Neurotic

This is a picture of the newest addition to our family, a reclusive elderly lady cat named Gigi. She used to live with my sweet mother-in-law, but now she lives with us -- and I'm not sure she's very happy about it. But to tell the truth it's difficult to know. She was a recluse even when she and Grandma Donna lived together, rarely coming out of the closet she had chosen as her cozy spot. Her core of sweetness shone, though, when, as Donna became less able to come and go, Gigi began to creep out at night to sleep on her feet -- a great comfort, as you can imagine.

These days, she has two cozy spots. Her preference is to camp under the tall boy's bed, at the exact center of the space -- where she is completely unreachable. He's fine with this, except for the part about how she would really prefer to have her food bowl shoved under the bed, too -- so that she doesn't have to make eye contact with anyone. I did say "reclusive."

So she makes do with an alternate cozy spot in our storage room. From her strategic location she can fend off the potential threat of . . . well, pretty much anything that seems scary. The family, the other two cats, the dogs, the phone, the light coming on . . . The world is pretty menacing according to Gigi.

Boxed up on the way to the vet, Gigi punched herself in the nose in an effort to fight the evil cat carrier. Then she realized that a crate is a perfectly perfect cozy spot.

But rarely, rarely, she creeps out in the middle of the night, like Grizabella the Glamour Cat, and timidly makes her way to the bottom of the stairs. Twice now, in seven months, she has made it all the way up to the kitchen, to peek around the corner and see if the coast was clear. Then she made a break for the powder room (cozy) and curled up on the throw rug for a nap. Global Anxiety Disorder is exhausting.

+++++++

Advent books!

December 20:

OK, so here's a book that was pointed out to me by MomVee, over on Facebook.  She loved it to the point of tears, she said. So like an idiot, I went to the library to look for it, and sat there and cried, right there in Mother Goose's Storybook Time Chair. Embarrassing. Patricia Polacco tells a loving and nostalgic story about a Christmas tradition from her childhood, and pays sweet tribute to her youngest brother at the same time.

+++++

December 21:

The phenomenally wonderful Ezra Jack Keats (you already love him because of The Snowy Day) illustrates this book, with beautiful pictures to accompany the well-known carol.  The warmth and detail of the drawings are lovely. You can get this as a board book, which makes sense -- the repetitive "pa-rum-pa-pum-pum" of the song is a mesmerizing magnet for babies and toddlers, so a sturdy board book for them to "read" while they sing is a fabulous thing.

Atticus and Jesse: best, best friends

A story without words . . . .

. . . because kittens!

So we are floating on a wave of happy around here because kittens!

 

And believe it -- objectively speaking, I could throw some weighty "woe is me" statements around,

but I can't because kittens! 

I mentioned a while ago that some heavy-duty shit has gone down amongst the family et cetera, but: kittens! 

The heavy-duty has stuck around, and it does suck sometimes to be a grownup,

 but I think I'll make it because kittens!

And the sunny girl will definitely tell you:  "Kittens!"

This even though she is contemplating her junior year of high school.  Angst!  Angst!  Oh, wait -- kittens!

So I do know everything is eventually going to be OK.  Because kittens!

Book Lovers' Advent Calendar: Day Eight

Well, so this book has always been in my family's basket of Christmas stories, even though to some its connection to the Advent and Christmas season might seem a little tenuous.  But bear with me!  The story of The Painter's Cat concerns Micio, the spoiled kitty who belongs to an Italian painter.  Micio is a little miffed when his owner ignores him in order to concentrate on a painting.  Micio decides to head out on his own, but soon realizes that he misses the life of an artist's cat.  When he returns home, he discovers that he has been given a prominent place in his owner's painting -- his owner must have missed him, too!

Our cat-loving family was tickled by this kitty's-eye view of the creation of a real Renaissance painting: Micio takes center stage in Lorenzo Lotto's The Annunciation.  And that's where the Advent part comes in; this painting depicts the moment when Mary is visited by the angel Gabriel, who tells her what God asks of her.

