Category: Miscellany

Just a quick note in case anything I do turns out to affect any RSS feeds, etc.: I will be making some changes over the next few days here at the site. Mostly, I will be adding links to all the Highlander posts so they can more easily be read sequentially (if only by me—hey, I enjoyed those) and adding a brief episode synopsis to each Jonny Quest post, for anyone who wants a less…interpretive idea of what’s going on in those.

In thanks for your attention, here is some of the currency of the internet: a cat picture.

If you read my Twitter feed, you probably know I lost my oldest cat recently: Jasper was over 17 years old, so in a way it wasn’t a surprise, but I’d somehow got my heart set on 19 to be the age at which I’d be sort of okay if the cat died of old age.

In 1998, my future ex-husband and I heard a sad little noise outside the door of our apartment. I opened it and there he was, a half-grown tabby kitten begging for food. I gave him a little of the kibble we had for our cat, and soon we were on a route the cat took around the building: on the first floor, the people who’d turned him loose in the first place were still occasionally feeding him, and he also had a benefactor on the third floor.

And on every floor he had a name. On the first floor he’d been Princess until certain facts made themselves apparent, then Prince. The third floor called him Toby. To me, he was Jasper.

Things continued like that until one day his former owner popped his head out on the balcony below ours. “You gonna take that cat?” he asked.

I said I was, and he handed up the remaining food and litter from Jasper’s brief tenure as an indoor kitten, and I was suddenly the proud owner of Princess Prince Toby Jasper, a cat who loved attention so much he purred if you made extended eye contact. When the FEH and I separated, there was no doubt who was going to take him, and Jasper and I became single at the same time.

He seemed bored, so I got him a friend.

I subsequently apologized.

A few weeks ago, it became clear that Jasper was wasting away. At his next-to-last vet appointment, he was diagnosed with kidney failure. (I’d already suspected it, since I’d seen my dad suffer kidney failure too.) As though he’d heard the diagnosis, in the space of a weekend the cat went from “kind of weak” to not being able to stand on his own. He wouldn’t eat or drink. When I carried him to the litter box, he simply fell over and stayed fallen.

As I told them vet who helped put him out of pain, I’d really hoped he’d go on the top of the sofa in his sleep. “It rarely happens that way,” she said.

I never thought I’d be one of those people who had their animal’s ashes in the house, but when it came down to it, I couldn’t put him outside again. So now there’s a little urn that wears his collar, and Jasper is again sitting on the furniture. And I am training myself to say “Let’s go feed the fish!” to the other cat in the morning when I used to say “Let’s go see Mr. J!” and not to turn back to his place on the sofa to say goodnight every night. I never look down to find I’m petting a cat with no recollection of how he got there: Inky’s no lap cat, while Jasper’s spy name was The Insinuator. No one steps on me on the way to find out how much milk is in my coffee. It’s surprisingly awful.

Goodbye, Jasper: you were one of the best.

Next time: Something slightly more cheerful.

Presented for your perusal this super-cold Valentine’s Day: everyone can think back to a person they desired for reasons that were poorly thought out, or because they looked good on paper even if it was a bad fit in real life. But what about things?

1. The Jeep Wrangler Sahara

I have wanted one of these cars since I was 14 years old, when I entered a contest to win one in my mother’s name. There’s something about the squared-off, almost classical lines of a Jeep that really, viscerally grabs me: coupled with the unbounded potential of being able to drive anywhere you want, it’s thoroughly seductive. Less seductive, of course, are some of the safety ratings, some of the prices, and the fact that I could probably get better gas mileage driving literally anything except an older Jeep. That doesn’t stop me from sighing over them on my daily commute like some weird car lecher, however.

2. The Newfoundland Dog

I live in a small space, have other pets, and am a pretty avid opponent of drool, and yet whenever I watch the Westminster Dog Show on television, I’m drawn in by the description of the Newfie. Who wouldn’t want a big, handsome, friendly companion who’ll be kind to your other pets and frolic in the water, something 0% of my family’s dogs have ever done? An avid opponent of drool, that’s who—at least, that’s what I tell myself.

3. Excessive Amounts of High-Endish Audio Equipment

I have a pretty good car stereo and a sound system at home that justifies my Pandora subscription nicely, but I will look at literally anything that sounds (no pun intended) interesting online, and when I encounter a Bose store, it’s extremely hard not to go in and poke around. I somehow wound up on the e-mail list for these folks and have been pining for this ever since. Do I need it? Not even close. Have a place to put it? Not really. Do I recognize that part of this stems from the same aesthetic that makes me lust after the Jeep? With distressing clarity! Still: Cherry and metallic taupe 4-eva!

Honorable Mention: Amazon Prime

Like a lot of people, I got Prime a while ago, when it was discounted, even though I knew it would unhealthily feed my caffeinated-puppy level of impatience. On the other hand, if you ever want a nice fountain pen in a hurry, I can’t recommend it enough, and I am slowly working through Instant Video even though it reminds me that HBO never loved any of the same shows the same way I did.

What are your ill-advised lust objects?

As for my Valentine’s Day, I’m going to be at my second science museum in as many weeks, because nothing says romance like fossils and visible tiger willies.

I wanted to try out my phone’s camera, and what could be prettier than Thornton the betta?

And yes, I talk to my fish as if they were puppies. I think I did a good job with his current tank setup, though.