Bother

So remember that time a few months ago when I wrote this post and was all like, "Blogging is AWSUM and I will never give it up!"?

[...]

I may have spoken too soon on that front.

I think I might be done with this blog.

The Mysteries of Simple Cat

Very recently, the little cat taught me how to play fetch with him. Middle Sister had left a couple of sparkle balls (think pompoms with tinsel) , and little Hob is quite taken with them. One day, I was in the kitchen when he came in with a ball in his mouth, and he dropped it at my feet. I picked it up and tossed it into the dining room, thinking that it would get Hob out of my way. (He gets stepped on in the kitchen at least once a week.)

He tore off after it, and then, to my surprise, he brought it back to me and deposited it at my feet. I threw it again and the same thing happened. And thus, a monster was born--I have to hide the sparkle balls at night or he would want to keep playing. It's ridiculously cute, especially since every once in a while, he will bring the ball to me, and realize as he drops it that it's a sparkle ball and sparkle balls are the most fun ever and then there's five minutes of batting around the ball and chasing it before he finally brings it back to me to throw.

The most interesting thing about the sparkle ball, to me, is that it's made me re-conceptualize how I think about my cat's intelligence. Hob has developed a reputation as "The Simple Cat", largely because he spends a lot of time doing this:

Or getting swallowed by the couch like this:

Here's the thing, though--he's not simple. Our adventures with the sparkle ball have demonstrated a much greater capacity for reason and logic than I would have thought possible. He brought the ball up on to the bed one night (it was about this time that I realized I would need to hide them at night) and accidentally knocked it down the side of the bed, where it fell underneath. He looked at where it had fallen for a few minutes, jumped down, and fished it out from under the bed. A few days later, he knocked it under the stove in the kitchen. Unfortunately, it's too far back for me to fish it out without moving the stove, but every time I go in to the kitchen now, Hob tries to herd me over to the stove, and he shows me how to get the toy out. It never occurred to me that he had that kind of capacity for memory.

He has also taken to putting the sparkle balls in his water dish when I won't or don't play with him. This is fascinating to me because the only other fetching cat I've ever known also did this, although her toy of choice was hair elastics.

The hands I love

This, believe it or not, is the man I fell in love with:

We met in the spring of 2004, on the steps of the only original 19th century building at The Historic Site Which Shall Not Be Named's Sister Site (a 19th century British naval and military base, in case you're wondering). A mutual friend introduced us. We were fast friends. I had actually been dating someone else for almost two years when we met, and that relationship was in the process of dying.¹ My near-instant feelings for Mat complicated things enormously.

(Small "awwww!" and/or nausea-inducing sidebar: A few weeks after we met, we went out for coffee with the friend who introduced us and his girlfriend. After dropping me off at home that night, Mat went back to his house and told his mom he was going to marry me.)

A trip to PEI with my family in 2005. It's amazing we stayed together, especially considering that a) his hair looked that stupid for the whole summer, and b) he had *no idea* who Anne of Green Gables was.

This first year of marriage has been surprising. I had no huge drive to get married--I certainly wasn't against it, but if Mat hadn't been so gung ho on it, it wouldn't have bothered me to stay common-law. That said, I love *being* married; it has brought me an inner peace that I didn't realize I was missing.



Our relationship isn't perfect; we fight, we squabble, we hog the bedclothes, we nitpick at each other. But we are still invested in and committed to each other, and I hope that we can maintain that commitment as we go forth from here.

Happy anniversary, love.

=====
¹ For a variety of reasons, including the fact that my ex thought grad school was a dumb idea and that I shouldn't go.