Gratuitous Web Presence

It’s the North American pretzel cat. Impressed she could ball herself up like that.

Heard Nirvana’s cover of “The Man Who Sold the World” while driving this afternoon. Hearing it again on the coffeehouse’s stereo just now. Somewhere, Kurt Cobain (or David Bowie) is trying to tell me something.

Oh, look. Mommy’s first beta-blockers.

I will be watching Ryan Gosling’s performance from the Oscars telecast on a constant loop tomorrow. That is all.

Nothing like the fast food of my people to cheer up the soul.

Listening to the New Heights podcast, and Jason Kelce tossed off a line about Yoko Ono. “You mean the speed skater?” Travis Kelce asked. He didn’t appear to be kidding.

I like the Kelce brothers. I’m going to figure it’s a generational thing and move on with my life.

I hate not having a pen I like when I need it.

I’m a gel pen girl, and I usually have such a pen on my person at all times. Except now, right this minute, at the coffee shop when I like to journal. Very annoyed with myself, and settling for gratuitous blog posting instead.

Still somehow coexisting.

(Repurposing some of what I posted to a grief support group on Facebook—some of which in turn is repurposed from a Threads post—because I have very little of anything left in me.)

It’s been a tough year of losses: one of our cats in April, my college mentor and close friend in June, and my sister last month. I feel like I haven’t fully grieved my mom in 2021, and a work friend and one of our dogs passed not long after.

I haven’t had a breakdown or anything—just a few scattered tears and overwhelming, heavy sadness. I still have to press ahead for work and family. Waiting with dread for some kind of collapse.

Meanwhile, it’s Christmas Eve. Just put together dinner: arroz caldo, a Filipino chicken and rice porridge, which Mom always made late on Christmas Eve so we could eat just before opening our gifts at midnight.

I’ve made it for my family for years. Sometimes I’d text my sister a picture to prove to her that I could make it. She’d text back with heart or thumbs-up emoji, sometimes typing “Wish I was there!”

Now neither she nor Mom are around to tell. Pressing ahead, but my heart feels empty.

My sister and I were close, and she would have been 67 at the end of November. This is tough.

But there will be Christmas. And arroz caldo. A blessed holiday to you.

You know you’re tired when reading the subtitles on an anime episode is exhausting.

For F’s baptismal birthday, I used to get her religious icons or books.

This year? I got her D&D dice that look like wedges of cheese.

Please don’t tell my parish priest.

This is Charlie (also known as Charles Edgar Cheeserton III, or Dipper). He appears to be a beagle/basset mix. Brought him home from the shelter yesterday.

This is as close to a 20th wedding anniversary gift as we’ve given ourselves this week. And Winter the Anxiety Dog has never been happier.

Little Edie Beale may be my newest patron saint.

“I think they’re highly underrated in terms of the zeitgeist,” Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails said in a phone interview. “Devo challenged the idea of what a rock band could be. It felt like rock was mutating. It made me realize, ‘Oh, there aren’t any rules. You know, you can do anything.’”

“It’s a good evening to experiment,” we said.

F said the resulting roasted Peep (left over from her Easter basket from months ago) looked like “it has yellow fever.” But she ate it and decided it met more than enough of her sugar quota for her to forgo a s’more.

It’s autumn in the Midwest.

“Don’t be more serious than God. God invented dog farts. God designed your body’s plumbing system. God designed an ostrich. If He didn’t do it, He permitted a drunken angel to do it. Empirical facts can add significantly to the meaning of ‘being godlike’." (Peter Kreeft [via Tsh Oxenreider])

How does one deal with raging impostor syndrome? I’ve got it on two fronts, and it’s seriously kicking my ass.

Book and strategy recommendations — and memes — welcome.

“Was not expecting to see the headline ‘ham everywhere’ today,” the husband texted.

“… the residents and employees of Rosalita’s are women from New Jersey named Wendy, Mary, Sherry, Sandy, Kitty, Candy, or, of course, Rosalita, who is our founder and CEO.”

Bruce Springsteen turns 74 years old today.

Helena, who unlike some of our other animals went by a singular name – much like Charo, Adele, and Eminem – passed away peacefully Monday afternoon after what amounted to 5 years in “kitty retirement” with us. As she was a semiferal cat when we took her in around Thanksgiving 2018, we’re unclear on her exact age, though we suspect she was at least 10 or 12 years old.

(And actually, I lied. We gave her a zillion silly nicknames: Lady Lardbottom, Lady Sparklebutt, Cottonbutt, Señorita Slushbottom, Sister Mary Elephant. Yes, there’s a theme. I guess fatshaming is okay if it’s a cat.)

We got her 5 years ago when Chris saw a social media post from a lady a few blocks away who wanted to find a cat a good home. She said it belonged to her next door neighbor, an older woman who had died; the cat ended up living in some adjacent woods, and the social media poster was feeding the cat but couldn’t bring it in the house with her other cats. It was November, so the lady was worried about the cat, which she named Helena – a variant of her late neighbor’s name, Helen.

So, we adopted Helena, who ended up hiding in our basement for a few months, surfacing only for food and water. It wasn’t until the following spring that she eventually showed up and decided to join the rest of the family; thus began the rest of her years napping on the recliner, napping on the sofa, napping on whatever lap or cushion she could find – and being carried up and down stairs by a little girl who is forever smitten with cats.

Helena also put up gracefully with occasional costuming humiliations at the hands of that now-teenager.

When cats decline, they seem to do so quickly. We took her to the vet only a few weeks ago for respiratory issues, and she went downhill fast from there.

Helena was at once elegant, cranky, and ridiculous. (Like most cats, I suppose.) We loved her. Thanks for sharing your retirement with us, old girl.

I usually have music or streaming video, like the Cornell bird lab’s feeder cam, on the iPad while I work.

Clearly the birds at Sapsucker Woods have transmogrified since we visited there years ago.

New Year’s Eve is as good a time as any to introduce the teenager, a budding D&D dungeon master, to “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

Back to work. Up late tweaking the Home Office Empire, now with the laptop docking station relocated to allow for a three-screen setup. (C and F pointed out four screens, counting the iPad, but that’s for streaming video Yule logs and old ballgames from MLB.tv archives.)

Note to self: Get a screen protector for the new iPad.