Thank you <3

She was the best! My soul pet. I had her for over half my life since she was 4 months old. We had a great life together and I’m so grateful for that, even though losing her leaves a gaping hole in my heart.

Thank you. I’m sorry you’re also caring for an aging pet. It’s hard but they are so, so worth it! Love her and her howls. Try to get pictures and videos of her! And give her an extra head kiss or scritch or whatever she likes best from me, please!

My 20-year-old baby girl insisted I face her as well. She would paw at the back of my head until I rolled over or moved her in front of me. She only started doing that over the past two years or so, but for about five years she would paw at me to lift the covers so she could snuggle under them or to hold her in my arms.

I had to put her to sleep just over two weeks ago on October 5. I miss her waking me up all the time for snuggles. I would trade every night of solid sleep in the world to have her with me still.

With one parent who turned 80 this year and the second in their late 70s, I’ve realized there’s a difference between “elderly” and “old.” A lot of people equate the two. I think “old” always started in one’s 70s to me, even as a kid. “Elderly,” however, is not based on a number but on a physical state of being.

My dad is elderly. He’s frail and struggling to move around much. It’s hard to watch and it’s been going on and worsening for a few years now. My mom, despite being only 3 years younger, is not at all elderly. She has more energy and vivacity than many people over 20 years her junior (hell I’m in my 30s and she can do loops around me, but I got the chronic illness genes that she didn’t have). Technically, she’s old. But no one who knows her would think of her as “elderly.”

Yeah, I’m a second-row person all the way; green describes me right. Purple as a backup.

Thank goodness my college only had one of these kinds of rooms, and I was only there for a class about movies.

Maybe it’s just the low quality image, but that looked to me like the part of the ear protection that goes over the head (is there a name for that? It’s not a strap, but that’s the closest I could think of), like it was just pulled down over her forehead instead of sitting on top of her head. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I saw the guy get attention because he doesn’t use a bunch of fancy gear. Looks like the woman doesn’t either, yet this is the first time I learned meme man was even on a team.

She has bigger ear protection and it looks like she’s pulled it in a way that shields her eyes from the light. Still not all the high tech fancy gear they were competing against. So leaving her out of every post made about him not using a ton of gear definitely sounds like what this meme is saying.

Clover reminds me so much of my childhood cat, Boots! This picture of him is from 2005 and he was put down 3/1/07 when he was about 15-16 years old. He was a good boy.

Not the point of the graphic at all, but this is the second time recently I saw the spelling “Turkiye” and was wondering the context behind that change, wondering if it was anything like the change in the spelling of Kyiv (which has now been so engrained in my head that I had to go look up the Russian spelling “Kiev”).

I looked it up and it appears Türkiye has been their own spelling for over 100 years, and they just petitioned the UN to update the spelling of the country’s name in 2021.

Cool, so Türkiye it is! (Plus my phone automatically adds the umlaut, so that’s handy!)

Also in Türkiye they don’t own cats, the cats own them.

I see my cat doing the same! At 16, she started pawing me incessantly while I was sleeping. Over 3 weeks I lost a lot of sleep and tried many ways to appease her. Finally I was so fed up I grabbed and held her so close she couldn’t paw me any more. She instantly relaxed and purred. The whole time the pawing was a request for me to cuddle her in my arms.

Three years later, the pawing has continued and expanded. She uses it to make me lift the blanket for her or reposition myself in ways more comfortable for her. In the past year, she’s decided I must face her while I sleep, so if I ever roll over on my side she will paw the back of my head until I face her again. She is so needy and getting worse all the time, but at 19 years old, I’ll give her whatever she wants for whatever time we have left together.