Random Photo: Christmas present, Christmas past

Once again the cats have been fascinated by the tree this year, to the point it's virtually destroyed....again. This Christmas was Ella's first in our home and she seemed every bit as enamoured and excited about everything as our other 2 muppets, Mel and Louis. Bless! Hence I had to post this Iphone pic I snapped of Ella, waiting patiently under the tree for the jolly ol' fat guy in the red suit.

Little Miss Ella - waiting for Santa.....and catnip.

It's also at this time of year that my heart remembers - and still deeply misses - our little Lucy. Four years ago today and I will never forget the feeling of my heart literally breaking. She was an absolute treasure and I loved her with every bone in my body. Dear sweet, adorably quirky Lucy.

Lovely Lucy, never far from my thoughts.

There's not a day goes by that I don't think about her, though I'm pleased to say, having Ella has really helped soothe any lingering emptiness - not least because she definitely looks so much like her (and is missing only Lucy's endearing spaziness and 'special needs' tics), but also because, like Lucy, Ella is incredibly loving, snuggly and a real sweetheart. Similarly, if you sit still for a mere 10 seconds you're guaranteed to have her in your lap, looking for love.

I'm blessed to have both angels in my life, as well as all our other much-loved feline family - present and passed.

Every little helps

For the past few years I've made a lump sum charitable donation to the SPCA towards the end of year. In 2009 my year-end donation coincided with the heartbreaking loss of my amazing and wonderful cat, Lucy, who had herself once been rescued by the SPCA (possibly even twice). In Lucy's honour and loving memory I made my donation, directing it towards the SPCA's Biscuit Fund for Medical Care which provides urgent and life-saving medical treatment to animals in their care and is named after a remarkable dog who narrowly survived a heartless knife attack several years ago. Thankfully Biscuit was successfully treated and re-homed through the SPCA.

When it came to donating this time around my heart was also honouring (and still grieving) our vocal and endearingly bratty companion Otto, whom we sadly lost to old age just prior to Christmas, on Dec. 6th, and of course, not forgetting the wonderful yet feisty 9 lives of Molly (1987-2006). So for 2010 I made a general donation plus, in my New Year spirit/resolution to "Do" more, I finally signed up for the PAW Plan Monthly Giving (something I've been meaning to do for ages). I figure it's a relatively small thing to do considering the 4 incredible cats Lorne and I have shared thanks to the efforts of the SCPCA. (This excludes Mishka of course, because I bought her as a teeny tiny kitten/beanie baby for $10 from a man with a bag of kittens down at Steamworks pub in Gastown.)

In wandering around the SPCA website, I found another great funding program, 'Guardian Angel' where you can read about animals currently in their care awaiting adoption and even choose an animal for whom you can become a Guardian Angel by making a small contribution toward their care. The great thing is, you can also leave a supportive note that can be viewed by those looking through the adoption site.

Since Christmastime also signifies the anniversary of Lucy's passing, I was acutely aware of it being a full year since we said goodbye. No surprise then that I was moved to tears when I saw this little gem, Bella, who not only bears a striking resemblance to Lucy, but Bella's story definitely reminds me of the hardships and emotional struggles we strongly suspect Lucy had encountered before I adopted her in 1998 and the angst she showed in the early days.

There isn't a huge amount of space to write your personal message but perhaps just as well because it forced me to keep it brief. Amid a few tears, I wrote my note for Bella: "Bella's traumatic past & related anxieties sound a lot like those my cat Lucy had endured. With love, patience, nurturing & reassurance Lucy flourished, revealing an endless capacity to love & trust. She was a true blessing. Bella will be too!" Heck, it was all I could do to stop myself from driving to the Okanagan SPCA right there and then to collect her for myself :-)

Anyhow, I'm pleased to report that I got the following lovely email yesterday informing me that Bella has actually just been adopted:

"Dear Guardian Angel,

Great news!! We are pleased to let you know that thanks to your support, Bella was welcomed into her new "forever home" in Penticton on January 15, 2011.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Happy endings like this are only possible with the generous support of animal lovers like you.

