Spirit Gendreau (1992-2011)

Most of you who have met Spirit, met her in her twilight years when she was a crotchety old lady.  She couldn't go more than 10 minutes without uttering one of her trademark sarcastic yowls.  If we left her alone for more than 8 hours, she would make us pay in the form of little regurgitation presents that she left in the most strategic places.  She was the proverbial old maid, having outlasted her sibling and fellow pack-mates.

Spirit was rescued, along her sibling Mirage in the summer of 1992.  At the time I was living in the basement of my mom's house and we had just lost our dog.  My mom wasn't ready for another pet and I took it upon myself to bring a pet into the family.  As I said, my mom wasn't ready for another pet and to prove to my mom that I was willing and able to care for a pet, she made me take care of a stuffed pet for 2 weeks.  For two weeks, I had to feed imaginary food to the cat and scoop an imaginary litter box.  After caring for Faux-cat, I went to the MSPCA and adopted Spirit and Mirage.  Spirit was all black and her sister Mirage was black & white.  I don't recall the thought process behind naming them Spirit & Mirage, but all future members of Clan Gendreau continued the tradition of being named for a super-hero which was also the name of  a car. (Vision, Phantom and Impulse rounded out the Clan in later years.)

My most treasured memory of Spirit happened very early on in her life.  As i said, I was living in the basement at my moms and my mom didn't want the cats upstairs.  They were cordoned into the two rooms that comprised my "place".  There were two entrances to my room.  One a door and the other an entry way into the laundry room.  To keep the cats from the laundry room, I used a 7 1/2 foot tall JFK movie cardboard standee to block the 8 foot tall entry.  Being kittens Mirage & Spirit tried for hours to try to escape but never were able to-until given the proper incentive.  One afternoon, my mom cooked chicken wings for an upcoming family party.  The smell of the chicken proved to be too much.  Spirit vaulted the 8 feet up and over the standee and bolted up the stairs where she proceeded to gorge herself on chicken wings.  Needless to say, my mom wasn't happy.

In the 18 years (that's 126 in cat years) that Spirit was with me, she out-lived all her Clanmates, but I'm sure she's pouncing through the Elysian fields with them now.  She is up there with Mirage, Vision, Phantom & Impulse.  Spirit, you will be missed.

    

Run, Rucka, run!

Just finished Greg Rucka's latest Queen & Country novel The Last Run.  What a great read!  Picked it up Wednesday night and haven't been able to put it down.  As all of his Q&C books, this novel centers around Tara Chace, a Minder (Special Operations Officer) in the employ of the SIS, England's version of the CIA.

As the title hints at, Tara is thinking about retiring as a Minder, but as Rucka writes "There were only three ways a Minder ever left...They were promoted, they quit, or they died.  Most of them took option number three."  Tara has seen a few of her fellow Minders take option three, most notably Tom Wallace, the father of her now 5 year old daughter.  Tara gives her resignation, but not before she is called on to run one more operation, the extraction of a high level Iranian defector.  Rucka doesn't confine the story to the action on the ground; we also see the back room political dealings and intrigue as the mission is planned and then later after the mission is botched.

Greg Rucka has done a fair amount of comic writing for DC including co-writing 52 and runs on Wonder Woman, Checkmate and Gotham Central (which is where I first became enamored with his work) but has recently announced his departure from DC to focus on his own projects.  Hopefully this means more Queen & Country!