I think I forgot to mention that the night Debbie and I took our big-time trip to check the PO Box in Madison because we didn’t want to sit around the house, after we visited Old Time Pottery (I always want to type in “Olde Tyme Pottery”), we drove by our old house.
(The house Fred and I lived in when we bought this house, I mean.)
Right after we sold our house in Madison, the people who lived right next door to us put their house up for sale.
(These are the people we’ve mentioned in the past, the woman who spent an entire summer stalking up and down the property line, scowling, before she asked Fred not to mow over the property line because the lawn treatment people wouldn’t treat their entire lawn and “It looks funny.” And the man who shook his fist at Fred, who was driving down the street going under the speed limit, because instead of taking his child on a walk on the sidewalk, he felt it necessary to parade her down the middle of the street. Yeah, them. Luckily, the neighbors on the other side of us were very cool and had the most adorable boys, which made up for the – shall we say – douchebaggery on the other side of us.)
When Debbie and I drove by the old house very slowly, first I noticed that the people who bought our house had two Christmas trees up, one in the upstairs study, which meant that they clearly DO NOT HAVE TEN CATS. And then I noticed that the house that had gone up for sale right after we sold ours was still for sale. A year and a half after we sold ours.
Yikes. Fred wasn’t kidding when he said that we put our house up for sale at exactly the right time!
(Also, our old house doesn’t appear to miss us at all. I DON’T MISS YOU EITHER, STUPID HOUSE. Hmph. You could PRETEND, at least!)
If you depend on my links list for your daily journal/ blog reading, you might want to go through and bookmark the links that are important to you. I’m going to redo my links list this week (it may take a while) and some of the links are going to disappear.
I realized yesterday that I didn’t hear Do They Know It’s Christmas? even once over the holiday season, so I had to go to YouTube and listen to it. That song, more than any other song, makes it feel like Christmas to me.
My favorite part of the song is when Bono bellows “WELL TONIGHT THANK GOD IT’S THEM INSTEAD OF YOUUUUUUUUUUUU!”
My favorite part of the video is when Sting and Bono and some other guy are standing in front of the microphone and Sting looks super-uncomfortable standing there next to Bono like he’s thinking “Oi! Who the hell is this wanker and why’s he all up in my shit? Pip pip!” (That’s my British accent. In case you were wondering.) My second favorite part of the video is when those skinny girls with the horrible hair that I do not know (maybe they’re from Bananarama? I know not.) are standing in the front of the group, clearly not knowing what the words to the chorus are (how hard is it to memorize the words “Feed the world/ LET THEM KNOW IT’S CHRISTMAS TIME!”?), swaying back and forth.
So yeah, almost two weeks after Christmas, I’m finally in the Christmas spirit.
I wonder – if they were going to make the song these days, would they call it “Do they know it’s Christmas?”, or (more likely) would they call it “Do they know it’s the holiday season (please don’t be offended if you don’t observe a holiday this time of year)?”
My desk is a popular destination for most of the cats of Crooked Acres, including even Miss Stinky, if I’m not around. It’s a nice, big desk, but I’m selfish and like to actually use it myself and thus need space for my monitor and keyboard and the mass of paperwork that always piles up, therefore there’s only room for two beds. And always, ALWAYS someone’s having a fit because both beds are occupied, whether it’s Miz Poo who’s all ::sniff::sniff::HISS!::HISS!:: when she sees that there’s no room in the inn, or Mister Boogers, who will just climb into a bed even if it’s occupied because he always assumes there’s room for one more.
So over the weekend, I started brainstorming about how I could provide more desk space for the spoiled rotten brats, and what I did was move the filing cabinet from the right side of my desk to the left side, so it’d be under the window. And I put a couple of small cat beds atop the filing cabinet, thereby doubling the cat bed space.
It went over pretty well – most of the time one or the other of the two beds will have a cat in it, and once I saw Tommy in one of the beds and Sugarbutt in the other.
Then yesterday, I noticed that only one of the beds was occupied and when I walked into the dining room, Mister Boogers had pushed his way into the cat bed on the dining room table with Newt.
I think that secretly (or maybe NOT so secretly), Mister Boogers is a snuggle slut.
I admired this sign at Cracker Barrel the first time my sister and Brian and I went there, but decided against buying it. Then the second time we went to Cracker Barrel (on the way home from Nashville), I admired it again and decided against buying it, because I knew we’d likely make at least one more trip to Cracker Barrel, and I could buy it then, and maybe it’d be on sale.
After we ate our meal, we were headed out, and the sales clerk pointed to a wrapped package on the counter and told Debbie that it was the item she’d bought. It was pretty obvious right away what was in the package, but Debbie tried to convince me that she’d just bought a lot of candy, no really, IT’S A BIG BOX OF CANDY! The next day, she let me open it.
I don’t know why I love it so much, but I DO. I plan to hang it over the doorway between the kitchen and living room. Isn’t it adorable?
I have to admit something. In the very bottom of my heart, I keep hoping that one day, Miz Poo will turn into Charlene Butterbean, at least attitude-wise. That she’ll start liking the kittens, that she’ll snuggle with them and groom them and treat them, if not in a motherly fashion, then at least in a tolerant big-sister fashion.
These days, instead of immediately smacking any kitten who comes too close to her, Miz Poo will sniff them, regard them and THEN smack them.
That’s progress, right?
More kitten pics over at Love & Hisses.
“How YOU doin’?”
Previously
2008: No entry.
2007: No entry.
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.
2004: What I hate most about flying is how incredibly fucking boring it is.
2003: Damn 8 Mile.
2002: I think we can agree that I’m all about the politeness
2001: The story of how Fred & I met.
2000: Fred: Well, what’s 8 times 1? Spud: 10?