 Mary, do not be afraid; you have won God's favor.  Look!  You are to conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you must name him Jesus.  He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High.  The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David; he will rule over the House of Jacob for ever and his reign will have no end.  (Luke 1: 30-33)

See!  That's pretty Christmas-y! 

Our copy of this gorgeously illustrated storybook came from the sunny girl's godmother.  We have loved it ever since -- and every time we read it, we think of our dear Lou.  So that makes it double fabulous!

Glamour Cat

So here's our ancient and elegant cat, Phantom. The husband and I have had several cat companions during our twenty-two years of marriage, but I have to say that of all of them, Phantom was the most beautiful. We said good-bye to her yesterday, which was sad, but not surprising, since she was twenty-four years old.

I know, right?

My mom took her in as a stray twenty-three years ago, and named her after the Phantom of the Opera -- because she wore a spiffy tuxedo and a strategically placed brown mask. She seemed a little spooky, too, like a glamorous ghost -- but it turned out she was just easily spooked.

We inherited her when my dad remarried, and have loved her for the past twelve years. Sweet, shy, and a little goofy like most calicos, she was always willing to be bossed around by Annie the Wonder Cat -- but I have seen her punch a passing dog in the nose, just because.

We will miss her.

Meet the hellhounds!

So two new dogs came into our family about a month ago -- Jesse and Watson. And they are just terrific, and so cute, and they add a warmth to our home that we've been missing since our round mound of hound Toby died, blah, blah, blah.

But I show a photo of Jesse licking his butt to accompany the fabulous news that they came to us with love to spare, and they also came to us with multiple intestinal parasites. Yes, they did. (I can't say "no shit," because it would be a lie. Heh.)

Let's all take a moment to meditate on all the meanings of this information. Among other things it means that these dogs have no "regular" intestinal function, and thus there is no way of predicting a "good" time of day to, let's say, "meet their needs" with a nice walk. Am I being too discreet? They shit everywhere, people.

This also means that they must eat a specialized diet, take specialized drugs, and receive a specialized supplement "to enhance digestive health." And by specialized I think we all know that I mean, "oh my God, it costs what?"

It also involves the most dreaded two words ever uttered by a veterinarian: stool samples. Lots and lots of stool samples.

OK, so here's what I know about these dogs:

They are rescues -- picked up in North Carolina while they were in the middle of a crime spree; no one knows how long they had been on the lam.

They are mixed breed mutts -- but both clearly have more than a little hound in 'em -- because they lead with their noses, and will eat anything.

What do I mean by anything? Oh, let's see: Pencils. Dish towels. Cough drops and the accompanying wrappers. Paper towels. Cat food, obviously. Mulch. The shit of other dogs. Tampons. Shall I continue?

They are heartbreakingly eager to please -- and starved for affection.

And they would love to be best, best friends with our two cats -- who hate them. Here Jake has found a perch as close to the ceiling as he can possibly get; from here he plans to use a sniper rifle to take out the dogs. Please note my fabulous Jane Austen action figure, because I am who I am.

Phantom is too much of a lady to participate in the killing spree, but I think she paid for the gun.

I have to admit they're pretty awesome, for hounds from hell. I just hope we all survive!

Snapshot: Why I suck

This tragically accurate (and let me note -- completely unstaged) picture tells you everything you need to know about me:

1. Newly purchased P90X workout discs (pricey) and glamorous "Extreme Home Fitness Nutrition Plan," being eaten by a delicious bag of potato chips. The girl in charge and I are starting this challenging! yet awesome! workout program ("Extreme workout! Extreme results!"), just as soon as we finish watching all of our backlogged NCIS and Gilmore Girls episodes. Honest!

2. Festive Merry Christmas tablecloth. Hello, January!

3. I've always had a thing for Sharpies, but it feels like the Sharpie Fairy scatters them all over my house like glitter, except more permanently staining. I seem to trip over them in the oddest places. Ask anyone, including Coleen's heart-faced girl, who, at the age of two, found one on the floor of my bedroom and proceeded to scribble in bright blue all over the pristine white belly of a sleeping Annie the Wonder Cat. Just one more way that my slovenly housekeeping has created one of my all-time favorite memories.

4. Blog posts, unwritten.

5. Bills, paid. Maybe.

6. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Hello, dream lover!

