* * * What I love about this whole house-renovating experience is how Fred and I, despite being beaten over the head with evidence to the contrary, are stupidly, naively trusting that workmen will show up when they say they will. Needless to say (though I will, of course SAY IT), the insulation guys never showed up yesterday morning. I got to the house at 7:45 and stood there looking out at the rain thinking “Jesus GOD IN HEAVEN all I want to do is go back to bed!” I called Fred and told him I didn’t know what I wanted to do while I was waiting for the insulation guys to show up, and he presented me with several thousand things that needed to be done, none of which I WANTED to do, and I hemmed and hawed and thought about just sitting on my ass reading while waiting for the guys to show up. In the end, I started prepping the upstairs bathroom to be painted. Said prepping included: removing screws and nails from the wall, removing the coves and quarter-round from the bottom trim, removing outlet and switch plates, taking down the shower rod, taking down the mini blinds, and last (but certainly not least) ripping the coves from around the ceiling. This last was the hardest part of the whole job, and I wasn’t terribly thrilled to find myself teetering on a ladder that was propped half in the tub and half on the floor, using a pry bar, screwdriver, and hammer to pull down this fucking trim that had six-foot nails every inch and a half the entire way around the GODDAMN ROOM. I took a picture of the trim I ripped down, along with the nails sticking out, but the picture didn’t do it justice, and I deleted it in a fit of pique. I was just trying to figure out how to take down the medicine cabinet (and kind of excited about doing so, because it’s the original medicine cabinet from the 50s, and it has one of those slits in the back where men would put their straight razors when they were used up because apparently throwing razors in a wall to rust and be found by people in 50 years who are klutzes and will slice the holy shit out of their arms and die in a bloody puddle on an ugly linoleum floor was considered A Good Idea and More Convenient Than Hauling Ones Ass to the Trash Can, and I wanted to see how many razors were there. DON’T JUDGE ME.) when I heard a door slam in the driveway, and looked out to see the tile guy walking toward the house. Did I mention that we’ve got a tile guy doing the tiling around the showers? The more Fred read up on tiling, the more worried he got that he might mess it up, so he had several people come out to the house to give estimates, and ended up going with the guy who was (1) cheapest (2) least likely to blow smoke up our asses (3) with good references and (4) a good attitude and a willingness to start work soonish. I won’t share a picture with you just yet, but I really like the job the tile guy is doing and the tile Fred picked out. Anyway, the tile guy showed up to work on the upstairs bathroom, and so I stopped doing anything in there so I wouldn’t be in his way. He endeared himself to me – once he heard I was clearing stuff out of the bathroom – by offering to disconnect the toilet for me. And not only did he disconnect the toilet, he brought it downstairs and put it on the porch for me. I should have asked him to be my valentine, no? While he worked, I ended up doing a lot of small things, like taking nails out of the trim I’d removed from the bathroom so it can all go on the burn pile and… well, fuck if I can even remember what the hell I spent the rest of the morning doing. I painted chair rail and quarter-round and crown moulding, I know that. I couldn’t turn off the power to replace plugs and switches because it was too dark out, and the tile guy needed light to see what he was doing. After the tile guy left I went upstairs, admired his tiling job, and tried to remove the medicine cabinet. I had no luck with that, because there’s a wire running through the medicine cabinet to the lights on either side, and so I left the medicine cabinet in place and finished removing screws from the wall. Then I did what I really didn’t want to do, and that is paint with a paint roller. New things scare me, so I’d been avoiding painting with the roller and only painted with a brush, since brush painting is how you (I) paint trim, and trim is mostly what I’d been spending all my time painting. The painting with a roller thing ended up not being too terribly difficult, and I got the lower half of the upstairs bathroom painted before Fred arrived in Smallville. In fact, I got a second coat of paint done before we left for the evening. And today? What are my plans for today, you might ask? Well, lovely readers, I get to haul my ass out to Smallville again to meet the GODDAMN insulation guys who will “definitely” show up today and didn’t show up yesterday because their “truck broke down”, according to the guy Fred spoke to who was “just about to call” Fred at 9:30 yesterday morning. Hopefully I’ll get there early enough to get an initial coat of paint put on the upper half of the upstairs bathroom before the insulation guys arrive (or should I say “arrive”, since I’m not sure they even truly exist as more than a figment of the imagination of the “salesman” who keeps assuring Fred they’ll be there “on time”), then I need to do touchup painting on the quarter-rounds Fred nailed down yesterday, and then I’ll put a second coat of paint on the upper half of the bathroom, do the trim around the bottom of the bathroom, paint some more quarter-round and crown molding, and if I’m feeling froggy I JUST MIGHT GODDAMN START PAINTING MY GODDAMN BEDROOM CLOSET. I can hardly breathe from the sheer goddamn excitement of it all.
This is a small cove in the upstairs bathroom where we’ll either put some sort of storage furniture, or Fred will build shelves, or something. I was removing chair rail from the wall, when I saw the gap on the right side of the picture. I peered through it, wondering if there was anything back there, and the thought “What if I saw two eyes peering back at me?” came to my mind, and I got so creeped out that I had to go call Fred to talk me down from the ledge.
I’m replacing all the floor heat/ air registers with new ones that look like these. I thought these, at more than $10 apiece, were expensive until I looked online and found that you could buy heat/ air registers for upwards of $100. ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS FOR A DECORATIVE PIECE OF METAL YOU PUT IN THE FLOOR. No thanks!
I sure do love Chickadees.
Naturally, I’ve been blaming Joe Bob for the near death of my chewed-upon plant, only to find out that Tommy’s the culprit. Or one of the culprits, anyway.
(Thanks, Kara!)
(Thanks, Sandy!)
My readers RAWK.
Not so much with the “in distress.”
