Mad Times

We said goodbye to our boy Theo today. At almost 19 he did pretty well. As I said to the vet today, everything from his waist up was still working fine, but his back legs and digestive tract betrayed him in the end.

When we lost his sister in 2008 we learned that being an only cat suited him just fine. He’s always been a little neurotic, jealous of any attention lavished on other creatures that weren’t him. He was happy to have us to himself. He was a clingy cuddly furball. Always up for lap time to the point where we got him a heated bed so he would settle and not cry constantly when we weren’t doing his bidding.

We’ll miss him forever.

He was mostly either asleep or moving too fast for a camera, but here are some pictures.

Showing his personality even as a baby. All the way on the left, latched on.

His sister wasn’t so bad when they were little.

Hanging out

Sitting in boxes not big enough for him

Too fast for the camera

Just a few days ago in his heated window seat

I’ve been lurking in the Tiny Challenges community.

They’ve spent January on a variation of resolution setting where instead of spelling out a specific habit they select three words to serve as a kind of theme for the year.

After obsessing about how to pick and whether to use nouns or verbs or adjectives I came up with these.

clear

As in “clear the decks”. Focus on getting rid of stuff, eliminating unfulfilling activities, bad value expenses, worries, obsessions. It makes me happy that it’s both an adjective and a verb.

quiet

This one is similar, but more focused on things like meditation, getting outdoors, turning off podcasts once in a while, feeding my introvert self. Adjective, noun, verb trifecta!

next

Think President Bartlet’s “What’s next?” Stop faffing about and do the next thing. If it’s not clear what the next thing is then figuring out what the next thing is is the next thing.

All of which leads to my challenge for February: Clear the desk! I’ll be spending at least 15 minutes a day for all of February working through the piles of paper and non-paper open loops that make it hard to make progress on anything but maintenance. I’m going to tweet (@jeffy) my progress and see if that kickstarts a habit of writing on twitter (rather than just reading and retweeting). That’s not another challenge, just part of the same one.