October turned out to be a pretty incredible month. Started on Day 1 with a Muslim Culture Festival in Austin with friends – my first proper ladies’ day out in ages – and ended with an amazing Halloween night where we had the exact perfect amount of candy and also got to feed a community cat. Because even the cats in the neighborhood know that we’re the cat house, ha! In between, I brought kittens back from the brink of death, went on a yarn crawl with a friend, semi-rescued a neighborhood cat, dove into a bujo project to consolidate the 13 notebooks taking up space on my shelf, and had my first real group photoshoot. Part of the busyness and insanity was in compensation for the very real dissonant feelings I have about becoming an empty nester, and part was just October, which tends to be fairly high-energy for me. So there were down moments, but overall, such a lovely month.

Reading and Watching
I didn’t read nearly as much as I wanted this month, just the four books (or four and one novella). My brain was preoccupied with other things, and frankly, I spent WAY too much time watching TV this month. Great British Baking Show (and omg the “Mexican” week was soooooooooo bad), Unsolved Mysteries, Love is Blind (with friends), NCIS, La Brea, The Real Love Boat (oh god it’s awful!), SVU. I remember the days when I literally watched only a single show or two! I really need to pare these down, especially some of the really horrible ones that I don’t even really like, haha! However, I did get to see Hocus Pocus 2 with my friends, and that was awesome!

Goals
We finally got all of our cats’ microchips updated with current addresses, which is something I’ve been meaning to do for ages!

House
Jason has been working on getting our porch/deck finished as a deck, since we probably won’t be enclosing it in the future now. We also fixed some of the holes/tears in the wall and re-textured. I’m at a place where the repairs aren’t ones I can help with, so I’m just trying to take care of other things so there’s less on J’s plate.

The Ferals
So many cats this month. We had Sunday, the not-actually-a-stray-cat who got stuck in our tree. We had the A-Team foster kittens, who survived calici and are now up for adoption. (Well, Gremlin was adopted within an hour of going onto the floor, and Abby was adopted over the weekend. Rillo still needs a home, though!) Our new fosters are Dexter and Dee Dee (see pic below), also recovering from calici, and probably have mild CH too. Then on Halloween, a big orange community cat decided to plonk himself next to us as we gave out candy (pic at right). We gave him some fish to eat, and scanned him for a microchip (nope). He was pretty friendly, and eventually, he brought a friend over to our yard (who was too skittish to get close to, but Jason thinks it might have been King – Shai & Hulud’s dad). The orange boy was so friendly that he kept trying to get us to let him inside the house. Not today, buddy! Ha!

Health/Fitness
Literally the only exercise I did all month was the hike up to the top of the park for my group photoshoot. Mourjaro was kicking my ass this month – or more accurately, my stomach. I’ve been at the lowest therapeutic dose for five weeks now, and the nausea was intense for the first three of those weeks, especially weeks two and three. Sometimes it would last for nearly an entire week. Nausea if I ate too much, nausea if I ate too little, and the beginnings of food aversions to anything with fiber, fat, or protein (leaving me pretty much with simple carbs!). Thankfully, the fourth week only had one day of nausea, and this week was maybe half a day, so I’m feeling much better. On the negative side, it means that a lot of the month, I was living on bread, crackers, and chips, plus yogurt for breakfast (the only time I could eat real food!). I was trying desperately to get in nutrition with pureed veggie soups, but the whole month was a struggle. You can see why exercise on top of that would have been bad! So I listened to my body, I did what I could to mitigate the nausea and food aversions, and I’ve made it to the other side now. Even without exercise and all the junky food, I lost 2.5 lbs in October, and as of today, a total of 11.5 lbs since I began this new med. Hopefully in November, I can add back in some yoga and walking to my routine!

Highlights of October
A great month with a LOT of highlights:

• Muslim Culture Fest in Austin, ladies’ day out, including henna and art and food and dance and so much fun
• Hocus Pocus 2 movie party
• my new perfume that I love so much every day
• the collective uprise against Paul Hollywood for his absolutely, certifiably wrong “expertise” in Mexican food; and then later for his “s’mores”
• yarn crawl and discovering new coffee spots with a friend –>
• having the resources, network, and support to rescue cats as needed when they show up on our doorstep
• queen butterflies and giant swallowtails and monarchs coming to our mistflowers! Plus, new critters, like the andremona moth, to photograph and identify!
• playing with creative editing for artistic portraiture
• the lady at the animal shelter told me that she honestly didn’t expect all three of our calicivirus kittens to make it, and said we did a really good job bringing them back to health
• the day Stephanie and I showed up wearing the exact same shirt by accident, ha!
• writing to a GBBO contestant via Insta, not expecting them to even read my message much less reply, but they replied !!!
• “YOU CANNOT HAVE MY PLANS!” (iykyk)
• Gremlin getting adopted within an hour of being put on the adoption floor! Abby adopted by the end of that weekend. Now if only we can get Rillo adopted!! He’s the sweetest and goofiest. ETA: He was adopted on Nov 1! Hurrah!
• the fake B$ (Brandon Sanderson) Spirit Halloween costume –>
• “Ghourlies” photoshoot, then dinner out with friends
• giving out full size candy bars for Halloween, and making a teen’s night when we let him have two caramel Ding Dongs, which he said was his favorite, and then some kid (maybe 10 yrs old) put his candy back when he realized the box of sardines on the tray was available, ha! We let him take a candy too.

Coming up in November
This is the time of year when I tend to quiet down. It used to be because I was hard at work for NaNoWriMo, now it’s just a comedown from October’s madness. There’ll be Thanksgiving, of course, but other than that, I have just about nothing planned.