What Would Jesus Sing?

This song was playing this morning - on our way to Easter Brunch...  All I could think was... PERFECT JESUS THEME SONG!!!  I just had to make this:

Jesus sings The Clash

Then later I thought what if they rolled back the stone, and found this Easter morning?  So I had to make this one:

(I know, I know...  I'm going to Hell.)

I've lost my nuts!

I bought them.  I know I did.  I specifically got a container of the non-salted roasted almonds in the bulk section at the No Frills.  I remember, because last time?  I'd bought the salted roasted almonds and now as I'm trying to cut down on my salt intake, I picked up the non-salted kind.  On purpose. I know I bought them.   I have a distinct memory of putting them on the bench by the front door, so that I would remember to take them to work as my quick protein fix.  I have no freaking clue where they went.

I thought that David might have mistaken them for regular groceries and put them in a cupboard, but when I asked him about them, he looked at me, well... like I was nuts.  So either we're both losing our minds, or Rissa's trying her best to Gaslight us, or the cats have figured out how to transport 500 g containers.  Steve and Lola, could maybe work together, but without opposable thumbs, I don't think that they could move it onto a cat forklift their own, which means that they'd have to call in Minuit, and we all know she is NOT a team player.

I also think that my purse might be the Tardis.  In the last week alone, I have looked in the purse probably a dozen times for objects that should be there - am UNABLE to find them and then, when I check again 3 minutes later...  the objects ARE there. ?!?

I know what Occam's Razor would tell us.  Occam's Razor would tell us I've already lost my mind.

Would you say this is weird?

"Hey Mummy, would you say this is weird?"  Says Rissa, upon her arrival home from school.  She pokes her head around the corner and sticks her tongue out of her mouth and makes this noise: "Lardl-lardl-lardl-lardl..."

"Yes.  I would say that is weird."

"How 'bout this?"

She ducks out of view for a second and then comes around the corner once more, her face screwed into a fishy semblance making this noise: "pwuh-pwuh-pwuh-pwuh..."

"That, too, is weird."

"Would you say they are equally weird...?

"As opposed to?"

"One being decidedly more weird."

"Let me see them again."

Like daugther like mother...

Ryan could come stay with me... I mean us...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/story/2013/03/21/ryan-gosling-acting-break.html

I'm just saying.  You know, if Ryan Gosling really needs a break and someplace to chill.  He could chill in our attic.  It would be a no-stress environment for him.  I mean, apart from dealing with the mid-40s woman pretending she's all nonchalant, who just happens to be on the floor below him, imagining him doing pushups right before bed...  on top of her. 

I could be all caj...(that's short for casual, see, I'm hip)... I wouldn't fawn over him or anything, that would be so déclassé. Occasionally I'd invite him to a family dinner, "Ryan, we're having pot roast!  You in?"  Ask if he wants to go the library, that sort of thing.  Small provincial town - if he wore a ballcap I'm sure that folks wouldn't recognize him.  Just sayin.'

Poohsticks with Rissa

Poohsticks from A. A. Milnes' The House at Pooh Corner.  Illustration by E.H. Shepherd

 
We played Poohsticks last weekend.  We had to be careful, and not cross the bridge willy-nilly on account of the fact that, for a small country road in Lanark County, there's a lot of traffic.  David, Rissa and I gathered our sticks - made sure we weren't going to be squished flat by asshole drivers who don't follow the 40 km/h speed limit - and launched our precious playing pieces into the Tay River.   We ran to the other side of the bridge, waiting for our sticks to come out, but to no avail.  We saw... nothing.  Where did they go?  Who had won?  The sticks must have been too small.

"We need bigger sticks," said I.

"We need Pooh LOGS," said Rissa, in her Eureka voice.

David and I shared a glance.  "Ummmm... I don't think we want to call it Pooh LOGS..."

"Why not?" asked Rissa.

"Well, it kinda sounds as if we're throwing bowel movements over the bridge.  Or maybe like we're sitting on the edge of bridge and poohing over the side."

Rissa thought for a second.  "I'm totally going to call it Pooh Logs from now on."

We all are.

And that's why my nipples were hard...

Protecting the masses from my nipples.

  
NOT because I was all het up.   But because it was 12 freaking degrees in our house.   We got home from a weekend visiting my parents and walked into a house where I'm pretty sure I could see my breath.  And, as a direct consequence, my breasts.  Well, at least my nipples.  On account of the fact that my nipples were frozen into temperature sensitive bullets letting the world at large know that I was freezing.  And this, through a t-shirt bra this is supposed to hide one's nipples...  I was THAT cold.

