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I couldn’t get through Ghazala Khan’s gorgeous op-ed without crying. Then I couldn’t talk about it with Josh without crying. And then I went on Facebook and saw other people mentioning it, so I cried again.

You must read it.

There is a perfect paragraph in the center of the piece, one that puts into words that concept that we are never the same again after a loss:

Humayun is my middle son, and the others are doing so well, but every day I feel the pain of his loss. It has been 12 years, but you know hearts of pain can never heal as long as we live. Just talking about it is hard for me all the time. Every day, whenever I pray, I have to pray for him, and I cry. The place that emptied will always be empty.

The place that emptied will always be empty. It doesn’t get filled by something or someone else. It is just an empty space inside you for eternity.

Sitting for a moment with that very sad, but perfectly said, thought.

I know what you’re going to ask me: Did I stay up all night to start reading J.K. Rowling’s The Cursed Child. And the answer is no. My copy hasn’t arrived.

I wish Amazon had a section on their ordering page determining the level of your fandom and then delivering products from said fandom faster to those who score higher on the list. I think we’ve determined over the years that I have an unusual, extreme love of all things Harry Potter, so… you would think Amazon would have gotten that book over to me post haste.

If I had known that there would be this delay, I would have never ordered it from them.  I’ll know now for Harry Potter 9.

(There’s going to be a Harry Potter 9, right?)

The book should be here in the next few days, and once it arrives, we’ve decided to read the whole thing aloud. It isn’t fair for one person to get to jam the whole book into their eye sockets while the rest of the people in the house wait around for their time to consume it. Also the ChickieNob’s idea that we purchase 4 copies of the book (plus an extra for Truman since he loves books, too) wasn’t financially sound. So I’m going to do all the voices. I’m going to switch places in the room so they know which character is speaking. And I’m going to act the whole freakin’ thing out in our living room this week.

Part of me wants to spread it out and read it slowly, but I also don’t want to start hearing spoilers.  So I am going to read aloud the whole thing in marathon sessions, and then each of us can go back and read it to ourselves slowly.  It’s what must be done.

So, no, I haven’t started it yet.  But I will soon.  Excuse me, I need to go practice my Scorpius voice.

Oh, and happy birthday, Harry Potter!

Truman has become obsessed with Critical Care, the Ensure-like nutrition supplement for guinea pigs.  The second he smells it, he starts wheeking and looking around frantically.  If he dribbles a drop, we need to pause while he licks it from the bedding (and then eats the piece of bedding for good measure).  His weight has mostly been holding, but since he has lost so much weight overall, I’ve been letting him have a few meals of Critical Care between his vegetables and pellets.

I get the Critical Care from the vet, but when we started to run low over the weekend, I called the pet store to see if they had it in stock.  They did, so we drove down to pick it up.

The moment I walked into the store, everything felt… wrong.  It’s usually pretty cramped, and there was suddenly room to maneuver around.  But I chalked it up to better display arrangements and went directly to the small mammal section.

The owner’s helper came over to talk about vitamin tablets and new treats, and she wistfully told me that the store would be closing this fall.  After 30+ years, the owner wanted to retire, and without a buyer stepping forward, it was time to close the store permanently.

I felt dizzy.  I still feel dizzy writing that.  I’ve been going to this pet store since I was 15.  The owner is my anchor.  She was the first person I called when Cozy’s eyes were coming out of his head.  The person I called after we had to put him to sleep.

The person I called to say Truman is sneezing, Truman has decided he doesn’t like his bedding, Truman isn’t wheeking.  She trims his nails, she cleans out his ears, she supplies me with new ideas for treats.  We clearly have a vet (or, really, at this point, two vets), but she has always been my source for information and reassurance.

Sure, I want her to retire and enjoy life.  She was beaming when she spoke about her retirement while we were checking out.  But… what about me?  Okay, I know, selfish.  But this is my blog and not her blog, so… what about me?

I am admittedly not good with change at all.  But she operates the only independent small mammal pet store in my area.  My only options now are big chain stores that usually don’t carry the high-end food  or Amazon.

