Ivy, Billy Goat.

Emy came by mid-week to stay a few nights and to bring Ivy to us on her way to the southwest to see her partner, Seth. Ivy is my new diabetic patient. I lobbied for this cat-sitting job because 1) I love cats and generally haven’t had a cat in the house because various people who visit often are allergic to cats, 2) I love Emy, 3) I owe Emy an enormous cat favor since she took care of Yeager, my college cat, when I moved to Taiwan with Jeremy and Vince and then Yeager, unfortunately, got really sick and passed away under her care which was 1000x more than I thought would happen with the cat and I’m forever grateful and ashamed that I put her through such cat-sitting trauma 18 years ago and 4) I take care of diabetic patients all the time. With Jeremy away, 2 funerals and the kids starting camp, I just could not handle Maxi (the dog) meeting Ivy (the cat) and dealing with cross species rivalry, I asked my parents to home Maxi for a little while, at least until Jeremy got home, before I took on that. Honestly Maxi is like – what? eat meatballs everyday that my human grandmother will cook for me and lounge around on a couch or stay at home with a stressed-out human mom and a hissing cat? I’ll take the meatballs.

Ivy’s very own glucometer. I’m semi-tempted to test my own blood.

It was a stunningly beautiful day on Wed and we had an afternoon free and honestly, I couldn’t concentrate very well, so we went to the Billy Goat trail to walk it out which is a great trail, probably one of the most popular trails in the area and spent 4 hours scrambling over rocks.

It felt great to move and share the afternoon with Emy. I’m happy we did this mid-week because on the summer weekends it can be quite crowded, but we had the trail mostly to ourselves. This is a photo of Emy climbing up the “traverse”. Aptly named the “Billy Goat Trail”, we spent a lot of time climbing up and around lots of rocks.