A Grief Exchanged
The working title of my previous post was, "A Grief Exchanged."
I couldn't quite make the title work in my head, so I abandoned it for "Adoption," which still works well.
I'm re-claiming that title for this post, because I can make more sense of where I was going with my last post.
I got home tonight after spending a few hours with family, and a familiar-yet-distant feeling was on my mind:
Excitement.
Excitement because I was home.
Excitement because someone was waiting for me.
I've been feeling lately like the last year was almost a Dallas Dream Retcon type of interlude.
...that the past 12 months of mourning, sadness, and intense feelings of aimlessness were just a passing shadow, and that I am now what I always was:
A cat dad!!!
Now, please understand. I am not at all trying to equate cat "ownership" as some kind of great panacea for the soul, or some kind of great spiritual calling in and of itself (although... it really kinda IS). And truthfully, most of the things I struggled with during the past year of loss were things I struggled with even while I had my floofson with me.
But during the past 54 hours, I have felt the sadness of the past 12 months steadily effaced as I spoke to, cared for, fed and delighted in this "Wee, sleeket, cowrin, tim’rous beastie."
And in doing so, I exchanged grief over the loss of one floofchild for the joy of caring for another one.
I think Hobbes would be pleased.
Adoption
I wrote six months ago about the process of mourning and also my struggle to find another cat to adopt.
There were a couple times that I had visited with a cat at a shelter and slowly warmed up to the possibility of adopting them, only to find that the …
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Mozilla and the Death of Virtue
A fedifriend mentioned me yesterday on a post about a recent kerfuffle regarding some decisions that Mozilla has been making, particularly in regards to buying an advertising company (and integrating advertising into the browser) and adding "A.I." features into recent builds of Firefox.
I had intended to reply with …
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Getting Back In Shape (For the Acutely and Chronically Under-Dopamined)
I've just started a new exercise regimen (because, you know, it was either that or apply for asteroid status*).
I've tried to get into exercise for... well... many, many years. I've even spent a lot of money of gym memberships that went absolutely nowhere.
I will say quickly that I …
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What Kid-Me Wanted To Do When He Grew Up
I sent a link to my blog to my best friend from high school, and he sent me back a screenshot of a poll I ran a month ago (dear God, where does the time go?) asking what I should post next on my blog.
The winning entry was for …
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I'm not a gamer, an introspection
Since I haven't blogged in a couple weeks, I put out a challenge to my fedifriends to help me come up with a subject to blog on, which I would write in the next 48 hours. I put out a poll to decide what to write about, and the idea …
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A Grief Fulfilled
Just moments ago, I removed the cat bed that's been on the corner of my bed for the past nine months, and placed it in the closet.
Minutes before that, as I walked into my home, I called out to my cat one last time (which I had done nearly …
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An unexpected game of "Musical Laptops"
I purchased this laptop I'm writing on now about a month ago. It's a Thinkpad X260 from 2016. I looked it up online, and it was actually shipped the very day (or the day before/after) I graduated college. That's a fun little coincidence to make me feel the passage …
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Organizing photos by geolocation from the command line
Want to organize your photos by gps/geolocation, but don't feel like dealing with a slow GUI app?
That's ok, you can do it from the command line!
precision=2
for file in *.jp*g
do
coord=$(exiftool -c "%.${precision}f" "$file" |grep GPS.Position |sed 's/^[^:]*:[[:space:]]*//')
dir="gps …
A first foray into miniblogging: `blogme`
I've often enjoyed using my tootme script to easily toot from the command-line.
The reason I wrote this script is that the excellent toot utility which I had been using to toot from the command-line would just fail ungracefully if it encountered an error (like crossing the benighted 500-character post …
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