Paul is always finding Cool! Internet! Stuff! and then showing ALLLLL of it to me, especially when I am concentrating really hard on finding a good baby name. When he first showed me the below video (which is in a group of similar videos, and I saw alllll of them), I said what I usually say, which is, “Uh huh. Very nice and/or funny.” But then he kept playing it in the background, which is another thing Paul does when he finds something he likes, and before I knew it I was not only humming it but also…well, TOUCHED by it. The visual is unimportant—it’s the speech I like. I have a little crush on Winston Churchill now, and there really isn’t anything Paul can complain about since he’s the one who so forcefully and repeatedly introduced us. And so I give it to you, but on its own rather than in a sea of other such things. “Best of Paul,” we can call these.

You remember my care package swap with Japan? Well, Lisa is willing to do swap with someone else, too! (Not necessarily the SAME EXACT stuff. But FROM JAPAN.) Sadness: it has to be someone in the U.S., because otherwise the shipping costs would kill both you and Lisa dead. (Lisa’s in a military family, so if you live in the U.S., the shipping rates are similar to mailing within the U.S.)

The deal is that you’d mail her a box of stuff, and she’d mail you a box of stuff. Lisa and I did it kind of free-form/surprise style, with both of us mentioning a few things we’d love to get, just to give the other person the general idea. Here’s what I sent her. (I used a military flat-rate box, which is even less than U.S. shipping costs. You can get the boxes free online, or many post offices can give you one. You’ll need to fill out a customs form, so allow a few extra minutes at the P.O., and write down everything in the box so you’ll remember.) (Don’t be overwhelmed. It was no big deal.)

I feel I should warn you that I had a TERRIBLE TIME trying to unpack my box. As of several weeks after I’d received it, it was still sitting on the dining room table, full. The only things that had been removed were (1) the ice cream scoop, (2) the teeny cute cookie cutters, which Paul used to decorate the kids’ lunches, and (3) the bag from Thailand, which I’m using as a library bag.

Am I really supposed to just OPEN these and EAT them and then THROW AWAY the cute packages? The potato is wearing a potato banner! And what if I LOVE them and can NEVER HAVE THEM AGAIN (unless I go to Japan)?

Here’s the ice cream scoop I actually did manage to unpack, and HOW WAS I LIVING MY LIFE WITHOUT THIS ICE CREAM SCOOP? I have tried many an ice cream scoop and I always end up using a soup spoon instead, but this scoop is TEH (ice-cream-related) BOMB.

But what am I supposed to do with the packaging? I can’t just throw it away! It includes the instruction “Do not carry the metal part of a knife to your lips directly.” That is valuable advice!

Also, I see you lusting after my scratched, stained, metallic-flecked, genuine 1960s countertop. BACK OFF IT’S MINE.

And am I supposed to just let the children USE these cute straws and then THROW THEM AWAY? (The straws, not the children.) Unthinkable.

And how about this? The packaging says “Tea Spoon” and “tea time,” but the cup says “coffee” on it! Also, the description: “A well-functioned sophisticated and best in quality created exclusively for you.” Exclusively for me! And the instructions: “Do not apply onto metal luffa to avoid hurts or residuals on articles.” I might need those instructions later.

And the cool clothespins. “Caution with using this product”! “Do not use it in a manner other than regular use”!

I did finally unpack everything and incorporate it into our household, and frankly a lot of the motivation was so I could take pictures for this post. So if you want to do a care package swap with Lisa, your package might ALSO contain SUPER-CUTE STUFF, and you too will have conflicted feelings about throwing away the wrappers and putting things away.

Well, if you want to do it anyway, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. Leave a comment on this post if you’re interested, or on Lisa’s post, and Lisa will choose someone as soon as she wraps up another project she’s working on (I’ll bet it’s unpacking her shopping: that would take me FOREVER if I lived in Japan).

GUESS WHAT I AM GOING ON A TRIP SEE MY BABY NIECE!!! I have already started buying twee travel sizes: I have not flown in ten years and evidently Rules Have Changed. Plus, I don’t want to have to check luggage, so every inch of space is valuable. Or so I tell myself when I’m cooing over the cute travel sizes.

Awwwww! Baby Degree!

Travel sizes! Because I will be traveling!

I can hardly believe it, even though the evidence is all around me! Look, I bought a suitcase!

Because I am going on a trip! So I need a suitcase! And could they have made that TAG any BIGGER?? It’s so huge, it makes the large carry-on look like a cell phone case or something.

