Sunday Serenity #328

Remembering My

Gremlyn 6/4/93-3/18/07

Our Abyssinian/Siamese/Tabby Gremlyn passed on the Sunday following St. Paddy Day in 2007 and it was in her honor that I started these Sunday Serenity posts so that Sunday could be something besides a reminder of loosing her again.  So today I'm recycling the list of 13 things I wanted to remember about her from a Thursday Thirteen post a year after her death and adding to it.

1. The way she rode on my shoulder from a tiny kitten to the last week of her life.  She could stay put as I vacuumed, washed dishes, typed, worked needlepoint, did gentle mini-tramp workouts, played computer games, folded laundry, read, watched TV played card games with Ed.
2. The way she would groom the tears off my eyelids and cheeks.
3. The many 'conversations' we had that would go on for as long as I replied for she always had the last word.
4. The way she slept in my lap while I read or sewed or wrote or...see all sit down activities in #1.
5. The way she kept us in stitches with her antics chasing shadows and dust motes if there was nothing more substantial; literally climbing the walls and launching herself into backflips off them.
6. Finding her asleep in the salad bowl on the second shelf up above the kitchen counter. More than once. (Tho I'd rather not remember having to wash every last dish on those two shelves each time.)
7. Having her land on my head or shoulder as I passed through a door or by the fridge or mantle or the living room drapes.
8. Having her purr next to my ear as I'm falling asleep.
9. The weight of her curled in a ball on my hip, or chest as I slept.
10. The way she would climb a door and ride it back and forth as she pushed against one wall and then the other until that moment she miscalculated and didn't get her front paws back under her in time so that her belly was arched over the abyss as she howled. And how if her front paws happened to be on the top of the doorway she would hang from the molding screaming until rescued but if she had just pushed off against the wall and did not jump down before the door closed then her hind paws would be shoved off as the door closed and she would fall and if she had trapped herself in the room would howl and scream until rescued.
11. Having her snuggled inside my fleece jacket or windbreaker with its bottom tied off to prevent her from slipping out and its front zipped up but not far enough to keep her from poking her head out at will. She would stay there for hours as I typed at the computer or as I paced up and down the driveway or as I did laundry, dishes or housework or sat on the front steps reading.
12. The way she would put a paw on my face to turn my head to face her so she could 'tell' me something. Occasionally the 'telling' was emphasized by a nip on the nose.
13.  How I once found a strand of embroidery floss trailing out from under her tail and tugged on it and tugged on it and tugged on it until a full 18 inches of thread with the tapestry needle still attached came free.
14. The way she always knew when I was in distress.  Even when I wasn't home.  Like the night I crashed on a cement roller rink in a town 40 miles away and she went berserk at home chasing the windows and hanging off the front door handle howling and would not be comforted.
15.  The way she constantly escaped the  house by clawing through window screens.  Even the one six feet above the bathroom tub.  It took us a long time to figure out how she did that.  Her route: floor to toilet tank to towel rack to shower curtain rod to four inch deep by four inch tall window inset.
16. How tiny she was.  Even full grown she was smaller than our Merlin when we got him at the shelter at 6 months.
17. How she snuck food off my plate.  I think she knew I couldn't see from the side.  She would seem completely relaxed and uncaring and suddenly one paw zipped out with one claw extended and grabbed.
18.  The way she sounded like an old typewriter talking to the birds out the window
19.  The way she treated Ed's dirty socks like her paramour.
20.  How she boxed the vacuum cleaner, the vibrator, and the electric razor into submission when they were turned on or how she would approach them when they were off as tho they were cobras, prowling a circle around it, tail big, belly on floor, hissing, growling.  Until one of us would turn it on so she could knock it silly umn silent. We called her our adrenaline junkie.  She sought out occasions to get hyped up.
21.  How she and her sister Shekinah once teamed up to herd my parent's Chow Tia across the living room and into the corner by the front door which was closed so she climbed over Ed in his chair trying to get out the closed window behind him.
22.  The way she talked to her food.
23.  The way she came running when I clicked my tongue.
24. How she would never tolerate a closed door between us.  Not even the bathroom.  Not even the shower door.
25.  Her funny face.  Or faces.  She had as many expressions as humans.  And I could read them better than I could most humans except maybe babies.

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Sunday Serenity #274

LOL

ROFLOL

 Thought it was fitting to post a Sunday Serenity featuring cats since it is March, the month my Grimlyn passed in 2007 on the Sunday after St. Paddy Day and threatened to ruin Sundays for me forever. It was a few weeks after that when I decided to start doing Sunday Serenity posts in order to make Sundays about more than reminding me to grieve.