Our boiler's automatic pilot light conked out.  So that meant that until Monday morning, we were wearing longjohns, pjs, bathrobes, extra socks with slippers and afghans.  (The blankets, not the dogs... although a big-ass hairy dog (or two) would have been great to have had on my lap.)  We lit a fire in our incredibly inefficient fireplace, cooked pizzas with the oven door open, filled the bathtub with near-boiling water and had space heaters pumping heat in our bedrooms.  I held a hot chocolate between my hands and, after consuming it, put my mittens back on.

Always the problem solvers, David and I decided to use some extra one-on-one friction last night... you know... to stay EXTRA warm.  There was no point in wasting those hard nipples, right?

I'm just a girl who can't say no...

This is NOT me eating something bad for me..

To chocolate.  And salty foods.  And apparently Rusty Nails...  My healthful ingesting self-control seems to be at an all-time low.  What the hell is wrong with me?

And what am I eating now?  Chocolate covered pretzels.  They were a gift.  How was the gifter to know they are my kryptonite?  Salty-wheaty-chocolatey-sugar-coma-inducing kryptonite.  I can feel my throat coating with phlegm and my stomach bloating already.  It's alright.  8 pretzels = only 140 calories.  Of course I've had probably 35 pretzels - not a problem - I just won't eat dinner. And I won't wash them down with that Rusty Nail that I was craving - or at least not a double Rusty Nail.  See?  I still have self-control!

Frenzied Feline Ferocity

Every morning outside our door, the cats lie in wait.  Pawing first.  Then head-butting.  Then heaving their shoulders into it.  Chirping, meowing, then yowling follows.  Lola's the yowler.  She yowls when Minuit growls then bites her.  Minuit is NOT a morning cat. Steve, our dopey orange male, runs up and down the upstairs hallway any time it seems that someone is close to rising from between the sheets.

We learned not to leave the door open.  Because if we leave the door open?  Then we basically live Simon's Cat  ... x 3 cats - one of whom, when she walks on your abdominal aorta, can actually make you pass out.  FYI - Simon Tofield's cat animation is pretty close to perfect - quite a feat with simple line drawings.

I HATE this part of being a Mom...

Detail from: http://www.etsy.com/listing/94665109/sick-girl-vfisit-by-mother-nun-1890s

I hate, hate, HATE - this part of being a Mom.  Rissa has a stomach bug.  She's so pale.  Almost as tall as me, yet as I'm smoothing her back while she woofs her cookies into the porcelain, I feel so freaking helpless.  She's a delicate woofer - no over-the-top gagging, just a complete emptying of her stomach contents.  She's fairly upbeat for having projectile vomited. 

"I broke my 7 year streak Mummy," she laments.  The last time she woofed her cookies was when we moved to this house.  She equates it with having eaten Cheezies while in the care of  her David's Moms - which isn't necessarily a bad thing - she hasn't touched Cheezies since then.  I sort of wish I'd had the same experience with ice cream when I was younger.

"Mummy, is this the flu?"

"No sweetie, it's not.  People call it the stomach flu, but it has nothing to do with the flu."

"Then why do they call it the flu?"

"Because someone made the mistake of calling it the flu a long time ago and now people no longer know the difference."

"You mean like when they say orangutan-g and nuc-u-lar?"  (My biggest pet peeve.  If you want to see my head explode talk about nucular orangutangs and you'll see it happen.)

The liquid children's diarrhea medicine (not to be mistake for children's liquid diarrhea medicine - which gives you an altogether more disgusting image...) we had on hand made her vomit and she can't swallow pills yet.  In between her half dozen trips to the bathroom last night, I was self-screening the noises in my own body.  Is this gas?  Is this the onset of bowel evacuation?

And today the hard part is going to be to try to keep her resting.

"You should be back in bed sweetie."

"But why?"

"Because you fell asleep at 1:30 a.m."

"I'm too hot to be in bed.  I'm going to stand out on the porch to cool down."

"No.  You're not.  Go down to the kitchen without slippers on, you be cold soon enough."

My debating whether or not I can leave her here for my 4 hours of work has now been answered - she's not going to rest.  She's going to stand naked on the porch and then develop pneumonia.  She needs a guard.  And maybe some snuggling.  And some bad tv watching.

Southern Ontario family perishes from hypothermia...

Yesterday morning it was 16 degrees in our house.  I met Rissa in the kitchen - she was bundled into her ginormous bathrobe, over which she had thrown on my down-filled winter coat.  She was breathing on her hands to warm them.  My first thought: Dear God, the boiler has given up the ghost, we're all going to freeze to death and we are THIS close to spring!  The news will report, "Despite entering the 'Out like a lamb' part of March, this Southern Ontario family sadly perished from hypothermia. Memorial Services will be held this weekend."

