Goodbye to Daxter

My cat Daxter had to be put to sleep today due to a liver tumor. I'm beating myself up about how much more I should have done to save him and how I should have taken him to the vet sooner when he started losing weight. As you know by reading this blog, half my life is spent fretting, worrying, and feeling anxious, but this is so much worse because there's an acute loss at the center of it. This is so much worse because Daxter's gone.

For a creature that only weighed ten pounds, Daxter had a huge personality that permeated our whole house and family. You couldn't take out the butter dish without slicing off a little taste for him, and I swear he could HEAR cream cheese when I brought it home from the grocery store. We had to buy him a collar with a bell so he wouldn't catch birds, but he still tried. Last summer, he chased a baby fox through our backyard, his bell jingling all the way.

My son found Daxter in the parking lot by his old karate school 10 years ago. He was a sick, scrawny kitten of about 6 months old. When I took him to our vet the next day, they asked me if I wanted to spend the time and money to get him healthy because he was a "fixer-upper." So we fixed him up, and we shared our lives with him for the better part of a decade.

Today I'm mourning my sweet little Daxter. He should have had a lot more years to chase foxes and mooch cream cheese. He should have been able to move to Georgia with us when we relocate in June. I wonder what he would have thought of an armadillo.

Rest in peace, Daxter. You're loved and missed, now and forever.

What's a hobby?

Whenever you fill out the profile page at any of the online sites that I visit, like Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, etc., one of the questions is always about hobbies. This one leaves me scratching my head. What, exactly, qualifies as a hobby? Can I list my cats? I spend a lot of time feeding, caring for, cleaning up after, and sitting under my cats, but does that count as a hobby? It's not exactly the same as cross country skiing.

Speaking of cross country skiing, how much time every year does a person have to do something in order for it to count as a hobby? Here in Illinois, there are relatively few days every year when there's enough snow on the ground to cross country ski, and even fewer days when the temperature is above zero, the wind chill won't freeze your nose off your face, and there aren't chunks of ice falling from the sky. In other words, if you want to cross country ski here, you've got about 4.5 days per year when you can do it. Can that qualify as a hobby?

How about completely non-active pastimes that I enjoy and spend a lot of time doing? Like watching TV. Is that a hobby or a bad habit? Same thing with drinking wine or eating chocolate or oversleeping. At what point does one cross the line from being a wine connoisseur (hobby) to being a drunk (bad habit)? And how about comfy clothes? I actually spend time and money looking for comfortable clothing to wear, so shouldn't that count as a hobby?

Here's another one: What about writing? Sure, I spend a lot of time writing, but since the goal there is to make money, does that exclude it from hobby status? But what if I'm writing something that's not designed to make money? You know, like a blog. Or something that I wish would make money but doesn't sell. Does that make me a hobbyist or just a failure?

And how about people who call themselves "buffs" or "aficionados"? At what point does someone go from simply having a hobby of going to see foreign films to becoming a film buff? Is there some particular moment in a person's life when they wake up and realize they have achieved buff status? It reminds me of George Costanza from Seinfeld when he once lamented that he'd like to be a Civil War buff, but he had no concept how to go about it. As it so often happens, George speaks for a whole generation of people, including me.

Now that I've gotten that off my chest, it's time to put on my sweatpants and kick back to watch a TV show about nothing.