Something Ate My Cat

You see, THAT is the sort of Catchy Title that I haven't been able to get away with for the last several  years, because of the nasty blog troll that I referred to in the last post. Can you just IMAGINE the comments I'd have gotten about something eating my cat?!! Oh, I hope he's reading now, and he's just beside himself.

Yeah, so that's sort of how I've had to process every word that comes out of my...um...fingertips for the last several years. 

Anyway, something DID eat my cat, or at least, something bit her up pretty good.

My little baby Minxy girl is an INDOOR cat. We warn her, often, of the repercussions of her wild desire to get outside: "Raccoons and coyotes, and things will eat you! No, cat! You can't go outside!"

(Just for introductions' sake, here she is, hairin' up the food drying mat that she is forbidden from sitting upon.)

Still, last Monday morning before 6 a.m., after the cat had NOT been outside, I swore, she came crawling up the stairs crying. Crying, I tell you, like a little baby. 

I'm probably a little too proud that I still have my innate maternal instinct: I came flying out of my bed like I used to when Brian had a weird little cough in the middle of the night. You know that cough where the kid goes ::cough:: and you manage to get a bucket underneath him before ::gag:: and ::BARF:: follow, milliseconds after?

Yeah, I still got it.

Only now it's with my daughter. I mean, my cat.

Oh, crying she was, and she couldn't jump up to tell me what was wrong. I lifted her and she cried some more, and when I checked around, I found one tiny little spot on her back. A spider bite? What in the heck happened? I set her back down to rest, and began fretting and worrying while I got ready for work.

By the time 8:00 rolled around, she'd holed up in the closet, and when I reached for her, she was crazed with pain. She screamed and hissed, like Linda Blair, in the Exorcist. I called the vet, and luckily they had an immediate opening. 

While she was on the exam table, the vet questioned me several times about whether she'd been outside? Ever? This weekend? No, no, and no. She'd gone into our closed garage when I took out the recycling, but I'd been home with her, otherwise, and no. She found offending spots, however, and when she shaved Minx's hind end:

GAH! Puncture wounds! Bite marks! Chomp, chomp, chomp! Something had freakin' chomped my cat!!

The vet stood tapping her foot, and really, all I could do was shrug my shoulders, and speculate that we had a critter in the garage.

A shot of painkiller, a shot of antibiotics, and 10 more days of pills, and we were on our way home, still clueless. 

I called Clint to give him an update, whereupon he pointed out, "Well, the downstairs bedroom window was open Saturday, and the screen was up." Um, what? I HAD been vacuuming Saturday, and when I worked by the window, threw it up for some fresh air. He had been out mowing, and when he finished up, came in and shut the window.

Apparently in the interim, Minx decided to sneak out the window, get all gangsta with some unknown critter, and then managed to jump back in, in less than an hour it took to close and lock the window back up. It took 2 days for the infection to set in.

Sigh. We don't know what she scrapped with, and we'll never know who won. We've had a plethora of raccoons, groundhogs, squirrels, and--oh Lord--skunks in the yard this year. Clint found a bat with a leg missing 2 days after the day I took her to the vet. Did she chew the leg off of a bat?!! We determined, after the bat died, that it was too small to have inflicted the wounds on her hiney.

A mystery. Minx is alive and well, and back to her old self, even though she's looking a bit baboon-esque with her fancy new haircut. 

She is also grounded for life.

_____

On another odd note, that troll that I referred to in the last post, and that I swear I'm going to stop talking about, after I'm done talking about him, always said something nice to me when I posted pictures of Minx. He'd say stuff like "maybe you aren't all that bad, since you have a cat." 

I share this tidbit with you now just to give you an idea of the mental hurdles I've had to clear to keep writing for the last 6 years. I am only now beginning to acknowledge them. "You can't shut me down!" I thought. Clearly, he did though. I pussy-footed around my words. (Ohmigod, I just said pussy-footed.)

TROLL! Stop looking at my cat!

Do Nothing Sunday

It's Sunday. After floating on the boat all day yesterday, then arriving home at nightfall to split a pizza and fall asleep, today I basked in doing nothing.

I was somehow awake at 7:30, and I read for an hour. 

It was nice to start the day doing nothing.

I fixed myself some coffee and a beautiful little breakfast.

Then I set about to tidy up the mess I'd left in the kitchen while packing for yesterday, and launder damp towels and swimming suits.

So great to have nothing to do today, so that the towels can be repacked right away.

It was a gorgeous day to dry clothes on the line, so while I was at it, I did 4 loads of laundry, and stripped beds, so that we can sleep on line-dried sheets. Man, I love sheets that smell like wind.

