ashes and aftermath

It was an unusually warm January, and now there's no snow on the ground. The snow drops have decided to make their appearance a full month ahead of my schedule (they're most likely on their own schedule; some years they bloom now; other years, I don't see them until April).

The snow drops are in Mark's memorial garden, which is supposed to bloom on the anniversaries of his birth and death. I'm sure Mark is laughing somewhere because of the futility of trying to schedule mother nature.

Soon, but not too soon (apparently, you can't schedule crematories either), a few of Juliet's ashes will join Mark's memories -- I don't have any of his ashes here, but as a sidenote, we will be visiting some of his ashes in a few weeks. I don't remember that they particularly loved each other, but I think they were peaceful together. And it *is* a memorial garden.

More of her ashes will go under the tall decorative grass by the dining room window; she loved hiding in the grass and sleeping on the bark mulch. I have another spot picked out in my bedroom for ashes in a container. Not sure if there will be other distribution points; Robert may have some ideas.


People have asked if I'll be getting another cat, and the answer is yes. I'm hoping to get two short haired cats, relatively young but not necessarily kittens, and relatively healthy, though not necessarily physically "perfect". Of the two cats that have caught my eye recently, one was missing her tail, and just learning to live with it, and the other is deaf (easy enough to deal with). But who knows what we'll end up with. I'd like two because there are two laps in the house, so that they can keep each other company, and so that when one dies, there will be a spare cat; this latest experience might have been a tiny bit eased by having another cat around the house.

I know I'm not ready yet. For one thing, I still have a physical hunger for Juliet, felt especially when I go to bed and when I wake up. I don't want another cat there just to fill an empty space; it seems like the cat would have to work too hard to get into my heart. I'd like to wait longer so that I can love another cat for itself.

For another thing, I'm still not sleeping very well. I mean, I sleep fine but in short spurts. The other night, I slept five hours in a row, which I haven't done for months. But it's taking me a while to go to sleep, and then when I wake up, I can be awake (or at least not asleep) for 1-3 hours. I'm not anxious or fretting or anything. I'm just not asleep.

I think to get a new kitty, it would help everything -- patience, love, availability -- if I could be better rested.


Work is a little challenging right now, but not in a bad way. We have a huge collection of short files that need to be converted from one format to another. There was a brilliant idea a while back to figure out a way to automate the conversion (don't worry, don't worry, we'll take care of it), and I hadn't had a chance to look at the results until recently. Apparently, there were some insurmountable problems which required manual intervention. When I saw the results, my opinion was that there were more than a few problems; the manual fixes would have taken way too long.

So I proposed (much to the delight, I'm sure, of my team mates) that we throw out the semi-automated conversion and perform the entire conversion manually. I think the results will be far better than the results of the earlier plan, especially because we can do a light edit and update the index in the process. But we have a very short window in which to do the work. So the three of us are scrambling to climb this particular mountain. Perhaps when we're done, I'll have more room in my brain for creative thinking again.


So I'm stumbling along, feeling incrementally better but not all better, but making my way.