I had ambitions for this weekend. Not very grand ambitions, just little things, like going to the gym and running a few errands—typical weekend stuff. But after sleeping unusually late yesterday morning (I usually wake up quite early on Saturdays, then nap around 1 p.m.), I woke up with a mildly painful sore throat and achiness and general rotten-feeling-ness, and as a result, I’ve been useless all weekend. I can’t afford to be sick at work (or away from work) this week, so I’m cutting myself a tiny bit of slack for my slothfulness this weekend, because if I can keep this from turning into a real flu, it will have been worth it (though those errands are going to have to get done sometime…).

My one moderately productive activity this weekend was taking some photos of the cats, which I’ve been meaning to do for ages because I just don’t have very many pictures of them. I’ve never done this catblogging thing before, and I know it’s supposed to be done on Fridays, but I’m winding down and getting ready to go to bed early, and I wanted to post something this weekend (again, I had such plans), so here goes.

I was prompted to grab the camera when I saw Maisy, the queen, who is the smallest animal in the household and the boss of all of us, posing elegantly in the sun. Maisy is a lynxpoint Siamese mix, but since (like the other two) she’s a rescue cat, I don’t know how mixed she is. She’s dark for a Siamese, even a seal lynx, but Siamese cats’ points will darken up if they’re exposed to too much sunlight and heat early on, which is a distinct possibility for a street cat in Missouri. She’s got sort of a snub face that keeps her from being classically beautiful but does not prevent her from being the queen. Here she is in all her regal splendor.

Yes, I am the queen. You may admire me…for a moment.

Maisy is always ready for her closeup.

Inhibitions are for wimps.

Jasper, the big boy and the only cat who is allowed outside (because he’s mostly content to stay within ten feet of the deck, whereas the other two would wander), was enjoying the gorgeous Indian summer day while Maisy’s photo shoot was going on. He’s a little harder to photograph, because if you sit down with him, he immediately wants to be in your lap. And I do mean your lap, not just my lap. Jasper loves you. The fact that he probably hasn’t met you yet is irrelevant.

He’s the most even-tempered cat I’ve ever met, which is surprising given his rough past as a street cat (he has buckshot in his side from when some waste of sperm and egg used him as target practice) and less neurotic than most Siamese, though not entirely neurosis-free. He’s a blue-point, probably a mix given his large, sturdy frame, but again, who knows. And he has the biggest blue eyes in the world. He looks a little irritable in these photos, which is just because the sun was in his eyes, I think.

Is that an empty lap I see there?

Is there a reason you’re not petting me?

Liam, the fluffball kitty, was feeling a little camera-shy this weekend, so I wasn’t able to get any daylight shots of him. He’s actually the beauty of the family, though you can’t really tell here. He is most likely a Siamese-Himalayan mix; he has the splendiferous Himalayan coat but not the flat, smunched face that purebred Himmys have. He’s a lilac point, the most delicate of the four main types of Siamese coloration, with a few little lynx-y stripes on his head and sides. He’s also certifiably insane and has been since birth, as far as I know; when he was rescued from a high-kill shelter in southwestern Kansas, the rescue people named him Bounce, because he literally bounced off walls. And still does. But it’s a lovable kind of insanity.

Why are you pointing that thing at me? (Note the resplendent tail, which is nearly as big as the rest of Liam.)

Here you can sort of tell that Liam really is the beauty of the family.

And there you have it—my cats, the creatures who own my heart, who bring joy to my life every day, who are the best company in the world, and who, I hope, will be with me for a record-setting length of time.

PS: So no one wants to play my parallel-universe-career game? Hrmph. Fine. Be that way. I’ll get over it.

(I’m running up against the deadline for a big project at work, so I’ll be working tonight and tomorrow night and all weekend, which means I’ll probably be blogging a lot. I got home this evening and took out the laptop, and it was still warm from when it had been plugged in at work 20 minutes earlier. That’s how I know I’m working hard, I guess…So I decided to treat myself to a bit of goofing off before getting to work.)

I don’t have the will to parse that Eliot quote and/or write about Lori Carson just now (especially because the female singer who is currently occupying my head is not Lori Carson but Patty Griffin—soon I’m going to need some kind of antidote for having “Useless Desire” from Patty’s most recent album running through my head in an endless loop, but right now, a day and a half into the loop, I’m still enjoying it, if “enjoying” is the right word for a song that tears me up as much as that one), so…here’s something more lighthearted that popped into my head the other day:

If, in a parallel universe, you could do something for a living that you are not, based on your skills and experience and natural abilities, actually able to do in this universe, what would it be?

