The Anal Gland Squeeze

WARNING: This post is gross

Me, averting my nose.  Minuit, really pissed.

My cat, Minuit, stinks.  Really a lot.  She has impacted anal glands.  Probably on account of the fact that she's so fat - something that happened when she developed her fear of people when we lived in New York for 6 months.  When Minuit walks by you, you are almost certain that you have just stepped in cat shit.  Except that it's her and it's coming from her own anal glands.

The last time that I took Minuit to the vet, the beast had her anal glands squeezed.  (Minuit, not the vet.)  I held Minuit, the vet squeezed.  Not Minuit's finest moment methinks.  Although after that, when she was taken to the back to have her nails trimmed she was positively passive - I guess when you've had your anal glands squeezed, the hardship of a nail trimming seems less traumatic.

After the anal gland squeeze, Minuit didn't stink!  She was fresh as a daisy.  It was like having a new cat in the house.  But now it's been a couple of months and the stink has returned.  So I either have to take her bi-monthly to the vet to have her anal glands squeezed, or I need to learn how to squeeze them myself.  The cost-efficiency quotient of my learning the technique is out-weighing the gross-out factor.  One of my sisters-in-law is a vet - I'm thinking she might be able to coach me.

The Naked Heather

You never know how much time you really spend naked until your kid has a sleepover. Thursday night, Rissa had three other friends sleep over, and I had to make a concerted effort NOT to be naked in my own home.  I had to close doors, I had to take a bathrobe with me when I took a shower... I had to get dressed in my bedroom...  Which lead me to this thought: I must walk around naked ALL the time. 

I get dressed as I'm walking to the kitchen.  I might have pants on, maybe my bra is on, maybe it isn't... rarely is a shirt upon my person.  I start the kettle to boil, I feed the cats, all while going topless.  Rissa frequently greets me with a "Mother!  Clothes!  ON NOW!"

I'm the only who really does it in our house. Though Rissa spent her first decade rarely wearing clothing inside the house, at the age of 11 she starting wrapping herself in towels, bathrobes and generally not wanting to be naked.  At all.  EVER.  David started covering up a few years before that, probably on account of the fact that Rissa did a lot of pointing and tittering at his groinal direction.  But me?  Nekkid.  Most of the time.  I cavort, I skip down the stairs (although when I do, I must hold my tatas so that I don't give myself a black eye), I lounge.

Being naked is a great thing.   I enjoy my liberation from garments.  I alone, the mother, have this freedom in our home.  I send out a call to other mothers - embrace this!  Cast off your clothing and luxuriate in nakedness with me!  Embarass your adolescent children, titillate your partners!  Mothers of the world - DISROBE!!

Sex is GOOD...

WARNING!! Adult sexual content in this post!

The grinding of pelvises, the bumping of uglies, the making of the beast with two backs...  The orgasm that makes you laugh or cry or yodel.  It's so freaking good!

For the first time in at least a month, David and I reconnected... intimately.  Right afterwards, we turned to each other and said "This is SO GOOD.  We should do this more often."  That night, I slept like a baby.  When we came down the next morning, we shared knowing glances.  I giggled like a school girl, he waggled his eyebrows at me.   The tension release was fantastic!

And yet we don't make it a priority.  It doesn't take that much effort.  I mean, once you get through the squaring of the shoulders in preparation for the mount.  You know what I'm talking about.  You're tired, your pillow whispers dirty nothings to you, or that last chapter in your book beckons.  You lean in for that half-assed attempt at a kiss, mentally rolling your eyes.

But then... if you're actually present in the moment?  You remember that kissing this person is not just a good thing, it's a great thing.  That tasting this person makes you wet... If you can just get through the first part and get to the remembering part?  The sex is pretty much always good.  I mean, if you're doing it right.   And after almost 15 years of marriage, David and I are definitely doing it right.  We excel at sex.  We should be given medals for it.  We just have to keep jumping up into the saddle and embracing the yodel.

That is NOT vacuuming!

I love my husband.  I adore him.  I do.  He is the best spouse in the world.  He buys me pre-emptive chocolate when he senses the arrival of my period, he tells me I'm beautiful, he gives a great orgasm.  But he cannot vacuum for shit.

Our house is still on the market.  (Want a quick way to add stress and lose your mind?  Put your house up for sale.)  Now that it's been on the market for 6 weeks, some of the blush has come off the rose.  We're not in that constant state of readiness because 1) we have to live in the freaking house when its on the market and 2) nobody puts shit away any more.

When we get the call for a showing, it's always the same thing.  We have the 24 hours notice and then we have a 3-4 hour cleaning blitz, which, if we were selling a 1000 sq. foot condo, would render the place spotless, but in a 2.5 story century home with furnished attic and basement spaces?  Ain't enough time.  And this week?   Our living room was covered in set decoration and tools from our recent production of Peter Pan.  The house cannot stay clean. Or at least not my level of clean

It comes down to this: I want the people who come to view the house not to think we're white trash.  Which means that I want to clean and dust everything.  In a house so freaking huge, after getting home from work, I don't have time to spend the remains of my day, ensuring that our dust bunnies haven't morphed into dust rhinoceroses and that the baseboard dings have touch-up paint on them.