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Sunday Serenity #106

I started up Sunday Serenity as a way to get past the fact that my beloved Gremlyn had died on a Sunday. So what better place to put this story of a pet who saved a toddler's life.

If you'd rather read the story it is here.

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Thursday Thirteen #78

Thirteen Things I Want To Remember About
Gremlyn 6/4/93-3/18/07

1. The way she rode on my shoulder from a tiny kitten to the last week of her life one year ago.

2. The way she would groom the tears off my eyelids and cheeks.

3. The many 'conversations' we had that would go on for as long as I replied for she always had the last word.

4. The way she slept in my lap while I read or sewed.

5. The way she kept us in stitches with her antics chasing shadows and dust motes if there was nothing more substantial; literally climbing the walls and launching herself into backflips off them.

6. Finding her asleep in the salad bowl on the second shelf up above the kitchen counter. More than once. (Tho I'd rather not remember having to wash every last dish on those two shelves each time.)

7. Having her land on my head or shoulder as I passed through a door or by the fridge or mantle or the living room drapes.

8. Having her purr next to my ear as I'm falling asleep.

9. The weight of her curled in a ball on my hip, or chest as I slept.

10. The way she would climb a door and ride it back and forth as she pushed against one wall and then the other until that moment she miscalculated and didn't get her front paws back under her in time so that her belly was arched over the abyss as she howled> And how if her front paws happened to be on the top of the doorway she would hang from the molding screaming until rescued but if she had just pushed off against the wall and did not jump down before the door closed then her hind paws would be shoved off as the door closed and she would fall and if she had trapped herself in the room would howl and scream until rescued.

11. Having her snuggled inside my fleece jacket or windbreaker with its bottom tied off to prevent her from slipping out and its front zipped up but not far enough to keep her from poking her head out at will. She would stay there for hours as I typed at the computer or as I paced up and down the driveway or as I did laundry, dishes or housework or sat on the front steps reading.

12. The way she would put a paw on my face to turn my head to face her so she could 'tell' me something. Occasionally the 'telling' was emphasized by a nip on the nose.

13. Her funny face.





Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!

The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It's easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

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Sunday Serenity #29

I was really resisting putting up my Sunday Serenity today. And I knew that just meant I needed it that much more than those times when it is easy. Here I return to the roots of this exercise for me. My first Sunday Serenity was put up as an effort to stop associating Sunday primarily with the death of my beloved cat, Gremlyn, who had died on a Sunday a few weeks earlier. My Gremlyn was a very vocal kitty and we held long conversations that went something like:

G: Meow?
J: What?
G: Meeeeeow
J: You don't say!
G: Murrreow purrrrlinow
J: That's some story girl.
G: Yearrowl Grrrrrrnow
J: Tell me more
G: Rawwwerrowl meeearowl
J: Nobody will believe it
G: Yurrrrlum mawl

Gremlyn alway had to have the last word. But if I stopped responding before she wanted to stop, she would reach for my mouth or chin to remind me it was my turn and if that didn't work, she would nip my nose to elicit an "Ow!" and get the conversation going again.

I miss her so much sometimes. Especially when I've been sick like this past week. She was such a comfort, curling up and purring under my chin, grooming my face, purrling into my ear.

Her markings were similar to the kitty in this video who's saying "You say what?" She was an Abyssinian/Siamese/Tabby mix with the Tabby stripes on face, tail and limbs; the Siamese personality and vocal traits; the Abyssinian salt, pepper, paprika marking on her back and small size. As an adult she was often mistaken for a six month old kitten.

Join us in a moment of serenity. (laughter counts)

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Should I Go Hide Under the Bed?

I was tagged by Adelle. This was the first time for me so I'm not sure which is the worse in blog etiquette: to not accept the challenge or to impose it on the next ones. I'm not even sure I 'know' enough bloggers well enough to fill the quota on this tag. Having fretted for two days, I have decided that just doing it is the only thing that will shut up that indecisive 'should I? or shouldn't ?' litany and give the whole thing closure for me.

At least this isn't any more imposing of a challenge than a Thursday Thirteen so I am selecting my victims from TT and Monday Poetry Train participants who have commented more than once on my my TT and Poetry Train posts. At least I know they enjoy memes and don't hate visiting Joystory. It goes without saying that I love to visit every one of their blogs and do so frequently. Which isn't reflected in my sidebar only because I have not been updating my sidebar since I started participating in TT last October. (see #4 below) To sweeten the pot for them I am also going to link their names to their blogs when I tag them even though it is is not one of the rules of this meme. (Personally I think it should be as that would be a better motivator for participants, and appears to be one of the points of viral memes. But I didn't write the rules for this one.)

