What to do when work is not possible?

Somebody forgot to put their wireless mouse in the charging cradle last night. So it's time for part 2 of the Nermal story!

In the fall of 2007 (wait, I'll say autumn, fall is too foreshadowy) we moved to Mississauga. Nermal spent a few weeks with my mother-in-law again while we carted things back and forth to our new home, and eventually Nermal came on one of the last trips. She delighted in having parquet and ceramic floors to tear around on, two flights of stairs for getting into trouble, a leather couch she wouldn't touch and a treadmill that was the best scratching post ever. She even had a basement rife with nooks for hiding out in. She never took much interest in clawing our leather sectional sofa, which I attribute to dumb luck more than anything. Instead she picked on my grandmother's antique china cabinet, my ex's treadmill, and the walls themselves.

For much the same reasons as why she lost her job in London, my ex and I began to have relationship problems, escalating to the point that we split in June. Nermal's fate was in limbo, and since it was a familiar place she went to live with my (now ex-)mother-in-law for the summer. My ex inexplicably (to me) decided she wanted nothing to do with Nermal, and from very early on it was decided that Nermal would live with me permanently, as soon as I had a place to live. I lived with a relative of a cousin, in a basement room in uptown Toronto, for most of the summer. She had three cats already, some with health problems, and it was best for Nermal not to come live there.

By August, that living arrangement started to get, well, old. There was nothing wrong with it, and I appreciated the generosity very much, but I was feeling like I should have my own space, and of course wanted to have Nermal back. In early August I learned that Alex, a student co-worker of mine, was also looking for a place, as his summer living arrangement was coming to the end of its availability at the end of the summer. I suggested that we should pool our resources and look for a place together, which I think ended up being beneficial to both of us. Although I will admit that Alex did most of the work finding a place, and it was no small task considering we started on the second week of August to find a place for September 1st. We lucked out big-time and found a big two-bedroom sub-let, connected to a subway junction, that came in just inside our budget.

Nermal joined us in mid-September, after a transfer in London made unnecessarily awkward by my ex's unplanned attendance, and a typically uneventful drive back to Toronto, which to date has been Nermal's last inter-city road trip. She took to the new surroundings cautiously at first, pacing the perimeter of the apartment (no doubt looking for an escape) and then settling on the huge 11th story window as the best place ever. She took a while to be ok with Alex (and likewise) but they eventually became buds. Alex would walk through the front door and yell "WHAT'S UP CAT?" and Nermal would run out from whatever mischief she was getting into and tangle herself up in the mat in the front hall. She even decided after a few months that it was ok to attack Al's feet instead of mine when it was 5am food time, and may have slept on his face once, if the early morning fit of swearing and fur flying was any indication.

We did have one incident where a friend of ours was over, and we were all a little sloshed and laughing and carrying on and being loud. Alex has a particularly boisterous laugh, and Nermal responded to one particular fit by launching out from under a table and giving Alex the five-claw handshake, so to speak, then ran off under another table. He survived, but that was the end of that laughing fit.

In the next part: I meet Tay, Alex gets deported, and Nermal's single-cat existence comes to an end ....

Nine lives

I occasionally have weird thoughts. Like, not serial killer weird, just unusual. A couple days ago Tay was out at a gig, and I was home alone with our three cats. We've only officially been living together for just under two weeks, so the concept of joint possession hasn't quite established yet, so I still feel like Nermal is my cat, and Tay's two cats are hers. I know that's not really the case for a variety of reasons and at any rate the cats are already over it, but moving on ....

I got to thinking, as I watched Nermal curled up under the bathmat attacking a crumpled Shoppers receipt, that she has likely had an abnormally interesting life, for a cat. She's on at least her seventh home in three years, and although I've been a fairly constant figure in that time, she and I have had a multitude of environments, partners and roommates over that time.

My ex and I decided to get a cat back in the spring of 2006, mostly a result of our varying degrees of aversion to children, also I had never not lived with multiple cats up to about a year before that. We went to Animal Control in London, and a possibly one-year-old cat slashed my ex in the face without provocation, and then poured on the cute. She came home with us about a week later. What her life was like before that time I have no idea. She was young but not a kitten, and had been picked up as a stray. Animal Control requires pets to be fixed, and rather than pay a deposit and have the operation done ourselves, the staff there put her in with a batch of cats that were going to their contract vet later in the week. We had temporarily named her after a coworker my ex was having issues with, and that got corrupted to Josie somehow. That almost stuck, because I'm a huge geek. But she was cute, so she ended up getting named after Garfield's cute sidekick. Also because I'm a huge geek.

Point of interest: in the Jim Davis comic, Nermal is in fact male. But still cute.

Nermal came to live with us on the third floor of our high-rise, and had a peaceful life of chasing string, clawing up carpet and watching the thousands of starlings that would land in the trees outside every night. When my ex had her work friends over for their Grey's Anatomy parties, she hid out with me in the bedroom. When we went away to Cuba, she lived with my ex's parents for a week, happily chasing chipmunks through the sliding patio door of their townhouse.

The conflict between my ex and her coworker continued to escalate, and in the summer of 2007 she lost her job as a direct result. We ended up making a sudden, unexpected and poorly planned move to Mississauga in the fall, ironically on our last anniversary. Nermal lived in her second home at my ex's parents townhouse for a few weeks while we got settled.

In a later post: Nermal comes to Mississauga, but not for long ....