Our cat just died. He was 10, his kidneys failed.
I never understood people who get attached to pets; now I do. He was one of the finest persons I have known, man or beast. He walked our daughters to school and picked them up again. He consoled them. He tormented the neighbor’s German Shepherd, god was that funny to watch.
He was tough, he survived a hit from a car that left him in a ditch with a crushed pelvis two years ago.
He was a fighter. A friend once asked her vet why her cat always had wounds on his ass. The vet laughed and said that was because the cat was always running away from fights. Our cat always came home with new scratches on his face.
My in-laws once found him dead in the street and buried him under the cherry tree one rainy day. Standing there crying, they turned to see him watching from 10 feet away.
They’d buried someone else’s cat.
Today we buried the right cat, under the apple tree where he always liked to sit.
Bye, Oliver.

I was going to describe my Friday in comic fashion, but I give up. I will just say that I reached the point where it would not have surprised me had reams of documents started spitting out the air vents, like in Brazil. More Kafka than Dilbert. More Brazil than… than…

It may snow here tomorrow. Too cold, at any rate, to put the tortoise outside. Here in one corner of our home office, paper is stacked. A sheet of heavy, fairly slick poster paper sort of curves up from the floor to vertical a few inches up the wall. Tortoise is standing on the curve, walking and walking. She must have traveled a mile already, without going anywhere.

Photoshop watch out.

How’s your signal-to-noise? My noise seems awfully high right now.

On the plus side, some wonderful writing has been posted to Lost in Transit. Those guys are so good it makes me afraid to post anything.

My wife fell asleep on the sofa last night while drinking tea.
With the teacup and saucer balanced on her stomach! That’s what I call living life on the edge.

She was exhausted because it was her birthday, and she celebrated by taking a sick cat to the vet’s.

I have found Pakeha New Zealanders to be a little schizophrenic about how they see themselves as New Zealanders. Pakeha is a Maori word describing white New Zealanders of European descent. The word Pakeha has been said to have originally meant various things: ‘pale’, ‘ghost’, ‘white pig’ and ‘white lice’, but its origins are still a source of debate. Today, it is a word in common usage, and perfectly acceptable.

My husband always refers to himself as Pakeha. When filling in forms, if he has only the option ‘European New Zealander’ to tick under ethnicity, he is livid. “I’m not European!” he’ll exclaim. “My family has lived in New Zealand for five generations. In what sense am I European?!”

Others, many from older generations, are offended by the word Pakeha. Perhaps they feel a loss of identity at being defined in a non-European way. They cling to the traditions of the Old World.

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