The Little Drummer Boy. Man, it just gets me right there when they sing "I played my drum for him … I played my best for him". I was driving along sobbing half-hysterically, barely able to see the road, and trying to sing along. That was quite a sight, I’m sure. The other song that makes me tear up is "O Holy Night." I once saw Lorrie Morgan’s (shut up) Christmas concert – in fact, I skipped out on a fairly important class to attend – and when she sang that song I got goosebumps. She followed it up with "Ave Maria", and I was a puddle on the floor. Anyway, I got back to work and read about a 9 year-old boy who went to school every day and shopped for food at a nearby market, while his mother lay dead on their living room floor. He didn’t tell anyone because he was afraid they’d put him in an orphanage. Doesn’t that just break your heart? The thought of that poor child doing his best to take care of himself, going to school faithfully, and every day going home to sit in an apartment with his mother’s body just made me feel incredibly sad and lonely for him. *Warning* – If you’re eating and/or you have a weak stomach, you may want to skip the rest of this entry. We were sitting around the table eating dinner tonight, and Fred told me that Fancypants was by the kitchen entryway trying to cover something up. Whenever Fancypants comes across something that should be in the litterbox, he tries to cover it up, even if it’s sitting on the carpet or bare floor. Occasionally, we come across a big yakked-up furball with lines around it where he dragged his paw across the carpet in a vain attempt to cover it up. Fancypants knows his place, and he knows that if Alpha Bitchypoo Mommy sees something like a nasty, messy furball that she has to drag the Resolve Carpet Cleaner out for, she is very much not happy, so he attempts to cover it up. Or so I’d like to think. Anyway, I got up from the table to check it out, and where he’d been scratching a few moments earlier was a poop spot. One of the cats had used the litterbox and not gotten completely clean, it appeared. (We tried teaching them to use toilet paper, but it was an all-around failure) I glanced about four feet to my right, and found another spot. And another, and another. Altogether, I found five or six such spots, including a nice nasty one right in front of the couch. As I stood in the living room swearing, Fred suggested that it might be the work of the kitten. I picked her up and checked her out, but she was perfectly clean. I checked Spot, and Fred checked Tubby and Spanky. All clean. Finally, Fred chased down Fancypants, and found a huge amount of poo hanging off of his furry black bloomers (the cat’s bloomers, that is. heh). We cornered him in the bathroom, and Fred held him while I tried to pull the stuff from his fur with a big wad of paper towels. God, the smell. I’m sure you can imagine. Fred and I stumbled about the bathroom, gagging loudly, he hanging his head inside the shower in case dinner came back up, and I hovering over the bathtub. He got tickled by the situation and giggled madly between the gagging. The paper towels weren’t doing any great job, so we decided to trim what we could of his bloomers. I held him while Fred cut, and to say the least Fancypants didn’t care for it. He growled and cried and bit the hell out of my shirt. Suffice it to say that a great deal of poo-covered black kitty hair went into the toilet, and Fancypants now feels violated and abused. Obviously, we need to have him professionally groomed and trimmed. And, as I told Fred, new rule for the future: No more long-haired cats! ]]>
12/09/1999