Oh my goodness, where DOES the time go? I have been too busy (not as a badge of honor, more of a running around screaming sort of thing) but the semester is almost over! I should probably sit down and reevaluate my life choices but I simply don’t have the time.

I did have the time to get a new cat though, on March 31. We named her Muriel and she is about 1 year old. She’s a sweetie, and she is such a stereotypical cat: she gets into everything, she climbs on stuff, she knocks some stuff down, she sits in boxes, all that jazz. She is soft and smells wonderful and I’m happy to welcome her to my home. It turns out that like 50 percent of my current students are allergic, so maybe this cat will scare everybody away and then I’ll be less busy She does tend to get overly excited by the violin so I keep her in the other part of the house while teaching.

I took her to the vet the other day, the same vet I’d taken the Fatness to. It is amazing that even though over two years have passed, when I walked in that door I felt so much sadness, because the last time we were there was putting her down. 

When I was a child, I remember deciding that older people didn’t get sad when people they knew and loved died, because if they did, and all those people died, why, they would be sad all the time, and how could anybody live like that? And as I’ve gotten older, I realize that I was both right and wrong as a child, that you aren’t sad all the time, but you do just live with your loss. And while this is a post about a dear cat, and my new cat, and how one is replacing but not exactly replacing the other, it applies to human loss as well, in many ways.  Sadness and grief are part of life, along with joy and happiness.

So I shed a few tears in the waiting room, and then I got her checked out by the same vet, and he said she looked really healthy, and we talked about what she needed in a future appointment, and then he said “have fun with her!” which at first I thought was odd, but then realized, oh right, why even have a cat otherwise?

So my feelings are mixed, but Muriel is her own self, and she is likely to become a natural part of life here. At first, it seemed so weird, you can just go get a cat and take it home and keep it, without signing papers or applying for licenses or anything?

Mackenzie seems to like her well enough—they are getting more used to each other, but there hasn’t been any fighting or growling or hissing, so that’s been really good. Muriel had lived with a dog already so we’d hoped that would be okay.

She’s getting used to being here. And no, that’s not peanut butter on her face. That’s just her face!

We now have a cat again, and it’s been really fun. I’m glad to be back into the cat world.