Ah, nothing to do but watch sheets blow in the wind.

I'm currently analyzing my finances and trying to save some big bucks, so I spent a couple hours doing nothing, printing budget sheets, pulling up bank accounts, and scrutinizing my own spending habits.

I needed this day to take time to reflect on the changes I want to make in my life.

I ran out to pick up some groceries, but I made it a quick trip, so I could get back home to relax.

It's nice to have time to get the shopping done, and be prepared for the upcoming week.

Early evening, I grabbed a glass of white wine, cranked up Johnny Cash radio on Pandora, and hauled the hose out to water the garden, and then the flower beds. I rolled the hoses up while I sang along to "Jackson."

Not a thing to do, but putter around the yard.

Since Clint is not home for dinner tonight, I fixed myself some whole wheat pasta tossed with pesto and parmesan, and swiss chard with fresh lemon juice and good olive oil.

Sweet to have enough downtime to prepare a beautiful meal just for myself.

At days' end, I sat myself down on the deck, put my feet up on the table, sipped another glass of wine, and watched fireflies, fawns, and hummingbirds. Here's a really bad photo of some cute little deer babies:

It's funny how a day of tidying, cleaning, shopping, cooking, budgeting, and yard work can seem like a luxury on some days. It has something to do with the lack of obligation. I had other choices on the table. I could have taken a day trip, or watched movies all day, or skipped out with a friend or three. Instead, I let the day take me where it did, and then there I was, at the end of it.

Sweet nothing.

2013 Garden Report

It's year number 2 for our "Garden of Eatin," and a much different year than number 1 was. While last summer brought us a record number of 100+ degree days, this one has been consistently rainy and cold. And rainy, did I say rainy?

While my vegetables have thrived in the cool wet weather so far, so have the weeds. A certain amount of mud can make pulling weeds easy: they pop right out of the soil, root and all. But with the rain we've had lately, I come home to water standing in the garden, and while I can sometimes get in to the high spots, I've been slipping and sliding in others. It's just been too much to keep up with.

I managed to wake up to a happy mud medium today, though, and went out around 11 a.m. to tackle the job. Here are some before pictures:

The first wagon o' weeds:

And by quittin time 4 hours later, the place was looking a lot better:

What's growin' in there, you ask?

The last of the lettuce was salvaged today, but the arugula and spinach ended up lacy, from some little bug or another. I'll replant more leaf lettuce and hope for another round of salads.

Our radishes were went from seed to the table in less than 3 weeks, and what I didn't pick got so big so quickly that they split open in the ground. Too much rain, I am told. I will plant another row tomorrow, and we'll be back in radishes before the end of the month.

The tomatoes did so well last year that the their weight destroyed the tomato baskets. We went another route this year and put in heavy t-posts and wire fencing. I've been training the plant back and forth up the fence, but this got away from me also so I finished up the day by shoring up 18 tomato plants. There's one more in each corner, one cherry, and one grape. 

The garden is complete with 4 jalapeno plants, parsley, chives, cilantro, basil, and dill, and in marigolds, for pretty-pretty.

Time in the garden still fills me with a sense of peace. It is a time spent with earth and God and ancestors. I almost always get lost in the memories of loved ones past when I'm pulling weeds and tying up plants. I wonder did my Grandmother ever let her garden get this many weeds? It seems like no, never. 

Years ago when I started my first tiny little garden, I planted all of my green onion bulbs upside down. They grow down, then up, and the were all shaped like the letter J when I picked them. I still remember Grandma saying "Lori! You know better than that!" Well, I do now.

For all of my memories, this is the first time I've had had a large full garden. I've always managed to find a corner for a few onions and a tomato or two, but have never had the space to put in a garden this size. 

Year 2. It is year 2, and I love it.

I can barely move a muscle, right now, but I love it.

Pee It Forward

I was walking into the nursing home this morning to attend a care plan meeting for my mother. In front of me was a little old lady pushing herself down the middle of the hallway, and through a set of double doors, and I slowed to let her get through them before I began to pass.

Just as I moved left, however, she started digging in her heels and frantically pulling herself along with her feet also, but still not managing to increase her stride. As I moved around her, I gave a cheerful hello. She sized me up, paused, and said, desperately, "I am trying to find a bathroom!"

A brief moment of panic where a myriad of scenarios of me helping her in a bathroom flashed through my mind. 1) Not my job. I don't want to. 2) Aw, man, what if I were in her shoes? 3) I could end up in jail.

