juushika

A week ago: While sitting up in bed, I threw out my upper back. How? with magic? a perverse force of will?? My trapezius on both sides were just gone, goodbye; everything hurt, but the worst offenders were sleep and the computer. I have a huge pain tolerance and endless experience with back pain, but it resisted every one of my treatments. (In retrospect, I should have iced it—the one thing I never do for my lower back, because it causes cramping.) What is it about a different pain that's somehow worse than chronic pain, not so much because it is worse or even more debilitating, but because these carefully honed coping mechanisms are now inapplicable. I've been dealing with my lower back for 15 years; I should either be exempt from other pain, or equipped to deal with anything. I was not. It went about 4 days without improvement, but is now back to normal anxious-person's-muscles level of ow.

A few days ago: Dee's mother's dog, Casey, died suddenly. Cut for brief discussion of pet death: ( Read more... ) This is not my immediate pain, but I still care immensely. All dogs are good dogs, but he was such a good dog, surfeit with love, content if he could just lean on you or lay against you and be touched. And so obedient, especially when I knew him and his puppyhood awful (of which I've heard horror stories!) was gone. And so engaged with his people. The loss hasn't quite registered for me, yet; but I've never been so glad that I had Thanksgiving with him and Odi. This was Casey: one, two, three, four.

Last night: Dreamed the mother of all anxiety dreams: I was back in school, living simultaneously-via-dream-logic at Devon's parents's house and in a boarding environment, and became convinced that the environment was so unhealthy and I was so stressed that I shouldn't have pets anymore, so I drowned August by luring her into a swiftly-flowing river with treats. Cut for suicidal ideation: ( Read more... ) I know what factors underlay all aspects of this dream; it was still singularly awful.

Tomorrow: Taking the train down to see Devon, to celebrate our 13th anniversary. (See: dreaming about his parents's house.) This is absolutely a good thing! It also bring with it "I have to leave the house" anxiety and "why do I have to travel to see him after thirteen years?" anxiety. It has been a long and strange week, an unearthly haze of blurred vision and intense pain and abstracted loss and anxiety. It will be good to make a clean break with it by traveling.

Following a seizure or heart attack or similar cataclysmic event that left him physically impaired, Dee had Spike euthanized on March 23rd. He was two months shy of 19 years old. ( More. )

Mamakitty reached her two month quarantine mark, had negative results on her second round of viral tests, and has joined the household! It only took about one day of supervised cat socialization before I felt comfortable letting everyone have free access to the entire house and each other. Mama is settling in beautifully. The only roadbumps are ones I expected: when Gillian is annoyed or feisty, he tries to take it out by chasing other cats; Mama is a little skittish and uncertain around Gillian and August, and remains easily startled by sudden sound or movement.

But while there is no cat cuddling, neither have there been scuffles; at most, there's bit of hissing. Mama has learned to get excited for foodtime (sometimes she even meows!); she eats and sleeps in Dee's room. She's turned out to be surprisingly playful—perhaps because play is still so novel, she's even more active than Gillian. She's sweet and cuddly, and learning that she doesn't need to jump off the windowsill or bed and go hide whenever someone enters the room. In short, she's learning to enjoy the freedom of the house and growing comfortable with it, and us, and the other cats—and what it means to be an indoor cat who has safe places and soft warm places and people who have love and toys and treats. She is still timidly exploring downstairs, and still adjusting, but both Dee and I are delighted to see how well she's doing. She retains the markers of a cat that was outdoors and unsafe for many years, but this is a good home for her and we all know it.

I've been feeling a little strange, lately; I'm not sure if it's back pain or depression, or both or neither, or just a minor strangeness I'm wallowing in, but I've mostly just been staying in and playing too much TERA and reading a lot. I don't feel awful about it. If I disappear from the universe for a few days it's not the end of the world (and not really that different from any other day).

