What Could Possibly Have Brought Me Back?

True story: I've been neglecting this place.  No, not just neglecting.  Actively neglecting.

I used to drink a lot of apple juice back in my university days.  And by a lot, I mean I had it at every meal.  Side note: I also had two glasses of milk (one 2% and one chocolate) and ice cream for dessert at every meal for two years before I made the shocking connection between how I felt after eating and lactose... those were a couple of loooong years.

One day, I reached for my glass of apple juice and realized that I didn't just not want it, I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.  The very thought of all the apple juice that I had drank made me dizzy.  It was years before I could drink it again.

Such was the situation with my online presence. It's not just my blog that I've been neglecting.  I haven't looked at Facebook in months (though I did do one update weeks ago that said something like "Is this thing still on?" or something like that.  I haven't worked my way up to logging back into it yet).  I haven't looked at my email in that long either.  I'm sure it's probably mostly spam anyway, but if you've written to me and I haven't responded it's not because I don't like you.  Though it might be.  So you should maybe do some reflection on that.

But, just like apple juice, I couldn't stay away forever.  I drink the AJ in much saner quantities now, even if it's only because I have to pay for it now.  So I'm back.  I hope you missed me.  I'm sure you did.  I'm sure that when I open up my email, there will be so many messages there from people saying "hey, what happened to you?" and the like.  And if there aren't, it's probably because you thought I was going through something and didn't want to bother me.  Thanks for that.  I appreciate the space.

So what was it that brought me back?

What brings anyone to the internet?  Pictures of cats.

This is one of our cats, Mordecai.

He works hard for the money, so we don't complain too loudly when he takes the occasional nap on the couch.

You may be surprised to hear this, but My Lovely Wife and I are generally covered in cat hair.  We'd been talking about the state of cat hair in our home, trying to identify the source and how it came to be that we are wearing the equivalent of a third of a cat at any time.  After much sleuth work, we narrowed it down to one of two culprits.  Neither of them would buckle under interrogation, so we went with our guts and determined that it was probably this guy.

I took steps yesterday, and this happened.

It's a little fuzzy, but if you look closely you can see our horrible deaths reflected in his eyes.

As we suspected, there was a much smaller cat underneath it all.  I mean, he's still a large cat, but he's not nearly as big as he used to be.

That glint in his eyes is the light that we expect to see at the end of the tunnel.

In all honesty, he does seem to really love it.  Considering it was his first time getting groomed, he was super docile the whole time.  The groomer even put a good note and a smiley face on his card.  I was so proud of him.  He's adapting pretty well to it.  I thought that he was being super snuggly because he loved me so much for helping him out of his fur coat, but it turns out that it has more to do with the fact that it's been a little chilly and he's used to a certain level of warmth.  I'm a cat person, so I'm totally cool with being used as a heat source; it means I'm not just Thing That Puts Out the Food, and I like being useful.

It also catches him by surprise when he cleans himself.  I watched him lick his shoulder twice without making any contact at all.  By the third time he figured out that he needed to lean into it a little more and all was right in the world.

Well, almost all was right in the world.

Our other cat, Callaghan, has never been, how do you say it what's the word I'm looking for how can I say this gently... adaptable.  When I let Mordecai out of the carrier, Callaghan got one look at him and then fled the scene.  Lest you think that he was worried that he'd be next, let me assure you that it was because he didn't recognize the cat that he's lived with for his entire life.

I managed to get this picture just before he ran away and hid in the basement for the rest of the day.

There you have it. Further evidence that cats run the Internet.

Talk to you later.