This is SO not a typical "kitteh" post. Trust me.

So Annie the Wonder Cat has been in our family for about eighteen years. She's old, and she pees on everything. When I say everything, I mean it. She peed on the tall boy's pal while he was petting her. No shit. No shit, just pee, heh. This peeing cat phenomenon is one I have heard about for years, but had never personally encountered before. It has caused our family to re-arrange our household habits in a way that I never thought we would. But -- she's our cat. I mean, . . . .

tangent: My mom had a friend with a four-year-old cat; the youth-cat clawed the curtains once and the next day made a one-way trip to "the farm." That's just cold, isn't it?

We have addressed our litter box problem by moving Annie the Wonder Cat to our deck for the summer; until this week this has been a great solution. Annie has lounged languidly in the sunshine; no furniture has been ruined, no friendships have ended ("Dude. Your cat peed on me. Not cool.").

But in the past couple of days it has become clear that our beloved Annie is failing; her appetite is gone; the probability that her back legs will obey her orders is chancy. There seems to be a little bit of kitty senile dementia as well. We are all saying our good-byes to Annie today.

In our time of kitty grief, rather than bludgeon you with cute "kitteh" pictures (who created this "kitteh" monster? I would like to poke this person with a stick), I will tell you an absolutely true adventure tale about our Annie the Wonder Cat. I have witnesses for much of this, so if it seems far-fetched, I ask Coleen, Lisa, the urchins to back me up.

Annie was a gift from our next-door neighbor, Miss Tina; she was always beautiful in a cat-like way, but really -- just a classic felis catus (formerly felis domesticus). But we had a neighbor who thought a) Annie was the most beautiful cat in the world; and b) we did not deserve to own her. He did not like the fact that we let her outside; often he would wander back and forth behind our house and call her, so that he could take her into his house and keep her "safe."

[I sound insane, don't I? Think about how insane I sounded at the time: "Honey -- our neighbor is trying to kidnap our cat!" "Sweetheart, do you need to get a little job? Are you OK here by yourself all day?"]

Well -- the neighbor put his house on the market, and I just knew that Annie would vanish when he moved. I did everything I could think of to keep her out of his clutches, but sure enough -- he moved (military, so I assumed he moved far away), and Annie disappeared. You do the kitty kidnapping math.

So fast-forward to a year (a year!) later, when Lisa commented about the alleged kitty kidnapper (her co-worker) in such a way as to make me realize that he moved across the county instead of across the country. People, my head just . . . exploded. This loser had my cat. I just knew it. And I wanted more than anything to tell him that he had not "gotten away" with this ridiculous crime. Seriously. I was less interested in getting the fabulous cat back than I was in just looking this guy in the eye and saying, "I know what you did."

So -- that's what I did. I found his new address; I went to his new house; I knocked on his new door, and I said, "I know what you did. You stole my cat -- and you didn't just steal her from me -- you stole her from my kids. I hope you can live with that."

As far as I was concerned that was the end. I really had no expectation of getting my cat back -- but it sincerely pissed me off that this asshole thought he had gotten away with something.

Well. He followed me home. [Cue scary music.]

He followed me home, and he admitted he had my cat, and he begged me not to call the police. And . . . he begged me to let him keep the cat. "She's my life," he said. Creepy, much?

When I clued the husband in to the goings-on, the first thing he said was, "Are you insane? You went to this idiot's house in the middle of nowhere; you confronted him about a cat; and now he's stalking us, begging us to let him keep the kitty because he loves her so. What have you done?"

And yet . . . the cat-kidnapper called, and the husband confronted him: "we just want our cat back," he declared. My hero.

The kitty freak offered us $1,000.00 to let him keep Annie. $1,000.00, y'all. This is where lots of people say, so you took the cash, right? Because really -- a cat is a cat. But this is also where we (the husband and I) both got totally weirded out by the kitty kidnapper. What on earth could make a house cat so valuable to a sad little middle-aged man? We were creeped out, people. We insisted -- just give us our cat back, and leave us alone. It turns out that the reason the pathetic man offered us $1,000.00 was because he had lied to his wife about receiving Annie as a gift. It was worth large American dollars to him to keep this secret from his wife.

