bullets from Rita Moreno, I ducked out of work early yesterday and rescued the kitten. She was sleepy and in pain and couldn’t quite seem to get comfortable, but it appears she still loves me, since she followed me around all day and spent a great deal of time laying on me while she slept. She also spent the entire night stretched out next to me, and first thing this morning she came looking for her dose of love. It’s nice to have my baby back. I’ll shut up about her for a few days, now, since y’all have got to be sick of my yammering about her. Oh, except to mention that the boys were extremely freaked out and kept coming around to sniff her, except for Spot, who would hiss at her and run away. It was nice having half a day off yesterday; very relaxing. I was in a good mood all evening, until I had to yell at the spud to clean her bathroom and bedroom. I’ll have to take a picture of her room sometime when it’s at the height of messiness. The biggest problem is that she has so damn much stuff. I took her to Wal-Mart last weekend and bought a bunch of shorts, since it’s been warming up nicely (although it was cold and rainy both Saturday and Sunday), and she’s mostly grown out of her shorts from last summer. She also needed new socks and underwear, since she has a habit of getting dirt in her shoes on a regular basis, and since it’s red clay dirt, it never ever comes out. Not even with the extra-special clothes-whitening formula I learned from my sister. Listen up, ’cause it works like a dream (Deb, tell me if I’ve got any part of this wrong). You put your clothes in the washer, and then dump in a cup of bleach and a cup of cascade dishwasher soap, and fill the washer up with hot water and let it soak. I usually let everything soak for about an hour, ’cause I’m afraid that if I let it sit any longer, the bleach and soap will start eating holes in the clothes. Then you let it go through the rest of the cycle, and run everything through on a regular cycle again, with Tide (or whatever soap you use, obviously). It’s incredible how white everything gets – but it doesn’t work on red clay dirt. Well, didn’t I get off-track, there. So when we got back from Wal-Mart, I told the spud to get all her clothes out of her dresser and closet, and put them on her bed, and we’d go through them. It took a good hour to go through everything, and when we were done, we had TWO garbage bags full of clothes that were too small for her, or which she didn’t care for. Two BIG garbage bags, can you believe that? And there’s tons left over. Speaking of Wal-Mart, while the spud and I were wandering around searching for the magic spot where they might have stashed the plain cotton shorts, we happened upon the "White Trash" section. My god, people, it was all horrid little babydoll dresses and ribbed halter tops and really short-shorts – I’m talking shorts so short you could wear them to the gynecologist’s and not need to take them off. I was horrified, and so was the spud. She picked a short, filmy, see-through halter dress off the rack and held it up, made a face, and put it back. I mean, I’m no, uh, person who dresses all classy – Audrey Hepburn! – and t-shirts and cotton pants make up the bulk of my wardrobe, but I wouldn’t be caught dead in any of that stuff, even if I had the body for it. On the other hand, I was shopping in Wal-Mart, wasn’t I? What’d I expect, diamonds and furs? —–]]>
03/23/2000