Meet Amy!

No burying the lede on this one, y'all.  We got a new cat a few days ago and so far, it is love, true love.  Well, between her & I.  Rory on the other hand, well, they're starting to tolerate each other more.  We thought he would be excited to have a little cat friend, considering how hard he tried to be friends with the cat we were sitting a few weeks ago.  But when we brought Miss Amy home, he hissed at her and proceeded to continue hissing at her all day.  We're three days in and they can now tolerate being in the same room and occasionally on the same piece of furniture.

I don't think he is plotting her imminent demise here, but he is not exactly thrilled with her presence.  I'm confident though, that as time goes on, they will be BFFs.

I mentioned previously that the Mister & I had been idly cat shopping for a few weeks.  Going to Adoption Day at Petsmart every Saturday has just become a tradition.  We pet all the dogs we can't have and we play with the cats, but we never come home with one.  Because they haven't been the right one.  And I knew that I would know when I saw the right cat.  And when we spotted Amy at a Petsmart we don't usually go to, I knew she needed us.  The sign on her cage said she was a year old, but I have a hard time believing that because she is SO tiny.  And she is skinny.  When we held her at the store, she was shedding like crazy and we could feel all of her tiny bones.  It worried us a little, but she immediately snuggled right into me and I was a goner.  The girl running the adoptions said she was brand new at the store and she had only just been spayed three days before, poor baby.  I think dealing with that and dealing with being in a cage at the store was too stressful for her and I don't think she was eating.  Because we've had her home for three days now and she has already started filling out nicely.  She's super active, incredibly agile and amazingly affectionate.  She wants to be where I am at all times.  We have vet appointments for both cats tomorrow (Rory for his annual exam and for updates on his shots; Amy for a general checkup) so we'll see what the vet says about her weight and about her age.  Meanwhile, I'll just continue to love on her.

And continue to love on this big galoot.

Catching Up

Ay yi yi.  I don't know why I let so much time go between posting.  I've had a few ideas knocking around in my head and I even went so far as to write out a whole long thing about a set of Very Bad Days on a trip a few weeks ago, but then the Asiana flight crashed and suddenly my silly difficulties seemed ridiculous in comparison, so I scrapped it.

But now here I am, on a layover, realizing that I've yet again gone almost a month without an update.  And yet again, I feel like there has been so much AND so little going on that I don't even know where to start.  I guess we'll go backwards.

On Wednesday last week, I flew to Minneapolis to participate in the Lifetime Fitness Torchlight 5k.  This race is special to my heart because it was the very first race I did, back when I first started running.  And this time I was running with one of my very best flight attendant friends and it was going to be HER first race.  And now she is also hooked on races because they're FUN!

It was like, 90 degrees when we started the race and I finished in 30 minutes, which is longer than the last time I did this race, two years ago.  I was a little disappointed in that, because I feel like I've become faster in the last few months, but hey, it was super hot & humid so at least I finished!  

After my friend crossed the finish line, we waited for her friend & mom to finish and then we headed off to find our free Michelob Ultras because free beer after a race is the best part. There was a band playing, so we stuck around to watch and it was a lot of fun.  The first time I ran this race, I was dating a guy who didn't want to stick around for the music.  And the second time I ran it, I was by myself and felt super awkward, so I didn't stick around.  I'm glad I finally got to do the race with people who wanted to hang out!  So that was fun.  And I looked cute!

Not so fun was only being home for 36 hours before heading back up to New York for this trip and not getting to go home until Friday.  Lame sauce.  But before the race, I had a layover in the city where the Mister's mom lives, so I got to hang out with her and meet her Siberian Huskies for the first time.

I slept in the Mister's old room and got to see a bunch of pictures of Baby Mister.  Let me tell you, he was freakin' adorable!

About two weeks ago, the Mister & I drove up toward DC to go see Camera Obscura and She & Him.  The venue was amazing and we had fantastic seats, but I'm sad to say both acts were a little disappointing.  I love their music, but Camera Obscura didn't really have any stage presence and Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward just seemed a little bored most of their set.  It was nice to see She & Him perform again though, because the last time I saw them was their first tour at First Ave in Minneapolis.  I went with this guy I used to hang out with who was not very nice to me, so even though the show was not so impressive, I'm glad I got to see them with the Mister who is VERY nice to me.  They wouldn't let us take photos during the show though, so all I have from that night is a rather moody photo of us waiting for it to begin.

And then the next night we got to have dinner with one of the few people from high school that I keep in touch with, who is in the DC area for work training.  His wife had flown out from where they live in Arizona, so it was great to see them both and for the Mister to meet her.  We had a good laugh that the last time my friend came out east for work training, he was in Virginia Beach which was 20 minutes from where we lived in Norfolk.  And this time he was about 45 minutes from where we live in Fburg.  Very considerate of his work to keep sending him to training near us!  We're hoping to have dinner with him some time during the week next week.

Other than that, we've just been getting things in order around the apartment.  I think we have finally emerged form the post-wedding haze and so now we are focusing on areas of life that got neglected while we planned & prepared for that, namely getting the apartment totally organized and decorated.  We have a lot of things that need to go up on the walls, some of which needed to be framed.  So we've started working on that, which is exciting.  I'm finally starting to see some of my personality coming out in the apartment.  Considering  I came into this cohabitation situation with pretty much nothing, it's been difficult, but we are learning to compromise.

We're also seriously considering getting a second cat.  We cat-sat for some friends of ours for about two weeks and while the visiting cat was not exactly warm & friendly toward Rory, Rory was obsessed with being her friend.  And we noticed that he seemed to act out a lot less while she was here.  So while it was something we talked about vaguely before, now we are talking in more concrete terms.  And of course I fell in love with a little boy kitten at PetSmart and had already named him and actually had the Mister's permission to go back & adopt him the next day, but the timing wasn't right because I was going back to work the day after and would be gone for a week.  Once I get back from this trip, though, I think we might go back and check out the kittens and maybe also visit the animal shelter.  Hooray for kittens!