Running Chick

It was a busy Saturday for us starting with a 6:25AM “service x is down” alert from Josh. He fixed that in a jiff, and promptly took a nap on the couch. Once I’m up, I’m up, so I drank coffee and trolled the intarwebs for a while, until I got bored and decided to go for a run.

It was about 17 when I headed out and, thanks to the summery temps earlier in the week, the roads were icy. Scary icy. I decided that I’d like to keep my 41-year-long streak of not having any broken bones and elected to head back home after a mile. However, I noticed that while the salt trucks didn’t get to the cross streets, the up & down streets were perfectly bare. Hello impromptu hill session, I’d forgotten how much you hurt! Actually, it really didn’t hurt as badly as I thought it was going to. I think that’s due to the bike trainer Josh got me for my birthday. I’ve been trying to get at least two 45-minute rides in per week and I think it’s really increased my fitness level because when I got to the top of my hill, I only sorta felt like puking. Last year when I did hills, I really felt like puking. Improvement!

When I got home, Josh was still napping on the couch so I decided to wake him up by doing a kettlebell workout. Nothing jolts you off the couch more than the possibility of a 10-pound kettlebell hitting you in the melon. Once he extracted himself from the couch, we were off and running. We poked around downtown at various stores and went to lunch at 5th & Elm Coffee House (they have a new location in Houghton and their lunch fares are so yummy). Hop over to Josh’s blog to see what he had because I didn’t think to take a pictures of my tuna sandwich & tomato basil soup. We looked at a few houses on the market and then decided to head out to McLain State Park to take some pictures.

Sky & clouds using my circular polarizing filter.

Stamp sand out in the middle of the ice.

Things on logs.

And me doing a really bad warrior pose on a stump.

Need to work on my form for sure. There’s more pictures in the gallery, if you are so inclined.

Dinner at a packed Michigan House capped off this fun, action-filled day. It was good.

It’s been a rough couple of months for me. Losing Simon in November was hard, but then losing Spencer just two months later was devastating. For 16 years, it was just the three of us, then it was the two of us, now it’s just me. I did not anticipate how lonely I’d feel and how sad it would be to be here at home without them. People have been telling me that I should seek comfort through my memories, but at the moment my memories just make me sad.  And just about everything else, for that matter.

Grief is so hard. Just when I think I might be working my way out of it, something triggers a memory and my tears come again. There are 5 stages.  I’m clearly in stage 4, which is depression.  I imagine this is the stage where most people stay the longest and for me, it’s the hardest. There’s nothing anybody can say to me or do for me to make me feel better and there’s nothing I can do to make myself feel better. Mostly, I just want to be left alone to deal with my feelings on my own terms.

I decided that I wanted to get something personal that would memorialize them and how much they meant to me. I custom ordered a necklace that just came today.

I think it turned out really nice and it makes me happy.

“The waiting is the hardest part
Every day you see one more card
You take it on faith, you take it to the heart
The waiting is the hardest part”  (Tom Petty, The Waiting 1981)

We are still here. Spencer has not improved, I am still at home. The last time he threw up was about 12 hours ago, so I guess that’s an improvement. But he is not eating. I’ve tried enticing him with all sorts of his favorite foods – tuna, chicken, rice and all he does is give it a sniff and turn his head away.  A couple of times yesterday, I tried to put food in his mouth, and he did swallow it, but within 15 minutes he was throwing up. I decided just to stop that, so in essence, he hasn’t had a bite since Monday morning.  He is regularly drinking, but he’s still fairly dehydrated.

I talked to the vet today, she said that if he doesn’t want to eat, he’s not going to eat. Period. She wanted me to bring him in for a shot of B-12 and an appetite stimulant, which I did. She said that if it works, he should be looking for food tonight. She also gave me some new canned food and a high-calorie paste to try.

So, we wait. And I worry and I cry and I spent a lot of time laying on the floor by his basket stroking him. And he sleeps. Sometimes he purrs. Mostly he doesn’t. I’ve not been getting a lot of sleep. Any little noise wakes me up because I think it’s him moving around. Last night I slept on the couch because he didn’t want to come upstairs. I got on the scale this morning because my jeans were baggy. I’ve lost four pounds since Sunday. Stress is a bitch.

So is waiting.