Author Archives: aureliaosborne

Over the last week, I started walking my cat on a leash. Pretty random, right?

Here is the cat in question, wearing her harness.

And now, a bit of context. If you look back in the July 2015 posts, you may recognize this cat as Rosie, the cat I was supposed to keep for a few months as a favor for the Montreal sibling. I ended up keeping her for good, which I suspect was the goal all along.

During our first yearly vet appointment, I was advised to keep a closer eye on her diet, because she was a little chubby. The Montreal sibling had a strong reaction when I made the report: weight control isn’t just about diet, it’s also about exercise. I needed to play more with her, and I might consider leash-training and taking her on walks. She gave me a harness and instructions on proper training.  (I never actually followed those instructions, because I wanted to keep Rosie an indoor cat. I would let Rosie out on the apartment balcony, until last summer, when learned that a colony of wasps had built a nest in one of my patio chairs. Yikes!)

I focused on controlling her food portions, and when we moved to the new house, she naturally started doing more exercise; the house is two story, and there are more windows compared to the apartment where Rosie could only look outside from the balcony sliding door.  All was looking good.

Then, at the beginning of the month, she decided that she had finished exploring the inside of the house and starting meowing at the outer doors. (Or maybe it was just the “cats don’t like closed doors thing” but the result is the same.) Cats don’t meow in the wild; that sound was developed by domesticated cats to draw the attention of humans, it is very hard to ignore. So I caved, with conditions. I dug up the harness and bought a leash. If Rosie wants to see what’s outside, I’m going to be there, holding on to her every step of the way. I also talked to the vet about my plan, at the second yearly appointment, and was given some heart-worm preventive medicine. (She is just a little over her weight goal, for those who care, and has no health issues.)

Last Saturday was the first time I hooked leash to harness and actually took her out. She’s not going very far, just around the back of the house and back. I, for one, appreciate her timidity. I also appreciate that she doesn’t need to be guided back to the house; when she’s had enough, she makes her way back without a fuss. We’ll see how it goes, but it’s a good start.

Posting this on Holy Saturday, because it just doesn’t get enough love.

It’s funny, thinking about what to write this week, I was musing about Easter itself and how little I do to celebrate it.

When I was a kid, there were the traditional egg hunts, but then the siblings and I grew out of it and now, if we’re lucky, we’ll get a little chocolate sculpture. (To be fair, we are all at an age and income level where we can buy our Easter chocolate ourselves, if we so desire. It’s just not quite the same.) Then Easter became the longest of long weekend. For a while, I used those four days to go to New York and see shows, but I bought a house last fall and I can’t afford it this year.

The point is, we were never religious in my family, and aside from that short period when I was part of a church choir and animated masses every other week or so, I never really spent time with religious people. I sort of fooled myself into thinking people don’t celebrate Easter anymore, unless they have kids or are really into the aesthetic. I was going to write about that, in what likely would have been an embarrassing-in-hindsight know-it-all tone.

But yesterday, hanging in my living room and nursing a low-grade headache, I saw a couple of police cars on the street corner. They were safe-proofing the street for a group of maybe 30 people, the vast majority of whom were holding crucifixes. It was an honest-to-God, city sanctioned (or at least police sanctioned), cross path. Walking in front of my house. Proving that my small secular bubble is not, in fact, the whole world.

So, religious or secular, chocolate or crucifix or travel or none of the above, have a good weekend. Enjoy the pastel colors. The weather is nice over here, hope it’s the same where you are and that you get to go outside and do something you enjoy. Or stay inside and do something you enjoy.

So… It’s been about a year and a half since I last posted something here. Same old story, really. I missed a day in the schedule and it stopped me cold.

So here I am once again, giving this blogging thing a go, seeing if I can do better this time around. A lot happened since September 2015, too much to lay out in one post. Better, I think, to just give a bit at a time, when the occasion calls for it.

I guess that’s it for now. Third time’s the charm, am I right?

Resume: Emmy and Oliver live next door to each other, and they are best friends. His parents are divorced, and his father only sees him on the week-ends. One Friday, Oliver goes with his father for a three day week-end. He doesn’t return, not for a decade. Emmy grew up living the consequences of Oliver being kidnapped by his father: the questions from the police and the reporters, her parents becoming much too protective for her taste, her missing her best friend. When Oliver returns, they have to learn to know each other all over again, and deal with the consequences of a ten year absence coming to an end.

Robin Benway is an underrated voice of YA fiction, and that is a gosh-darned shame. I read her previous novel The Extraordinary Secrets of April, May and June, and I really enjoyed it. (I have not read Wait, Audrey, Wait yet, but I plan to.) And I was especially looking forward to this.

I expected a typical contemporary YA romance, but I got a lovely coming of age story on top of the cute romance. What I loved most about this book is that the romance between Emmy and Oliver developed naturally and without drama. They both had enough drama in their relationship with their parents, and in the general circumstances, so keeping the romance simple and sweet was a great touch.