We Got Cats!

These are the times that try human souls.

I know that’s not how Thomas Paine said it – he wrote “men’s souls” of course. That’s usually excused by the explanation that “men” used that way includes all of us, but – not to disrespect Paine, who was a force for good in the Revolution – it really means that no one considered the thoughts, or even the souls, of women important.

At the moment, I am angry and depressed over the murder of a woman by an agent of an over-funded federal police agency that shouldn’t even exist, by the various actions against the people of Venezuela, by the way surveillance tech is creeping into all of our lives, and by the efforts (and not just by the regime controlling our federal government, but by local utilities) to slow walk renewable energy and keep polluting.

That’s just the short list for this morning. There are many other things I’m mad about.

However, I interrupt this listing of horrors for an important announcement:

We got cats!

Meet Shadow (female dark gray) and Piper (male gray tabby), our new beloved and chaotic housemates.

They are still kittens, more or less, though growing like the proverbial weeds – seven months old when we got them just under a month ago. All the exploratory energy of kittens, but old enough to understand such things as the litter box and – to an extent – the word “no.” (Or at least the water spray bottle when they’re on the kitchen counter.)

They have torn up several things and caused a minor water emergency by somehow disconnecting the overflow hose from our heat pump – while one of us might have actually caused that disconnection, it was due to moving things around to protect the overflow bucket from the cats, so it’s pretty much their fault – and generally been a handful.

We are developing several tricks for getting them away from the front door when we’re headed out – they are still, fortunately, very distractable – because we don’t want an accidental meeting between them and any of our neighbors’ dogs, of which there are quite a few in our building. I have some interesting scratches from bringing them back in when they wanted to go explore, not to mention from them leaping across my head while I was still in bed.

They also purr and talk and sit on laps (when they decide to stay still) and tend to crawl into bed with us in the middle of the night. They are bonded siblings, according to the animal shelter, and like each other and us.

Which is all to say that they are a joy to have around.

I am sharing this news and some pictures not just because even pictures of kittens make people happy, but also because bringing small agents of chaos into your life helps a lot in these difficult times.

They don’t distract you from your responsibilities, but they do distract you from some of the stress brought on by those responsibilities.

There are other ways to find relief. Meditation is good. Music – either listening or playing. Comfort reading – I’m making my way through the Thursday Murder Club series, which continues the British mystery convention of absolutely improbable murders but has them solved by some very interesting residents of a retirement community, which is to say people even older than me.

But the nice thing about cats is that they do things on cat schedule, not yours, so you can’t plan to go play with cats as soon as you finish your current effort to address the outrage going on in the same way that you promise yourself you can get back to your book as soon as you show up at the protest or finish writing your members of Congress.

You have to play with the cats on their schedule. They won’t stop. And, of course, you have to feed them and water them and stay on top of the litter box and provide them with entertainment while preventing them from doing too much damage.

It’s a full time job, except when they’re napping, which, fortunately, cats do a lot.

And just so you know that I’m thinking about a lot more than cats, here’s a picture of the flag hanging outside one of the businesses in my neighborhood. Yet another reason to be so grateful to live in Oakland.