Well, we got her back, and she's been our Wonder Cat ever since. How many cats do you know who have lived through such an adventure?!? She's amazing!

We will miss her.

A star is born . . . ?

So the tall boy will be making his film debut soon -- although I'm sorry to tell you that you will have a hard time finding the movie at your local AMC theaters.

These four high school pals came over to film him for a class project, and proceeded to boss him around our kitchen, with a Flip camera capturing the glamour.

I had a hard time telling what approach the Scorcese wannabes were using, as they directed him to "make a sandwich!" Being the ever-vigilant mom, I asked them if they were speaking in some sort of film school code -- because it sure sounded like "make a sandwich" could go in a lot of different directions, and some of them could get him kicked out of school.

They just looked at me with four pairs of limpid eyes and said, "Oh no! We just want him to make a sandwich!"

"Are we talking PBJ here, or something a little more risque?" was my next question.

"Well -- we will get extra credit if he makes a creative sandwich . . . " answered Sophia Coppola.

After examining all the contents of our refrigerator, he decided to make a Ramen sandwich -- which sounded nasty to me, but cracked the future Golden Globe winners up.

Then the bossy part started: "Get out a pot! Don't waste the water! Get a sponge -- you're making a mess on the stove!"

But they got distracted by Annie the Wonder Cat -- talk about a film star! -- and left the tall boy standing in the kitchen with a package of noodles, still trying to find his character's motivation.

Creative strife broke out between the actor and his directors as they discussed the genre and themes of the film. The tall boy was headed toward some sort of existential approach -- something like "Solitude and the Sandwich -- a Reverie." But it seemed the directors had another vision for the film's message, because the two who were not completely mesmerized by the cat told him, "OK, now dance."

Here is how the tall boy responds to being told to dance. It's the high school equivalent of stomping off to his trailer in a huff, calling for his agent.

The director tapped her foot patiently, thinking she could wait him out.

But she doesn't know from foot-tapping. The tall boy Does. Not. Dance.

Luckily Ramen only takes three minutes to prepare, and the drama subsided as the tall boy began to put the actual sandwich together. The next crisis arose when they said, "OK, now take a bite."

The tall boy howled with laughter. "Do you really expect me to eat a Ramen sandwich?" he choked, and I do not kid when I say these girls were not laughing at all.

"The whole point is that someone has got to eat the sandwich, tall boy." What kind of class are they taking??

"Hello, sunny girl! How about a delicious Ramen sandwich?!"

Hmm . . . . "Not bad!" she said brightly. Annie was skeptical.

I just love the sunny girl -- and now these high school film students do, too!

How 'bout that Ramen sandwich -- with a side of nail polish?!? The Pioneer Woman has nothing on my tall boy!

Fabulous!

Let's catch up!

So it's been a while since I've filled you in on the goings-on and what-not; but mercy! -- I've been having so much fun! Annie the Wonder Cat tried to keep my blog going for me while I was off gadding about, but she has always had trouble spelling "Oklahoma," so she eventually said screw it. She's like that.

Well, now I'm back, and I can't wait to tell you all about my adventures!

Over the next few days, wanna hear about my trip to Texas and Oklahoma with my sister? You got it! Do you love the sign posted on the door of the Pioneer #3 restaurant?!

I can tell you all about my trip to Rhode Island with my dad, to see my godson get married -- and how old that makes me feel.

And I had a great day yesterday, when I got to go back into the classroom and teach a group of college students. The topic was Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales -- so I just know that's a post you won't want to miss. Make sure you have done the assigned reading before you come to class!

But today a mound of laundry as big as my . . . . -- well, it's really big -- is waiting for me. Do you know that low-grade feeling of guilt and dread you get when you've been blowing off stuff for way too long? That's my diagnosis right now -- so I had better get crackin'!

tangent: Wouldn't it be nice if the Christmas decorations you see in the corner of my dining room were there because I am so proactive and ahead of the game when it comes to preparing for the holidays? Wouldn't you be sad if I told you they've been there since . . . . OK, let's just drop it.