I've been Blog-Bitch Slapped!!

Oh, it is on, Dine-o-meter!! The sound of crickets?? Am I the one skipping out on Saturday Knitting? Noooo, that would be you. Except, I missed 2 weeks ago and may miss this week... But that's not the point!

What is the point, you ask? I have been called out for my spotty (at best) blogging. How rude of you to point out the obvious! I am a busy single mother of 4 who works all day and comes home very tired and in need of toast! Did it ever occur to you that I have nothing interesting in my life to blog about? Well, thank you for pointing out my extremely boring existence to your readers.

I mean, look at these faces:



Roxanne needs lots of love and reassurance!



Blinky needs supervision - she has started stealing my cigarettes again!



Tinkerbell obviously needs to be fed!



And Izzy - it's just interesting to watch her watch the world, and bugs, go by.

So there! I killed all the freakin' crickets over here, Dine-o-meaner!!

I LOVE this man!

I was not planning on writing anything tonight but in making my nightly rounds of my favorite blogs, I stopped by www.jezebel.com and read this article titled, "10 Things Karl Lagerfeld Could Do Without."

Read and enjoy! I love that he is completely honest - hates kids and meat and fat girls and skinny girls and the 90's and prints and... As one person commented, he is like your favorite batshit crazy uncle. But those weird gloves. So demode. And of course he only wants to talk about the fat girls - everyone knows they are the most fabulous and interesting women in the world! But I don't think that was his reason for wanting to talk about them...

Enjoy!

Oh, and here is Roxanne's toy, Bear (don't you love my creativity in naming her toys?). Bear is not longer with us as he lost his arms then legs then head. At that point, he went to his Glad grave. Sad day for Roxanne...

Cat Pee vs. Wooden Knitting Needles

An epic battle that has been raging for ages - but which will finally triumph? Thanks to Blinky, we may finally have an answer. Looks sweet and innocent, doesn't she? Docile, lovable, cute and posed? She is just this side of evil.

You see, Blinky is one of the four kittens I found in a drainage ditch and bottle fed and loved and cared for until the other three were old enough to go to new homes. As you can imagine, Blinky has a bit of a princess complex. When I moved to my new apartment, she did not adjust well. I did not realize how not well she was doing until I started smelling cat pee and started sniffing around. I discovered that random boxes containing books, bins with random contents, and a box with knitting patterns & needles were drenched in cat pee. Not misted, not a slight puddling but a concerted effort at soaking every single item in each box.

Horror! Disgust! A strong desire to pass out from the smell! I dragged boxes outside and tossed most things in the dumpster. There is no saving a book from cat pee. The cd's could be cleaned, the patterns were done, and the throw knit from hand painted yarn could be saved by the dry cleaner. The knitting needles - they were an unknown. Could they be saved?

I asked A for her expert opinion. I proposed wiping them all down with Clorox wipes but would that take off the varnish and ruin them? A responded that being covered with cat pee had also ruined them so what did I have to lose? Her logic is undeniable. I was either going to ruin a few hundred dollars worth of needles or have a few hundred dollars of ruined needles.

The great experiment began. All needles were wiped down well with the wipes and then wiped again with a damp paper towel then subjected to a sniff test. Test results were inconclusive - they still smelled like lemon from the wipes. So now I am pausing in the typing to go and check for the final results:

A random sampling indicates that wooden needles do indeed defeat cat pee! One or two may have to go but that is a small price to pay for overall success. Blinky's evil plan was only minimally effective. Now I must go love on my evil genius and her associates. They can pee on my needles, eat my socks, and sharpen their claws on my sofa but like a teenager overwhelmed with hormones and in thrall to her first boyfriend, I ignore all of the negative and pretend they love me as much as I love them. And as they cannot talk, I'll never know differently.

A Very Sad Passing

Last Monday I came home from work and found Bailey curled up in the batting of my box spring mattress dead. An abrupt assessment? Well, it was an abrupt moment - just ask my poor mother who received a phone call that was completely incomprehensible due to my sobbing and sniffing and hysterics. I really don't think she understood anything I was attempting say for the first 15 - 20 seconds of the conversation. Then she had to walk me through the preparing of the body for refrigeration (I'll come back to that) and the opening of the first beer of many.

I ended the phone call and her misery and then realized I would be incapable of concentrating on work the next day and so thinking I could hold it together, I called my boss to tell him I would not be in Tuesday. Well, needless to say, he also could not understand the first 15 - 20 seconds of our phone call but was very sweet. I then remembered that I had a dentist appointment on Tuesday and called their office and left a completely incoherent message on their machine. It was a trifecta of incomprehensible messages.

So the fridge. I wanted her cremated and so I had to keep her chilled until I could get her to the vet in the morning. So I wrapped her in a towel, put her in a garbage bag, and put her in the fridge. Morbid, yes. Effective, yes.

Tuesday morning I work my way step by step toward the vet. First getting the bag from the fridge to the door; door to car; car to vet; bag from car to front door; front door to front desk. And crying the whole time. I drop off Bailey with the very kind staff and cry my way back to the car. I am sitting in the car sobbing (no delicate, gentle tears here - snot and sobs only) and I notice this elderly man looking at me. I give him the "I acknowledge you as a fellow human only because my mother taught me that this is what I should do" smile and he mouths the words, "I'm sorry" and I mouth back, "Thank you." More sobbing until I realize that the man is back outside my window. Addled with grief, I crack the window and the man proceeds to tell me how he once a wonderful dog that he loved very much (it helps if your inner voice assumes a Scandinavian accent while reading his story). His dog was deaf and every time he got in his truck the dog would stand there and then move out of the way. Well, she was deaf. So one day, he started the truck and ran over the dog. Because the dog was deaf, it didn't move out of the and he ran over it. He loved that dog very much and he understands how I feel. End of the story. What do you say to that??? I said, "Thanks," started the car, and left.

How do these people find me? Am I cosmically listed? At least it made me laugh - so hard I had to pull over and blow my nose and wipe my eyes. Bailey would have enjoyed every moment of my misery but have been the first to let me rub my face in her fur while she purred in my ear. I miss her every morning when she's not demanding to be fed and at night when she's not beating up the other cats and the dog. She was mean, she peed on me in bed more than once, and I loved her so much. She cannot be replaced.