For the A-to-Z Challenge 2017 I’m writing all about myself. Every post will be some random fact or bit of information about me that you may or may not have already known. Maybe you’ll learn something! Feel free to let me know! ^_^
How about a silly post for today? Cats! Let’s talk about cats!
I was obsessed with cats when I was a kid. Part of that was because we didn’t have any pets and nearly everyone I knew growing up had either a cat or a dog (sometimes both). There was a perfectly good reason that we didn’t have pets – my mom and I are both allergic to pet dander, her so much so that she can have trouble breathing – but as a kid you don’t care about logic, and all I wanted, desperately, was a cat. I had so many stuffed cats, all with names, and at one point I even had imaginary pet cats…take that as you will.
Eventually I did something that was technically very, very stupid, and went out and adopted two kittens while I was in college and still living at my parents’ house. They had a dual-reaction of wanting to murder me and also kinda falling in love with the kitties, so I survived that particular event, luckily. I also lived in that basement at that point, so that helped with the non-murder.
I named my two kitties – who were brothers – Maximus and Commadus, because I loved the movie Gladiator at the time, and shortened them to Max and Comma (and there were plenty of jokes about that, I assure you). Later on when my husband and I were first living together as boyfriend and girlfriend, we adopted another kitty we happened to find on the streets, looking for food and picking a fight with a really, really big dog. No one ever claimed her, so we ended up keeping her, and she wound up with the auspicious name “Little Bitch” because that’s what we were constantly calling her when she kept picking fights with the two boys.
Unfortunately Max died quite suddenly one night – we’re not sure what happened, but he’d been finding places other than the litter box to hide and pee, so we assume he had some kind of health problem – but Comma and Little B are still with us today. My daughter loves them, which is going to bring up some difficulties soon since they’re both at least ten years old now. I can’t wait for that discussion. Ugh.
In fact, she loves cats at least as much – and possibly more – than I ever did. It makes me see a little bit of myself in her, but also makes me groan because, as much as I’ve loved my cats, when they’re gone I don’t ever plan on getting any more of them. That’s okay though…I’ll just keep drowning her in kitty plushies like I’m already doing, and I’m sure that will keep her happy…at least until she hits college. ^_~
Do you have any pets? What kind? Feel free to leave a comment down below!
Since I’ve been working my butt off to get lots of blog posts scheduled over the past while, I’m going to returning to posting quick, glorious little drabbles on Friday’s for a few weeks. Are we all okay with that? Of course we are! See, I knew you loved me.
This is a little something I came up with based on how I think cats genuinely feel about kids. Not my cats though. My cats are abnormal.
——————————————————————————–
I awake to the sound of small humans laughing. I open my eyes just wide enough to sneak a peek of the two of them playing on the floor with those ridiculous pony toys. Humans are so stupid. The little ones doubly so.
I stand and stretch, yawn and dig my claws into the fabric of the couch. The little ones see my movement and spring to high alert. I feel my hackles go up and ready to swipe, but their own attack was pets and coos and ear rubs.
Humans are stupid, but the little ones are acceptable.
Like anyone, I have a mental list of things that annoy the hell out of me. You might call them pet peeves. Everyone has them. Yours may be completely different than mine, or some may be similar. Pet peeves don’t really have much to do with any logical sense; they’re just things that bug us personally, sometimes for no good reason.
And then there are the big peeves. A lot of people would probably not admit to having any of these, but it’s my personal belief that everyone does. These are pet peeves on an enormous scale. These are the things that, even though they mean nothing in the grand scheme of things, just make you mad. I mean, seriously filled with unbridled rage. You know you’re overreacting, but you can’t help it. When these things occur, you have to grit your teeth and count to ten while you breathe to keep yourself from punching a hole through the wall. Other people think there’s something wrong with you for getting so worked up about something so meaningless, but you can’t help the way your heart starts to hammer and your eye starts to twitch. These are the things that make you wonder if you need anger management courses.
