It's been a long day.

I guess I've been waiting to post. Waiting for the permission to post really. Emotional permission, for one, to write about the death of Flip. Emotional permission that, even today, almost 3 months after his death, I begin to regret giving myself as I write these lines. To be simple, Flip was run over by a car on the main street near my home. It happened in front of Jac & I. He followed us out. We were going to return a film a few blocks away. I saw the car and as soon as I did, even though it was far down the street I knew what could happen and it did. We watched him die, and to this day it's still hard for me to walk down the same street and I bawled at a party when I unexpectedly saw the woman who gave him to us.

Some weeks after his death, in part to help fill a deepening void caused by his death, in part because it was awful to come home to Jolie who has been home alone all day and had that deperate 'i need attention' look in her eyes, I decided to get another kitten. I finally found one, through the same woman that gave us Jolie. She had been abandoned in Lampedusa, an island in the south of Italy near Sicily. By contrast to Flip, she is all white -- but she shares in a lot of the personality traits that Flip had and has been a joy in the house and has helped us heal. Her name is Alaska. She prefers to be held tummy up, and she nurses on Jolie's arm when she wants to play the baby. She is still tiny, even though my now she's about 4 months old -- and Jac and I absolutely adore her and Jolie. We get along well, the four of us.

The other permission is to write about work, which I cannot, as the changes are still 'in sviluppo' but I expect to write about it after the second week of January.

Then there's me and Jac and home -- all of which is going well. There's talk of weddings and rings floating about -- nothing concrete. It's pretty to think about, but as much as it can be fun to imagine and plan --- fantasy talk makes me nervous, especially after concrete conversations tend toward negating all the fantasy. So for now we are good. We laugh more than ever now, we joke around -- something that seems really simply but just due to language barriers until recently was rarely possible. We're still working out our boundaries, we're still learning, there's a lot left to learn... but everything we believe we know leads the way for only optimism and that's something to be grateful for.

I'll write again soon .... something more specific and less of a summary but I suppose something typed out is better than silence and maybe it will give me the incentive I need to write more...