3 AM and fur balls

Gracie had her first fur ball throw-up episode last night. At 3 A.M. In bed. I guess it was a good thing it was just me home and not Tony too. Poor girl. Then she tried to cover it up by pawing at the covers.

Luckily it was on the blanket we use to sleep under and not our actual bedspread. I have no idea how I'd clean that. I'm guessing the culprit is the new healthy "weight maintenance and hairball help" cat food I got for them. I was thinking it prevented fur balls...maybe it actually facilitates them.

I was up half the night thinking anyway. Writing in my head. It always comes out like that, a lot of stuff that never makes it to paper.

I'd just finished reading Sarah Dessen's Just Listen (came out earlier this year). There are three sisters in it and at one point, the middle sister reads aloud something she's written at an open mic poetry night at a cafe. Something about her and her sisters.

I am the middle sister, but I've never felt like one. There's too much age between us all. At first, I was the youngest sister, with an older sister 10 years older than me. Then, 7 years later, I was the oldest sister. With 17 years between the two of them, I don't know that they even feel like sisters, at least not in the sense that you normally read about.

We had a very non-normal childhood anyway. Not like anyone's childhood is normal, but when your parents travel art shows for a living, things are different. When you always live somewhere in the middle of nowhere, but then travel around to all kinds of different states and towns (who all look the same from the middle of an arts & crafts show), things are just not the same as what other kids have.

When school was in, I was often left alone at the house and Pam was sent down the road to stay with her friend Lily. Sometimes she'd be there with me too, and I'd be the "adult" of the house (I say that very loosely). I'm sure that child services would have been all over us if they'd had a clue.

Then dad died and everything changed. And stayed the same, I guess you could say. At any rate, getting back to my original point, I've never felt like the middle child that everyone always talks about. The one who's always stuck in the middle; never gets to do anything first and is no longer the baby. Shoot, sometimes I felt like an alien in my family anyway (though I suppose that's a classic middle child thing).

Anyway. There was no point to that rambling, just something I was thinking about last night.