this made me laugh really hard yesterday. Hee!
* * *
I put too much perfume on this morning and now I’m sitting here with the stank rays shooting off me in every direction. I won’t be spending much time in public today – a run to the grocery store and then maybe the post office later – and thank god for that. I hate to be one of those women you can smell coming from three aisles away.
I’m wearing
Pleasures today, by the way. I bought a purse-sized solid version of it (it looks like a little lipstick!) when I was in Maine. I didn’t realize how concentrated it was, though, thus the stank rays.
I smell good, though. Strong, but good.
* * *
If you didn’t read Fred’s entry from yesterday, you must go
check it out now. There are some incredibly awesome pictures of the Bean.
Let me point out that I’m the one who came up with the idea of pretending to yawn so that the Bean would get all yawn-y. That cat just cracks me up.
* * *
The spud came into the computer room the other night wanting help with a homework assignment. When Fred asked her what the assignment was, the spud seemed to enter another dimension, one where only about every third word was coming through. The child made NO sense at all.
“And the thing and the teacher and the Greek gods and then the today?” she said.
Fred struggled with her for a few more minutes and then turned to me.
“Do you have any clue what she needs?” he asked, and I allowed as to how I was clueless.
Finally, she came back downstairs with the sheet of paper detailing the assignment.
“God LORD,” Fred said. “Why didn’t you just SAY that?”
Please tell me that they start making more sense when they get older.
* * *
I was apparently under a cloud of Dumbassery this morning. I opened the back door to let the cats wander around in the yard because there were two squirrels hanging around the bird feeders, and Miz Poo, Spot, and the Bean were losing their little kitty minds. After I opened the back door, I went out into the shed and grabbed a garbage can to block the hole in the fence that Spanky went through the other day. And then I wandered off to eat breakfast. I got up every few minutes to check on them, and they were mostly wandering around by the bird feeders and paying the fence no mind. I got caught up in a conversation with Fred, finished eating my breakfast, and then went back to the door to check on them again.
Spot and Spanky were sitting on the patio, but Miz Poo and the Bean were nowhere to be found. I went back into the house to see if they had gotten cold and were hanging out in the living room, but they were not in sight. I went back outside and walked around the yard, even stopping to look under the shed.
Nothing.
I went back in the house, checked every nook and cranny, hoping they’d been scared into the house by a particularly noisy truck or car driving by on the other side of the fence.
Nada.
I finally got a clue and shooed Spot and Spanky back into the house (Tubby was already in the house, hanging out at the top of the stairs) and shut the door so that they didn’t go missing as well. I grabbed a rattly toy and went back out into the yard, calling alternately for Miz Poo and the Bean (“Little kitty! Little kitty, come play!”), and looked under the shed again.
Still nothing.
I came back in the house, double-checked all the usual hiding places, and even checked the places they couldn’t possibly be, like under the sink and in the cabinets. I had just picked up the phone and turned it on, about to dial Fred’s phone number and cry at him about how I’d lost our favorite cats (he told me this morning that he thinks the Bean is his Miz Poo – that is, he feels about the Bean the way I feel about Miz Poo), when I heard a howling at the door. I opened it, and the Bean shot through the door, howling and chirruping the entire way.
But still no Miz Poo. I checked all her hiding places for a third time and came up empty. I picked up the phone and called Fred.
“I’ve lost Miz Poo!” I told him, and stepped out into the back yard.
“What? Really?” he said.
And then I saw a Poo-shaped cat on the other side of the fence – the BUSY ROAD side of the fence, and about ten feet down, behind the neighbor’s back yard. I ran over to the fence and called her name, and she chirped and meowed frantically at me. I walked along the fence, calling her name, and pulled the garbage can away from the gap in the fence Spanky had gone through the other day. She couldn’t even get her HEAD through the gap, let alone her body. I continued walking along the fence, calling her and looking to be sure she was following me. She did, stopping every few seconds to cringe and flatten against the ground when a car or truck drove by.
Finally, we reached the other end of the yard, the part of the fence where the guy
hit it with the car last September. When the fence guy came and replaced that part of the fence the following Monday, he left a gap between the bottom of the fence (or, I guess I should say, when the guy cartwheeled his car through the fence, he gouged a lot of the lawn that had been at the level of the bottom of the fence, thus causing a gap under the fence). I didn’t think Miz Poo would fit through the gap – and I didn’t know what I was going to do if she didn’t, but now that I think about that, that’s a stupid thing to worry about, because she got OUT there, didn’t she? There had to be a way for her to get back – but in that way that cats have of somehow collapsing in on themselves, she slipped through the gap, and then stopped and stared up at me, howling her fool head off.
I’m such a big baby that I started getting all teary-eyed from the relief.
I just KNOW that Miz Poo would never have considered going under that gap in the fence if that troublemaking bastardly Bean hadn’t done it first. Bastard.
* * *
My roses, a week later. Holding up well, and looking mighty gorgeous. From now on, these are my favorite flowers, Fred. And I understand Valentine’s Day is right around the corner…
This is the tidal river which is next to The Muddy Rudder. This picture would have been a whole lot better if the sun had been out.
I think this picture was around ’75, though I could be off by a year or three. Check out the fakey smile on my face. Even then I was perfecting the “Take the picture damnit” look. I can’t guarantee it, but I believe Randy got in trouble for – as my father claimed – blinking faster than usual so he’d be caught in a blink in the picture. He looks like he just got yelled at, doesn’t he? (That’s him on the left in the back row) And – hee! – look at Debbie, not even looking at the camera at ALL.
Miz Poo on the “night vision” setting.
]]>