I really did not know what to say, and finally settled on "I don't know where the bathroom is." At that point she informed she was just trying to get back to her own room before the floodwaters released. (Oh, thank God.) I asked her if she'd like me to give her a little push, and she all but said "step on it, sister!"

Our nursing home is a series of loop-de-loops and dead ends, and she wasn't really sure where she was. She gave me my first hint: "It's past the beauty shop!"

I picked up the pace to the next intersection, took a hard right to the beauty shop, when she said "No! It's the other way! Go straight!"

 

I gave her a quick spin and began to tear through the same intersection in the opposite direction, when she said, "No, turn right here, I meant to go straight from the other way!"

I hit the brakes, took the corner on two wheels, and raced her to the nursing station in her wing.
 

As we screeched to a stop, we yelled over each other, in unison: "She needs the restroom!" "I have to pee!"

The nurse understood the severity of the situation, and whisked her off while she thanked me over her shoulder.

I left giggling, and praying that she made it in time. I wish we'd have had time to high-five one another.

It's nice to be someone's guardian angel, every now and then.

Memorial Day from a Soldier's Mother's Perspective

This day is a little different for me now, than it once was. I am guilty--guilty, guilty, guilty--of looking forward to Memorial Day, in the past, as a Monday off. A 3-day weekend. How often it is reflected, at the New Year, as the next paid holiday most of us get.

That was then.

Now I have a son who has served two tours in a war. Through  his service, I have come to know and meet and love dozens more who have served by his side. He is only still on this earth because of their quick responses, their anger, fear, adrenaline, and determination not to lose a brother. Likewise, there are some that owe their lives to him.

I have met hundreds more veterans who have fought and served in Iwo Jima, World War II, Viet Nam, Desert Storm, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and more.

And today I know that they stop, and they remember, and they grieve for those they lost.

I grieve with them. I weep for lost soldiers, and the pain of those that remember, first hand, their courage and service.

It is not just "my" soldiers that touch me. I am gripped by the tombstone of a civil war soldier, and naturally, I think of his mother. There is little I have in common with her, but I know what she felt when she said goodbye to her son and watched him leave his home, until she couldn't see him any more. I know her relief when he returned. I know her love for him, and her heartache at his experiences, and her hope for his future. We are over 200 years apart in history, but I know her, just a little bit.

When I finish up my thoughts here, I will gather up, as I do every year now, and I will walk a cemetery. I will straighten leaning flags, and I will speak, out loud, the names of veterans and fallen soldiers.

My doing so will not make much of a difference in this world: it will not prevent a tear, or ease anyone's heartache, but it will make me feel better. I like to think that speaking their names aloud, 50 or 100 or more years after they are gone just matters, somehow.

I like to think their mothers would have liked it.

Spring Cleaning

Ah, our sweet, pure countryside. Peaceful, and quiet...and often a dumping grounds for a bunch of asshats too lazy to find proper disposal for whatever it is they have to throw away. Yard waste, sofas, once an entire truck full of crap—truck and all. Last week, these bags full of paint cans were dumped in the ditch  near our yard, and several more 5-gallon paint buckets tossed over the fence.

I'm not sure who cleans this stuff, up, but the bags in the ditch were removed within a day. The paint buckets inside the fence remain.

In the meantime, I have turned into a bona fide cranky old lady over all of the rest of the garbage that lines our road. I am dadgummitting all of those no-good disrespectful whippersnappers that toss their beer bottles and beer cans and fast food wrappers out the window until the cows come home.

As fun as it was while it lasted, griping never solves anything, so I resorted to Plan B: Pick it all up myself. I shelled out a dollar-seventy-nine for a picker-upper at Harbor Freight so I wouldn't actually have to touch anything gross, and I headed South yesterday afternoon.

I only went about 1/4 mile and back, cleaning up both sides of the road. As I was working, the thought crossed my  mind that cleaning up now was good timing, as the brush in the ditches was mowed down, and there would be no hidden snakes, oh, don't think about snakes, just don't think about snakes.

And yet, as I leaned in to grab a beer can, I stepped back onto the road to find myself tagging right up to a garter snake sunning itself on the side of the road.

 

 (Not my photo, but it looked just like this.)

Did you hear me scream? Because scream is what I did, involuntarily and right from the heart and the gut. I screamed and I jumped and I convulsed and shuddered, and had myself quite a spasmodic little fit out there. I'm sure you heard me. My heart races a little just writing this, and looking  at that photo. Brrrrrrrr


By the time I got back, I was loaded down enough to wish for a wagon, and thankful I hadn't gone further before I turned around. Glass and aluminum gets heavy fast.

