Sal has a conference in Mt. Vernon for a few days so I've tagged along. We've made this trip many times and we like the area so it's a fun little free getaway.

After an almost 6 hour drive thanks to Seattle's demonic traffic, we've arrived safely to a hotel room that's decent and quiet and are thinking about where we're going to eat. Start unloading the car, he gets the luggage cart loaded up, I ask, "Where's the suitcase?"

It's been over a year without kitties in our home, and we were finally ready to bring home some new family members. In a couple of months, after the chaos of our recent crazy had calmed down a bit, we'd planned to find a couple of new kitties at the shelter -- a bonded pair or siblings or just a couple of kitties who weren't as likely to be adopted -- and bring them home with us.

But Calypso had other plans.

I'd just gotten home one evening a couple of weeks ago (day after the 4th), and as I got out the car, I heard a kitty crying somewhere nearby. I looked around trying to figure out where it was coming from as I headed toward the house, and just as I reached the bottom of the stairs, the kitty emerged from along the curb and came right up to me, as if she'd been on her way to meet me and just happened to arrive right as I pulled up.

She was lovey and talkative, and didn't look like she'd been neglected...a little dirty but not ragged, no sign of hurt or illness or starvation, wearing a dirty flea collar and clearly cared for until somewhat recently. So I got her some water and spent my evening on the porch, trying not to fall in love with her and failing miserably.

She was still there when Sal got home that night. He took pics that he posted on NextDoor and neighborhood FB sites. She clearly had had people at some point, and we know the desperation of having a kitty go misisng and trying to find them, so we of course wanted her to get back to the people who loved her. But secretly, we were hoping maybe she could be ours, even though neither of us said anything.

We decided that if she was still hanging around by Friday morning, I'd take her to the vet to check for a chip and if she didn't have one, we'd start the process for adopting her. We talked very carefully about her, as if it was just a matter of thinking of her as someone else's to pretend we wouldn't be really sad to say goodbye.

Thursday night, as we were getting ready for bed, Sal said he'd thought of a name for her. So much for not getting attached.

This was the sight that greated us in our living room window Friday morning.

The vet's office didn't find a sign of chip anywhere so I brought her home and we let her come inside with us while we decided what to do. I got some food and cat litter. Just enough for a temporary stay. Trying not to get attached.

By law, we could either 1) file a report with the county and keep her with us in the meantime, posting lost notices in all the places they require and after 180 days, she'd officially be ours if she wasn't claimed; or 2) take her in to the shelter so they could use all their resources for finding her home and be 1st on the list to adopt if no one claimed her after 3 days.

Taking her to the shelter was a hard choice, but we felt, for various reasons, that it was the best one to ensure that she was reunited with her people if she had some, and it would mean we'd get to call her ours much sooner if she didn't have any. The shelter also has a universal chip reader, so there was still a chance she had a chip that just wasn't showing up in our vet's scan.

She spent that Friday day and night inside with us. All pretense at not getting attached was gone by the time Sal got home that night.

Sal took her to the shelter last Saturday. Which turned out to be the best choice, even if it was the hard one. They found a chip -- Sal texted me that his heart sank when they said that -- and we wouldn't have known that if we hadn't taken her out there. She was older than we thought -- 10 to 12 years -- had had her shots at some point and been spayed. She definitely had people.

He filled out the report and put our name on the list anyway. They said that if her people didn't claim her in 6 days, we could adopt her. So we called to check each day, and started a list of name ideas, and added "get collar, cat food, litter" to the grocery list.

The phone number on her chip was an old one, belonging now to people who'd never had a cat. No one responded to the "found cat" listings on all the various sites and boards. On Thursday, our anniversary, the shelter confirmed that unless someone called to claim her by Saturday, we could come fill out the adoption paperwork on Sunday.

So she's home now, officially licensed with a brand new collar and brand new name, scouting out all the best perches and napping spots of Hall House. We're getting used to having a kitty boss us around again.

Welcome home, Calypso.

