January is usually a slow time at the SPCA, but it took me three visits and near-constant reloading of the SFSPCA website to find an all-black male kitten that J and I could adopt. Not a lot of kittens are born in the middle of winter, even the mild California kind. Usually this wouldn't be a problem, because everyone adopts pets over Christmas and ( Read more... )

Dear readers, I got a promotion ( Read more... )

If you go back, way back to my very first livejournal entires, you can see wee little never, in her early twenties, living in the Concrete Bunker on Folsom Street, posting about her tiny black kittens, Ada and Perl. What you don't see in those entries is that I am in the grip of a black depression, and J has bought me these kittens because he ( Read more... )

Today I read that our bodies now have an extra organ. Obviously, no new organs have snuck into our bodies in the middle of the night. Sometimes what was always there is just classified as an organ now. It's funny to think that you know the human body and then oops, science intervenes, and suddenly you don't. You have a mesentery somewhere in your ( Read more... )

I may be tempting fate, posting this with a day left to go, but 2016 has not yet killed my cat. Perl is fifteen years old. She is a frail and skinny thing. The last time I weighed her, she was 6.6 lbs. She has cataracts in both eyes and she moves slowly because she has arthritis. When she started losing weight very quickly this year, the vet ( Read more... )

It's the end of 2016 and my life is very simple ( Read more... )

In some ways, this is an addendum to my previous post. I hadn't quite finished thinking ( Read more... )

If I were to live my life ( Read more... )

I suppose there is some advantage to having a space where I've been keep my writing for so long. I went back and looked at my entry for the first day of 2015 I saw that I started this year with a profound sense of ambivalence. I gained and lost so much in 2014. And maybe I had hoped that I was done losing things. Certainly, I couldn't have guessed ( Read more... )

After seven years at the Mysterious Workplace, you are allowed to take a sabbatical, which is three months of paid time off. Not many people achieve this milestone and some of us are such workaholics that we put off our sabbaticals for years, or we don't manage to take them at all. One of the lawyers made no less than three separate attempts at ( Read more... )