Woof, Devon's family's dog, died in the night. I am getting very tired of writing death announcement posts. Her health has been failing slowly for some time, and rapidly for the last few months, so this does not come as a surprise; a few months back I went to Corvallis expressly to see her after what was probably a stroke, and I've been back once more since then, so I have had a chance to see and celebrate her, and this doesn't hit me as hard as it would otherwise. She lost her ability to move late last night, and developed breathing problems; they took her to a vet, and she pretty much laid down, fell asleep, and died. The question of euthanasia had been on the table for a while, but she was vivacious enough for some mild play until yesterday (her favorite toy was cardboard tubes), but she'd still been living with limited mobility, severe pain, and a detached retina in these last few months; this was just her time, and it sounds as peaceful as it could have been. As such, I think everyone's doing okay in the wake of it. The possible exception is that Doug, Devon's father, has been out of town on business for some time; this was essentially his dog.

I've known Woof for nearly as long as I've known Devon. She was a problematic beast, with intense attachment issues and a number of health problems (white dogs, you guys: they have it hard), and she loved with a trembling depth, and she adopted my guinea pigs and never forgot them. When I had them there and would put them outside under the top of a wire cage, she'd spend the entire time running circles around them and trying to paw off the cage cover so that she could lick them; one time she did manage to set them free, and then it was she who found them, leading me to each pig where he was huddled in the bushes around the property, so that I could scoop him up and put him away and we could find the next.

Love is a dog. (Yes, even the stupid one who is downstairs howling out the sadness of his soul because he's in the crate for half an hour while Dee weedwacks the back yard.) I'll miss her.

Be warned that if I ever have the occasion to housesit and watch your cats (or other pets—I don't discriminate, much) for a few days, I will spend most of those days with a camera by my side.


For the last few days I've been watching Spike, who would like to know why.

( Spike spam: +5 pictures. )

He'll be thrilled to see his person when she gets back tomorrow, though, I've no doubt of that.

I bring you also bonus August. When I washed bedding before Devon got here, I wanted to wash her microfleece blanket—but the rest of the bed was naked and she was (as usual) curled up on said blanket at the time. So like the sap I am, I went downstairs, got the other microfleece blanket, brought it up, laid it out on the bed, and carefully lifted my cuddly cat from one comfy blanket to the next.


And she stayed there for hours, and adopted it for the weekend.
Having two blankets upstairs also meant that my boyfriend and my cat didn't have to fight for bedding every night. But the second blanket is back downstairs now because so help me, not even my cat needs two.

We're on day two of fantastic weather—gray skies and cool days and the occasional chance of rain—and after almost a week of heat (some of that without the even saving grace of a breeze) it's a blessing but also hard to believe. Part of me is suddenly gearing up for autumn—and not just mentally, but with a physical instinct towards soft warm fabric and an ache that begins in my heart. Part of me is unwilling to engage with or even appreciate the thick billowing clouds, because I know that there's more heat and blinding sun to come, and it'll feel even worse if I've adapted back to the cool.

I don't even know if it's weather you come to love. Myself, it seems bred into my bones, and the cool and wet and clean is where I'm meant to be, and the first hint of autumn is a homecoming. It revitalizes me. When the heatwave resumes I'll be crushed, so help me. But this autumn will be miraculous.

Anyway. Today I woke (the second time—both Devon and I have been sleeping poorly, and I was also up between 3a and 9a, but then managed to sleep until noon) being able to see a little more than just a line of type on a blank page—which is to say that when I pause for two minutes and remember that Madison is dead, it doesn't just trigger a sense of incomprehension; it triggers instead the beginning of comprehension, which is to say grief. It's not entirely unwelcome. That something, even if it's pain, is less frightening than the void of nothing—and this weather indulges gray melancholy with gray skies. It's exhausting, though. Today Dee and I went out on a distracting shopping trip, and I used up what bit of energy I had there. Then we went out to comfort food (the restaurant was warm against the cool of the day) and across the street for coffee. It's silly, but the warm cup in my hands almost made me cry—it's like a soft warm sweater, and it's a comfort, and I've been craving that (coffee, and comfort) since I heard the news.

