This morning, I followed the Sacrament of the Cat, which is that first I must use the bathroom and allow our cat to watch, and then I go to the kitchen and give her a nice big spoonful of Fancy Feast. This is a ritual that has been followed for time immemorial. She gets very cranky if I don’t follow it, and if I do, she gives constant yowling commentary.

I was alone in the bathroom. It was very strange.

I walked to the kitchen alone. She heard me open the tin of cat food and walked in quietly. When I served it on her plate, she sniffed at it, and then sadly walked into the living room and hopped up onto her easy chair. Here she is:

I opened the door to the sun room, where she has a blanket laid out for bird watching. The birds were making their usual racket. The cat didn’t budge.

I scratched her behind the ears, which usually triggers a paw swipe and a twist around to try and bite me. Not this time. She closed her eyes and didn’t move.

Uh-oh.

I let her be. She hasn’t left that chair all day. Tonight, I opened a can of tuna, which usually has her coiling around my ankles and demanding a taste. Nope. She didn’t leave her chair. She hasn’t eaten all day.

If she hasn’t bounced back tomorrow I guess I’ll be walking to the vet with a cat in her carrier, which she hates, and would normally have her snarling and hissing and spitting. I’m not even sure I’ll get that reaction out of her. She failed the tuna test! This is very ominous.

This past month has been something else — overworked, trapped in my office all day long, stressed out to the point where I’m severely lacking in sleep. I’m a physical and mental wreck. But that all changes shortly. I’ve been meeting with students all day, trying to coach them through their last few assignments, and my last appointment of the semester is at about 1:00…and then I’m done. They’re all on their own at that point. They’ve got their final exams in hand, they do them and turn them in on Tuesday, and it’s one last surge of grading, but I’m free until then. Days of freedom. I won’t know what to do with myself.

Well, actually, I kind of do.

By 1:30 I’ll have finished my last meeting. Then I’m bolting outta here. It’s a warm sunny day, I’m going for a nice refreshing walk. I might stop at the coffee shop — I can do that, I’m vaccinated — which I haven’t visited in over a year. I might just breathe fresh air for a while. I’ll try to avoid getting hit by a bus, which would be a terribly ironic end to a long painful year.

Then I’m coming home to sit out in the sun room and work on our Mother’s Day Fundraiser. See the link over there on the left? It’s empty at this point, but only because I’ve been too swamped to fill it in. The other good people here at FtB have been making plans, I’ll be consolidating those and putting them on the page, and then we just have to do it all, while begging you for donations to cover our legal expenses. I’m making a video about an intersex mother — it turns out you don’t have to have XX chromosomes to be a good mom, surprise, surprise — and we’ve got stories about mothers on various blogs to be unveiled. But all that isn’t work, it’s a change of pace, and fun.

But first, leg-stretching and lung-filling and pretending I’m human again for a while. Maybe I’ll sleep through the night tonight, too.

I think my theme for the day will be, “Look, mom! I’m still alive!”

Bill and Melinda Gates are divorcing, news that does not interest me at all. A pair of meddling incompetent billionaires are splitting their fortune? Whoop-te-doo, as we say down here in the holler, does that mean they’ll stop trying to interfere in healthcare and education? Probably not.

But what does make me sit up and listen is that Melinda is letting all her resentments hang out. Oh boy! I am not at all surprised that Bill was suckered by Jeffrey Epstein.

Melinda Gates met with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein alongside her husband Bill in New York City and soon after said she was furious at the relationship between the two men, according to people familiar with the situation.

The previously unreported meeting occurred at Epstein’s Upper East Side Mansion in September 2013, on the same day the couple accepted the Lasker Bloomberg Public Service Award at the Pierre Hotel and were photographed alongside then-mayor Mike Bloomberg.

The meeting would prove a turning point for Gates’ relationship with Epstein, the people familiar with the matter say, as Melinda told friends after the encounter how uncomfortable she was in the company of the wealthy sex offender and how she wanted nothing to do with him.

This is what I don’t get about these people who willingly associated with Epstein. As the article says, Epstein was rude and arrogant and was constantly name-dropping, so why would anyone with billions of dollars want to hang out with him?

The ties between Gates and Epstein ran much deeper than the tech mogul first admitted. As The New York Times reported, starting in 2011, Gates met with Epstein on numerous occasions. This was three years after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage girl in Florida; by then, accusations that Epstein exploited girls and young women were widely reported in the press.

Oh, and this is fun: catch Gates lying about his relationship.

Indeed, the Times reported Gates visited Epstein multiple times from 2011 to 2013, and that Epstein had tried pitching a new charitable fund to JPMorgan honchos and to the Gates foundation. In 2013, Gates also took a ride on Epstein’s private jet (christened by tabloids as the Lolita Express), from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to Palm Beach, Florida, according to flight records reviewed by the Times. CNBC also reported that Gates rendezvoused with Epstein in New York in 2013.

When Gates first met Epstein, he was still Microsoft’s chairman and the second richest person in the world with a net worth of $56 billion.

“I met him. I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him,” Gates said in September 2019, as media coverage into his connections with Epstein were heating up. “I didn’t go to New Mexico or Florida or Palm Beach or any of that. There were people around him who were saying, ‘Hey, if you want to raise money for global health and get more philanthropy, he knows a lot of rich people.’

Oh, yeah? What were you doing in Palm Beach, Florida in 2013 that you now want to hide, Bill?

That’s my daughter Skatje, who has successfully passed her exams for advancement to candidacy for a Ph.D. today. It’s hard to believe.

OK, the photo is about 20 years old.

She has decided to pursue a new career as a mouser. That wouldn’t be so bad — every time the weather fluctuates and cools, the local mouse population decides to move indoors until it warms up again — except for a few small problems.

• The mouse hunting hour begins at 3am. It can then go on for a few hours.
• She is not a stealthy feline making swift, silent pounces. No, she’s a klutz. Hunting involves much bouncing off of furniture and knocking things off tables or just generally over.
• She’s a sadist. One mouse is good for hours of bumbling, brutal torture.
• She is finally succeeding at her profession. She used to just bat her prey around like a toy, but now she eventually actually kills. This is not for me, at all — she doesn’t proudly present me with a trophy. Nope, she leaves the sad little corpse where ever it eventually succumbs, and then it is my job to find it before it rots and stinks up the house.

It’s not just the classwork that is turning me into the shambling undead. It’s also my roommate.

Please? I have finished grading my nightmarish genetics essay exam (do not ever assign essay exams to bright, ambitious, literate students without setting an upper page length — I had over 400 pages to read. Will not do that ever again. Ever.) and finished the first wave of lab reports. Oh god my eyeballs are about to explode. I think I deserve to take a little walk in the sunshine, don’t I? Don’t make me sit here in my office any longer.

Really, just a short walk, maybe look for a few spiders, then I promise to get back to work.

I have two more sets of exams to finish — but they are much more sensibly designed with short calculations to read, and they either get them wrong or they don’t. And then I have to write two final exams.

There is another lab report and the answers to the final exams to read, but they don’t come in until Friday and next week. Please don’t punish me if I go outside for a little bit. Maybe I can just go feed the spiders? I’ll be right back to buckle down again.

<whimper>