Eight of Wands

    Once a shot is fired, there is no going back. Resistance only brings harm. The only thing you can do after is to go with it. This card shows just that. This card shows that one is cleared of all barriers and is ready to put their plan in motion. Everything this month is moving fast and I need to be laser focused on my goals. 

    It's a card that appears often in my readings, but I never really know what to do with it. I have so many plans and ideas but I feel the barriers that block this forward momentum are still in place. At the start of the year when I pulled my monthly cards, I thought I would have a full time job or would have started one of my many projects, but alas, I still feel as though I'm in the same spot.

    Perhaps this is just about my school projects, Christmas events, new kittens and wedding planning that the card is talking about and not any of my bigger ideas.

    Currently I'm taking Interactive Animation. The project being something akin to early choose your own adventure flash games like Henry Stickman. I just have an astronaut you (as the player) need to pick the correct door to find the escape pod. On the first draft, I may have went overboard and gotten much further along than my peers. The second draft only adding in a couple extra sounds and a shadow to the character. My final submission is due soon, but one thing I feel is of is my project refuses to work in a browser. I cannot tell if it's on my end or others as well, for my peers don't comment on it. I may see if I can post it on here and if it'll work when its finished.

    I am still job hunting. Something more solid, full time and pays as much as I'm worth. Hell, I've also been looking at lower paying ones. But the search still proves fruitless. A jack of all trades, master of none seems to read "will for sure be searching for something better" to hiring managers. I hear nearly nothing back from even seasonal positions anymore. I like my current schedule with a lot of time to work on other things, but it also means my bank account is bleeding out. I find myself now asking my fiancé to just pay for an extra set of groceries as a Christmas present instead of what she was going to get me. 

    I should note, while I do call it Christmas, what we celebrate is more akin to something like Yule. Though we don't necessarily make it a religious event of any kind.

    As I was trying to take the first photo of the card, this one followed around where I put the card. Maybe she was trying to tell me something. 

    I was actively hunting online for kittens, preferably a bonded pair or at least friends. My fiancé sent me a facebook post I immediately applied for. Not 10 minutes later, my fiancé gets a text from her highschool friend. Turns out her friend was fostering the cats in the post and we were allowed to go over and meet them. 

    I'll start with her. This is Vivi. When we got her, she was incredibly small. She still is really heckin small. She was found alone near a dumpster and was feral. Since she was so young, she stopped a lot of her feral traits. She's still a goblin who will aggressively eat treats and is always down to play. The shelter named her Ziti and when we met her, my fiancé immediately bonded with her. We changed her name to Vivi (much to the dismay of my brother) as a reference to the small black mage character from Final Fantasy 9. (I'm not a FF fan so I had to look up which game they were in).

    To stick to the theme of video game names: this one had crescent shaped whiskers which made me decide on Rennala: Queen of the Moon from Elden Ring. I also considered her daughter Ranni of the Stars, so I call her Ranni as a nickname. Her name originally was Belle, but considering a couple of my friends already have a cat named Belle, I thought I should change it. She was a bit more skittish when we got her but she really wanted a connection. Nobody knows what her life was before she was rescued, but she must have been abused. She was emaciated but picky and was underweight when they tried to spay her. Not long after we got her I noticed she would pick her right front paw up when she sat and it looked a little kinked to me. It was hard to confirm because it felt intact and she's fluffy, but when she strained it and began walking around as though she had three legs, I knew something was up. 

    We took them to the vet. Vivi was experiencing intense eye gook as well. The vet confirmed they both had upper respiratory infections and Rennala broke her leg when she was really young and it never healed quite right. But kittens heal breaks incredibly fast, meaning there wasn't anything they could do about it. We spend the next couple weeks administering antibiotics to them, which was surprisingly easy. After one day Rennala would kinda assume the position so we could administer it easier.

    They've since warmed up to us and don't run away when we get near. We can pick them up and they'll come over to cuddle or beg for food. We believe Rennala has some Ragdoll in her, which I didn't even know was a breed, because she will completely melt when she's comfortable and into being pet. They aren't biological sisters, but they act like it: cleaning each other, wrestling and even being respectful to each other at the food bowl.

    One thing that concerns me right now is, even after the antibiotics, Rennala breathes fast and sometimes is wheezy. She doesn't have symptoms of distemper or anything too serious, so I'm thinking it's either allergies, being a kitten, a habit because of anxiety, or asthma. Obviously, I hope it's nothing too serious, but I'm bringing her next week to get x-rays done courtesy of the shelter. The owner of the shelter is a saint. 

    Either way, having cats around again has made me less depressed and anxious. Even days where I've done nothing, I feel like I've done something because I'm caring for these babies.