Last Friday, Dee and I went to see The Decemberists in concert. They're turning out to be mostly a live-only band for me, and I'm enjoying it. Recorded and studio-refined, the twang to Meloy's voice bothers my ears—but live I embrace and forgive and soak up the energy. It's fantastic. On Sunday, we took the bus into the city center and went to Powell's for my birthday book shopping trip. I gave myself a blister on one heel, but the skyscrapers cast shadows on the sidewalks and I came away with a small but wonderful (and tailored to my taste in obscure books and favorite authors) stack, with leftover money for the next impulse used book purchase. On and off, I've been feeling a renewed desire to embrace the opportunity of living in Portland—and the heat has been utterly decimating my will to do so, so it's good that there was something to force us out of the house and into life. Since Madison's death, I've been trying to stay occupied because of the fear of seeing that line of text on that white page, so the trips out were exhausting in just the right sort of way.

Dee is heading out of town tomorrow to attend Dragon*Con. Devon resumed full-time work this week, so I'll see some of him while she's gone but not a full four-day stay. I was ambivalent about facing that time alone, but now I think I can embrace it. Oh, the weather will heat up by the weekend, and I'll be miserable and complaining as I play my video games. But right now the weather tells me that it's safe to be alone, and grieve. As much as my attempts at faith have consistently proven unsuccessful, I'm looking towards a thoughtful Samhain this year. If it seems silly that these deaths are impacting me so strongly, know that it seems quite right to me. I've been realizing, and I've been forced into correcting, my incomprehension of death. I want to see the world die around me. I've always found life in that—in the vivid colors and the cycle it precipitates and the way it makes my heart—and perhaps it will bring me full circle. I can dwell, and die, and come alive again.

Thank you all for your condolences. As always for this sort of thing, that's what I'd be saying each time: Thank you, thank you. I am grateful. I'm just also tired.

So here's the thing. It wasn't until the last year or two that the fact of my grandmother's death really hit me. She'd died some five years before. I've written about this—in some depth when Dink died, and in passing mentions when Alfie died, and I keep meaning to sit down and really explore the issue but, no surprise I suppose, it's one I don't want to explore while I'm coping with it—but: I don't miss people, and as such I find it difficult to comprehend death. I tend to see the past as a bad memory and the future as a terror, but the bulk of my brain lives chronically in the here and now. I don't have a good grasp of trends over time or general histories, and there are some things I find it hard to project forward. And I don't miss anyone. I have a healthy sense of nostalgia and can get lonely, and I can miss the stimulation associated with certain social interactions, but with the exception of Devon I don't specifically miss anyone when they're not there. I can go months without remembering to contact my immediate family, and it's not them, it's me: it just doesn't occur to me that I should. I suppose it's a little hard to explain.

Death is the knowledge that you'll be missing for the rest of your life. Without missing, and with a poor concept of the past and future, I don't really understand death. People go away, but I never really need or expect their return, and there's no sense of loss.

But December last year or so I was talking with my mother about the upcoming (second) cruise and realized that my grandmother was dead. She died when I was a freshman in college, and I went to her service with almost no trace of emotion; there's some uneasiness between my family and my grandfather's second wife, because of how soon he remarried and because she's so insistent on the ease with which we (grown) grandchildren should adopt her as replacement grandmother. I saw those grandparents about twice a year as a child and biyearly as an adult, and (socially) I take after that side of the family, which means we were relatively close.

And it bothers me that my grandmother is dead. It bothers me because of the fallout it's had on my family and my (lack of) relationship with my grandfather, but it bothers me also because while we didn't have the emotional resonance that some people have in these relationships, I was always so much my grandmother's kin; and while she wasn't remarkable in any expected sense of the word, my grandmother was a memorable and irreplaceable woman who I will never see again. It's not a keen sense of loss, it's not like I'm finally cognizant of that loss and just now beginning the grieving process. It's that the grieving process was, for me, all number of years spent not knowing it was going on, and then I came out somewhere near the other end going: Oh. This death upset me.

I'm afraid this will happen with Madison.

It's not unfair to compare a cat to a grandmother. Animals are people, to me; I spent more time with Madison than with my grandmother; I know from my experiences with losing Dink and Alfie that while the circumstances are different, the basics of my grieving process is the same. I also know—especially with the loss of Alfie—that I am better, now, at conceptualizing loss and death, and I know what helps me do that. I know that seeing his body freed me, not because it released me from my pain but because it triggered it, allowing me to experience a more immediate, intense, and timely grieving process. I'm not at peace with his loss now, but I'm so much closer to that than I would have expected to be. Where my sister can still mourn pets we lost ten years ago, I can finally comprehend those losses ten years later; that I have come so far in understanding Alfie's death is remarkable.

