I'm a Painter with a wonderful Cat.
I really do have the best cat in the whole world.

Last night, he had to throw up (as cats sometimes do). Instead of throwing up on the rug or the floor, he ran over to his heavy plastic toy he has and threw up perfectly into it. So when I went to clean it up I didn't even have to touch the nasty bits, just clean them off the plastic with paper towels. And his toy was good as new, which the carpet wouldn't have been. Puck is such a great cat. He'll be four this fall, and I don't deserve him.

I painted bits of my apartment today, and it made me feel really good. Back a few years ago I used to paint murals and dormitories for MTSU, and I loved it. Painting a place was just something I did everytime I moved, and I was fairly eleborate about it - weather my room was a giant aquarium or a re-creation of The Secret Garden. In short, painting walls used to be a big part of who I was, and when I moved in with a guy, oh, five years ago, I stopped for some reason. And though the relationship with the guy didn't last and I loathe white walls, for some reason I never painted my places again until today. I just got fed up with impersonal whiteness and painted some of my window casings in the new place a bright blue. Some sort of switch flipped back on inside me after lying dormant and hidden for years.

It felt good. It felt *right* to paint the deep window casings of this old apartent blue. The molding around the windows is a good four inches wide and the window-sills are nice and deep, 10 inches wide in the bathroom and eight inches wide in my bedroom. The blue paint I used I had leftover from I-don't-know-when, but it was the same color my bedroom was as a teen. And painting was fun, as Dinan reminded me when she was here last week.

Next month, when I have a little money, I'm going to do the whole apartment. I don't think I'm going back to painting murals again - that's a part of me that I'm just sort of done with right now. But I like having the painting part of me back again. I can't remember why I abandoned it in the first place! Painting today was like regaining an arm, or maybe a hand I'd lost in some war. And I can't even remember what war, or why I bothered to fight it in the first place.

I'm only going to be 25 soon. I wonder how many little bits of me will get discarded and picked up for later usage in the long life ahead? All ready my juggling is mostly gone from my book store days, and I don't embroider or sew like I used to when I was small. Once upon a time I rode horses. Once upon a time I could paddle a canoe. I'm glad to know that like painting, these things are just beneath my surface, ready for use later on.