“No, I’m not angry with you. Whatever would make you think that I was angry with you?”
– A “pet” peeve in the literal sense, I can’t stand it when my cats wind around my feet and beg for food when there is still food in their bowls. I’m to understand that this is a common feline predicament…they just can’t seem to be able to stand the fact that a tiny section of the bottom of their bowl is showing. But knowing that other cats are the same way does not help. This phenomenom enrages me. Every time my cats follow me around, begging for food, mewing and whining and trying their damnedest to trip me, and I subsequently see that 80% of the bowl is still full, I want to kick the cats as hard as I can. I don’t, of course, because I’m not a lunatic, but that’s how this kitty attitude toward partly-empty bowls makes me feel. On several occasions I’ve flat-out refused to give them any more food until the bowls were completely empty, I guess just because I wanted to annoy them as much as they were annoying me.
– I’m not a road rage kind of person, but there are two driver-related actions that make me want to scream. One is when people refuse to use their blinkers while turning. It’s really not a difficult action and I can’t for the life of me understand why so many people flat-out refuse to do it. The blinker is right there, two inches away from where your hands (presumably) are on the steering wheel. You can literally reach out with your pinky finger and flick the handle in the right direction. It takes a quarter of a second of work and absolutely no brain power. Nothing frustrates me more when I’m out on the road than when I’m waiting for a car to be out of my way only to have it turn before it reaches me, sans blinker. Except, possibly, this other thing frustrates me a little more: people who (blinker or no) take half the damn day to make a turn. No, I’m not in a rush, and no, it’s not really affecting my day in any meaningful way, but if I’m a hundred meters down the road when you start to turn and I end up having to come to a dead stop to wait for you to finish your turn, that seriously makes me want to speed up and push you wherever the hell you’re trying to go. Turns do not hurt your car, people. You can take them at a little faster than 0.5 miles/hour.
– As much as anyone, I enjoy sharing things I like on social media. I’ll share a funny video I found, or an interesting news article, and sometimes – just sometimes – I’ll even share an inspirational message of some kind. But something that fills me with an indecent level of fury is when I see a post of any kind that involves the words “most of you won’t even read this” or “let’s see who cares enough to share”. The second I see these words, or any variation of, I immediately hate whatever your post is about. It could be about saving baby puppies from being tossed in a wood chipper, but the second you try to guilt me into sharing, or somehow suggest that I’m a bad person if I don’t share, I immediately delegate your post to the junk pile. If I care about a topic, I’ll share it in various other ways, but I refuse to share something that I’ve been bullied into sharing. It makes me genuinely angry that people think that this method is the best way to get their message out there.
– Toys of any kind that require assembly and subsequently do not assemble properly. As an adult who enjoys a few guilty-pleasure-type collectibles, this is something that frustrates me. As a mother who has now had to assemble many playthings, this is something that makes me want to punch toy manufacturers in the throat. When I used to collect Todd McFarlane Dragons it would bug the hell out of me when a tail refused to click in properly, or when the dragon was designed in such a way that it literally could not stand up, because believe it or not some of us actually like to open and display our collectibles instead of leaving them trapped in plastic for all time. Now that I’m a mother and am regularly assembling toys for my daughter, this annoyance has reached an all-time high of animosity toward toy-makers. I have an entire box on the top shelf of my daughter’s closet, full to the brim with pieces from toys that I had to put away because they refused to stay together and will just end up lost otherwise. Can someone please tell me why Master Splinter’s tail comes packaged as a separate piece? There is absolutely no good reason for his tail to ever need to be detached, and yet it comes in the package as a separate piece that all the super-glue in the world can not keep together.
We all have our things that bother us in a fist-clenching, tooth-grinding, eye-twitching kind of way. These are a few of mine. What about you?
This past weekend my husband and I celebrated the dual joys of our 4th wedding anniversary, and the marriage of two friends of ours. We enjoyed a beautiful ceremony in the lovely community of Cheticamp, whilst also spending time with another married couple who we hadn’t seen in a long time, and marked the whole thing off by staying at a sweet little chalet along the coast. It was all quite lovely.