So here goes:

A. Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves.
B. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed.
C. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

1. I am legally blind due to RP aka retinitis pigmentosa a genetic degenerative disease that progressively destroys peripheral vision. I have almost zero night vision and even in the best lighted conditions am limited to less than twelve degrees vision in each eye out of the 180 degrees of normal peripheral vision.

2. We can only trace it back five generations from me because my mother's mother's father's mother did not know her own family history. She was raised by the Indians from age three, when the leader of the raid on her parent's farmstead found her in the pickle barrel where her parents had hidden her after the rest of her family had been slaughtered. He was in awe of her blond curls. She was raised as his daughter until she was at least eighteen and returned to the White man's civilization as the bride of a missionary/trader with the tribe. (Umm. Does that count as a fact about me?)

3. I fret a lot about big and small stuff. Lot of wasted energy and time. It is part of the Anxiety/Depression mood disorder I've had since at least age four but wasn't diagnosed officially until I was nearly forty.

4. I am such a procrastinator! I should spell it in 20pt font but then I would hate they way it looks on the page. Which leads to:

5. I am such a perfectionist! I should spell it in 28pt font but....well you get the picture. And it isn't the kind of perfectionism that actually produces order and well-made finished projects. Rather....

6. I am easily discouraged by mistakes or the inability to make a project turn out the way I envision it or stay on schedule and then I stop working on it and let it set, taking up space in my environment and mind for weeks, months or years, unwilling to give up on it entire but only returning to it maybe five percent of the time. The major successes that have resulted from a small percentage of those makes it that much harder to say a final bub-bye to those that really are dead in the water.

7. This includes staying organized in my environment, including my workspace and schedule. I crave organization, I visualize it in great detail but can never seem to achieve it. And of course my being a hoarder of all kinds of ridiculous stuff does not help at all. You can find the post that lists said stuff via labels if you dare. Hoarding was bad enough when I had my own home but...

8. Since August 2001 we have been living with my husband's parents in the small second bedroom of a single-wide trailer house. With two cats on leashes: Gremlyn and Merlin. Until we lost Gremlyn in March. With the litter box, cat's food and water dishes, bed, entertainment center and my jerryrigged office made of stacked cardboard boxes and a board, there isn't enough standing room for two people. This room has not been thoroughly cleaned since I started spending race day Saturdays watching my husband's elderly grandmother two years ago instead of using that time with the family out of the house to do a major cleaning. I'm fretting about this now because we are about to inherit a new bed from his grandma, who passed on earlier this month, and I am nervous about having to take down my 'office' and put it back together, as interrupting my projects has repercussions (see #6 above) and freaking about what we might find under the bed.

So I'm tagging:


Rhian / Crowwoman
Susan Helene Gottfried
Wylie Kinson
Robin L. Rotham
Tink
L^2
Gattina
Candyminx

Sorry gals. Should I go hide under the bed?

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Obsession

You would be pardoned for thinking this is just another post about our local library closure since I've admitted to being obsessed about it and well over half of my posts in the last four months have been about it. But I've been tagged by Selena Kitt to admit to five obsessions. 5!! Now any other time in my life, I would have been hard pressed to narrow it down to five as obsession is practically my middle name. It has been suggested to me by those with expertise in the field that I have more than a touch of OCD going on with me. See my post, Hoarders R Us.

But this week, with the library closure only four days away, I can barely force myself to think about anything else and feel stressed whenever I am unable to have my eyes glued to the page of a library book or the laptop screen as it plays one of the library DVDs. The kind of stress like that experienced in a dream when being chased by the bogey man. So when I got tagged, I was tempted to just post something to the effect that I'd get back to you on Saturday when I had time to think about it. But the concept intrigued me and I decided if I could come up with four more things that I spent significant time doing or contemplating in the past month, I would go ahead and post tonight. It took me less than three minutes to make the list. In fact I came up with five besides the library. Just know that if font size indicated the ratio of attention, then the library thing would have to be 44pt font while all the rest would be in 14pt and smaller.

Following are the five things other than the library capturing a significant amount of my attention.

1. Nuzzling, cuddling, huggermuggering, teasing and playing with Merlin as we adjust to life without Gremlin. Huggermuggering is a word I use to mean mugging hugs, something I started doing a couple years ago because, unlike Gremlin who wasn't content unless she was snuggled against me, Merlin didn't care for being held or even sitting on your lap. By playing the game huggermugger I have increased his tolerance from about two seconds to almost two minutes. He comes when I sing out "huggermugger, huggermugger' and a couple of times since Gremlin's passing, he has voluntarily climbed into my lap and gone to sleep.

