RainRainRainRAINRAINRAIN!!!!

Argh!  Just stop raining already!  I'm delighted, thrilled, tickled pink that the drought conditions are done, but seriously Mother Nature, today was just overkill.  If we didn't live on so much thirsty Florida sand that just sucks water down like a really amazing infomercial sponge, if this water had fallen on clay soil, in another part of the country, this would have been a flood disaster.  It has rained every day this week for at least an hour or more, and we are not talking gentle rain here. Think deluge.   No wind, little lightning, but rain like a massive firehose blast from above for a couple of hours at a time.

We have two areas in our little condo community that were designed to catch overflow rainwater.  Normally they are dry, sometimes they are slightly muddy, now and then they are sort of swampy.  If I remember my land development stuff, these are probably meant to hold and absorb the water over 24 hours.  Good luck with that this week.  They are now small LAKES.  They are in no danger of overflowing their banks or anything, and I salute the engineers who designed this community because day-um, those boys planned for truly epic hurricane level rainfall; the retention areas are deep-set and doing their jobs.  The drainage system sucks it all in, but those two normally dry retention areas are suddenly small lakes at least 2 ft. deep, maybe more (and remember, they are meant to be dry). 

So, yeah, after this wet stuff passes, we are supposed to get dry again, but not cooler.  Shit.

Onward to other things (this will be a long catch-up type post).

I am adjusting to life without the Ancient Cat, and it's reminding me of the other adjustments I had to make after losing the humans I lost in the last decade.  There is this feeling of loss, a hole in the household, a missing piece, and it's always there. This is just another layer.  This is an extreme oversimplification of the very complicated issues of memories, loss, regrets, and yes, guilt. When you put an animal down, even when every single bit of evidence before you says it's time, there is still guilt.

But there's also this sense of relief.  I realized in the last few days how truly bizarre life had been in the last year.  Not just the cat barf incidents, those were the least of it. I'm not one of those prissy neat people who freaks out over barf or hair, I just clean it up and move on.  It was the nursing home I was running, with two senior animals with two entirely different conditions that were in absolute conflict with each other.   It was the incredibly complicated logistics of coaxing an old cat to eat when he walked off and left the food 3/4 of the time, while keeping Murphy from getting into the cat food (which tipped his delicate balance out of balance and quite possibly could have killed him if it happened more than once in a while).  And the cat wouldn't eat in another room, or on a table - oh no, he had to eat in the kitchen, on the kitchen floor, because he always ate in the kitchen and he was an ancient cat and you are not going to change his mind about that rule.  I tried. He won.

 I hadn't realized the rituals I'd formed in the last year until I stopped doing them. Bedtime meant taking both dogs out, then transporting them to my bed, where they had to STAY, while I put down the bedtime can for the cat.  He rarely ate it, but God help me if I forgot to leave the bedtime dish for him; he'd wake me at 3 a.m. screeching.  Then, when I woke in the morning my first move, before a pee or anything, was to go put that dish UP so Murphy wouldn't race to the kitchen to clean the plate of the forbidden cat food, which actually could kill him with its high fat content.  

And there were nights when Murphy felt extra spry and jumped off my high bed to clean up the barely touched cat food dish while I slept, and I apparently was sleeping half awake, as I did when my husband was ill, and heard his little 6 lb. ass hit the carpeted floor, and snapped awake like a sentry and leaped up to go intercept him at 4 a.m. Or got there too late, and he had a setback.

And in the morning, if we had managed to sleep past the 3 a.m. screams and the 4 a.m. daring leap for the pre-dawn forbidden cat food,  I couldn't get up and just go pee, because the cat was screaming and Murphy was ready to leap, so my FIRST moves upon rising were animal driven.   There was uneaten cat food to be moved out of the dog's reach before I could even pee or find my glasses.

Right now I'm having a touch of the quasi-PTSD recovery I went through after my husband, then my father, then my mother, as I adjust to NOT being on call 24/7, and NOT being awakened by an emergency phone call, or that 3 a.m. screech.  I truly do miss the purring cat who jumped up on the bed to cuddle. I don't miss the screaming. 

So Higgins, I do miss you. You left a hole in the household, but I know it really was your time. When I finally really stopped to look at you a week ago, and saw your cheekbones jutting out of your face beneath your protruding eyes, I was horrified that I hadn't noticed how very, very emaciated you'd become in the last month.  That last big dramatic barfing up everything you'd eaten all day was my slap in the head.  It really was your time.   Love you, miss you, but I'd be lying if I said we weren't all sleeping better without you.

Give Boris and Natasha my love.  I'm sure Natasha is already happily slapping the crap out of both of her idiot boys.