Because it was our anniversary, we were inevitably asked what we got each other, and my husband got to tell our companions that he bought me a Playstation Vita.
For our wedding anniversary.
Because I asked for it.
Hey, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while and haven’t yet figured out that I’m a total and utter dork…now you know.
Hubby bought me a Wi-Fi version Vita with a 32 GB memory card, connected it to his Playstation Network account, and downloaded a bunch of free games for me (Sony, don’t ever change your Playstation Plus system…you’re definitely doing it right), plus he picked up Rayman Origins at Walmart. Since last week I’ve been glued to this little handheld joy-box. The Vita definitely has it’s flaws, as any gaming system tends to, but I’m absolutely loving it.
And that’s a bad thing.
Okay, it’s a good thing because it was a present and I wanted it, so obviously one would hope that I enjoy playing with it. But it’s a bad thing because it is a positive time vampire. This morning I got up at about 8:30 am and started playing it. Other than to put it aside long enough to get breakfast for the baby, a coffee for the hubby, and to dance with the baby when she suddenly decided I had to dance with her, I didn’t put the Vita down until 1:00 pm. I got a dozen or so Rayman trophies, and that is all I accomplished all morning.
This is the face of my procrastination.
I didn’t write, I didn’t edit. I definitely didn’t exercise. I didn’t do any laundry or dishes, and I didn’t start tidying up the guest room (which I have to do because we have two days worth of guests coming next weekend). I didn’t even really get dressed. I put on a pair of jeans long enough to run out to the car for something, but I couldn’t be bothered to throw a bra on under my shirt, and I still haven’t as I’m typing this. The baby is still wearing her pajamas. I only just took something out of the deep freeze for supper, and I haven’t established what I’m going to do with it yet. The kitty litter is full and the cats’ streaming water dish has been broken for several days. There are a ton of leftovers in the fridge that have gone bad and I haven’t thrown them out. There are about ten boxes of old baby clothes in the hallway that I’ve been meaning to go through so I can send some stuff to consignment.
But instead of dealing with any of these things that need dealing with, I played my new Playstation Vita for four and a half hours straight. And if I’m totally honest? The only reason I actually stopped playing is because I realized that battery was dying. Yes, the only thing that dragged me away from my gaming is the fact that battery scientists (that’s a thing, right?) haven’t figured out how to make mobile batteries last longer yet.
Distractions are a terrible thing when you’re in a position that requires you to be self-motivated. Currently I am not employed; I’m working on my writing, but I’m not in a position where I am getting paid or compensated in any way. That means that every morning when I get up I have to look at myself in the mirror and tell myself, “Okay. You are going to get some damn work done today!” And then I have to try to follow through with it. I have to pick my own self up, with no hope of any kind of payment of any form, and I have to force myself to sit down and write. That in and of itself wouldn’t be too bad, except for the fact that while I’m trying to force myself to write I also have to deal with a child who thinks I should wear little pink play glasses all day, and a household worth of chores and errands that never seem to slack off in any sense of the word.
Distractions are terrible and they must be eliminated. They must be stricken from the lifestyle. It is the only way. Only when distractions have been completely removed will one be able to go on with one’s day productively and efficiently.
Unfortunately, I’m way too distracted by my shiny new Vita to get on with eliminating my distractions right now, so if you don’t mind…
Cats are magnificent creatures. They’ve adapted to the world in a most fascinating way. They are adorable creatures who spark our loving nature and cause us to take them, cuddling all the way, back to our homes. There, we feed them, let them sleep wherever they wish, and even clean up their waste by hand. And what do they do to thank us for our generosity? They ignore us, snub us, occasionally scratch or bite us, and if we’re really really lucky, when we’re doing something important, they’ll come up and sit on us.
There’s something wrong with this picture.
