This post has been sitting in my drafts for about a month now... This time of the year is hard; my Dad's birthday would have been the 9th, the anniversary of my Mom passing is the 23rd, last year my Dad passed away on April 9th, and then a about a month later we had to put Daisy to sleep, finally, my Mom's birthday was May 9th, always right around mother's day.
So, I haven't been able to finish this post, until now.
My wife got Ella when she was just a kitten, her friend's mom used to breed ragdolls. That was 18 years ago. My wife and I hadn't even met yet, so when we got together I knew up front that it was a package deal; “the dog and the cat have to like you, otherwise this isn't going to work.”
Thankfully, they did like me, and Ella wasn't like any other cat that I had ever met before. Which is why it was so hard having to say goodbye to her.
Quite a lot has happened in my personal life. Some of it I've shared, other stuff, not so much. The pain of loss is probably the hardest thing I've ever had to go through. But to lose my Dad and my dog in the same month has been an especially terrible to experience. A bit compounded by the fact that last Friday (May 9th) would have also been my Mother's birthday.
Everyone has their own winter rituals. Either you make them or you follow what has come before, or you choose to ignore them all together, we're all acutely aware that it's something that a lot of us do every year. Figuratively, symbolically, or astrologically, everything in the human condition is a cycle of some sort, like a series of a million different Venn diagrams creating infinite combinations of various overlapping factors, perpetually in motion like celestial gears; these cycles dictate a number of things related to our lives. Or, the cycles at least preside an influence over our perceptions, emotions, and actions during certain times of the year, or periods in our lives over the course of several years.
Not sure what's taking me so much time to finish my Nation of Victims review. I keep coming back to it though. Hopefully I'll be done changing things around and rearranging paragraphs enough to post a fairly decent overview and recommendation for the book soon. Right now though, I'd like to talk a little about life and get into some personal knowledge management (or, “pkm”) software that I've been using.
