Today I return to the internet the same way I left it a week ago: by posting a picture of my cat doing cat-like things.
There’s a lot of gathering-up-the-threads going on today, trying to figure out where I’m at in a whole bunch of projects. First cab off the rank is calling the shelter we adopted the Admiral from last month, letting them know that our thirty-day trail is going well and that our cat is very definitely going to be our cat. We like her and want to keep her.
Second cab off the rank is taking a look at my daily routine and hacking it a little, trying to figure out where the kitty fits in. The admiral is an inside cat, and our apartment is kinda small. That means she needs a lot of exercise of the hunting-and-pouncing kind, or the thing that she hunts and pounces will inevitably be our feet.
This means there needs to be two or three sessions of play fit into the daily routine, giving her a half-hour or more of chasing a mouse on a string around the flat. It’s a genuinely gleeful experience for cat and owner, but it’s also disruptive. A new daily behaviour with no strong indicators about when it needs to happen, or what occurs after it.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but we picked up the need for this much play after watching Jackson Galaxy’s show (and reading his book, Total Cat Mojo) right about the time my grandmother passed away. Not having my usual routines in place made it easier to let some of the necessary self-care lapse and get distracted by the complex knot of feelings I’m trying to process.
Which, in turn, wore me down because that rarely led me to the work desk on a given day, and so a neat little anxiety/shame spiral started picking up momentum.
It’s been a good week for the kitty mojo, but a tough one on my own.
Fortunately, it’s not like that mojo is out of my control. So, today, I’m taking a page from some other recent reading, James Clear’s Atomic Habits, and mapping out my morning routine to start building in the new additions and creating a flowchart I can follow that will deliver me back to the desk.
