amount to the best of all worlds.

We also went Mother's Day gift-shopping (what, really, Mum, don't look surprised; you know that's why we were gone so long and why we hid those bags straightaway! :D) and Timmy bought all of us chocolates out of his own pocket, which was incredibly sweet of him, and outside smells like rain and green things and there is still a bit of hope glimmering in the corners of the world. I know this, because when we were driving home in our great hulking monster of a van, the sun broke through a cloud or two and streamed down on the road like a benediction.

I am reading A Circle of Quiet (as I said) and it is exactly the sort of book I need right now -- quiet and reflective and serious and tender and wistful and loving. Bartholomew is very nice to have about, too; I can't imagine if we hadn't got him -- imagine a house with no cats at all! He's curled up in one of my dresser drawers now, being obstinately difficult to see in his blackness until he opens his startlingly golden eyes and regards you with the particular sort of haughty hubris that can only be found in the visage of a cat.

The world is very quiet. It's astonishing and odd and terrifying and fascinating and horrible that there was someone who was alive and breathing and moving this morning and now there is nothing left but a shell of flesh and bone and fur. Another mystery of life and time and death. The world brims with mysteries that cannot be solved or really understood, though they've got to be so commonplace that we don't often remember that they are questions without answers.

I'm glad my bedroom is clean, for once, with the bed made (it had ceased to be a suitable atmosphere for reading; I had to clean it, and I have spent the past three days doing a lot of daydreaming, thinking, listening, and being -- it's been oddly solemn). Outside is grey and also bright; I have the windows flung open and the breeze comes in and wends its way around every now and then. I have pale light coming in the window onto my pillow (I moved my pillow from one end of the bed to the other, so now I wake with the sun on my face, and when I am lying on my back I can see the other window with all the brilliant green of tree curtaining it) and onto my book. The world's shifted position. (A thunderstorm has started; the world out the window is a frightening, manic shade of green. Thunderstorms always seem to me like the world cracking and crumbling and remaking itself over again.) I'm not quite sure what to do about that, but I am feeling as if someday everything's going to be all right.

Bartholomew-the-not-quite-kitten has been getting high on catnip lately and rolling about on the floor pawing at a) things which are not there, b) his bit of scratching cardboard, or c) us, not to mention embracing his scratcher and otherwise acting like a kitten whose sense has gone away without leave. This is especially funny as Roscoe, the Alpha Cat, has never been particularly drawn to catnip, although he has been exhibiting kitteny behaviour lately, such as wildly chasing tin-foil balls through the house, and, not satisfied with catching them so easily, sends them flying again, as he goes flying himself.

Speaking of cats, you'd think bagels are safe, right? You would. I mean, we're used to covering food carefully and not leaving it on the table or suffering Dire Consequences if we do (Heidi left a plate of meat in the middle of the table a few weeks ago when she didn't finish eating before we had to visit Mum in the hospital: when we returned, the plate was upside down on a chair, the dinner roll had tumbled onto the floor, and the meat was so very gone that there was a hole through the paper plate), but we don't necessarily worry about protecting our bagels. Well, we got a dozen bagels from Panera (♥!!) when we were in Pittsburgh visiting Leandra yesterday (read Mum's post for more on that), and I had an Asiago cheese one warmed up and sitting on the table whilst I hunted about (futilely, alas) for ham lunchmeat. I heard Bartholomew batting something around, but I didn't pay attention, because he is always batting at something, being a kitten and being curious--but when I finally turned around, there he was with half of my bagel on the floor, nibbling away. I sent him fleeing, and the bagel was saved, but I am still astonished. Cat? Bagel? Really? We do know that he loves cheese, but--really? Bagel? 

By the by, I'm nearly convinced that this cat is the Doctor in, well...cat form. (Can Time Lords regenerate into cats?) Because, seriously. He is cocky and reckless and also adorable, and, being a cat, is devastatingly intelligent. OMG TEN = ANIMAGUS YAY. 

