Last night was strangely exciting for me. Unable to find anyone to have an election-results-watching beer fest with me, I sat at home alone and split my attention between the election coverage on the various local TV channels and the interweb, which gave me instant results about my riding. Despite being told that my riding is a “safe Liberal seat” the first results had the Conservative candidate ahead. What followed was a very close race between the Conservative and Liberal candidates, where as the polling station counts were added, the difference between the two was sometimes as little as 25 votes. I was cursing the gods on Twitter but at some point the Liberal was on top and climbing steadily. In the end Ujjal Dosanjh won by less than 800 votes, which is hardly what I’d call safe. That’s like “I’ll pull out before I come, honest!” safe.
After guilt-tripping Jen for not voting, she and I were trying to figure out who these sudden new Conservative voters were, and what happened to our neighbourhood. We were this close to feeling misrepresented in parliament. Phew.
In comparison, my dad’s area is now under a Conservative (Dad can’t complain since he never bothered getting citizenship) and my mom’s area was a big NDP win. Well, if this doesn’t make you feel all democratic in your innards, I don’t know what else could be done.
Now that the election is over I finally can go up to visit my mom in Kitimat. Not that I couldn’t have gone before, and I would’ve visited in September except that once the election was called she started work at the elections office every day. And there’s no point me visiting Mom if she can’t devote every waking moment to me. It would be so cruel to her. So I’m flying up tomorrow, to stay for a week. Conveniently my contract job started today, and I have a phone interview next week, so I can’t completely relax when I’m there. Timing being everything, everything obviously wants me to suffer.
I might’ve decided on a longer stay, but I couldn’t find a friend to feed my cat twice a day (it’s a lot to ask) and I’ve had to pay someone to board her for the week. This person is a stranger to me but a friend of my stepmother’s and her nickname is “The Cat Whisperer”, so I feel somewhat confident in leaving my cat with her. My biggest worry is that my cat will like her better. Supposedly my dad and stepmom’s two cats like her better. Though I believe they’d like me better too if they saw me more often, but I think that about everyone.
It occurred to me that I’ve never been in Kitimat in the fall. Winter, spring, summer, yes. Never in the fall. So that’ll be nice, to see it look different, to see the leaves changing colours. Hopefully there’ll be some good photo ops.
Does this “cat whisperer” come to your house or does your cat go to her? I’m trying to find more options for when I leave town, other than begging my friends to stay at my house to look after my cat. The only problem is that because he’s a rescue, he’s very insecure about going other places and he has to be looked after in the comfort of his own home. *looks over at the man in question who is sprawled out on the couch, snoring gently* Sometimes too much comfort, I think …
Can’t you just dump out a big bag of cat food and let it feed itself? Kind of like hamsters?
@erin My cat’s over at this person’s house. And yes, my cat’s also very nervous about change and strangers, and I would’ve left her at home if I could’ve afforded to pay someone to visit her twice a day.
@garth My cat’s on medication that she gets every two days, and she eats wet food with dry, so I can’t leave her alone for several days like I used to.