I’m really, really happy about this. I’d been thinking of it as if it were an impossibility—as if there was an actual barrier between me and my niece. But it turns out that if you give $300 to Southwest and $50 to Marshalls and $1 to Target, you can have a round-trip ticket and a pink suitcase and a travel-sized deodorant and time with a niece!

Awwww! Baby Niestle!

And please, will you imagine this: I am going BY MYSELF. I will READ on the plane or if there is a long delay. No one will be requiring my feeding assistance! No one will require me to carry their things or their person or their safety devices! No one will TALK TALK TALK at to me! (I am packing a gag in case my rowmate tries to start a conversation. That’ll go through security, right?)

So! That is the answer to the contest: I am showing you a travel-sized deodorant because I am going on a trip to see my niece.

A handful of you guessed the trip part, and if no one had guessed closer than that I would have chosen among those for the prize—but only ONE person guessed correctly that it was a trip to see my niece, and that was so right-on I made the little “We have a winner!” ding sound. It was Halloweenlover, of lots and lots of nonsense. Yay! I’m going to email you, HL, and we’ll talk food allergies and stuff. [Follow-up: you can see the care package if you’re interested.]

Not much longer to make a guess in the contest. I’m working right now on the post that surrounds that photo. I’ll post it tomorrow, probably, and then we’ll pick a winner. Oh, please be someone who likes brownies or cookies so I have an excuse to make some and eat the rest of the batch myself.

Well, it happened. My Postcrossing fantasy happened: I GOT A POSTCARD FROM ONE OF YOU.

YES! It’s true! It was from Colleen A Madison Mom. You should have seen Colleen and me FLIPPING OUT about it. Sample dialogue:

Swistle: SQUEE SQUEE SQUEE!!
Colleen: SQUEE SQUEEEEE!!!
Swistle: OMG SQUEEE!
Colleen: SQUEE SQUEE SQUEE!!
Swistle: I KNOW RIGHT???? SQUEEE!

And actually, it got me thinking: maybe I’ve gotten postcards from OTHERS of you, too, without knowing it (Colleen had put her blog url on her postcard—otherwise I wouldn’t have known). And maybe I’ve sent postcards to some of YOU without either of us knowing it! So what I was thinking is that we ought to do a little CODE of some sort: something that wouldn’t look weird to someone else, but something that would catch our eye if we got a postcard from each other. Maybe a little triangle across one corner, like this?

I’m doing that from now on! If you’re on Postcrossing and you get a postcard with a line-corner, it’s from ME! And tell me about it so I can FLIP THE FLIP OUT!

I feel like putting together a care package! Let’s have a contest!

Guess the significance of this photo. Like, when I show you later this week the blog post that accompanies this picture, what will the post be about?

I’ll put all correct answers into a random-number-generating hat and choose one. The winner will get a Swistle care package of various shopping finds. Unless the winner has a mailing address that is not USA, APO, or FPO, in which case I will mail them a kiss in an envelope because HOLY SNEEZES the shipping. If you won an earlier contest, you are nevertheless welcome to enter this one. Contest runs through Friday, April 24th, at, say, noonish, U.S. Pacific time. (In other words, best to get vote in by Thursday, but if you make a guess on Friday before I’ve gotten around to choosing a winner, you’ll probably still make it.)

When one cat is getting spoiled with tuna, EVERYCAT wins

OUR NEW COUCH IS HERE!!! Unfortunately, probably due to a problem with the warehouse it was stored in, it is INFESTED with children. We didn’t notice until we’d already signed the thingie saying we’d received it in good condition.

Also, remember how I said it was RED? Not quite so red as we’d thought, is it? I’ve said before that I am not AT ALL skillzed at visualizing from a swatch of paint or fabric or wallpaper, and this is total proof of it. To me, the swatch looked very bright red, with a variegated color pattern that included some orange and some deep red.

It arrived, and it is WINE-colored. Which on one hand, excellent! Because AFTER we ordered the red couch, WEEKS after we ordered it, we remembered that we have a wine-colored recliner, and it seemed like the red and the wine might be a…poor mix. But in fact they are the same color, really. Both wine. And really, I can’t claim I was misled by the swatch: the color name is “Claret.” WINE.

But on the other hand, I was looking forward to fiery red with little bits of orange in it. Last night, I kept trying to get Paul to engage in a conversation about whether we’d made the Wrong Fabric Choice—on a non-returnable couch, is what I was trying to discuss. He escaped into sleep.

Thank you for all your kind comments about Georgie. Srsly, what did people do before they had internet support? It feels so much better to read the commiserations, the anecdotes, the personal experiences, the tips.

