Things come in threes, they say, so I guess it’s official now: for us Schleiers, this is transition season. Tomorrow’s the anniversary of Haskell the dog telling us he was done. Today was the third anniversary of our arrival in New York (having left Indiana the day before), eager to get nested for the kid who turned out to be Taavi. And yesterday morning was when Paul Cat, after a couple days of mildly restored glory, ceased and desisted on his own recognizance. It looked peaceful.
He had a great last day Thursday, aside from the bath to wash off the poop, for which he did not care. He did, however, enjoy an extended grooming session afterward, lots of lap time on his beloved mom, lots of sun time on the windowsill with me, and even a little beef broth. We’re grateful he went easy and made it easy for us.
It’s fitting Paul went out on a Friday. It would have been a Friday in Bloomington when we came home to find the challah still plastic-wrapped the way we bought it, except for the part right in the middle where he’d torn it open and eaten a bunch of the bread. You could say Paul did not have the traditional cat discernment about which food to consider right and proper. You could also say (I sometimes did) he was kind of a jerk, but only because in all the ways that mattered he was no kind of jerk whatsoever. Out of all the justifiable occasions on which he might have swatted at Taavi, for instance, he did so exactly once, no claws.
He was, in Bekki’s words, such a fucking good cat.
Also yesterday, I found out that when I return to my largest client this week, I’m already on a new assignment. In unit tests, there are three parts: Arrange whatever’s needed to set up for success, Act out whatever steps we need to succeed, and Assert whether whatever we got was what we wanted. In unit-test parlance, the too-brief gig that just ended had just finished the Arrange and skipped right to the Assert. I’m disappointed at missing the expected chance to Act together with those people, but my new assignment at the same client is a plum one. No complaints. Easy adjustment. Just one more reminder, in case anyone in this house needed it, that it’s transition season.
What’s this?
It’s a
/now page.
nownownow.com
is a directory of people with /now pages.
I’m listed there.