Monday, July 23, 2012

The Phonetics of Fostering, Part 1 - Vowels

If you're new to this blog, I'm fostering a senior shelter cat named Maddox. I'm also returning from a week-long blogging vacation, during which I was to "rest my tired and aging brain."

For the record: Rest is a relative term and might be highly overrated.

So anyway, while my brain got a rest from thinking up and publishing blog posts last week, it was plenty busy fretting over the foster cat situation (read: perfectionism sucks). And that, coupled with the pressure of only having four weeks with which to make the best of Maddox's shelter respite, nearly drove me nutty. 

In fact, during a bout of over-thinking in the car, I decided that fostering was making me anxious and emotional. And then I observed that anxious and emotional begin with the letters "A" and "E," respectively, causing my brain to auto-fill the next three (imaginary) blanks with the letters "I" "O" and "U," which, naturally, made me wonder whether vowels (and consonants for that matter) might be a metaphor for the pet foster care experience. 

(Not really. But it did make me wonder whether I could make an acronym representing my sad mental state, using only the letters for vowel sounds.)

And wouldn't you know it? I can!
I call it:

Moody Vowel Syndrome
(aka adverse side effect of trying to be a perfect pet fosterer)

A - Anxious
E - Emotional
I - Irritable
O - Obsessive
U - Unrested

...and sometimes Why? - Why the heck did I sign up for this?!

Maddox has "sympathy" Moody Vowel Syndrome.


To be continued...

5 comments:

  1. Oh no, I'm sorry to hear you are having a rough go of it. I hope there's a happy ending in the 'to be continued...'

    He *looks* good!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Happy Tuesday to you all. Hope all is well in your world now!
    Best wishes Molly

    ReplyDelete
  3. Okay, you had better be planning to follow this up quickly because I'm wondering what's going on. :(

    You were supposed to be enjoying your down time. We really need to talk about how to have a vacation. ;)

    Can't wait to hear "the rest of the story..."

    ReplyDelete
  4. So sorry you're experiencing problems with Irritable Vowel Syndrome. I hope your consonant are more positive.

    Waiting for the rest of the story...

    ReplyDelete
  5. I'm sorry to hear that you were having such anxiety... given my month of July, I can totally understand! However, since I'm reading the posts in reverse chronological order, I know that this one has a happy ending. Yay! :)

    ReplyDelete

We love comments almost as much as Reese's Peanut Butter Cups! Thank you!

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...