Madison is dead and buried. I have no control here, no immediacy. I can't trigger and embrace my grieving process. I barely feel like I'm entitled to one because of my lack of involvement—Devon didn't even tell me that she had died until they had already buried her. I understand that that seemed like a reasonable response of their end, and they're entitled to it. Not everyone finds solace in freezing a corpse for later inspection which, and let's be frank here, is pretty reasonable. And I know it's not as feasible with a cat, no matter how small. I know that she wasn't my pet in the way that the pigs were, and so I can't make demands about the disposal of her body.

But I love this cat. I suggested her name—an M name for a tabby with a classic M forehead marking, and also one of my favorite names, a name I'd always wanted to use for a pet. When she was young she used to be a wild beast (they nicknamed her Kerrigan), but I used to pick her up, hold the scruff of her neck so she couldn't bite, and enforce socialization—and bit by bit it began to work. When they finally spayed her (after years of reminders and promises that it would change her behavior), she became an entirely different cat—calmer, tamer, and fonder too of soft bedding and warm corners. It got to the point where she would purr when I picked her up—she, this half-feral five-pound wildbeast. I was the one that groomed the mats out of her cheeks, and she didn't even mind that.

Madison is the cat that taught me to be a cat. Dude is the lovable confident man of the house, and he and I get on famously—but in Madison I saw myself: not specific character traits, but the existence of character, the knowledge that each cat is a life, entity, person onto themselves, that they don't always (or often) conform to feline clichés but are nonetheless wholly themselves and wholly cat. Madison was my sister-cat, who taught me about sleeping in a circle and finding hidden corners and having tufts of fur in the ears and a poofy tail.

Intellectually I know that she's gone, and clearly some of that hit home because she I first heard the news my fingertips went numb—there was something there, some realization. And now when I run idle for a few minutes my thoughts come back to Madison is dead or and we found Madison dead earlier and they buried her with this sort of dryness—it's literally just the words, like a line of black type in the middle of a white sheet of paper. I don't know what happens after that, because I just get the white, the blank, the rest of the naked page, or I find something to do (which, today, apparently isn't sleep) so that I'm not thinking about it any more.

But that's it: a few words on a blank page. I cried on and off when Devon first told me, but I've been numb since then and I'm not sure when that will change. I'm worried that it won't. I'm on the fringes of this and not allowed in. I wasn't there, because I'm not her family. I can't turn to Devon for help because he was there and he's hurting from this too, and it's not right to compound or to trample over his grief. I can't engage with the rest of the family because I blame them and I don't want to recieve their comfort or share their grief—they were the ones that decided to make Madison indoor/outdoor and while I know that wasn't malicious, and that you can carry the the guilt of a death and still be a decent human being (as I feel about what happened with Dink), this is still something that could have been prevented and so yes, there is anger there. I will never see her corpse, and never say goodbye.

When I think of her I remember her sleeping curled, but when they found her she was on her side, dead, with blood in her mouth.

I'm angry about what happened, and I feel isolated and denied by my lack of involvement, and I don't want to be brokenhearted and grieving too but I would rather have that—violent and miserable and cathartic—than feel this hanging over my head: the loss I should feel, and can't understand; the experience that I don't know I'm engaging with, and may not resolve for weeks or years. And then I'll finally go: Oh. This is what it means that she's dead.

Maybe it'll make sense the next time I'm in Corvallis and she's not there. I don't know. I feel guilty, as always, about making this about me and my grieving process and my issues instead of about her—because it is all about her. She was a remarkable little beastie and I wish you could have known her. She used to stare at her reflection for hours. She used to suckle on microfleece blankets. She used to curl up so tiny—she was a remarkably small cat, and half of that was still fluff. She was bizarre and beautiful and she's dead, so there's that. But I don't know what to make of it, yet, and it scares me.

Dee's family came down over the weekend. They drove down Saturday the morning, stopped here for a rest while we all went out to lunch, and then Dee left with them to drive a little longer to visit family in state. They spent a day there, then came back up the Sunday evening; they spent the night, and then left Monday morning. Does that make sense? There were some car troubles shortly beforehand, so it was nice that they were able to make it despite them. Her family is very personable, and there were lots of changes around here for them to see, and it seems like everyone had a nice time.

