It's Kitty Time!

We'd been talking about getting another cat ever since Our Beloved Cat passed away in October 2020. The Husband and I mourned his loss very hard. We didn't want just any new cat; we wanted the cat we had. We knew it wouldn't be fair to bring home another soul until we were ready to accept him/her as she was and not how we wished he/she was.
It's been a long, lonely time without a cat.

Several things have happened recently.

As we closed in on the holidays and Omicron reared its ugly head, it became apparent that COVID-19 was not done with society, and I was going to spend another long winter working at home fewer opportunities to work with other human beings. I told The Husband my mental health would benefit from getting a cat, and I suggested it might be nice to bring one home before Christmas. He pointed out that if we set a deadline like that, we might feel pressured to choose a cat based on availability over compatibility; he proposed we instead make Christmas the marker for starting our search. That made a lot of sense to me.

As a gift on Christmas Day, Younger Son's girlfriend brought her cat over to our house for me to play with. I spent most of the day playing with her cat and ignoring my family. Don't worry. They expected nothing less.
Not once did I compare YS's cat to Our Beloved Cat or expect YS's cat to behave like Our Beloved Cat. Perhaps I was truly ready to accept a new cat personality into our home without unfairly laying expectations onto him/her.

Two weeks ago, the one co-worker who occasionally worked in the office with me announced that she was going to work remotely TFN. Last year, she had rekindled a romance with a former boyfriend who's in the Army across the country, and things were going so well she was going to move two time zones away to be near him. Frankly, the pandemic helped her love life by introducing work-from-home culture to our company allowing her flexibility to go wherever he's assigned.
Super great for her, but she was the only person in my department that I ever saw... and only occasionally... when I worked in the office. My motivation to work in the office to be social is now gone.

Last week, upper management at my workplace announced renovations were scheduled to retrofit our building to better serve work-from-home culture, and our department was the first area to be impacted. We were required to removed all remaining personal effects from our cubicles and work from home while reconstruction was under way. They gave no hint as to how long we'd be uprooted. They alluded vaguely to "eventually" placing us with another branch of the marketing department, but did not explain what we were to do for a workspace in the meantime if we wanted/needed to come into the office for anything. So. Even if I wanted to work in the office for the off change I'd encounter another human being, I can't right now.

Yesterday, The Husband and I called the Humane Society and made an appointment to meet with some kitties. 

Today at noon, we're going in.