David is all about the cursory clean.  The 'First-Glance' clean.  "They're not going to notice this stuff!"  My problem is that on my way out of the house, I'll notice that the kitchen tap hasn't been polished or that the front hall runner has cat hair on it... again.  I'll dust and polish and David will do the vacuuming.  But then, when I see where he's vacuumed?  It's not vacuumed.  There are still bits of things ON the carpet or the vacuuming marks suck.  We have  a shag carpet in our study - if you haven't vacuumed the WHOLE carpet - it totally looks like you HAVEN'T VACUUMED THE WHOLE CARPET.  The vacuuming marks don't lie.  And yes, I'm anal about vacuuming marks.  You don't just willy-nilly vacuum - you start at the farthest end and work your way back in little archways of recently-sucked clean.  You leave a pattern.  You've got to take out the attachment wand for the vacuum and suck off the bits of dirt that are beside the front hall runner.  The cat hair on the occasional chairs needs to be gone. 

David doesn't see these things.  And because I don't want to nag, and I don't want him NOT to volunteer to help, I do the surreptitious 2nd clean after he's gone.  My level of clean.   It's mostly working out.

Riding the Red Roller Coaster - a bloody beat poem

True peri-menopause is upon me. It has been 15 days since my last ride on the red roller coaster.  17 before that.  23 before that.  Desperately seeking the silver lining while my body is reeking of blood...  Perhaps this portends the end?  Blessedly sooner than my worry of 60?  It does explain my cravings for salt, chocolate and fetal positioning.  I thought I was developing yet further symptoms of thyroid failure when in actuality, the cause isn't so rare.

My mother, who also began her journey towards menopause early (at the age of 37), gave me her PollyAnna take on the menstrual legend.  "If you're irregular now - it could be a good thing.  I was spotting and spotting before I had the Period from Hell.  It was the DELUGE to end all deluges but it ended my time tied to Tampax and pads with wings."

I'd been worried, see?  Figuring that the bleeding and the hormonal imbalances would leave me unbalanced, prey to the pain and inconvenience more frequently, until I could flash my senior card for discounts on Tuesdays.

"How old were you Mom?" I ask.  "When the bloody roller coaster stopped?"  And my mother, who charts time in postings from my father's career in the Air Force, easily replies: "Colorado."  Which then has her doing the mental math, equating that location with actual dates.  Her eyebrows dip down towards the bridge of her nose as she subtracts from today - or maybe adds from her birthday.  "I wasn't 50 yet," she states.  "I think 48."

48?!?  48?!?  With me turning 45 this summer, the possibility of less than half a decade of this nonsense throws the silver lining at my feet.  I thought this rapidly unravelling cycle would have me under its thumb for another 15 years.  The glimmer that this lunacy could now disappear?  It has me smiling... hugging that silver lining...

And then my mother, soon to be 68, says, "I'm still prone to the occasional hot flash."  But her PollyAnna quickly pipes up. "Winters in Canada can be rough.  Being your own mattress warmer can be a feminine perk.  And when you really think about it?  A hot flash doesn't actually hurt."

Trophy Kills

This morning, as I was stumbling to the bathroom in a near catatonic state - I noticed something in the hallway.  I couldn't quite make it out - I had yet to wipe the sleep from my eyes.  In the dawn's early light, the something was dark and lumpy.  And possibly rodent-shaped.  And I'm not talking a mouse - I'm talking teenaged-rat-size.  I took a tentative step or two closer.   Actually it wasn't that lumpy.  It was kind of uniformly... dome-shaped.  Again, being half asleep I'm wondering how the cats managed to get a small turtle  into the house.  Wait there was another one!   Another step closer...

Okay, so you know how a lot of sports bras have those padded, smoothing inserts to add support and hide your nipples?  (Cause we all know how excited gals get while exercising...)    I wash them separately in little meshed lingerie bags so that they don't disappear into the realm of lost socks.  They usually end up stacked on the shelf in the laundry room, depending how many of those sports bras I use during the week.

So what I woke to this morning?  Was a trail of sports bra insert kills from the upstairs hallway to the laundry room.  Which, when my first thought had been a trail of rodents?  Way better. 

Astronomy 101 with Rissa

We are coming home late.  The stars are brilliant in the night sky.

Rissa says, "I know Orion's Belt."

I say, "I really only know the Big Dipper.  And maybe the North Star."

"Well, that one?" Rissa says.    "That's the, um... triangle... and over there is the octagon constellation and that one... is the irregular trapezoid constellation... OH MY GOD!  That one looks like a boob!"

"Does it have a nipple in the centre?"

"It does!  And that one there looks like a dog eating a duck."

And here is a picture of Rissa pointing to the Bala sign "Everyone's been to Bala..."