Here's the view from the mailbox now:

Clean, clean, clean, clean, clean! I've made the trip down the road only twice since I tidied it up, and the work was well worth the hour or so I spent on it.

Worth the snake too? Honestly, I don't know. I got lucky with a garter snake—we've witnessed a few in the 3- to 4-foot long range slithering across the road, and if I ran into one of those suckers, I think it really would be the end of me.

So, just do me a favor, and just keep your garbage in your truck until you get home, would you?

Winter-into-Spring at the Casa

As the onset of Spring brings joy to most midwesterners who are sick and tired of winter, a friend once shocked me with her declaration:  "I hate spring!" Whuh...What? Robins! Sunshine and warm air! Daffodils, and buds on the trees!

And, she reminded me, snow and sleet, and slush. Mud and raincoats and wet socks. Gosh, when she put it that way, I realized: Spring does kind of suck. All of those things are pretty miserable.

In the last 10 days, the weather has run the gamut. It has been balmy and it has been rainy. 8 inches of snow a week ago kept most of us home, and then most of it melted away 2 days later, turning the countryside into a marshy, swampy, muddy pit.

As mucky as it all can be, I still can't help rejoicing about spring. The galoshes are pulled on when it's time to fill the bird feeders. The house is still chilly and I wrap up in fleece early in the evening, before I settle down with last year's garden journal, to figure out what I will and will not plant in this year's.

And while I am wrapped up, either inside or out, the view at the Casa is still often pretty magnificent, no matter the weather.

(Click to enlarge for a better view of this herd of deer. Or for a better view of any of the photos, taken mostly through house or car windows)

 

 

The "FIVE DOLLARS!" Game

Does anyone remember my coffee shop days, when I first started blogging? I would meet a gaggle of  friends on weekends, and sit at the outdoor tables. We'd talk, and blog, and check out icanhazcheezburger on someone's laptop. Once my friend Momo and I tried to teach ourselves how to knit, and failed miserably. We drank gallons of wine (collectively, not all in one night), watched cars and people, and would most often end up helping our favorite baristas chain up the chairs at the end of the night.

We created nicknames for people we hadn't met yet, bought a sandwich or two for a few local characters, and created stupid games amongst ourselves.

One of the stupid games we played was at the expense of poor parallel parkers. The first of us at our table to spot someone struggling to park their vehicle would scream FIVE DOLLARS! Making the first call entitled you to five dollars if the driver hit the car in front of or behind them. Only, no one ever got the five dollars, because there was no five dollars on the table. It was an imaginary five dollars.

But it was the game.

Clint and I were recently having dinner at the bar across the street from that coffee shop, and turned around to watch someone in an SUV making an attempt to get one of the front parking spots. The driver—I will not reveal her gender for fear of your discriminating against us—had about 4 feet in front of her, but to our amazement, BAM BAM BAM BAM...just kept backing up and hitting the car behind her.

Oh, it was a nightmare! Still, I could not stop screaming "FIVE DOLLARS! FIVE MORE DOLLARS! FIVE DOLLARS!" It was terrible, and I kept laughing gleefully every time she rammed into that car. As if I were at a demolition derby, for heck sake. Clint, and others around us were amused—I mean, it was a quite a spectacle—but not nearly as giddy as I was over the whole thing.

Oh, how I miss my coffee shop, some days.

Welp, that's the whole story, and the moral of it is: If you're telling yourself that all of the people along the sidewalk aren't paying attention to the way you park, and so you shouldn't be nervous...well, yes they are, and they are winning imaginary money off of you.

Do as I do, and go find a parking garage.



Sidenote: Clint and I did cross the street when we left; there was no damage to the car that had been repeatedly bumped in this story.

Start Out By Thinking

I've mentioned before, about a hundred million times, that I worked for 24 years with one company, before it closed 2 years ago. While I loved the work, after that much time I wasn't necessarily challenged. I used to joke that if they left me with a computer and a keyboard, I could still do my job if they removed my monitor.

The temp job I landed at the University wasn't terribly stimulating either. In a small, over-staffed office, my only bragging right was that I had custody of the key to the cabinet that held the red pens.

Fast forward, and I'm back in publishing and books, doing work I love. Internal restructuring 6 or 8 months into the new gig left me with more responsibilities while I was still getting my chops. That is, I knew how to do the work, but I was still learning how they do the work. On one hand, I was confident and sure. Publishing is publishing.

But internally, sometimes, my initial inner reaction to any question was thusly:

Lori, do we need to order more of this?