But really, the reason I'm writing is that they traveled with Casey, Dee's mum's dog.

I tend to do best when surrounded by multiple high-social-needs animals, because I have more pettings to give than most animals want to receive. I have to remind myself to hold back on the touch and grooming and affection, or I can overwhelm an animal's desire or even tolerance, and no one wants that. As a result, I get along damn well with pets that just want a little bit of constant love. I rarely, if ever, grow tired of giving one-handed cuddles for a few hours while I read a book or watch TV. In fact it calms me, and grooming animals satisfies my obsessive tendencies, and so if they like it too—then yay.

Casey is one of those dogs that wants nothing in the whole world more than to press against you and receive your love. (Well, he would really like the food on your plate, too.) I met him when I visited Dee in Seattle, lo these many months ago, and we got along famously. These last few weeks I've been missing dogs something fierce, because I am of the rare breed that loves cats and dogs equally, because I was supposed to see dogs two weeks ago before plans for my visit home changed, and because some dogs (especially the dogs I know) are more receptive to that endless sort of love—they just want you to touch them and love them forever, please.

So he came bounding in, and scared my cat, and stared avidly at the guinea pig, and I touched him and loved him forever, or at least for a day.

And I took pictures of a black dog (Casey is a mostly-lab mix) at night. Y'all, this is Casey.


Say hello, Casey. (Hello, Casey.)

( +2, sorta. )

It's about, er, a third of the fur I ended up collecting.

I really do find that sort of thing calming.

Tomorrow evening I head to Corvallis for a thusfar-undecided period of time. I'll live with Woof for a few days, and visit Jamie at least once. Maybe after all of this, that need for dog time will finally be satiated. But Casey was a fantastic start. He's a remarkable dog—I wish you could meet him.

Kitty under my chair.

August has discovered the magic of microfleece blankets. I'm not horribly surprised—Madison goes crazy for them, she'll kneed and suckle on them like some replacement mother; August just kneeds and ... puts her nose one the fabric. It's like she's not sure why her nose and mouth need to touch it, she doesn't drool or suckle at all, but they have to be there or the experience isn't quite complete. Honestly it's like she's not sure why any of it has to happen at all—she gets this look of WHY AM I KNEEDING PLEASE SEND HELP that morphs into NEVERMIND TOO COMFORTABLE PLEASE GO AWAY. Kitten loves her blanket.

Not that it's her blanket. Boy is using it over his long weekend here, and then it'll return to the living room because my dirty little secret is that the freakishly soft feel of that fabric makes my skin crawl. Said blanket has been necessary for the weekend, however, because we hit the sweet spot in this week of remarkable, overcast, cool summer weather: Rain. Buckets of rain. It's pouring now and has been pouring all day, hours of it, I fell asleep to the sound of heavy rain and woke to find it even heavier. All of this unseasonal coolness has been welcome—seriously, Dee and I won't stop talking about the weather—but this rain, it feels too good. It's perfect. It makes me long for autumn as if it weren't already here—because I know well enough that it's not: this weather can't last forever, and now that it's had its grand finale it'll probably pass. I've come to embrace summer in the last few years, as I've learned the art of sleeping in sunlight (and since Boy has an air conditioner in his room), but this is my weather and my home: the sound of rain, the gray sky and silverblue light, the cool humidity, the cold breezes, long sleeves and blankets and a sudden craving for warm food covered in cheese. It hurts me a little to know that after this will be many more weeks of heat—not that the heat has been bad this summer, and we've found all the little tricks for coping with it, but ah, this weather. I want it to last forever.

Devon's visit has been fantastic. He got here Thursday night, and leaves this evening—we've been doing four or five days together every two weeks, which seems to work out wonderfully: the longer visits are more relaxed and fulfilling, and the weeks off give us more time to engage in our own local lives. This weekend's weather has me in the mood for books, sleep, and staying in, so we're thoroughly wasting our time away with a marathon of the original American McGee's Alice, and it's perfect. We're sleeping when we want to sleep, sometimes at night but also to the sound of the rain during the day; we have the windows half open and most people would think it's way too cold in here but that just makes the snuggling even better.

