97 days until the wedding, and less than that until I leave Chicago forever. For some reason, when I picture myself making my final exit from the city, I picture myself galloping south on Lake Shore Drive on horseback, waving my hat in the air and whooping and hollering with glee. But that’s just because I’m weird. In reality, of course, I’ll be in a plain old moving truck with the two cats in their carriers meowing loudly and plaintively next to me. They’ve been moved around quite a lot in their short lives. My college roommate and I adopted them our senior year, and they had to be moved around quite a bit during that year to keep from getting caught by the authorities. When I moved back to Nebraska they flew back with me, and we moved in with a friend for the summer. Between us we had three cats, one dog, two newts, a bird, and several tanks of fish. My cats didn’t care much for the competition. We moved two more times while in Lincoln, then moved to my first apartment in Chicago, and then to the current place. They like moving less and less every time. I think they’ll be happy with their new place, since it’ll be bigger and they’ll have an extra human to annoy, but they won’t like the moving part.
The ten-hour drive from Lincoln to Chicago was the worst from my point of view, since I had to listen to Teti meowing the entire time. I had a John Denver tape in the car and I found that singing along loudly with that quieted her to some extent, but that was really the only thing that helped.