Dear Miss Kitty,

I know the last few days have been real hard for you. I am so sorry we didn’t know you were this sick, or we’d have acted so much sooner. I don’t think that I will ever stop feeling responsible for how this has happened.

I’m so sorry that we sometimes took you for granted, and just assumed you’d always be here. We didn’t take that many photos of you, because we figured we had time. We sometimes brushed you away when you wanted attention, if we were busy or not wanting to be bothered. For that I am SO sorry because if I’d have known your life would be so short, I’d have treasured every single head butt, purr and snuggle. I wish I had taken just those extra 30 seconds every now and again to make sure you had a pet on the head, or just watch you. Watch you sleep on the office chair, or in the window. I wish I’d have played with you more, instead of always putting your cat toys in the basket.

You were SO strong, and so brave. When I brought you home all those years ago, you were so sick but your heart was so full of life. You fought that fight for a long time, and you won. I never thought you’d get sick again, and I never thought that what we thought was a little cold would end your life.

We’re still wishing for a miracle here, but this morning you looked ready to go. Don’t think I’m not wishing with all my heart and soul that you’ll turn out ok, because I would give anything to bring you back home, and have you be just fine after all.

I, and the rest of the family, really, really love you. When you go, there will be a void in our hearts so big, that I’m not sure anything will ever be able to fill it.

I’ve spent the last 6 years watching you grow, watching you get healthy, and seeing the cat you became. I love so many little things about you, and losing those things in my life are breaking my heart into a milion pieces.

I will miss walking into a room and seeing you sleeping in your favorite spots…your Joe Boxer pillow, a window sill, the office chair. I will miss hearing you snore on my head at night, and I will miss SO much the ways you demanded attention. I will miss seeing that stumpy little tail wag back and forth when you are playing, and I’ll miss hearing your little chirps when you are happy to see us. Every time I see a little patch of sunshine, I’ll think of you and the way you liked to “charge” in the window. And I think that for as long as I live, I will always expect you to see you in an upstairs window, looking down on the world.

I love you. We all love you.

I love your little ears, and the way they’re not all brown, they have little edges of pink.

I love your beautiful green eyes, they were the prettiest I’d ever seen, they were a blue/green, and always so bright.

I love your cleopatra lines, and how they always made you look so beautiful.

I love your little nose and the way you’d always rub it against mine.

I love your little mouth and the way you’d give kisses.

I love your chin, and the way you’d lift it up when we rubbed underneath it.

I love your little paws, they were so dainty, like a princess.

I love your little spots, that you only had on one side. Only yesterday did I notice for the first time that when you sat a certain way, they looked like two halves of a broken heart.

I love your stumpy tail, and the way you’d wag it. You didn’t always realize you were a cat.

I love the way you purred so loud that you could hear it in the next room.

I love the little brown spot on the inside of your back leg.

I love your beautiful fur, it was always so thick and full of life.

I love your heart. It made you who you are, and who we are going to miss. You had limitless amounts of love, and you never once made us feel unloved. I never thought I’d see a day when that heart stopped beating.

I love you baby girl. You’re our princess, our baby, our everything. I still find myself pleading with the universe/God/whoever to please make you ok. To stop this before you’re gone. Please don’t think that by writing this I am wishing you away, because I’m not. I want you to be here, I want to see you at 10, and 15, and 20. I want to see that coat get full and shiny again and hear you on my pillow at night.

We love you. I hope that you always knew that, and that you never forget.

Nashville is out of gas, because Nashvillians are apparently less intelligent than we first suspected.

I mean…we knew they stopped at green lights and can’t drive in the snow…but to run out of gas because of a RUMOR.

Someone said “Nashville is going to run out of gas this weekend”

So everyone went out to buy gas.

If they had never heard that rumor, we would have gas. The rumor was false, but it came true because people are stupid and gullible.

I have a gallon of gas in my car, it will get me to and from work for about a month.

Of course that’s if my car would start, but it would appear that the alternator blew.

One of my favorite comics ended it’s run recently, I’d been reading For Better or For Worse for the last 20 or so years. Pretty much since I learned to read.

I was sad to see it end, but with the exception of thinking that Liz’s new husband is a bit of a weiner, I thought it ended gracefully.

Except…it didn’t end.

It’s being started over.

Now, I’m a bit confused by this idea. Obviously I’ll continue reading, I want to see what is going to happen. The first two comics since the re-start have been cute but, so far it just has the two oldest kids.

So, in restarting is she going to re-do every single story? Or is she going to stay in some sort of suspended state where the kids are perpetually tiny, the last one is never born, the dog never dies, the kids never get married….I mean, I’m really confused.

No offense to the creator, but she’s probably not going to re-write the entire story…does she really want to devote another 25 years of her life on the same basic plotlines, but different stories? If she’s going to do the exact same story she’d have to age everyone a month per week to get it all done before she officially decides to retire.
Or does this mean that maybe in this alternate life of the Pattersons that maybe Liz won’t marry a weiner?

Anyone in Erie need someone to work on a temp basis? Through the months of September and October (I could probably even go into November…) taking off just the weekend of the horror fest, and the 30th/31st of October?

We made it to the Outer Banks! We got in yesterday around 5, and were into the house around 5:30.

Frisco is as beautiful as ever, the weather has been perfect, and everything is awesome :)

There is no doubt that Alan and I have had trouble in our relationship. A year after we started dating, we broke up, I was forced into living in a “grown up” world, had my own apartment and bills and responsibilities, and he was still in high school, and for a few months, we just weren’t compatible at all.

