This is a post about cats

I have a cat. Her name is Artemis.

She is three years old, grey tabby, part-American Short Hair, part-Siamese.  Her mother was a feral cat, and she was found with her brothers and sisters in a barn (she was the runt). She has a very squeaky meow and doesn't see very well due to her aforementioned hybrid status. She enjoys looking out the window and playing fetch with toy mice.

She also likes to wake me up in the middle of the night for no reason.

See, like most cats, she is generally smarter than humans and thus realizes that I, being a sucker, will probably give her some attention if only she's annoying enough.

Thinking about my cat's nighttime habits made me wonder about my relationship with pets. While I don't go so far as to think of my cat as my child (although calling my mom "Grandma" as a joke was pretty hilarious), and I think the PETA people who refer to cats and dogs as "animal companions" instead of pets are kind of silly, my cat is still important to me. If something happened to me, I'd want to make sure someone would take care of her.

I got a flyer in the mail recently about a continuing legal education seminar addressing estate planning for pets. When I was in law school, my trusts and estates professor actually talked about how she had provided for her pets in her will. Someone had been designated as their caretaker, and she set aside some money specifically for their care.  Most states permit people to do this now.  Pets, like other property, can be bequeathed to a trust.

Planning for what happens to pets when you're no longer there to care for them has become an increasingly visible topic in the news, too. I heard a broadcast on NPR the other day about pet estate planning, and several other major news sources have done stories on this as well.

Too often, if people don't have a plan for who's going to take care of their pet once they're gone, those pets end up in shelters. And I think we all know what happens when shelters are too overcrowded. No one wants their beloved pet to end up in a Sarah McLachlan commercial.

Hopefully, this won't be an issue for me for many years. In the meantime, I'll be the one tossing tiny toy mice around my apartment at 4AM.

Beating Writer's Block

I've gotten away from blogging for the past few months. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, I've been doing more journaling and creative writing - writing for myself, so to speak.

Two, I've been lacking in ideas.

It seems unbelievable, really. It's an election year; there should be plenty of material from which to draw inspiration. Any writing, even if no one reads it, is good practice, and reflecting on current events and politics via the written word has always helped me gain perspective. So why the writer's block?

I don't know, really. I've thought about it and haven't been able to come up with any real answers. All I know is, spending more time writing seems a better use of my free hours than marathoning Downton Abbey and trying to beat Mario Kart Wii for the second time.

So, my goal for the fall is to set aside time every week for blogging. We'll see how many posts I actually manage to publish between now and Christmas.