But by Thanksgiving 2019, he was losing a significant amount of weight and behaving sluggishly. Obi had always had a curious binge-and-purge eating disorder; he’d eat dry cat food and barf some of it up. But he was simply giving up on dry food now. We took to giving him canned meat – chicken, beef, tuna, turkey – and he suddenly began packing some weight back on. Which was fortunate, because a series of events beginning in the summer of 2019 with my ex-wife being injured on the job and being left unable to work led to us being… invited… in no uncertain terms… to vacate our Utah rental house. We looked for other places, but with the nightmarish housing situation in Utah proving to be a real bar to entry for anyone not already ensconsed in the Utah/LDS ecosystem, and with my job being 100% remote, we elected to leave the state again and head back east to someplace more affordable, though backup plan after backup plan fell through and we ended up not far from where we’d started in Arkansas. My ex, the kids, and the dog temporarily moved in with her parents; I found a rental house not too far away that turned out to have significant issues, and that’s where I took my cats, my belongings, and became stuck there as we went from “family emergency cross-country move” to “national emergency pandemic lockdown”.