We got back together a few months later, only to break up again another year later, and had a really rough patch a year after that.

In 2004 he moved to Tennessee to take an internship at Opryland. We knew it was the end. He had no intentions of coming back to Erie, and showed minimal interest in taking me with him. Despite the fact that we were dating when he moved, we just expected that we’d eventually fizzle out.

About 2 weeks after he moved down, he called me, and began a speech about how much he loved me, and how I complete his life, and how he couldn’t live without me nearby.

Too bad I didn’t hear it, his phone died halfway through.

When he called back, he only remembered parts, but the high and low of it was that he wanted me to move to TN with him.

3 months later I was emptying the last of my things into a small moving van and we were on our way. I began working at Opryland, and we had about 6 perfect months before things started getting terrible again.

We hated our jobs, there was never enough money, and we were living in the midst of Antioch trash, we barely slept, and rarely slept at the same time.

Once again, we thought it was over. I began working third shift, and we started drifting apart. We were technically dating, and we definitely lived together, but we never saw eachother and our lives started to seperate.

Then on Easter morning, I came home to find a letter on the computer. He had noticed I’d stopped wearing my ring, he hadn’t slept properly in months because I wasn’t home, and he acknowledged that we were living in a state of limbo. Were we together, or weren’t we? It hit me like a ton of bricks…I didn’t want “us” to end. No matter what I’d tried to tell myself, and other people, there was no other person in the world that I wanted to be with.
I came back to working 2nd shift, and after that, life got back to normal. We decided to call it a blank slate, and just forget about all the stupid stuff that happened in the past. We both made stupid mistakes in the years leading up to it, but when he proposed on August 9th of 2005, there was no doubt that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.

A year of planning, and we were married on August 12th, 2006. It was a beautiful day, and we were surrounded by the people who love us most.

Now, two years later, I love him just as much as I did then, if not more. We compliment eachother, and we’re on the same page on so many things that we don’t find much need to argue with eachother. Sure, we have our days where we are moody and snappy, but it’s never because of the other person, it might be fatigue, irritation at our neighbors, or plain old grumpyness.

He’s at work right now, and I had the baby all day, so we didn’t get to celebrate, but we’ll take some time together on the beach and celebrate, perhaps a nice night out to dinner with a walk along the ocean :)

9 years ago, while on a trip home from Texas, on a day when I should have been en route to NY with my mom, I started a relationship with a boy I met in middle school, who up until a few months before, I really hated.

It was complicated for sure. I lived in Texas at the time, despite being Pennsylvania born and raised (I only spent a year in Texas) and he actually had a girlfriend.

Oh, and we were pretty young. I was 17, he was 16, and we were probably too young to deal with what laid ahead. A long distance relationship that would span 9 months, thousands of dollars in long distance bills, and the stress that came along with it all.

It didn’t matter. We were determined, in that teenage love sort of way. We talked on the phone daily, we tried to talk online as frequently as possible, and he even hopped in his car one day, and instead of heading for school like he was supposed to, he hit the highway and arrived in Texas a day and a half later. We believed that we’d be together forever, and 9 months after he first kissed me in the back room of the video store, I was on my way back to PA to be with him.

The long distance relationship was easy, but college, parties, and growing up, that was the hard part.

To be continued Tuesday.

I rarely read our local newspaper, the Tennessean. I often go to the site, but reading the articles is next to impossible. Every now and again I get lucky, but 9 times out of 10 it wants me to put in my age, gender and zip code.

Now, if I did this once and never again, or only after I deleted cookies, ok. But it makes me do it every single time. There is an option to register and stay logged in, but I don’t want to register, I only check the site once in a while, because there isn’t much Nashville news that really interests me. It just seems like every time there IS, I can’t read it.

So, big thumbs down for Tennessean.com.

GoErie.com did that for a few months, and it was terrible, I HATED going to their website because of it. They finally got rid of it, I hope that Tennessean.com follows suit.

So, I have lived in TN for a while, and I’ll admit, we do tend to shop at chains. But every now and again we find a cute mom & pop store, and sometimes we get such great service I want to tell people about it.

Ma & Paws is one of those places. They are located in the Walmart plaza on Indian Lake in Hendersonville, TN, and they are just amazing. I’ve only ever seen one girl working there, but she is incredibly knowledgeable about everything in her store. She knew things off the top of her head that I would most certainly have to look up.

Their prices aren’t bad either, I was able to get a Repti-Glo 8.0 UVB bulb for $20, the same bulb cost close to $30 at Petsmart, and close to $40 at Petco. It’s still a bit more than if you ordered it from Big Apple Herp, but I’m willing to pay a few extra dollars to keep a family owned business operating, plus to be able to go get it immediately and not have to wait for shipping.

I think we’re going to start talking to them about ordering our crickets in bulk from them, they cost ten cents a piece when you get them in store, but I think she said she’d be able to get us 250 for $16. Not a bad price at all!

They also have cat, dog, bird, rodent, and fish supplies, including foods that most chains don’t carry.

What I really loved was we were there one day and the girl got a phone call, the people were asking if they sold puppies, and she informed them that they don’t, and that they should talk to the local humane societies. I loved that she recommended a rescue as opposed to finding a breeder.

So Ma & Paws has my vote for great business in Hendersonville! I think next time I am there I’m going to pick up a couple of the cute bumper stickers they have!