I once had a manager in the game industry tell me there were three things that always made him accept that a designer, developer, or editor was going to be less productive for weeks or maybe months and that there was just nothing the manager could do about it.

One was getting married.

One was moving.

I’ve moved six times in the past six years, and I’m not quite done with the most recent one.

Sometimes, things come along that suck up a lot of your time and energy, and there’s not much you can do other than get through them as quickly and professionally as possible. Sometimes you can plan breaks or lower-workloads to coincide with these time sinks.

Sometimes you can’t.

And sometimes, you just have no idea how much of you time and energy a life event is going to take up. you can plan, and hope, and make contingencies… but in the end you’ll just have to deal with the cards you get dealt.

So, Lj and I are now in our for-the-foreseeable-future digs. We’re not OUT of the other place yet, but most of what is left is cleaning and putting things in storage. The worst part of the actual act of moving is over.

So now, we get to deal with the pets.

We have a cat, Maeb.

Our roommate has a cat, Alphonse Lord Tubbington of Sausage-On-Chonk.

They are both indoor-only cats (though Lord Alphonse used to be a street cat, years and years ago). they are both used to being the only pet in the house (though Maeb used to live with her sister, and spend many months in a group PetSmart adaption center).

If this process goes well, it won’t impact my (still-wecked and horribly behind) writing schedule at all.

If it doesn’t, I may have a lot of low-sleep nights ahead.

We’ve done a lot of research, and we have a plan built up.

We’ve been introducing Maeb and Alphonse Lord Tubbington of Sausage-On-Chonk to each other’s scents for weeks. We spent the night letting Alphonse get used to us being in the house, and he adjusted to THAT just fine.

We just brought Maeb over. She is quarantined in the Underground Bunker with us, which is a 400-foot area we use as bedroom and offices, while Alphonse is currently banned from it (he gets the rest of the house).

They can hear each other, and are pretty vocal about it, but neither is doing more than meowing. … It’s a LOT of meowing, but that’s it.

Over the next few days we’ll block small sections of the house from Alphone at a time, and let Maeb explore them, then bring her back to the Bunker to feel safe with her stuff.In a few days to a week, when they don’t meow as much, we’ll bring them to areas connected by glass doors so they can see each other, but that’s it. Once THAT seems okay, we’ll try held introductions.

Hopefully in a few weeks, we’ll all be one vaguely tolerant family.

If not, you may start to get some WEIRD blog posts from me…

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