This is definitely a stellar MG to get lost in. The moral questions are fantastic, and the characters vivid and wonderful. I hope you enjoy it!

So many congrats!!!

My immediately family has no plans. We'd love to go on a lovely little vacation, but it's not worth the risk.

So true. It's reached the point where I am seriously afraid of flying.

And I'm grateful that she continues to be my companion for both my author job and my day job. She's been on my lap for nearly every Zoom presentation or meeting, sometimes showing her face, but often just purring quietly while I do my work and, of course, stroke that very soft and lovely ruff.

And I think how wonderful it's been for my little boy to grow up with this very sweet cat. He was in 4th grade when we lost our first cat (to FIP), which was heartbreaking. I'm so glad that he's had the chance to enjoy the quiet independent companionship that a wonderful cat will give.

But I also think about these past ten years and how often we've been in the same room together, three introverts doing our own thing, with Flora sleeping on one lap, then another, then playing with one of us, then climbing "Mount Mommy," as my son called it when he was small.

I think of that often, how kind her foster owner was, but also how that foster owner had been tempted to keep her. I'm glad she let Flora go to us. For one, I suspect she'd have had trouble in a house with that many other cats. For another, she adores fish and can only take a little bit of chicken.

When we first met her, she was a friendly but wary young mother (somehow, only 7 months old or so) who had been abandoned as a pregnant cat in TN. She was living with a very kind foster owner who had three or four other cats, in a chicken-only house due to one cat's allergies to fish.

That's one of the many things I think about when I hear people wishing that things would return to the way they were a year ago. We need change that goes forward, that supports the world we want to see.

I just don't understand why our government, when the decent people were in charge, allowed this happen. It's a secret police who can do what they like, and that is against all principles of human decency.

That is utterly terrifying and heartbreaking. This should have been stopped a long, long time ago.