The floors were cold, the walls were cold - I'm pretty sure that I could see my breath in the downstairs bathroom.  I reached out for the radiator, dreading what I might find to be true.  Boilers are expensive.  They are very, very expensive.  We have money put aside, but it was put aside for the new roof that we didn't manage to fix last year  Maybe if we started buying lottery tickets?  My palm touched the radiator.  The radiator was warm, deliciously hot, in fact.  It was the house that was freezing.  What was going on?

Last week was March Break - we did a lot of sleeping in.  David and Rissa had the week off and I didn't have to go into the office until 10:00, which is why we didn't notice that we'd forgotten to spring ahead the thermostat clock until yesterday morning when we all rose at the crack of dawn.  The radiators  thought it was 5:35 a.m. instead of 6:35 a.m.

"It's okay sweetie!  We were just morons!" See that? Bright side totally found!

That erection is not for me.

Warning: Adult Sexual Content

Sunday morning, I gently wake.  Snuggling into David in bed.  He moves his arm so that I can rest my head on his chest.  I make yummy noises.  This is perfection.  I run my hand over his chest and then downward.

"Well 'Hello Sailor!'" Nothing like being given a full salute from below decks first thing in the morning.  I tilt my head to give him a closed-mouth kiss - on account of the fact that neither of us has brushed our teeth yet.  The day is beginning well.  Then I remember.  It's Sunday morning - we've slept in.  He's just woken up.

"That erection isn't really for me, is it?" I pout.  "You just need to pee, don't you?"

He reaches down and squeezes my derriere a couple of times.

"Now it's at least half for you."

I always have to have my own spin...

Thank you so much Bad Word Mama for nominating me for the Liebster Award!

Very kind of you indeed.  It is always nice to know that someone thinks well of you.  And that someone thinks well enough to encourage you to post a kick-ass graphic and share the love with other bloggers?  Pretty gratifying.  Nice too, to know, that Bad Word Mama is a gal, like me, who doesn't have a lot of extra time and she's into streamlining the process.  Instead of asking a blogger to answer 25 or 10 or even 5 questions about themselves, she's asked for one (1).

What is the biggest regret that I have?

The regrets that I have come from my wedding day.  Oh CRAP! That makes it sound like I'm not happy to be married to David.  Which would be a complete and utter lie.  I'm very happy to be married to David - it'll be 15 years this August - we're having a big-ass party celebrating our 15th wedding anniversary.  I love him lots! And more importantly, I LIKE him lots and still want to do the bouncy-bouncy with him. 

My regrets, and there are a couple from that day, are these:  when David and I got to the speeches, we thanked everyone for coming and offered up the mic to the Fathers of the Bride and Groom.  When they didn't leap immediately at the opportunity to speak - we basically said, "Nope?  No one wants to say anything?  Okay, then we're good to go... everybody start dancing!!"  I really wish that we'd urged both our fathers to talk.  I would have liked to hear what my Dad and David's Dad thought about it all.  They're both great story tellers, they probably would have made us cry.

The other regret from that day is that we had several relatives who had passed away and couldn't be there with us.  We had a table set up with pictures of our absent friends/relatives who were no longer with us, but I really wish that I'd mentioned them all by name and really talked about how much they meant to us.  And as by-product of that regret, I wish that Rissa had had a chance to meet all these people - that she'd known how great they were and had her own memories of them instead of the ones I share through story-telling.

And now... the  NOMINATIONS.

Folks should know this: I'm the person on Facebook who, when assailed by one of those "pass it on if you have a soul" posts happens, I completely change the wording, take the chain letterness out of it and encourage folks to share it, only if they want, with no potential karmic fallout.   I've posted about that in my Magical Meerkat post.

So here's what I'm going to do.  The 5 people I have nominated write well and make me laugh and I think other people should read them and laugh too.  If they, in turn, want to post the kick-ass award on their blog and nominate others, lovely, if not... no worries, it's all good.  If you want to share something about yourself - do so... If you want to answer the question that I answered, go for it...  Paying it forward is a great thing, I am a big supporter!  So check these folks out - they're worth it! 


A Whole Lot of Nothing

Mommy Adventures

Pink Dryer Lint

Stuff White People Like

Not Your Average Mom

Self-amputation should not be your go-to...