I kept an eye on him, but he very much did not appear to be in any kind of distress, unless looking like a big dork, scampering around the living room, and keeping an eye on Fred in case Fred might suddenly feel the need to hand out food is his way of acting distressed.
Saturday morning Fred went and got groceries, then headed out to Smallville to meet up with a guy delivering lumber. I stayed in Madison until about 10 minutes before 9, then popped Joe Bob into the cat carrier and carried him to the vet. They were only taking drop-offs, so I dropped him off and left my cell phone number to call when he was ready to go.
I went home until about 10, then decided to go on out to Smallville, figuring that even if they called in the next hour or so, I’d just tell them I’d pick him up before they closed at 5.
Well. They didn’t call and didn’t call, so finally after Fred and I made a trip to Lowe’s to return a thousand different things we needed to return, and bought a thousand items we needed to buy, I called them on the way back to the house. At this point it was 3:30, and the receptionist said that he wouldn’t be ready ’til 4:30 and I could just show up at 4:30 and he’d be ready to go.
We went back to the house and did a few things, and I decided to go ahead and head out to the vet. I got in the car, and just as I was about to put the car in gear, my cell phone rang. The vet’s assistant had some more questions about Joe Bob, and kept asking if he’d been outside in the last few days. Finally I told her we’d had him a month and he had never been outside, and then she asked me to hold on, because the vet wanted to talk to me.
The vet told me that they’d put Joe Bob in a cage with a litter box and water, and wanted to see if he’d pee so she wouldn’t have to get a urine sample direct from the source. He didn’t pee and didn’t pee, so she used a needle to the abdomen –
(go ahead and scream and run around in sympathy. I sure did.)
and his bladder was very very small and the urine was dark brown with blood in it. What concerned her was that pretty much every time a cat gets a needle to the bladder they immediately have to pee afterward. When they put Joe Bob back in the cage, he didn’t even think about peeing. Which, to the vet, indicated that there was a blockage.
“And I’ve never ever seen a cat with a blockage whose bladder is this tiny,” she said.
I was opening my mouth to say “And this means.. what?” when there was an excited voice in the background, and the vet said “Oh! He just peed! Yay!”
She said she hadn’t had a chance to spin down the urine sample, but she’d do it and call me back, but since I was on my way out there anyway, I told her I’d be there in a little while and would talk to her then.
When I got to the vet’s, forty minutes later, she was just then looking at Joe’s urine via a microscope, so I waited and watched dogs being groomed. It turns out that ol’ Joe is loaded up with crystals in his urine and needed medicine and a new special diet. Also, I needed to keep an eye on him to make sure he’s not acting distressed, and still using the litter box.
When we got home, I took all the old cat food away from the cats and put them all on the 
Apparently something was going on out there.
Previously
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.
Last summer the beach roses grew wild the way they did that summer we couldn’t walk two feet down the beach without running into thicket after thicket of them. Last night I slept with the window cracked barely open and though the roses should be dried up and long blown out to sea by now, somehow my room filled with their scent, mingled with the brine of the ocean. I dreamed of you again, and I woke so filled with longing that I could hardly catch my breath.
It seems stupid to miss you. Though it’s been longer since your death than you were even alive, you’re as much a part of me now as you ever were.
I ran so hard from your memory that it seems all I did was embrace it harder. Times went by when I swore to myself that I was moving on, I was forgetting you, I was getting over and around and past your memory. There were sometimes days when I hardly thought of you, followed by days when you were all I could think of.
I’m back, after spending more than half my life trying to get the hell away. So many times I settled in the middle of the country, the wastelands, thousands of miles from this goddamned state and that goddamned ocean, running with all my heart, until I had to give up. I’m back here, not two hundred yards from the beach where we spent the happiest days of my life.
And how pathetic is it that I’m forty-two and the happiest days of my life happened when I was seventeen?
I almost married a man because he smelled like you. He smelled like you, and he was as damaged as me and when we looked at each other there was a jolt of recognition because we saw the damage in each other, and somehow we thought we could build a life together. The smartest, bravest thing I ever did was to leave that man.
We would have done nothing but destroy each other.
I wonder if I’ll ever get to the point where I don’t feel like a complete asshole for taking cats to the pet store and putting them in cages.
(The only reason, by the way, that Joe Bob didn’t go to the pet store is because there weren’t enough cages.)
Y’all send happy adoption thoughts to Myrtle, would you? I think she’d make someone a great pet. Maybe someone who’s a little hard of hearing.
But of course. Why NOT hang out in the trash an and sniff the wall? What do you do with YOUR days?
Harbl: Aired.
Mission: Accomplished.
(DON’T JUDGE ME)
but I felt that since the kitchen is yellow and cream, the red-and-white checks of that curtain wouldn’t really go.
(I’m willing to be convinced otherwise, y’all. But you’ve got to really CONVINCE me.)
I spent a couple of hours looking at curtains on Amazon and while I like 
“Hey. Does this taste funny to you?”
“Pardon me, but is it about time for the snackin’?”
::the sound of a porky cat hustling through the house as fast as his little paws can carry him::
“Did someone say ‘snackin’ time’?”
This is how I feel when I realize I need to take another goddamn picture of myself. I think this little project is coming to an end, because I am SICK of looking at pictures of myself. I’ll still take the occasional picture and post it – I think I’ve made it pretty clear that I’m willing to jump in front of the camera at any time – or maybe I’ll make it a weekly thing. We’ll see.
Apparently he likes to sit around with his foot hiked up over his head, and watch the other cats play. Don’t ask me what that’s all about.
This isn’t what I really look like when I’m sleeping. For one, I sleep nekkid, and for two, I sleep with my mouth hanging open. But you get the idea.
“Ah hets yew.”