If he's not the Doctor, maybe he's SIRIUS. I mean, he's black. And cocky. And he exhibits a lot of general Marauder-like traits. Maybe the curtain didn't kill Sirius, it did the next worse thing: turned him into a cat. How embarrassing that would be for Padfoot, you know? :DD

I. This is probably the most newsworthy, so I'll get it out now because I am feeling charitable and won't leave you lot hanging in suspense: THE BABY IS A GIRL. !!! Mum had an ultrasound...er, several days ago...and it was, according to her and the doctor, very obvious. I...actually forgot to post about this, which is really rotten and scatterbrained of me, but I didn't get on until late that day, and I posted it on my Xanga, and...here, have a whole barrel of excuses; they're on sale today. Anyway, we are quite excited (except Timmy, who was hoping for a brother to even out the pack, but he's coming around), and Mum and I are already having to resist buying cute baby clothes.

II. Our wee kitten's got a name at last, six days after we got him! The trouble was that Dad and the rest of us couldn't agree on a name, and the poor kitten got called 'kitten' for days until Heidi suggested 'Bartholomew', inspired by the Doctor Seuss books Dad had got out for her recently (Bartholomew and the Oobleck; The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins). I like having a long name for a wee kitty, and somehow it suits him, although we may take to calling him Black Bart as well. (And, you know, we could call him Barty, too, which by a long, long stretch of imagination, logic, and fangirlishness could end up as Ten. Which...has just proved me The Ultimate Fangirl, as I am fangirling for a fandom I'm...not technically in, due to variables I can't, unfortunately, control. I'm going to go hide somewhere now.)

III. On the way out of Goodwill this evening, I spotted a man walking a VERY LARGE BLACK DOG. Sirusly Seriously, it was massive. Says Mum: "Oh, that looks like a Newfoundland." Says I: "OMG IT'S SIRIUS. I TOLD YOU HE LIVES IN OUR TOWN." Mum is oddly silent and not leaping jubilantly or attempting to knock the man down and make a run with the dog.

IV. While in Goodwill (a new one to us in a town we happened to be near), I finally found my winter coat. I have a lovely brown tweed dress coat that is simply crying out for a fierce black umbrella, but I can't wear it out all the time (I nearly ruined it bicycling down the highway on a rainy day; the back was horribly mudspattered and we had to take it to the drycleaners', which was when, um, we sort of totalled the car), and it's bedimmed hard to find a nice short coat. I was looking for a pea coat, but this one was just as lovely. (Yes, I look...ill and disgruntled and sort of mentally questionable in these photographs; they were taken with the ruddy flash on.) Also, the scarf? Was once owned by Sirius Black. You know it. (Can't you see him wearing it while motorbiking through the sky?)

V. I might as well get the clothingspam over with, so, um, here are photograph of me gadding about in a couple of dresses, and looking very much as though I need a shower. (Which I did. I took one afterwards.) Here I am in this rose-covered thing that I would wear to a holiday party if I...had a holiday party to go to. Here is this vintage thing with awesome buttons. And here I am in my pathetic go at dressing conservatively (we went to a different church on Sunday, and I was instructed not to worry anyone with lurid colours, striped stockings, or other things that might jump out as Really, Really Odd). Yes, the preening is on purpose. It's a foppish sort of outfit (or foppish vampire, which was what I looked like the last time I wore it, I think). How is this conservative, you may ask? Well, the colours are vivid but subtle (if you can't tell, the jacket is dark sage and the skirt is royal purple and the boots you can't see are burgundy), and...I'm not wearing the hat.

Going to bed now, I promise.

The news of the moment?

We've got a kitten!

My father currently works with special-needs students, and one of his clients' families, I gather, had kittens to get rid of. He brought most of them to the shelter run by a friend's wife, but kept one--he says it's an early Christmas present. I am an absolute girl around cats--I adore them madly, and our little kitten is so bedimmed adorable: I think one would be hard-pressed to find someone who didn't go 'awww!' a little, at least inside, at the sight of him. He is perfectly black, down to his wee little nose; and tiny and soft and very curious and a little bit nervous just now.

Now the real test will be to see how he and our other cat, Roscoe, react to each other. Roscoe is a very mellow and friendly cat (bit of a pushover, really), and this kitty seems awfully quiet and friendly, too--we'll see.


Also, Wordie is the current Best Thing Ever. I am right here, and still sorting out categories, so it's a bit disorganised. But: egad! wordlists! Combining three of my favourite things: words, lists, and community! Squee!!