And also the book recommendations. I ordered Desser, The Best Ever Cat by Maggie Smith (recommended by Jessica), When a Pet Dies by Fred Rogers (recommended by Trina) (I LOVE Mister Rogers), and I Miss You: A First Look at Death by Pat Thomas (recommended by Amazon after I added the other two to my cart). Our library has Lifetimes by Bryan Mellonie (recommended by Trina and Heather), so we’re going to pick it up this weekend.

Another Heather asked if Georgie were Burmese. The vet lists him as an American domestic shorthair, which I think is a nice way to say “cat mutt” (Georgie was a shelter kitten), but when I went and looked at a bunch of pictures of Burmese cats, I saw some that strongly resembled Georgie, and I also saw resemblances in the Burmese temperament: Georgie still acts like a kitten, and he’s social and cuddly (though not much of a meower, and the adjective “intelligent” didn’t click right into place). Maybe he’s got a Burmese grandparent.

Oh em gee. Woman. Stop taking my picture. Also, I’m ready for another Pringle.

I took the cats to the vet this week for their annual check-ups. Two kitties are doing well; the third is not. He’s lost weight; he’s got a heart murmur; he’s coughing; he has fluid in his lungs; his kidneys are smaller; and he’s “side-breathing,” which I gather means that he’s using his abdominal muscles to help him breathe because his lungs aren’t working well enough to do it on their own.

The vet says he has both kidney disease and congestive heart failure. The tricky thing, she said, is that the treatment plans for those two things are opposite—and in fact, treating one could push the other one over the edge. Georgie is 15 years old, and she said even if we did a bunch of testing to discover exactly how bad each situation is, it would still be difficult to get a treatment plan that would…well, that would WORK.

I croaked out something about how long would he….? and she said it could be months or it could be weeks (she did not say years), that it could happen suddenly or that he could start struggling to breathe. It’s so smart of them to keep boxes of tissues handy. I mouthed “Pain?” and she said no, not usually, but that he could start panicking and feeling like he’s drowning, and if that happened we might want to “keep him from suffering.” She said if he seems okay now (he does), we can just, as she put it, “enjoy each day with him.” But that if he seems to be struggling and suffering, we could “bring him in.”

Here’s the part that got to me: she said we didn’t need to do the usual vaccinations. She put away the little filled needles. Doesn’t that sound like a “hospice” kind of move?

Here’s another part that got to me: he’s very allergic to fleas, and he recently apparently got bitten by one because he has a huge itchy patch. I asked if he could have a shot of whatever they gave him last time to make the itchiness go away faster, and she said it would put too much strain on his heart. She said it could just…and she snapped her fingers and pressed her lips together.

So now we are on full kitty-spoiling mode. Does he want some cheese? A chip? Ice cream? Kitty treat? ANYTHING? He’s always liked people food but we didn’t like to let him have very much of it, but now that seems like an unnecessary limitation, if the situation is so dire that he’s not going to have vaccines.

He likes to sit on my shoulders, which can be inconvenient. But what’s a little inconvenience? What’s a little claw-puncture here and there, between friends?

(And incidentally, if you’re trying to conceal a double chin in a photograph, I highly recommend using a cat.)

Now and then I see a post with the theme “What makes you feel like a grown-up?” The answers are always so cool: when I started doing my own taxes; when I realized no one was going to clean up that barf except me; when I bought my first set of dishes; when I had to start paying for things like furnaces and roofs; when I started buying pictures for the walls instead of posters.

And this is another one for me: When I had to make a decision about a pet’s life. It’s hard to be responsible for deciding whether someone else lives or dies, and when the suffering justifies the intervention, and this is the first time I’ve had to do that. Georgie was the first kitty I adopted on my own, as opposed to my parents adopting a cat for the family. And he’s the first pet I’ve had on my own who’s been in this situation: I’ve never had to make end-of-life decisions before, or wonder what is supposed to be done with the body. Do we….bury it in the yard? The last time any kitty of mine died, it was a family kitty and my parents handled it entirely.

I’m fretting, too, about how to talk about it with the kids. I had a brief talk about death with Elizabeth the other day, and it didn’t go well: she immediately started talking about how she didn’t want any of us to get any older because we might die, and about how after her BIRTHDAY would SHE be old enough to die, and so on. Ack.

On the other hand, I’m grateful to have this warning. The vet said that with heart disease, sometimes the first sign of it is when the cat dies. I am glad to have this time to give Georgie extra treats and pettings, and to take his photo, and to be extra sweet to him. Want to sleep on my favorite blanket in the sunshine? And can I bring you a Pounce treat?