Lunar New Year 2024 (Belated Christmas 2023)

 

 

Belated Holidays 2023 Oops, New Year 2024 greetings!

Well as we approached this Christmas season and the end of 2023, we were finally ready to write this letter after the big day we were anticipating sharing with all y’all (that’s foreshadowing... read on). Unfortunately, before we printed it, we had an unexpected event that derailed our epistle yet again. We’ve now settled on Lunar New Year as our new letter deadline and hope it reaches you swiftly (since we’re mailing it so late!) and finds you healthy, happy, warm, and dry. We’ve had something of an unexciting but expensive year as we run our geriatric cat care clinic here in Houston. This year Smoke and Scrappy, who turned 19 and 16 respectively, started to really struggle with kidney disease and other old age ailments.

We began the year with Lynda’s birthday and then rapidly rolled into our first encounter with the Covid virus. We were thankful for tests on hand, and that we were fully vaccinated and had managed to avoid it for three years (so far as we know). It was just a matter of time after Joe had to go back to the office in person for it to invade our home but luckily, we had mostly not terrible experiences of it. Not great, but not terrible.

With the cats in need of so much care ~ Smoke needing subcutaneous fluids every other day and pills every day, we weren’t in a position to travel together as at least one of us had to stay close to home to take care of him. (We told the vet that he was deaf, a little confused, and crapping on the floor; she said we’d be like that too if we were closing in on 100 years old.) Since he can’t hear, Smoke has taken up a new hobby: yelling for treats. Chicken, salmon, butter, cheese, and his new favorite: Churu cat treats… you name it, he’s interested in it and annoyed that he doesn’t have it RIGHT NOW!

Scrappy joined him in needing fluids by mid-year. Her kidney disease was quite rapid in onset and sapped a lot of her previous high-energy crazitude. We started noticing that her water intake was increasing, especially once she declared her love of Joe soup. Joe loves a good soak in the tub and Scrappy is obsessed with drinking his bathwater, now dubbed “Joe Soup” (Lynda says, “pass” on that dish!) But we were thankful that two of them still seemed happy, and were purring, eating, and playing even if it’s at a slower pace and they seemed a little creakier.

It turns out, as we’re now on the northern side of our fifties, we’re finding ourselves a little creakier as well – health challenges are rearing their heads in our lives too. Lynda was none too happy to find that she needed to make some adjustments to alleviate issues including the onset of some arthritis and the need for a CPAP machine now, but those seem to be some of the things that can happen as we age. Joe too found some problems to be addressed, quite possibly due to long covid, but luckily by the end of the year they seemed to have resolved.

We celebrated our arrival in Houston 25 short years ago (thankful for 8 years in that span spent in exotic locations like Singapore, London, and Ottawa), and the 30th anniversary of our first date this year. Lynda posted our “meet cute” story from 1993 on Facebook for our 27th wedding anniversary and the next day Merriam Webster defined “meet cute” with the following example: “The elderly couple loved sharing the story of their hilarious meet cute from 30 years ago.” We were righteously indignant!

Summer came, and with it, Lynda’s trips to cooler BC, leaving Joe on kitty care duty in the unrelenting heat. It really was crazy how long the heat dome stayed over Houston -- in August, every day but three was over 100°F (38°C) and we had a total of 39 days over 100°F during the summer. Needless to say, Lynda was very glad of the escapes – after all she couldn’t miss Rosemary’s 80th, or Ronan’s graduation, or the Festival of the Written Arts and all the family and friend visits that went along with them. All were lovely and it was especially good to see distant (geographically!) relatives who came to the events. Joe was very understanding and certainly qualified as an excellent nurse and primary cat needler. Smoke did not always relish his time as a pincushion and Scrappy was properly annoyed when she had to join the party.

By autumn it became obvious that the house was going to eat up the travel money we didn’t spend. While we had patiently waited for some maintenance issues to magically resolve on their own, that somehow didn’t happen! We (well, the Royal “we” – actually a smattering of contractors) re-sealed the stucco, painted the exterior, and added a new roof given that our house was heading towards its 20th year. And just when we thought it was all done, the fridge decided to pack it in! It is rather nice to have 0ne with all parts intact for a change though. After it was all done, we did really enjoy having the paint all match properly and worries over leaks disappear. Thankfully no hurricanes, power outages, or floods visited us this year

Joe had his usual low-key birthday in October, and finally decided on a nice gaming laptop computer as a combined b-day/Christmas present around Thanksgiving (sales, baby!). Now he can slay zombies and cast spells from multiple locations in the house (or further afield), and Lynda can easily find him from the sound of the cooling fans or the nifty LED light effects.

With that birthday milestone passed, Joe decided that the time was getting right for retirement. (Remember the foreshadowing? This was it.) Thirty-plus years of engineering seemed to be enough… and we have the good fortune to be able to make some time for ourselves now. Given that this was some pretty big news, we wanted to share it with everyone; but as it wasn’t official until the 29th of December, we wanted to add it to the letter once it was. Sadly, the day before Joe’s required last day in the office and when he’d have printed this letter, we took Scrappy to the vet as she’d been “off” for a couple of days. We fully expected the vet to fix whatever ailed her, but we were devastated to learn that what ailed her couldn’t be fixed and we had to say goodbye to our little girl. She was a great cat (to people) and a terrible cat (to Smoke) and we miss her horribly. So now, at 19½, Smoke is our solitary fur-beast, loving his heated pad, his return to sleeping on the bed with us (Scrappy did not allow it), and his copious pets and treats.

And thus, we end our missive having celebrated Christmas, said goodbye to the one and only puppy-cat, and will celebrate retirement whenever it sinks in that this is not an extended staycation but actually a new phase of our lives. Our letter this year reflects that not every year can be all sunshine and roses, or travel and adventure, but we look forward to the coming year (even knowing we won’t have Smoke much longer) hopeful for brighter days too. Though to be honest, we’re probably not looking forward to all the work that has to be done to get our move organized (Lynda is looking at everything in the house with a jaundiced eye, evaluating whether or not it’s worth the cost of moving it!). Anyone need any chotchkes, ephemera, bakeware, china, or old books and DVDs? There’s a garage sale again in our future! Our plan is to return to our little townhouse in Ottawa in 2025 (Lynda misses long winters sooo much!), so there’s lots to get done before that and we foresee a busy year ahead.

 

Happy New Year / Gung Xi Fa Cai / Gong Hei Fat Choy to all!