The cats don’t agree with one another. Ruby and Shakira, after hours of tense negotiations and several bouts of hissing kafuffles, have decided against offering each other favored nation status.
To this effect, Ruby has claimed the upstairs as her territory, while Shakira annexed the downstairs. The stairs themselves are a neutral zone, and subject to intense reconnaissance and exchanges of low-pitched growls.
This explains Ruby’s pee problems, since the litter box is downstairs in enemy territory. We put Ruby’s food upstairs, and put a litterbox upstairs (eew) because I CANNOT TOLERATE CAT PEE IN MY BED. I don’t think that I’m being unreasonable.
Next up...Strange Occult Blood Offerings at the OBs office
So Luisa, Andrew, Craig, and the cat Shakira have moved in to the house. Ruby is not impressed. You take one look at her, and she says "This was NOT part of the arrangement You never told me that there would be another animal who gets better food than I do. You never TOLD me that there was wet food! Why haven't I gotten wet food before? That's it. You're going DOWN"
And then she started peeing...
...on my bed and on Andrew's bed.
Oh lord.
Luisa is, as I am typing, vacuuming my floors and mopping my tile. Now, I imagine that humility should dictate that I stop her and say "Luisa, you've worked so hard unpacking boxes, please stop. Let me do that."
But you KNOW I didn't say that. Dude, I'm getting my floor mopped.
So Craig and Luisa and Andrew will be moving in with us in a bit more than a week. Their house sold, and their new house is not yet completed.
Their dog, thank goodness, is going to Craig’s mother’s house. The cat will come with us. Poor Ruby doesn’t know what will hit her: a two-year old AND a Siamese cat. Talk about double whammys.
It will be very strange for me to have another family living with us. I adore Andrew, and he digs me, so that’s not a problem. Craig will hide behind a computer most of the time, so that’s not a problem. My main concern is how I will interact with Luisa.
Let me be VERY clear: I really like Luisa. I think that she’s a fabulous gal, and Craig is damned lucky to have her as a wife. Luisa and I are VERY different, though, and we’ll be spending quite a lot of time together.
Luisa is very materialistic. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s hard for me to relate to wanting $300 purses and having designer furniture and having a two-year old that only wears the trendiest clothes. It’s like a foreign language to me. Luisa dresses phenomenally, drives a nice car, and (gulp) cooks dinner every night of the week.
Luisa is a domestic goddess. Her house always looks like a showplace; a phenomenal feat, considering that she has a husband, two animals, and a two-year old to undo all of her efforts with stunning efficiency. Her car doesn’t have french fry crumbs in the crannies and papers strewn about the passenger seat. She has no underwear dangling from the mouth of the dryer for two days straight. Her shoes don’t hang out in entryways so as to cause trips and falls. (Her shoes are all stored in Lucite boxes with Polaroid mugshots of the shoes neatly taped to the front.) Man, is she going to be horrified when she moves in here.
I never had a roommate in college, so I don’t really know what living with another woman is like. I have no idea how we’ll split the groceries, the housework, the utilities, anything. I hope that I’m making more of this than logic and pragmatism warrant.
The biggest pisser is that I will have to cut down on traipsing about the house in my birthday suit.
Ann Telnaes' cartoons are so simple, yet so telling:
I really respect her work.
My friend Amy sent me this book, swearing up and down that it saved her sanity with Lindsay, her almost-one-year-old:
From Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child:
If your child does not learn to sleep well, he may become an incurable adult insomniac, chronically disabled from sleepiness and dependent on sleeping pills.
Aaaagh! If I don't follow the advice in this book, my child will become a wheelchair-bound zombie junkie!
I'm speaking of my thumb. The flappy, hanging-off the digit skin has started to knit to it's old stomping gound and has turned from a ghastly grey-white color to a pink color. To my medically-uneducated mind, that means that bloodflow has returned to the flappy bits and they will soon permanently adhere themselves to the rest of my thumb.
See? No stitches, people. And things turned out FINE.
I am grateful that I am not feeling nauseous all day. I do admit that about 3:00 every day I feel gross and a little green. I haven’t yet, though, sauntered into Barfytown
I do, however, have a terrible case of exhaustion. I have the kind of exhaustion that cripples me, prevents me from thinking clearly, and makes it damn near impossible to get out of bed before 10. I tried sleeping more. I tried sleeping less. I tried berating myself and calling myself horrible names to roust myself from bed. Nothing works. I’m tired, but I can’t sleep it off.
Dimitri just doesn’t get it. I tell him that I’m tired, and he says “Yeah, well, me too. I worked all day. What did you do?”
I reply “Man, I did TWO loads of laundry and fed the cat, and I can barely keep my head perpendicular to the floor.” He hasn’t strangled me yet, but he looks like he might.
Here are the two promised videos of the preparation of The Creature. One is rather large, but both are worth the download time, I believe.
I have also built a small Flickr page with stills from the roast. (Follow the link to the right)
Second Reaction: Cool.
I looked at the hedge clipper blades this morning, and I saw a little chunk of my thumb on them.
Now that the clippers have had a taste for human flesh, I think they will crave it.
Do not fear the clippers.
I was out in the front yard using the electric hedge clippers to trim the UNBELIEVABLY AND QUITE POSSIBLY SUPERNATURALLY REGENERATIVE ACACIA OF DOOM when my neighbor came out to chat with me. She was an OB nurse in her career days, and so I started to talk to her about the pregnancy.
She was tactful enough to only tell me nice things about birth, and none of the freak-ass deliveries I'm sure that she witnessed in her day. We talked for a bit more, and then she left me to finish trimming the horrid acacia.
Before I knew it, I had mangled my left thumb in the clippers. Greeeeeeat.
I went inside, rinsed my bleeding thumb, and put pressure on it for a while. I think that I had a mild case of shock, because while I was putting a band-aid on my thumb (IT DIDN'T NEED STITCHES BECAUSE STITCHES INVOLVE NEEDLES) I was pale, dizzy, ear buzzy, and my arms started quivering a little.
I lay down on the bed and elevated my thumb. After about five minutes, I felt better. The rushing sensation in my ears took another ten minutes to go away.
The upside to this is that is was my left thumb that got hacked. Granted, I am left-handed, but I haven't had full nerve feeling in my left thumb since my junior year in high school, when I managed to hack it open in a broken dinner glass. This is good, because I realize that I chose the proper thumb to hack open. Imagine what it would have felt like on the thumb that I CAN feel with!
I used to always be able to tell when it was going to rain by the scar on my thumb, but lost the ability a year ago or so.
It looks like I might have the ability again. Luckily, monsoon season is over here, so I'll have to wait a while to test the theory.
Dimitri's penis works.
Dimitri and I will welcome our first child in early May.
We had family and friends over for a Labor Day Barbeque, and I slipped them the news then. Nothing fancy, just "Happy Labor Day, and, by the way, I'm six weeks pregnant" People gasped (I hope they were happy gasps) and I was instantly set upon my rampaging, hugging women. I still don't know who all tackled me, so I would be of no use in a lineup.
The mothers cried, my dad had a mini-heart attack, and my Nana said "I knew it!"
Sophie even HUGGED me. She then told me that I better lay off the booze, since, in case I wasn't aware, alcohol was not good for her grandchild.
So I am NOT soliciting parenting advice, nor do I want to hear what a traumatizing, humiliating, and utterly disastrous experience your pregnancy was. I'm just diggin' the fact that I have a pig/octopus looking creature inside of me and I don't feel like barfing.
So congratulate me and tell me that my labor will be no more painful than petting a kitten. Then tell me that it's acceptable behavior to keep grandparents at bay with long, sharpened poles.