As you know, the BC SPCA is a charity entirely reliant on community support. We could not care for the tens of thousands of animals like we do each year without it. If Bella could thank you, she would too! "

I'm so happy and it's great that you get sent an update. I truly hope that her new family will give her all the love and devotion she so richly deserves to help her overcome the past and live out a long and very happy life! And I know Lucy would wish her the same.

Seven days and still waiting.....

So it's been 7 days since my May 1st birthday....when I turned f...f...f...forty...two. Yes 42....which, according to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is supposed to represent the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Really? Well my question is.....does that start anytime soon? I mean it's been a week already and so far nothing...nada, zilch, zip, diddley squat and bugger all. Come on, I only have another 358 days to go, time is of the essence!

Don't get me wrong, I had a great birthday - the weather was sunny and we sat outside on Vicky & Mark's lovely rooftop deck, enjoying a glass of wine and eating home-cooked snacks, treats and fabulously decadent chocolate birthday cake that Lorne bought at Fratellis orgasmic bakery no less, along with the first chocolate cornflake cakes I've eaten in y-e-a-r-s! that Bronwyn and Vicky made :-) Bronwyn also made me a lovely birthday card. She adores our cats!

This is the back of the card, which shows all four cats, including our much missed Lucy.

Oddly enough, the blue collar with gold name tag that Bronnie has drawn in the center is exactly the collar I bought for Lucy to wear in the first few years I had her.....but Bronwyn's never seen that collar, in fact none of the cats have actually worn one in years. There's a hidden surprise with this card too - the 'pop-up' picture once you unfold it..... A remarkable headshot of Lucy. I'm really quite touched that she made this for me, it's so thoughtful and really cute - not to mention that she's quite the artist!

Of course it's a little less 'cheeky' than this one that Bronwyn chose for me last year. Nice :-)


And since I'm on a birthday card roll, I have nooo idea where Vicky and Mark managed to find this hunk-o-hunk-o-fabulous Elvis card, where the black around Elvis is velour no less. Classic! I think this one (& the cat card) has got to get framed.

But enough about cards. For my birthday dinner (which we did Tuesday night) Lorne had bought tickets for a 4-course dinner + scotch-tasting event at Vancouver's Dubrulle Culinary Institute through a local whisky lovers group Rare Drams It was an excellent and really delicious 4-course meal cooked by students of the Culinary Institute and the accompanying scotch tasting enlightened me to a few new and rare 'drams' that I'd actually not heard of but hope to have tingle my tastebuds again some time soon. After opening with a smooth Glenandrew upon arrival, we were treated to Clan Denny from both Speyside and Isla with the starter (both were good but the Isla was outstanding), then Tomintoul 14 yr old with the next course. With the entree we were treated to the delectable blend of McAllan & Laphroaig (a marriage truly made in heaven) and a great dinner was rounded off with the rather excellent Ardberg 18yr old. Bliss. I still can't believe it took me so long to get around to discovering scotch but better later than never, that's what I say! Could it be these delights are part of my life, universe and everything enlightenment?

And here I am, almost a full 7 days into being 42 and still waiting on my 'Answer'. Tum de dum de dum.......any time now would be good......la-de-daa-de-dum.....yup....aaaany-time sooon would be great.....hmmmmm deee da diddley deee......

So while I'm waiting for that pearly wisdom, I'll just run with Terry's analogy of being 42.....i.e. 'two 21-year olds rolled into one'. Hey, works for me!

I Love Lucy...and I miss her every day.

