I've been feeling guilty today, because as the hours have worn on it has become clearer and clearer to me that my life is tremendously easier without Sick Cobweb in it. Of course of course of course I would prefer to have Healthy Cobweb in my life, and my life would be better than it is now, but a day without Sick Cobweb has been so much less stressful than a life with her. It makes me feel rotten, like I'm glad she's dead. I'm not glad, of course, and yet I can't deny that things are easier.

For the last several months, especially the last few months, I've been feeling like we were grabbing Cobweb, holding her down, and doing mean things to her several times a day. We were trying to help her, of course, but I'm sure it didn't look like that from her side of things. Sometimes when I reached down just to pet her, she would run away from me, clearly reacting to how often we tortured her. Watching her run from me was heartbreaking.

I was telling Shannon today that before the last few months, I'd never seen her run from me before ... but it triggered a really funny memory of her, a memory that makes me smile. I actually do remember her running from me once previously. When she was young, she loved tomatoes. If I ate anything with tomatoes or tomato sauce, she would hover around eagerly, sniffing the air. When she was maybe 2 years old, I was making myself some spaghetti, and I had put the cooked noodles in a bowl and put some tomato sauce on them, and I had turned around just for a brief second to take the pot off the stove and put it in the sink. When I turned back around, I saw Cobweb on the table with her head in the bowl of spaghetti. I shouted and ran at her, and she took off like a shot, with a long strand of spaghetti dangling out of her mouth, leaving a trail of spaghetti sauce behind her. Even at the time, with my dinner ruined and my apartment floor and furniture slimed with tomato sauce, I couldn't help laughing and laughing. Good memories.