and so november ends.

the last few days have been … good. i find myself clinging on to every conversation, memorizing every smile, reveling in every inside joke or playful insult. two weeks ’til home, and ’til i leave yet a new home behind. (give or take another sixty years at my current rate of travel and i’ll be wagging my head wisely at the candystripers, avowing “there’s no place that isn’t home.”)

oh! we have a baby. paul found her in a sack on the side of the quincentennial bridge, mewing piteously. fortified by a round of shots and several daily meals of kitten formula, three-week-old quin is the center of attention in twenty gort na coiribe. she’s pure white with brown ears and a brown tail and one back leg that’s ever so slightly too long. she burrows into my lap when i’m studying the nutritional requirements of microbes, and bats at angie’s hoodie strings, and purrs like a full-grown cat when claire rubs her belly. she isn’t very good for our studying goals, but exams seem inconsequential when she’s discovering her own back paws or sniffing the big girl cat food (when only a few days ago she was weakly licking food paste from our fingers.) the only displeased individual is the big girl cat herself, who’s deigned to come inside just once since the arrival of miss quin. boots is apparently past mistress in the art of sulking; she sits outside our door glaring at us whenever we come or go. but we’re quin’s mothers too now, and so we tell her “tough luck.”

and now it’s back home to play with the quin-kitty and study microbial metabolism and see if paul has quite finished off last night’s one a.m. batch of cookies. and maybe introduce him to napoleon dynamite – claire’s not seen it either! what silly folk these irish be.

ha! before i forget – abraham told me today that the sentence structure in the original Greek story about Zacchaeus implies that Jesus, not Zacchaeus, was the short one. this really makes me laugh. can you imagine Zacchaeus up in heaven muttering under his breath while dozens of preschoolers screech “Zacchaeus was a wee little man, and a wee little man was he!” good for a laugh anyway, even if the Sunday school teachers do have it right.