20th anniversary @ Orcas Island

• The way you still laugh as hard at the movies and shows that delight you as you did the first time you saw them. Not everything holds up, and sometimes you have to be in the right mood for it, but when it does and when you are...you laugh, and it makes me laugh, and it's like getting to watch it again for the first time.
• Your unbroken streak of picking out the exact perfect card for me every time. Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, just-becauses, thinking-of-yous, I'm-sorries...you are seriously a card-picking savant. I've kept every one, framed a few, wanted to frame many more. I imagine that if someone who never met me opened a box full of these cards and laid them all out, they would know me without even reading what you wrote inside them.
• I love all the characters and voices you create, but my favorite character is Big Al and whatever he's selling in his barn that day. The day we drove past the big metal barn that had "BARNS" emblazoned on the side, we looked at each other and both knew without saying a word: Big Al and his Barns Barn. It was like discovering the singularity.
• After we watched Pride & Prejudice the first time, you spent weeks afterward saying "Capital, capital!" whenever you were pleased with something. It was adorable.
• That day several months ago, a typical work day for me, when I was trying to complete an impossible task list with an equally impossible deadline, and had jotted down the do-or-die-must-complete-at-all-costs-before-tomorrow things on a yellow sticky note stuck to my laptop, with the ominous words "MUST DO TODAY" written at the top, and I realized after you left for work that you had added an item: "Love yourself". I've looked it almost every day since.

Thank you for being you, Sally. I love you.

Farewell, my beloved Obama Family.

On the first rainy day of not-officially-autumn, if I am a very good girl, Sally makes me a crisp. Pear, in this case. While we sit at our humble, rickety little kitchen table waiting for it to come out of the oven, listening to the music of the rain and breathing in deep lungfuls of cool, water-filled air, we talk about deep life things. Soon, the oven beeps and the crisp comes out, sweet and cinnamon-y autumn love in a 9x13 pan.

We eat it while it's still not-quite-burning-our-mouths hot, big white bowls warming our hands, simple mix of pear and sugar and oatmeal and flour warming our bodies from the inside out, and I think, this is my life, right here. This is the life I get to live, this love and this comfort and this peace.

This life, I tell you what. It'll bowl you right over in the most quiet little moments.

It's been 15 years since we were last there, and then it was only for a daytrip so we didn't really get to enjoy it as much as we wanted. This time, we did it up right: rented a little getaway with a beautiful view, packed up enough delicious food to last the duration, filled our bags with books and games and writing supplies and art supplies and movies, and fit it all into the Black Pearl for the road trip adventure north.

Six hours, most of Washington State, and a ferry ride later, we arrived at our tiny, magical, fairytale cottage, tucked into forest and steps away from the water. A little kitchen with just enough room for one person at a time, a bathroom with a skylight. A bedroom with a soft bed, woodstove, and French doors that open wide to the forest and the view. A covered patio a few steps down and a cobbled path through green and trees to a couple of wooden chairs perched on the water's edge. A hot tub hidden in a stand of firs and madronas, complete with lights for a good night time soak under the stars. Beauty and solitude and magic.

It was a warm and beautiful day when we arrived, rainy and cool the next, a mixture of both the day after that and the day after that. We had a chance to get a little too much sun, and to snuggle under the covers with the doors open while the rain played outside. We played in the water and warmed up in the hot tub. We spent time sketching, and writing, and playing Zombie Dice and Firefly Fluxx and Love Letter and Gloom, and watching movies late at night with a smorgasbord picnic spread out on the bed. We enjoyed a lovely breakfast at the village a few miles away, and walked through shops and galleries, and found a beautiful art treasure to memorialize this Year Twenty milestone.

We talked a lot, and laughed a lot, and enjoyed contented silence a lot, and it was like regular days together, but special days, too, because here we are, still together after all these years, and these are what regular days are like, and they are wonderful.

See all pictures from the trip here.

After twenty years, our little dragon has flown away. Rest in peace, sweet Mei Mei.

Many, many more pictures here.

This was the view from the lanai of the condo we stayed at on Maui, where we've been (along with Oahu) for the last week. Just arrived on the red eye home to gloriously gray and cool Portland and cannot wait to climb into my own bed and get back into the Pacific time zone. Ocean waters are good for any sea loving heart, but this little mermaid's flippers are definitely most at home in cooler northern waters.