Half way between Vashon and Fauntleroy marks the beginning of my journey.

I’ve started using a new program on my smartphone to keep track of how long I walk (time and distance) each morning. Today, after about 25 minutes of walking, I looked at my phone and it said that I’d walked 3.5 miles. Hmm, I usually walk about three miles an hour and since I had not noticed that I was running really fast or roller skating down hill, I took a look at how the program, which uses GPS locating, had mapped out my route.

To my surprise, my starting point was recorded as being at the midpoint of the Vashon Island/Fauntleroy ferry route, in the middle of the Puget Sound. In fact, it looks like I jumped ship, swam north for a bit then swam east to shore at Lincoln Park. At this point I must have flown, because the route runs straight through the park and the park only has a bunch of winding trails. Or maybe I just crawled straight up the steep hill along the beach, making my way through brush, trees, and poison oak. That couldn’t be because my clothes weren’t the least bit muddy when I came home and that would have been a very slow way to travel. I must have flown and done so very fast. Actually, I couldn’t have swum that fast, either, even if I were Diana Nyad, rather than the poor swimmer that I am. So I must have flown from the ferry and over Lincoln Park.

After flying over the park, the route shows that I actually zig zagged through streets, on which I actually remembered walking.

I am very happy with the apparent improvement in my physical fitness but a little worried about my memory. On the bright side, I got something good out of breast cancer. Breast Cancer, you gave me the gift of flight!

Or maybe it was just solar flares or something, throwing off my GPS navigation.

Science and logic, you take the fun out of everything!

(Cancer, you’re back on my shit list.)

Okay, I took a little tiny bit of creative license with the title of my post. My cat, Ollie, is actually male and he is neutered, not spayed. “Neutered” just doesn’t have the right sound. Fortunately, I am not planning to apply to veterinary school any time soon. Or any time for that matter. I’ve had enough advanced education in my life. I absolutely love my job. It’s a good thing I didn’t fully know what I was getting into with graduate school because if I’d known, I probably would have skipped getting a Ph.D.

But back to another infertile member of the family, Oliie the cat. Ollie has been seeking a LOT of attention from me lately. He climbs up on me to purr and sleep, several times a morning, and what I mean by the morning is any time followed by the letters “am.” Ollie is exacerbating my sleep problems by waking me up a lot. He is also warm, which compounds my hot flashes.

Since Ollie has treated John as his favorite for years, I have been perplexed by this change in his habits. At first, I thought it was because he is getting older and has a number of ailments. I thought that maybe he is just needing more attention from every body. This is true, to a certain extent as he has been asking for more attention from John as well. John thinks Ollie is actually feeling better from his liver medicine (he has a liver disease, pancreatitis, and hyperthyroidism) so he has been seeking more attention. The hyperthyroidism also makes him hungrier so he is bugging us for food more frequently. (And yes, there is a treatment for hyperthyroidism but we tried the cheap route, twice daily medication, and he was unable to tolerate it. The alternative treatment costs $1000. We just paid $1500 in diagnostic tests to find out about all of these ailments so we need a couple of weeks to recover.)

I have another hypothesis as to why I have become Ollie’s favorite. You know how cats love to be warm? How they lie in the sun in the summer and on the heater vents in the winter? I think the cat is seeking me out because of my hot flashes!

I do love my kitty but perhaps I will start sleeping with an ice pack on my chest to discourage him.

Another time I tried to turn Ollie into a girl. I put a tiara on him to try to submit a photo to the site, “Cute Overload.” Then I never sent it in because I was embarrassed about trying to take a funny cat picture.

My family gets home later than usual tonight. I decided to use the time to make room in the vegetable bin by cooking a bunch of vegetables. My original plan was to serve all of them with the main entree tonight (Italian chicken sausages). I roasted cauliflower and semi circles of delicata squash with a drizzle of olive oil and a little salt. I also sauteed some chard with shallots.

I still have the chard with shallots. They are untouched. The rest of the vegetables are in my stomach. It started by my looking at one of those little cooked crescents of squash. My massage therapist, Jann grew it and gave it to me. Heaven, every crescent of it. Then I thought, “That cauliflower looks pretty good. It was a small head and I’m really the only one in the family who likes it anyway.” So I ate that.

Now I’m a little full but I still have 45 minutes to get hungry again for a sausage and some chard. Somehow I think I will work up an adequate appetite.

Also ravenous, but not just today, is my cat, Ollie. He has hyperthyroidism and we are still trying to get it treated successfully. This gives him a large appetite and also makes him run around the house at times, in a seemingly manic state. This morning, he climbed into bed with me. He was sweet and snuggly. I gave him a lot of attention. Then he put his paw on my breast and put out his claws slightly, like he does when he wants to play. I thought, “I wonder if he could get through my nightgown, my skin, and the plastic tissue expander? I thought that he probably couldn’t but was not entirely thrilled with the idea of springing a leak in the expander. So I shifted my weight a little and remonstrated, “Kitty!”

You will not believe what he did next. He took a playful bite at my breast, not just once but twice! He’s never done that before in the 11 years he’s lived with us. I wondered why this was the first time. Maybe this is crazy, but I think when he reached out his paw, he was confused by how hard my temporary breast is. It’s a bag full of saltwater, under my skin, after all. Maybe he thought it was my elbow or something.

Now Ollie’s eating greenery from a vase of flowers on the table. Now that’s something he’s done many times before. But a fake breast? Maybe he has another illness. With humans, habitually eating items that are not food is called, “pica.” Maybe he has pica. I’d leave you on this note, but I have a funny pica story.

When I was on internship (a one year clinical position that was required to finish my Ph.D. in clinical psychology), we had a morning meeting one day to assign cases to the interns. This was a normal thing that we did every time we had clinic duty. The referral questions were written down on a phone message by the clinic secretary, along with the patient’s name and age. There was a 4 year-old coming in for an evaluation. The supervising psychologist read the secretary’s notes aloud, “Eats couch.”  I said, “I’ll take the couch eater!” No one else in the group liked preschool aged children like I do, so my preference was uncontested. Yes, it was my first and only pica case.

Chew on that.