wow a whole week

has elapsed and I think that is the longest since arriving here that the blog has been without update. For a while there a nice rhythm was settling into my bones...sleep in the mornings with Baby E while Kenneth gets up early to have his time...and after he and the baby go to sleep for the night, I'd sneak away to write in this blog. It was working so nicely, but then the daddy had to go and get himself hired at Whole Foods. In the meat department. Evenings. Same exact hours as before. I'm not complaining about his having a job. I'm not complaining about having whole stretches of day where Edie and I get to sit on blankets at the park or flirt with a busful of strangers on the way to the farmer's market across town. I'm complaining about that precious bit of night time that was mine, all mine, in which to write, read, knit, or read about knitting, or writing, while the rest of the house lay dormant.

Now, it seems there is no dormant time. None!
Kenneth comes home late and we hang out with a movie and leftover whatever was for dinner earlier (I always eat twice) as soon as Edie is asleep. Edie is getting to bed later and later now because she seems to be waiting up for Daddy to get home. By the time we go to sleep ourselves, Baby Early Bird is only a few hours away from getting the worm. She's fast now, too. When she's up, I'd better be too, or else bits of paper get consumed and diaper pails intimately explored. Her morning nap is my morning nap. Her afternoon nap is my lunch break. We'd better get outside at least once as well, or she and I both go a little nuts.

All I'm saying is that Kenneth and I should both be unemployed, so that we'd have time to write/knit/sew/play drums/cook delicious foods AND enjoy our precious infant child.

Right now it is piles of done and undone laundry mixing in ways that prevent their being cleaned, or hung.
It is a cascading trail of ants, an undulating puddle of ants, a carefully scripted and contagiously cheerful contingent of ants, holding their very own conference of delegates around the rubber soled shoes smelling ominously of meat. The promise of our future, they say, is that every ant will be gainfully employed, labor will not be outsourced, the crumbs in our house will be carried out by the ants under our house.
The cats are understandably upset as their litter pan has been exported to a little spot outside, by where the dog lays at night. I'm too tired to think of a practical solution. Just go somewhere. Anywhere. Jinx is gone gone gone. For some reason I haven't been dwelling on it. It is what it is. If I think too hard, I'll get sad, and there is no room for being sad about Jinx in a situation like this. Right Left Right Left. You just gotta keep walking.

But just for a second?

Jinx is the most amazing cat I've ever known. People who are devoutly Un-cat people have admitted, a little bashfully, that there is just something about that cat. Junior at the Fairmount called him Cat Dog. Every neighbor I talked to would tell me stories about Jinx. "Your son came to visit me this morning. He just walked straight past me, through the door, and into the bathroom where he drank from my toilet." Or how Tim walked up the front steps, opened the front door, and saw Jinx galloping toward him from the end of the block. Tim held the door waiting, and when Jinx got to him he stopped running, looked up as if to say thank you, and walked nonchalantly up the stairs and turned right, heading for my apartment.
Once, when he'd been missing for a whole day and I was starting to worry, I went out to look for him and ran into the former live-in building manager who'd been fired the week before and wasn't taking it very well. He was staggering down the street with a big grin, a six-pack in one hand and a paper sack in the other. "Hey I got me a new cat, man, he's the sweetest thing! He's been cuddling with me all day and now I got a sack full of cat food." I asked if it was Jinx and it was. He took the disappointment well. "No problem, man, we're gonna watch American Idol together and I'm gonna feed him some dinner. Then I'll send him up to you." I told him that that would be fine as long as Jinx was home before midnight. Jinx would spend all day visiting the neighbors, eating their fried chicken and sleeping on their couches, but he always made it back to my door around midnight. We slept like spoons in a drawer, every night. He was my cat boyfriend. When my other boyfriend started coming around, Jinx moved to the foot of the bed, and then the chair by the window, without much complaint. When we moved in with that other boyfriend and his football jock cat, Siddartha, Jinx was miffed but he still did not complain. He transferred headquarters to the attic, where he could sleep undisturbed and still be the Alpha catdog. Sid and then the kitten, Gertrude, took over the house with their busy wrestling, and Jinx took over the neighborhood.

Oh man that is simply quite enough.

That cat is special and I hope he has found a situation that makes him happy. I don't blame him for taking off - we are crowded into somebody else's home with a dog that was here first and a cat that was here first. The one spot behind the dresser in the closet that Jinx had found for privacy got taken away when we moved some furniture. Leaving was the sensible thing to do.

I guess.

We miss him though.