You may have noticed at some point that sleep and I are not particularly good friends—but August has me napping at all hours, these days. We curl up for a cuddle and sometimes when she drifts off, so do I. That, like this casual non-schedule that Devon and I have had this weekend, feels surprisingly natural. It embraces my preference for sleeping in sunlight and the fact that I wake up so often that pretending to get a solid chunk of sleep is foolishness, and it dismisses so many of the anxieties that make sleep difficult—like the simple expectation that I'll sleep now, for this long, and then be awake and engaged with the world. As a result of course I'm less engaged, but...

Basically, August is teaching me to be a cat. Some of it already there, in little realizations that tickle me—like when we watch out the window together and we both perk at the same sound or movement. But my sleep issues are one of the hallmarks of the disconnect between my self-as-human and self-as-cat, and so this.... Well, back in that post I wrote, "A cat that can't catnap hardly feels a cat at all." And now, sometimes, we catch a bit of sleep in the sunlight for no reason at all other than the fact that the bed feels nice. There's that argument in the therianthropy community about nature and nurture—if this identification is innate, or if it changes and grows; if it's inherent nature, of if it's tainted by affectation. It makes me feel like something of a charlatan that so much of my personal experiences are about the disconnect between my human and cat identities, and therefore about (re)learning mentalities and behaviors—not because they're not mine, but because I get in my own way where they're concerned. And for all that anxiety I still don't give a flying fuck how it might be perceived, because these little lessons, these little naps, make me so happy.

So it's been a pretty nice long weekend, I guess is what I'm saying.

Well the good news is that we don't have to return the cat: She doesn't limit her food consumption (AT ALL), leaving us to do a food-regulating dance so that Spike has constant access to his food (since he should be eating whenever he wants, to make up for his low appetite) and she doesn't, and she gets fed twice a day in my room instead. Spike is a little territorial and the two of them are still exploring and refining their relationship—to incredibly improved ends, but it's not all love and snuggles just yet. She wants to jump up on counters and desktops, so we're training her to keep to beds and couches. In other words, August is not broken, but is indeed a normal cat underneath all of her perfect floof, and we don't have to take her back to the shelter and ask for a replacement.

The bad news is that I hit critical mass and went boom. All of this new cat stuff has been energy-intensive—and even if it's largely good energy, even if it's energy expenditure that I invited, the fact is that I've run flat out. No gas, no spoons, resources hit zero sometime yesterday and so I'm making myself take it easy while I try to recharge. My analogies are everywhere. I know that realizing I've run into this wall puts me halfways towards climbing over it (all the analogies!), but it's also a lesson I need to remember for the future. I am doing so much better these days, but I will always have minimal amounts of energy and cope; my exciting life of books, video games, and making dinner once a week may not seem too taxing, but at this point I am moderately active and I need to remember that that, for me, is exhausting.

And I need to not hate myself for that, or have so little faith in my loved ones that I expect them to hate me for it, too.

There's no good mental health tag for all of this. It's not quite agoraphobia but it's that step beyond introversion that makes all social activity utterly exhausting; the anxiety likes to take a developing issue and worry it into a real and present one; depression is sort of the end result, and true to form my sleep schedule is rocky and I have little appetite, and more important than all that I just feel like shit. It's not one of these things in the same all-consuming, debilitating form they used to take—but it's a bit of each and the fact is that I'm just, well, tired.

August is good, though. She has a toy of awesome, and still sleeps with me. Spike can stop spraying any time now, but he's really engaged and interested, and I have faith that things will work out between them. We had a day and a half of fantastic weather, if your definition of fantastic means "overcast, cool, and a little windy"—and in this house, it does. We're going out to dinner and then seeing Neko Case, which isn't quite the same thing as relaxing—but I took yesterday off, and can hide in my room this weekend if I need. Things will all be fine.

I promised August's story, so here we go. Some of this is epically long, but I would rather have it all written down than not. I frown not upon skimming.