Me, I think I’d be an industrial designer. In the real universe, I have no skills whatsoever when it comes to the visual arts (okay, I’m a pretty creative doodler, but somehow, I don’t think that counts). But after years of working on children’s books at a publishing house where the bookmaking process was way more hands-on than anything most editors ever get to experience—the company had its own camera-stripping department, among other now-obsolete things, and I used to do paper layouts by hand on resin-coated paper with FPO photocopies of photos, and pick colors and typefaces and stuff like that—I developed a really strong design sense (which turns out to be a good thing, since my current profession requires a certain amount of design skill—or a lot of it, depending on who you ask; in fact, there are people in the field right now who are claiming that it’s inseparable from design, which makes me nervous, because I have “I Am Not A Designer” tattooed on my forehead. In invisible ink.). And I love good industrial design. Ever since I’ve known that there was such a thing as an industrial designer (which I don’t think I found out until I was in my late 20s—I led a sheltered life, I guess), I’ve thought it would be an amazingly cool thing to be. We looked at a couple of design exhibits at the slightly disappointing renovated Museum of Modern Art recently, and the stuff in the permanent design collection wowed me, as it always does. In the current universe, I could never in a million years come up with anything as cool and brilliantly designed as the iPod, or even as cool as the little colored-plastic-circle bookmarks that they sell in the MoMA store, but I’d like to think that I could imagine them—that the problem is one of lack of technical skill rather than lack of imagination. It’s possible that I’m fooling myself about that, though. Anyway, I’m not sure that being an industrial designer would be the exact opposite of what I do now, or what I’m capable of doing; I suppose the polar opposite would be manual labor of some sort. (Or maybe the real polar opposite would be making information harder to find and more confusing, if we want to be literal about it.) Nonetheless, being an industrial designer is something that the actual me is incapable of, so I think I get to be one in a parallel universe.

So what would the paralllel-universe you do for a living?

Of all the many (and somewhat unexpectedly) wrenching, horrendously painful things about the breakup of my first marriage, one of the worst was leaving my dog behind. My first husband and I got the dog when she was a four-month-old puppy, in April 1991. When we split, there was no question that I would get our one surviving cat (my Tim, the best cat I’ll ever know, about whom I hope to be able to write someday; he died shortly after I left my husband, and I miss him every single minute), and that my ex would get the dog. She wasn’t entirely a one-person dog; she adored me and protected me and considered me the alpha dog in the house. But Eric was her person, and there was no way I could have even considered asking to take her from him. But leaving her behind was incredibly difficult; I still can’t talk about the last time I saw her, a year or so after we’d split, because it’s just too painful.

He wrote me today to tell me that he had had her put to sleep, because it was her time to go. She was nearly 15, so she had a good long life (and a very happy one). But I’ve never stopped missing her, and now I’ll miss her even more.

She was a happy, delightful, funny dog—a beautiful and typical example of a wonderful breed, the Keeshond. As an animal lover, I’m a big believer in mutts, and adopting shelter or rescue pets, but because we were bringing a dog into a household with two adult cats, we decided to opt for the predictability that you get with a purebred. I’m a cat person first and foremost, and I wanted to make sure we found a breed that wouldn’t herd, hurt, or (accidentally or deliberately) kill the cats. We also wanted a dog that wasn’t too huge, since our house wasn’t, and we didn’t want a little yippy dog either. (I’m somewhat more tolerant of little yippy dogs, at least some breeds of them, than most people, but I still didn’t want one.) And we wanted one that wouldn’t need too much exercise but would enjoy a good long walk on a regular basis. It also needed to be able to tolerate the climate in Minneapolis, so Italian greyhounds, for instance (a breed I adore), were out.

So I did a ton of reading, and we went to a whole bunch of dog shows, looking at breeds we’d liked in pictures, talking to breeders and owners and finding out about the dogs. We thought briefly about a Borzoi (gorgeous, but too big, and the ones I met seemed sort of aloof), and seriously considered the Vizsla and the Schipperke—fine breeds both, but neither was quite right. I was sold on the Keeshond pretty early on; they were so beautiful, with their wolfish faces and their glorious fur, and they were bred primarily for companionship rather than hunting or herding or pointing or whatever. Eric thought they were a little foofy, till we were at a show and he saw the Kees that had just won its group competition leap up into its owner’s arms and give the owner a kiss on the nose. He was sold right then and there, and we set about finding a Keeshond puppy.