Who is is this vendor?

Where did this money come from?

Can we get a refund?

 Is there a contract?

It may be true that my initial responder can be a bit of a drama queen, but one thing I have going for me is my ability to drama down.

Also, I take advice from children. Shortly after I got news of my new role, I came across this image:

I laughed then, and I laugh now. I think all too often we run around squawking and creating stress and chaos over ridiculous crises, and really, all we need to do to fix a thing is to start out by thinking. Stop bitching, stop panicking, and stop making this bigger than it is. Think, for a second.

And the answer, or how to find the answer, always comes to me. In the workplace, at home, in personal relationships, in business transactions, or even spinning out on black ice on a country road: Shut up and use your damned brain for a second, Lori.

Sometimes the answer is just a matter of Google Search. Sometimes I have to get the answer by asking someone else that has the answer. And sometimes I come up with the wrong answer altogether, I end up in a country ditch, and I have to start thinking all over again.

It still remains that a great deal of my solutions can be found by following this kid's advice.

I wish I could find him, and tell him that his words of wisdom hang on my cubicle wall.

Rambling About 50

Originally titled: Reflections on 50

I'm 50.25 years old now, going on 50.33, and that "Reflections on 50" post has been hanging over my head for over 3 months.

Believe me, I started it. I started it and started it and started it, and each time it meandered off down rivers and branched off into various ancillaries and I ended up befuddled by my own writing, trying to figure out what my point was. It happens, I suppose, when we are 50

When I was 28, my best friend confided in me that each of her friends served a different role in her life. She had a party-girl friend, and a soul-searching friend, and a no-nonsense friend.

I was that third friend. Unwavering. Right and wrong. Black and white. I was newly divorced, and was going to do a damned good job of raising my son.

I had a decent job. I freelanced when I needed extra money. I owned my own house, mowed my own yard, changed my own oil. I didn't ask your opinion because there wasn't much I wasn't clear on. Life, as difficult as it could be, was a cakewalk.

I reflect on that now, at the age of 50, and I wonder at how little I am like my 28-year-old self. While I still have my shit together—thank you very much—I am shocked—SHOCKED—to admit that I am much more anxious and unsure now, than I was then.

"Anxious." "Unsure." I want to deny those words; they embarrass me. I am a confident, take-charge woman, dammit!

It still remains that what I feel, in comparison to "28-year-old Lori," is that Life is fragile. 

Since I was was 28? I married again, and to my utter surprise, divorced again. I lost my father. I cared for my mother, with Alzheimer's, while my sister lost her battle to ovarian cancer. Shortly after, our Grandmother passed away. In the midst of it all, my son deployed to Iraq, twice.

 

'Scuze me very much, but these events unnerved me just a tad.

Still, nervous as I may be, sometimes, at 50, I am also often so thankful that I am buckled.

My 40s found me dating a childhood friend, that at one point I gave the option to cut-and-run: I wasn't going to soon bring a lot of rainbows and teddy bears to the table. I'm still amazed that Clint's answer was "I know what Lori Stewart has going on."

 I am appreciative. I don't take an evening laughing with friends for granted; I rejoice in it.

You can only imagine what hearing my son's laughter does to me. After fearing for his life for a combined 28 months? I hear it. Whether he's on the phone, or in my kitchen, or around a picnic table, I hear it, because it could have turned out so differently, and it did, for so many other mothers. 

I have a great job.

After losing one I worked in for 24 years, I have a great job. That I love what I do would be enough. But throw in health insurance after borrowing money to pay for my own, while I schlepped through a few temp jobs to stay afloat? Backflips, baby! When at 28, I would have haughtily thought "of course I have a job and health insurance! I wouldn't accept anything less!" Hmph!

Clean mammograms and clear pap smears are worthy of fireworks. I recently had a girl's night in which one of my BFFs would or would-not be in attendance based on biopsy results. She was there, and we got so drinky on Duck Farts* that we had to review the photos the next day to see if we had any fun or not. It certainly looks like we did.

In summary,

Yay, 50!

While I wouldn't have casted my vote for every event that's brought me here, I can recognize how I've grown. I love deeper, I laugh harder, I rejoice more readily, I hang on tighter, and I take less for granted than I did, at 28.

And this post, once again, has gone completely off track. It was going to be whimsical, and have a photo of a child's handwriting.

But that's ok.

Because I'm 50.

*Duck Fart Recipe

1 shot whiskey
1 shot kahlua
1 shot Bailey's Irish Cream
 
1 Designated Driver