I wrote this drabble back when I was still working on the 100 Drabble Challenge. The reason I’m posting it here today is because of a present one of my cats left me this morning: a large pile of vomit – not a hairball, mind you, but vomit – right on the living-room rug. This rug, mind you, is an 8’x5′ area rug and is the only 40 square feet of flooring in our three story home that isn’t bare hardwood or laminate. In other words, they choose (and believe me, this has happened more than once) to expel their sickness on the one small spot of flooring in the house that cannot be simply wiped up with a soapy cloth.
Some of it was also on the pillow that we leave on the living room floor for the baby to lay on while she watches her Sesame Street videos. Insult to injury, anyone?
It’s surprises like this one that make me wonder why I ever liked cats in the first place and what insanity leads me to keep them around when all they really do is terrorize my home and expect me to clean up their excrement. Damn you, you little fuzzy balls of evil. Damn your cute little asses right to hell.
In my defense, I spent the time between approximately 9 am Monday and 8 pm Tuesday on a shopping trip with my husband’s mother, aunt, and grandmother. Yes, I willingly went shopping for two days with my in-laws. Unprecedented, I know. 🙂
Yeah yeah, no excuses, I know. I’ll do better this week. 😛
Now on to more important things! I’ve been nominated for the Kreativ Blogger Award by miss amyauthorblog. I had actually noticed a few other blogs posting their own acceptance of this award and was wondering what it was all about, so I looked into it. Basically, from what I can figure, the idea is to “award” several blogs that you personally enjoy and think deserve some kudos, and in turn those bloggers give their readers some random facts about themselves and pass the torch on. So without further ado, the Kreativ Blogger Award rules:
1. You must thank the person who gave you the award.
And of course I thank you very much, amyauthorblog of Pen Names and Other Escapes! I honestly couldn’t have expected to find something like this in my comments so soon after creating my blog! Thanks again, and everyone go check out her blog! Her bathtub post this morning cracked me up. lol
2. You must list ten facts about yourself.
I’ll be 28 years old in just a few days, and I still don’t know how to properly apply makeup. It’s never been something I was good at, and since I don’t generally wear a lot I never bothered to learn. I struggle to get my lipstick on without getting it all over my face, and when I wear any kind of powder I just sorta…brush it everywhere and hope for the best.
I have two cats (once three) even though I’m allergic. I’ve always been a huge sucker for cats, so they make me stupid. Though once these two are gone I don’t think I’ll ever get another one. Once you have a kid running around, dealing with cats just seems to become an annoyance.
I’m a huge nerd. I love Star Wars and have more recently gotten into Star Trek as well, there are still a few anime shows that are dear to my heart, and I could watch movies like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter over and over.
I think Plants VS Zombies may be one of the greatest games ever. Can you say digital addiction?
I was a cheerleader for a year in high school. Those who know me and didn’t actually see that period of my life would never guess, I promise you this.
A while back I got into writing fanfiction, and with some amount of devil’s advocacy from my best friend, I ended up writing a slash fiction between Sirius Black and Remus Lupin (Harry Potter characters). I posted it on FanFiction.net and to this day I randomly get reviews on it. Part of me honestly believes that nothing else I ever write will be as enjoyed as that silly slash fic.
If it were nutritionally logical, I would probably drink nothing but chocolate milk.
I prefer to wear jeans and t-shirts/tank tops all the time. I hate wearing things that are uncomfortable, and I rarely find skirts and the like to be comfortable.
I could sit with a coloring book and a box of Crayola crayons and be perfectly content for hours.
Alternatively, I could easily sit in a room full of Lego blocks and just build towers and let my daughter knock them down all day. 😀
3. You must tag other bloggers to nominate them for the award and let them know that you’ve nominated them.
I’ve seen several different bloggers who tagged different numbers of people. Since I’m actually pretty new to blogging seriously and I don’t follow a lot of people, I’m just going to tag a few of the ones that have captured my attention since I started my blog:
No Page Left Blank 