But… it loses something, you know?  It’s the one errand the kids love to go on because while I’m shopping, they’re checking out all the guinea pigs and chinchillas and hamsters for sale.  The twins are nearing the age I was when I first started going there.  It feels like the end of an era, and I am so damn sad about it.

After the store, we stopped off for water ice, and I think I freaked out the woman at the counter when I asked her if her store was considering shuttering, too.  If the owner was ever going to retire and shut down the store between now and the time that I die, I needed to know now.  She reassured me that he’s not considering closing the store any time soon.  (Soon?  Soon?  Did you hear me?  I need to know EVER.)

When friends or co-workers retire, I continue to keep in touch.  But I don’t have that sort of relationship with the store owner.  She is somewhere between a human-nequin and advice-giver; not quite friendly enough for me to suggest that we should grab lunch from time to time, but more than someone playing a nameless background role of Store Owner #5.  I am going to miss her tremendously.

Some people roll with change and love change and look forward to change and try to create change.  But I have kept the same haircut since childhood, shop at the same stores, eat the same foods.  Like Bilbo Baggins, I like my cozy, little life.

And just as I imagine Bilbo would respond if Gandalf suddenly announced that he was retiring from magic, I am sort of freaking out about losing our pet store.

If I ruled the world, good stores would never be allowed to close.

I make a printable television schedule every Olympics so my family can keep track of the events we don’t want to miss.  News sites create convoluted schedules that require a lot of clicking.  I need to see it all written out in a simple manner, so I create these printable television Olympic schedules for myself and put them online in case someone else wants it too.

After the 2012 Summer Olympics, someone contacted me and told me that a link to my printable schedule was being passed around the blind community because the format works well with a screen reader.  Which is just so damn cool.  I love the idea of the world coming together over these games.  So a special hello to anyone who is hearing this from a screen reader.

I’ll be keeping the printable schedule up-to-date in case anything changes.  I had to make it as a page, or every time I added to it, it would reset the permalink and you wouldn’t be able to find it again.

You can access the schedule here.  If you want to help spread word, you can post this link on Twitter or Facebook: https://www.stirrup-queens.com/summer-olympics-2016-schedule/.

Which event are you most excited to see in the 2016 Olympics?

I just started listening to Earwolf’s podcast, The Longest Shortest Time.  When they state they are a parenting podcast for everyone, they literally mean everyone, even people who aren’t parenting.  Which makes sense because we all have opinions or thoughts or ideas to contribute to conversations.

A case in point: I started with the April 20th episode featuring an interview with Terry Gross from NPR.  She does not have kids by choice, and she takes the episode to explain how she came to that decision, why she stuck to that decision, and whether she’d make that same decision again.  It was the most interesting thing I listened to all week.

(By the way, you can download and subscribe to the podcast, as I did, or you can listen to the episode online as well as read the transcript if you scroll down the page and click on podcast transcript.)

The thought that gave me chills (and made me wish my drive to camp pick up was a little bit longer so I could have marinated on this a bit longer):

I think the main thing we want as women is we want the choice. And the choice only has meaning if there is a choice. It’s great to be a parent when you’re not forced to be – when society isn’t demanding it, when they’re not making it an obligation. And in order to no longer be an obligation, I think some people had to choose to not have children and rewrite the rules a little bit.

Someone had to take the other option — to not have kids — to make the choice to have kids truly a choice.  I was thinking about it in terms of infertility.  We need people to choose all the options in order for there to truly be options.  We need people willing to build their families through treatments, donor gametes, surrogacy, or adoption in order to really be making a choice vs. fulfilling an obligation.  We need people to choose to resolve their infertility by being child-free after infertility.  Again, without some people choosing that option, the people who don’t choose that option aren’t really making a choice.  Does that make sense?

So, thank you, to everyone who has made every choice that has allowed me to also get to make a choice.  We don’t need to choose the same thing, but we do need to support each other’s choices because other people’s choices directly impact whether or not we have a choice.