David wants to amputate his right leg...  and replace it instead with a sproingy prosthetic.  He has a pinched sciatic nerve - which if he were to actually see the chiropractor and/or physiotherapist, he could probably fix.  But right now he thinks the best idea would be to amputate said limb and get a cool prosthetic. I'm hiding the the hack saws.

David: "This is not fun any more."

Me:  "Was this really ever fun?"

David: "It had novelty for a while.  I was enjoying the wallowing."

Me: "Maybe there's somebody out there with a voodoo doll who is sticking pins in your hip!"

David: "That would mean that somebody out there really hates me."

Me:  "I think that's the only logical explanation, I mean, other than you not going to the doctor, chiropractor or physiotherapist. So Big Guy, who did you piss off?"

David: "I really don't know."

Me:  "Must be one of those many women who, when they throw themselves at you for sex, you turn down on account of the fact that you're married to me."

David:  "That must be it."

Tuna Sweater

Every time.  Every single time.  When I open a can of tuna - I end up with tuna sweater, or tuna shirt or tuna blouse or tuna dress.  If I have long sleeves on - I end up smelling like a fish market...

I met David at the door the other day, wrapped my arms around his neck, leaned in for a kiss...

"What have YOU been up to?" He said, waggling his eyebrows at me.

"Dude!  I'm making dinner!   It's tuna juice."

"I'll say it's tuna juice..." more waggling of the eyebrows.

"No seriously.  It's TUNA juice.  We're having tuna melts for dinner."

He looked a little crestfallen for a moment.  Then he perked up.  "I like tuna melts."

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..."

It's an honour to be nominated...

I have been nominated for the Very Inspiring Blogger Award by Menopausal Mother - very kind of her indeed!  Please check out her blog! 

These awards encourage bloggers to read each other's blogs and to let the public at large know about the blogging community.

I am, in turn, nominating 15 other bloggers.  It's like a Blog Hop but with pretty pictures attached and more patting on the back!

Fresh Parsley
T-Rex Trying
Ugly Renaissance Babies
My Drunk Kitchen 
Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber
That Artist Woman
Twin Dragonfly Designs
Soul Pancake
Improv Everywhere
Daily Grommet
Girl's Gone Child
Dooce
Kate Inglis
Blog Con Queso
Fin Slippy

 

 

The rules for this award are the same:

1.  Link back to the person who nominated you.
2.  Post award image on your site.
3.  List 7 random facts about yourself.
4.  Nominate 15 other bloggers.
5.  Notify the bloggers that they have been nominated and link back to their site.

7 Random Facts about me:

1. I have a NO-FAIL sound that will make all babies laugh.
   
2. I dressed my younger brother in my old clothes and called him Cynthia when he was too young to know to stop me.
   
3.  I was a surrogate for another family.
   
4.  I have been known to eat peanut butter on hotdogs.
   
5. I lived in California for 2 years and came back beige, not tanned.
   
6.  My husband made a list of all the qualities he wanted in a woman before he met me.  I meet all those qualities except for "healthy."
   
7. I am fiercely loyal to friends and will fight dirty to protect them.

Kitty Litter Cloud

From canitbesaturdaynow.com

We have three cats.  We have three boxes of kitty litter.  You'd think that would mean that each cat would use its own box.  You would be wrong.

Two boxes are used for number one and one box is used for number two.  Which means that one box is mostly dry with stinky bits of poop and two boxes are somewhat wet with rounded balls of cat pee.  And no matter what anyone tells you?  The clumping kitty litter doesn't really stay clumped.  It's more like disintegrating kitty litter that can't really be sifted, but needs, rather, to have the top layer skimmed to take all the grody, stinky wet stuff out.

And the one kitty litter box that holds the number two?  When you sift it to gather ye olde cat poop, there is this cloud of kitty litter that then permeates the air. Which means that when one is leaning over said kitty litter box, the hazy fog of odour that you can practically taste, tends to cling to one's clothing and hair.  Which makes the cleaning of the kitty litter job even more pleasurable, on account of the fact that when you leave the basement with three tidy boxes of kitty litter left behind you, you can smell the stench of feline feces on your person. 

At first you don't notice it; you're pleased with having accomplished the kitty litter chore.  But then, as you make your way through the house... there is this niggly sensation... something on the tip of your tongue - and seeing as what's on the tip of your tongue is a cloud of kitty litter, that's when you start the dry heaving...  that's usually when you need to either have a full-on shower or at least immerse yourself in a vat of baby powder to remove said stench.  On the bright side?  The kitty litter cloud serves as a particularly pungent reminder of when you have to completely change the litter from the one box that holds the number two.