2. Story is the over-riding passion of my life. And my Fruits of the Spirit storyworld is one of my favorite mental playgrounds. I have discussed it in several of my Thursday Thirteen posts but especially #25 on the 22nd of last month and #13 on the 28th of last December. All three of my NaNoWriMo attempts were based in it. My two entries in the WriteStuff Creative Carnival were based in it. See: Kicking the Bucket and A Tail of a Wail.

(Oh, I totally forgot to post that I won the contest last month and received the prize Fiction Writer's Brainstormer by James V. Smith, Jr. The day I learned I won was the day Gremlin got sick and the day the book arrived was the day my 13 year old niece arrived to spend five days of her spring break with me and her grandma during which we watched about fifteen movies and walked to the library twice and chatted about stories--reading, watching and writing them.)

My niece has read several of my stories and is very irritated with me that I am not writing more. She thought I was overdoing the library thing even before the upcoming closure was announced in early December after which....oh, just scan the last four months of my blog and you'll get the picture. Anyway, it is partly because of her interest that I began to become re-enchanted with my FOS storyworld again, after a several year hiatus precipitated by the loss of my manuscripts and notes in 2001.

3. Stat watching. After I met the challenge my husband set me at the beginning of March to post five times in a single week and he followed through on his promise to start using his know-how to promote Joystory, I started refreshing my stats pages at Sitemeter several times per day. And there was a week there when it was at least once an hour. I couldn't get enough of wondering who all these people were and especially what motivated them to visit multiple pages and hang out for 5, 10, 30, 60 and more minutes.

Before I started participating in Thursday Thirteen last fall, almost no one visited multiple pages and few besides my sister and niece left comments. I'm still not getting many comments outside of TT. That didn't used to matter to me but now my curiosity is severely piqued and I dearly wish some of those who visit more than two pages or stay more than ten minutes would drop me a comment to tell me what has snagged their attention. Like, right now as I compose this paragraph someone from China has been on for over twenty minutes and visited 7 pages. Now who wouldn't be curious about that? Or when Monday morning someone from the Midwest US visited 40 pages in 31 minutes?

There is more to this obsession then just curiosity or gratification. This is part of THE obsession that will replace the library obsession beginning next week as I throw myself into content creation, design and promotion of the three sites I already have up and two more I have planned. My husband has two up with plans for a couple more too and I will probably return the favor by helping him with promotion. We think we have figured out a way to make income via the Internet by combining our two skill sets. Stay tuned for that story as it unfolds.

4. Riddles, puzzles, puns. I've always loved these but ever since I encountered Weffriddles last November, I've been obsessed in a completely new way. I gave up almost all computer gaming along with almost all prime time TV after learning of the immanent library closure. I can't wait to get back to solving the Weffriddle maze. I quit just after finishing batch 1 shortly after the New Year. I couldn't trust myself to play without getting sucked in for 3, 6, 12 hours. That probably cost me the NaNoWriMo win this year.

So I knew that I had to let it alone until after the library closure, if I wanted to get as much as possible of the essential research and movie watching done before the library closed. I quit playing but I didn't stop thinking about it. And I began to notice that everything I encountered during each day became inspiration for a riddle, puzzle or pun and I began to itch not only to play Weffriddle but to create my own levels and batches and dare I admit it? To put up my own riddle site loosely modeled on Weffriddle but imprinted with my own passions: story, wordplay, reading, writing, thinking, movies and more.

Watch for this before the end of spring. If this concept interests you, leave a comment; with contact info if you would like to be notified when it launches.

5. National and World News. I get almost all of my news online and more than eighty percent from non MSM. I used to read news and editorials and political blogs for several hours per day. I dropped it down to one the past four months. I do a lot more thinking about it than that. Many of the library items I have spent time with in the last four months were first encountered while reading news online.

~~***~~

OK that about covers it. Now I am supposed to tag five people. This is going to be harder than writing the post. There are only two that I feel comfortable tagging without checking with them first.

1. My sister
2. My Niece
3. My Husband.
4.
5.

I'll have to get back to you with three more after I check with them first. But anyone who sees this and wishes to play, consider yourself tagged. Leave a comment with your URL and I will post your link above.

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Grief Doth Howl and Rave

January gray is here, like a sexton by her grave;
February bears the bier,
March with grief doth howl and rave,
And April weeps - but, O ye hours!
Follow with May's fairest flowers.
~~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Gremlin: July 4, 1993-March 18, 2007




Fresh grief is yet too raw for words for even the sweet memories are like heat applied to a sunburn.

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