The one we found was Diane, named (by her breeder) for the character on “Cheers.” (She had siblings named Woody and Norm.) We didn’t change her name, because we figured she was used to it already, which in retrospect was silly—over the course of her lifetime, she answered to at least a dozen different nicknames, and we could have changed her name at any time. But we didn’t, and the running joke was that her real name was Dianewedidn’tnameher, because whenever we told people her name, we had to add the disclaimer that we had nothing to do with it. She was a show-quality dog—in the odd little corner of the world where Keeshonden (that’s the proper Dutch plural) can be famous, her father and grandfather were both very famous—and as a condition of our getting her, her breeder had the option to show her for a while, but as it happened, Diane had some fairly serious eye (actually, eyelash) problems, which made her unsuitable for breeding. Which was fine with us, because that meant she was all ours. (It also meant that we only had to deal with her going into heat a few times. Female dogs in heat…yeccch.)

She was my first dog, pretty much. My family owned a dog, briefly, when I was about four years old, but he wasn’t my dog, one I chose or helped to raise. That was Diane, who was and always will be my first dog.

I wasn’t sure we’d survive our first summer together, though. We took her to puppy kindergarten at a place that used the then-standard nylon choke-correction collar method, which works well for many breeds but not for Keeshonden, who need positive reinforcement and encouragement. They can be stubborn, and they respond much better to gentle coaxing and outright bribery than they do to corrective behavior, as we later learned. So she wasn’t doing very well in obedience, and I was finding it frustrating to try to train her—and Eric and I argued nearly every time we took her to obedience class. On top of that, Sophie, my female cat, quickly learned to love the dog, but Tim didn’t, so Tim would be aggressive toward the dog, which would make Sophie attack him, which would make me mad at Sophie, and none of us were very happy. Worst of all, Diane picked up fleas, and our house became infested before we realized it. Diane, Tim, and I all turned out to be wildly allergic to flea bites, and Diane and I were scratching ourselves bloody every day (I still have scars on my legs from that summer). It was a tough summer for all of us, though I can kind of laugh about it now.

But pretty soon, we got rid of the fleas, and Tim learned to tolerate the dog (though he loved to occasionally stand up on his hind legs and box her face with his paws—I wish I had a photo of that), and we started working with the local Keeshond expert at Keeshond-only obedience, which Diane and I both loved, and she turned fairly quickly into a well-behaved (though still impish) girl. And sweet and funny and charming and loveable, all 45 fluffy pounds of her. It’s a cliché, but it really was hard to be in a bad mood when she was around. Tim—like all my cats since—was a Siamese, or a Siamese mix, and cats of that breed are somewhat doglike in their devotion to people, so I was used to being greeted at the door by someone who was happy to see me…but even Tim wasn’t quite as expressive about it as Diane. Keeshonden carry their tails curved up onto their backs, so when they wag their tails, their entire back half wags along with the tail, which is very entertaining and endearing. They’re good-tempered, happy dogs, and being around her made me happy.

Most of the time, that is. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t sometimes get annoyed with her, or that I didn’t occasionally resent having to walk her when it was -20 degrees out, or that the ubiquity of her fur didn’t sometimes get to me (I used to find Diane hairs on the inside of my clothing when I was out of town and hadn’t seen her for days), or that I never got angry when she misbehaved (which she didn’t do very often). But because of her sweet nature, and because she really did end up being very well trained, she was a remarkably easy dog to live with, and more important, a remarkably enjoyable one. I loved the fact that we could take her cross-country skiing with us—Eric even figured out a way to hook up her leash to his waist and let her pull him, which, with her sled-dog ancestry, she loved to do. Her first winter with us was the year that Minneapolis got 28 inches of snow on Halloween, and it’s one of my favorite memories of her: she wasn’t quite full grown yet (and she was only 15 inches tall at the shoulder even when she was full grown), so she was like one of those little mushroom toys with springs—the ones you push down and then they pop back up—she’d disappear into a snowdrift and then come bouncing out of it, only to disappear and reappear again. She thought it was the best thing that had ever happened ever.

And when we moved to Park Slope in 1998, I looked forward to taking her to the big dog run in Prospect Park every day, because she was a sociable dog, and when she got to the park and saw all those dogs (as many as 100 or more on a nice day, and usually at least 40 or so even in bad weather), she thought that was the best thing ever too. She was a boundless, furry, huggable container of joy.

There’s a Keeshond rescue group not far from where I live, and I know of others around the country, and someday, I’ll have Keeshonden in my life again. But there will only ever be one Diane, and I’ll miss her forever. Rest in peace, my sweet girl. You’re always with me.