On Friday, we brought home two new additions to our family.

Two little kittens!

Meet Sally & Izzy!

OMG! KITTENS!

They’re acclimating to their new home quite quickly. We’ve got them penned up in one of our smaller rooms at the moment to keep them separated from Logan, and it’s a little kitty paradise in there.

Logan’s taking it reasonably well thus far… For the most part he’s been ignoring their presence… but if the kittens get feisty and start mewing and sticking their paws under the door he has been taking notice and trying to put them in their place with a little hissing and growling.

We’ve let them out into the kitchen twice while Logan’s been penned up in the bedroom for a little exploring time, and they seem to love that.

Working on kitten proofing the rest of the apartment!

(Edit: Sorry that some of the pictures had been down… Flickr made some changes this week and they got borked. Let me know if you’re still seeing errors!)

You know that feeling of when you’ve stayed up two hours past your bed time and you’re still not sleepy?

You try to curl up in bed and you just sorta end up laying there staring up at the ceiling and thinking to yourself, “Nope, this is so not happening.”

You end up grabbing your tablet and laying in bed playing some knock-off of Bejeweled for 15 minutes which normally soothes you right to sleepytown but it does nothing.

You quit the game and browse Twitter and send that “Why can’t I sleeeeeeeeeep?” tweet.

And if you happen to sleep at night, you probably did this at like 2 in the morning and possibly got a solidarity affirmation from a fellow tweep who is also up past their bedtime.

However, if you’re like me and don’t sleep at night and your bedtime is when the sun comes up, sending that tweet tends to result in a morning person saying, “Because it’s time to get up?”

And you find yourself thinking to yourself, “Excuse me while I go punch a baby in the face. I can’t sleep and now I have to deal with the smug superiority of morning people who think this is a reasonable hour to be awake.”

So, you don’t send that tweet. You write a blog post about what would happen if you did instead.

And you start feeling bad for yourself because you’re awake at what everyone considers a perfectly reasonable hour and it’s now closer to 9 AM than 8 AM and you’re upset that you’re awake because you haven’t slept.

You start debating trying to do a hard reset.

You know, when you decide to stay up all day and then go to bed somewhere between 9pm and 11pm like a so-called normal person and then you can wake up in the actual morning and you’ll be all normal again and no one will scoff at your weird sleep schedule and you can stop feeling so sorry for yourself.

And then the other half of your brain is like, “WTF man? It doesn’t matter WHEN you sleep just THAT you sleep, and you know damn well that whenever you do try ‘hard reset’ bullshit the result is you end up so exhausted that even if you were to crawl in bed at 11pm, you’ll just wake up at 2pm like you always do.”

And this is why I never want to see 8 AM….

When someone would ask me, “Do you have any brothers and sisters?” growing up, it was always a loaded question that inevitably would be rife with confusion and frustration.

So much so that I wanted to lie and just tell everyone I was an only child, but even at 7 or 8 years old I couldn’t bring myself to deny their existence. I was resigned to have to share my family’s complicated history.

I have two siblings.

My half-sister who is eighteen years my senior. She’s my father’s daughter from his short-lived marriage to his high school sweetheart.

My half-brother is actually my half-sister’s half-brother. He’s fifteen years my senior. My father’s ex-wife is his mother and his father didn’t stick around. My father treated him as if he were his own and when I was small my parents just referred to him has my half-brother for the sake simplicity.

We never lived under the same roof, and their visits were so intermittently spaced that I can’t even really recall how often they did come.

It’s a mouthful at 29 to have to explain but at least now it tends to fall on understanding ears.

At eight, not so much. Inquiries about my siblings would send me into an internal panic because my situation just took a gigantic shit on my peers understanding of what constitutes as a sibling relationship and my patience with their lack of understanding was fleeting.

“I have a half-sister and a half-brother,” I would say.

Then someone would try to clarify, “No, you have a step-brother and a step-sister.”

I would counter with the explanation of the difference between a half-sibling and a step-sibling which would usually fall on deaf ears and be followed up with the question, “Well, why haven’t I ever seen them?”

Everyone else had siblings their own age, mine were grown-ups. When I tried to explain someone would shake their head as if it didn’t compute and tell me I was an only child.

Stung by comments by other kids who couldn’t get the relationship right or couldn’t wrap their heads around the concept at all, I would find myself wondering if I should have just skipped the whole ordeal and said I was an only child… I mean, it was half true, wasn’t it?

I’ve been staring down Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity for months now. I read the first chapter over and over and I keep coming down to one conclusion…

I don’t want to go this alone.

In the back of the book Julia Cameron writes of a vision of no cost peer-run circles going through the book together which she calls “creative clusters”.

I decided that I have a need for such a group and have decided that I’d like to start one and want to invite you on a twelve week journey of going through the book together.

I’ve created a group on Google+ where I envision us sharing our thoughts as well as having Google Hangout chats once a week.

If you’re interested in joining me, please go join the group for AuthenticExperience.org’s The Artist’s Way Creative Cluster.

We start on June 1st!

This is the face of a killer who obviously thinks I don’t blog about him enough.

Today, he exploded a bird in my kitchen.

For better or worse, we let Logan go outside.

I always feel a twinge of guilt saying that because NYC kitties tend to be indoors only type creatures but our boy was born on the street, a master escape artist and tends to be much happier if he’s let out every now and then… He never goes far and within an hour or two, tends to be meowing at the window to be let back in so I don’t feel so bad about it.

He happens to be an excellent hunter. It comes in handy when mice sneak into our apartment and helps some with the cockroach control.

The super doesn’t mind that we let him out because he curtails the rat population around our building.

He also, on occasion, gets into the local bird population.

There have been a couple of times when I’ve noticed he’s left a dead bird outside by the front door in the past… but today? He was especially proud of his kill and decided to bring it inside for his mama to brag about on the Internet.

To back up for a minute, I have to describe my mental condition at the time this happened… I was on hour ten of a rather nasty anxiety episode that sleep had not done much to relieve. I was sitting at my desk writing in my journal in my bathrobe while Jed was taking a shower and getting ready for work when I heard the cat meowing at the window to come in.

I ignored him, figuring that when Jed left he’d let him into the hallway and then I’d let him back into the apartment and I could avoid the whole opening windows thing.

Which is precisely what happened… What I hadn’t been counting on was the cat to return with a small bird in his mouth.

Now, I don’t know if Jed was just not awake enough to notice that the cat had a bird in it’s mouth or if he consciously thought, “Oh fuck it. I’m going to just let it go and see what ensuing hilarity will occur by unleashing a cat with a dead bird into the house,” but the cat trotted in proudly with something in his mouth and dropped it on the middle of the kitchen floor.

I didn’t handle this well. Shrieking and screaming and crying ensued. I locked myself in the bedroom and texted all of my boys hoping for a white knight while knowing the best I was going to get was someone stepping forward to say, “Nikkiana, everything’s okay and you can handle this,” to which Mike did the honors today.

I composed myself and came out armed with a dust pan, a kitty litter scoop and a cell phone camera and snapped this photo of the slain bird…

I dumped him outside and came back in, vacuumed up all the feathers and thoroughly shamed my roommate for letting the cat in the building with a bird via social media.

So, that was my day… How was yours?

I got passed along this tune by my friend Nick last night and I’ve seriously listened to it over and over and over since then… and well… That just seemed fitting for a Music Monday.

Elephant Revival‘s an Americana band based out of Colorado. Check them out!