( On August 22, 2010, August was found as a stray on the city limits of Salem, Oregon: Her history.  )

On July 3, 2011, I adopted her. She's thirteen months old, and I'll be calling her August for the rest of her life. ( The adoption. )

August was vocal in the car ride home, but not quite terrified. When we got to the house I took her upstairs and into my bedroom, opened the carrier door, and she made herself right at home. I went into this ready to deal with an adjustment period, especially in a shy cat, especially one who's had elimination issues. But August sniffed around and then came over to flop down in front of me, and she has been nothing but loving, social, and well-adjusted since.

I imagine the shelter was simply overstimulating; here in a quiet home, August has blossomed. She's a companion cat, perfectly content to sleep next to you, happier still if she can sleep touching you, and always open to cuddling. She'll initiate active contact and cuddles, sometimes if she's bored or lonely, sometimes when she spots an opening (like right after I climb into bed). She likes pretty much all touch, and will lean into cheek rubs and chin scratches, but she best likes having her tummy rubbed—she flops over willingly, and even wants to have her belly fur brushed (and a good thing, too: it needs it). Petting her chest or back legs can make her a little kicky or playful, but not aggressive. She gives headbumps to initiate contact, and love bites in the throes of a good cuddle. She kneeds and paws at people, gently and with love (and currently with clipped claws, which I intend to maintain). She will change positions a few times to find the optimal layout for maximum flopability. A really good cuddle ends up with her leaning against me, tummy up, legs flopping everywhere, eyes closed, falling asleep as a stroke her tummy.

Yeah, it's that cute.

She's sweet, inquisitive, and utterly engaged—she's occasionally playful, but wants a more interactive toy: batting something around isn't as interesting to her as human-directed play would be. If left in the room alone, she tends to meow for a few minutes and then sleep, but she can occasionally get restless and go in search of people. When there's someone in the room, she spends most of her time sleeping or snuggling, will occasionally wander into and under things, and is open to and initiates plenty of interaction. She's alert to sound but not easily startled, and loves to watch out the windows. She's fond of my bed and always sleeps there, and tends to fall asleep with her back or head pressed to a pillow or blanket (or me). The longer she sleeps, the more floppy and stretched out she's likely to become. She has a healthy appetite and has used the litterbox fine from the get-go, although she prefers to do her business at night or when I'm out of the room (but that may change when she's using an enclosed litterbox). When she eats and drinks her whiskers get in the way, and it makes her twitch her head.

August is a domestic medium hair, almost entirely black, with particularly striking eyes. Her facial features are delicate and petite; her teeth are oversized and knock against you when she rubs her cheek on your hand. The fur on her head, neck, and back is black as can be and kitten-soft; it's fine and short on her head, and gets longer along the length of her spine. Her chest and belly fur is longer, frizzier, and slightly curly; it has a brown tint, and some of the tips fade to cream. It's almost impossible for her to groom, and brushing her tummy helps immensely. Her tail is huge and fluffy, black and smooth on top, fuzzy and brownish on the underside, and she carries it at high and pretty. Sometimes when she curls up, she breathes in her tail fur and it makes her sneeze. Her eyes are remarkable: the irises have an outer ring of yellow and an inner ring of green; when her pupils are dilated the green ring is large and makes her eye entire look yellow-green, but when her pupils contract the green ring all but disappears and the yellow reflects ambient light, varying from golden to amber to orange (especially on my orange bed). All of the color variation is vivid and flattering against her black fur. Her whiskers are long and jet black; she has a stray long white hair that grows from her chin. She's adorable. And, of course, there are pictures.


I expect that I'll end up taking a lot of shots trying to capture the beauty of her eyes.

( Hey look, it's what you actually came here for: +7 pictures. )

August is currently locked away in my room while we watch her for signs of illness and let her get adjusted. She's doing beautifully and that I've come to know her so well already is remarkable, but these are still the early days: things are subject to change. In the meantime, rooming with me establishes this as her home in the house and gives us a chance to bond. Eventually we'll introduce her to the rest of the house and to Spike, Dee's cat—Spike used to have a sister and shows ongoing interest in female cats, and we image that he'll be thrilled to have her around; August has previous experience with cats, and should be a good follower to Spike's leader. August is already eager to see the world beyond the bedroom door—it will be a test of willpower to keep her locked away.

But she is happy, and healthy, and so fucking adorable that almost two thousand words aren't enough to express it. So, y'all: That's August.