"Grief is like the ocean; it comes in waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim." (Vicki Harrison)

My little Lucy, what a treasure. I want to feel the softness of her fur and her wet nose against my cheek. I miss her gentle spazziness and stomping gait that always made us laugh. I miss her loving cuddles that made everything else simply float away. It's not right that there's an empty space in the corner window where she'd stretch out and look so content, soaking up the sun. It hurts so much that she's not here to climb on my lap the moment I sit down or trying to snuggle into my legs and somehow make herself extra-heavy when I try to move her. Whenever I look to the armchair, I catch myself still expecting (hoping) to see her there.
My thoughts turn to her every day and even though I try not to think about the painful emptiness of losing her, I'm nonetheless still fighting back tears when she's not there to come home to at the end of the day. I feel blessed to have had the privilege of sharing over 11 years of my life with her. She was my emotional support in good times and bad, my comfort, my faith and my unconditional friend and companion. From the moment she won my heart (advertized as a 'special needs cat' needing a new home) she was my soft and furry 'work in progress' as I worked with her through her nervousness, her fears, the unknown traumas that evidently marked her early years, the nightmares that sent her running from a deep sleep and her fear of brooms, vacuums and angry voices. By all accounts she was a bit of an emotional train wreck when I adopted her in 1998 and I devoted myself to nurturing her emotional and physical well-being, helping her grow and winning her trust - for which I was rewarded every day with her unwavering love and warmth, her wonderfully adorable nature and all her delightfully endearing quirky twitchy, stumbly and thumpy spazziness that made her so unique....and just so 'Lucy'. The little cat who'd come flying out of nowhere and onto the bed, diving and sliding around under the sheets as we tried to put on new linens or burying herself among the warm laundry, fresh from the tumble dryer, before we even had chance to fold it. The little cat who couldn't meow properly (except for occasional trips to the vet) but who managed a squeak of enthusiastic anticpation whenever she thought a treat or plate of food was coming her way.

Admittedly, when Lorne first moved in, I was more worried that Lucy would not handle it at all and might retreat into her former shy and anxious self - but Lorne showed just as much caring, patience and love for her and all her spazziness - that he was able to finally win her trust too, to the point she loved cuddling and laying on him just as much as with me. She even surprised us both by accomodating the invasion of three new cats that Lorne brought with him into our home.

In this picture (taken with my iphone, hence the blurriness) she'd been nosing around in a bag of stuff we'd just bought and managed to get the handle around her neck till she proudly sported the bag like a superhero cape. (Thankfully she came out of this better than she did shortly after I adopted her, when she did the very same thing nosing around in a bag of potted plants I'd just purchased. At that time she freaked out when she lifted her head and, feeling the weight of the bag handle around her neck, proceeded to run in circles at 60mph around & around my apartment, sending soil, petals and bashed up pansies and african violets right across the room.)

Little by little Lucy flourished and gained confidence, agility (gradually ceasing to overshoot furniture or fall flat on her face), her personality blossomed and she shared her endless charm with us all (even if she initially ran off and hid under the duvet from most people.)

The only thing that hurts more than the thought of facing the days ahead without my little Lucy Love, is the stark emptiness I imagine of having lived my life for the past 11.5 years, had we never found one another. She was truly loved and unreservedly happy – an absolute blessing and a glowing ray of sunshine in my life. I am forever changed, blessed and spiritually enriched thru the privilege of sharing the precious time we had together. While it hurts like hell to have lost her so soon and so quickly (to an out of the blue diagnosis of stomach cancer just 6 weeks earlier - in mid-November), and my heart literally aches for missing her so much, I try to take comfort knowing that she was such a happy cat - she felt very loved and there's no doubt that she absolutely loved us just as much in return.

She took a little piece of my heart away with her and I don't think I'll ever stop missing her but I'm truly thankful for having her be such a wonderful part of my life. I love Lucy....(aka Lu-lu, Loopy-Lu, Spaz, Lucy Button, Lucy-Luv-Love, ...etc.) and she is very, very missed.

Lucy: 1996 (?) to Dec. 28, 2009.

And ever has it been known that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation. Kahlil Gibran