If only there was someone strong to help her move the body down to the cellet.

Low mileage!

Hollow and Kitty look like a matched set, though of course that’s no guarantee they’d get along.

Maybe the dose needs adjustments?

I am kind of glad I did my dating before the internet was a thing. Not that creepy entitled men weren’t around in the 70s and 80s, but they didn’t have a village of creepy peers telling them this was okay.

Back then there were personal ads in newspapers. Creepy entitled men provided us with quite a lot of entertainment at work in the break room, as we read those classified ads out loud for a laugh.

Well, presumably there are doors and stairwells.

All of them, but my all time favourite was a huge blue point Siamese mix. He was the best cat ever. No longer with us, sadly.

Too small, unfortunately.

My new family crest.

Update: the toy arrived today. One cat is fascinated by it but won’t get down off her chair to get close to it, the other seems afraid of it.

On the plus side, it’s good for getting into tight spaces that the vacuum cleaner won’t reach to pull out dust bunnies. Just have to teach it to stop saying “EXTERMINAAAATE” in cat language.

Cheese. Life is too short for mediocre cheese.

This is one of the advantages of being old and grey haired. If you smile at a man, he just thinks you’re a daft old granny.

I’ve been growing indoor plants for decades. It’s just cat grass that doesn’t seem to work for me. Heck, I even got one of those grocery store orchids to bloom again every winter.

I tried that last winter. It made no difference. I can grow indoor plants, just not grass for some reason. If I could persuade them to nibble on phalenopsis orchids, I wouldn’t need the grass.

I just didn’t think I would be a good mother. Plus, my family was kind of messed up and I didn’t want to foist our particular brand of insanity onto another generation.

It doesn’t live long enough for that.

It gets plenty of water, but more light isn’t an option.

Mine likes to wrap himself around my head, stick his back feet in my face, and nip my ears and nose with his sharp little teeth. All while purring loudly. He’s a multi-tasker.

Two books that I found useful were Beautiful Bones Without Hormones by Leon Root (because I had a bad reaction to HRT) and The Brain Trust Program, by neurosurgeon Larry McCleary. That was 17 years ago, no doubt there are some more good guides written since then.

Perimenopause was a pain, mainly due to the lack of sleep. One year after my last period, coming out the other side, I freaking loved being post menopausal even if it was the end of my libido. It felt like I got my body back and I wasn’t at the mercy of hormones.

Tried low dose HRT for all of three days for hot flashes, ended up being driven to the hospital with stroke-like symptoms by a coworker, came off it immediately afterward on the advice of the ER resident. (Not a stroke, just an uncommon side effect.)

Then I tried a high fat keto diet for a few weeks, that reduced the hot flashes from about a dozen a day to 2 or 3, eventually they tapered right off. The idea is, the brain uses estrogen to ferry glucose into it during the fertile years and it feels starved when the ovaries stop supplying estrogen. So teaching it to use ketones until it can figure out a different way to get glucose shuts it up for a while. This was the diet once used for children who had epilepsy that didn’t respond to meds.

Now, 17 years after menopause, I get to have hot flashes again (yay) due to taking Anastrozole, which apparently stops my body from making estrogen. I didn’t even know it still could, but I guess it comes from body fat instead of ovaries after they shut down. I have to be on that until age 72 in hopes the breast cancer won’t come back.