on the day

With a little bit of help - for none of the non-library-worker volunteers came back this week, though a few had trailed on to the end of the previous week, beyond the dates we'd originally scheduled them for - the library barcoding project is pretty much done. Some of the more obsolescent media material still needs to be done, and the cleanup ahead of me is immense, and will take at least the whole of next week, but at least we can return the library to normal circulation operations.

Another piece of news I'd passed by that went into effect that previous week is that we have a new cat sitter. What generated this was Pippin being moved for medical reasons onto canned wet food. We've always fed the cats twice a day, but when we were gone we'd have the cat sitter put two meals' worth of kibble out once a day and hope the cats would pace themselves (because they weren't getting any more until tomorrow), but that won't work for the wet food, which once opened won't keep without refrigeration, and also because Maia craves the stuff though it's not hers and she only diminishes Pippin's portions.

But the cat sitter we already had couldn't come twice a day because the traffic around here is too thick. So at her recommendation we bought an automated cat feeder with ice packs. But then last month, on our first trip since then that required the sitter to refill the feeder, she didn't understand how it worked, despite my having devoted considerable time to writing out detailed instructions and then rewriting them when she didn't understand the first batch. Fortunately she brought in a ringer to take the other daily visit and not leave the cats in the lurch, but this isn't a permanent solution.

So B. put out a call on a neighborhood list and we found a professional sitter who's more local and can visit twice a day with no problem. She came over, chatted a lot (cat people love to talk), actually saw both cats (which I wasn't expecting: they're shy), filled out paperwork and took the key, and we await her maiden working visit.

So the cats don't have anything to worry about. I do. So here's the question. Which induces more existential dread, the wave of record-breaking temperatures or the retirement of Justice Kennedy?