DeadpanAnn (old blogger version)

My alarm wasn't set to go off until 6:00 today. I have a doctor's appointment at 7:50, and that would be plenty of time for me. Besides, after weekends (especially weekends that Tim has been home) I usually need an extra half hour or so to sleep on Monday. So imagine my disgust when I woke up at 3:45 a.m. I'm not sure whether I woke up because I had to pee, or if I woke up because Pookie was throwing a shit fit, but the point is that I woke up.

I tried to go back to sleep, but the little devil was demanding my attention, so I got up and fed him. After he ate he came back to the bed and continued to meow, then he jumped up here with me and started moving around the bed. He would find a place to curl up, and then he would start his loud paw sucking routine, then get up and move to another part of the bed and start the process over. I'm used to the paw sucking, as sick as it is, but when it is interspersed with meowing fits and moving around, it becomes too much. It really became too much when he decided that he needed to set up camp on top of me. I sorta rolled him off me, and then he decided he needed to be on my pillow. I finally lost it and screamed and swatted at him, and he went to the floor for a while and he got quiet. So I've found the way to shut him up-- scream and swat. (I should've known. It works well with the students.)

Unfortunately, perhaps because of the mattress I'm sleeping on, I couldn't fall back asleep. Lately I have been waking up with back pain. It's like I've slept with a softball pressing into the very center of my back, right between the shoulder blades, and it hurts to turn my head or move my arms. No position relieves it. The only remedy is to go get in the other bed with Tim, but then he suffers because I apparently saw logs like no other woman in the history of womankind.

Within five minutes of running Pookie out of the bed, my nose was completely clogged so that I couldn't breathe. Great. That's what happens when he tries to sleep on my pillow. Bastard. I laid there hating him for some time, tossed and turned and got a new pillow case, and then I finally fell back asleep after about an hour of lying in bed awake. An hour later, at 5:20, he was at it again with the meowing and the moving around on the bed. I got up and grabbed him and carried him to the door and as soon as I got it open, I tossed his ass out. And in came Millay, the multi colored devil. The multi colored devil who shat in our closet. Did I not blog about that? Well she did shit in the closet of the empty bedroom, and she pissed too, multiple times, when there was a perfectly good litter box available for her shitting pleasure.

Her presence outside the door is no doubt what had Pookie in crazy mode all night. He loathes her. And I have taken Pookie's side now that she crossed the line and took a shit in the closet for no good reason other than she wanted to be unpleasant. She's no longer allowed inside at all, so I grabbed her and threw her out right on top of Pookie. There. BOTH are banished!

Of course there was no point in going back to bed considering that it was 5:30 by that time, so here I am, blogging about cats at 5:45 in the morning. I love little Pookie when he acts right, but I could wring his furry little neck on mornings like these. Damn him, waking me up at 3:45! Let him try that shit when I've got a newborn baby in the house. I bet it doesn't take me nearly as long to get up and throw his ass outside.

Moving on to non-cat blogging. (Hey it's still only 6:04. I've got time to tell you about ALL the non exciting things happening in my life.)

We bought a bedroom suite yesterday. First we went back to Ashley's, which was the cheaper of the two places. My dad used to work in a furniture factory (something I didn't know until I called him yesterday for advice) and he gave us a few pointers on things to look for in regards to signs of well made stuff, so we returned feeling like we had some information.

The stuff at Ashley's just flat out didn't pass the test, but more importantly, the sales people there don't know how to act. As soon as we walked in the door, a saleslady jumped on us and didn't let go. She was oh so very annoying. Even though we walked away from her several times and told her we would come find her if we had any questions, she didn't back off the whole time we were in there. She was like a fly in my ear. I know these folks work on commission and are hungry for sales, but there is a right way and a wrong way to approach potential customers. She did it the wrong way. Nothing will put a bad taste in my mouth quicker than a pushy sales person. Tim is completely intolerant of them. He won't deal with them on any level. I tried to be polite to the lady, but after half an hour of being hounded and having her fail to pick up on the fact that we wanted to talk alone, Tim got frustrated and walked out of the store.

We drove around looking for another furniture store, but went back to Haverty's again. We wanted that mattress for sure, and we thought we would look around at their furniture a while since we'd had our fill of Ashley's. After walking around the store once, we found the clearance room in the back. As soon as we walked in, Tim spied the exact same mattress as the one we had already mentally committed to, except this one was marked down from $1,500 to $1,100. It had a quarter-sized smudge of dirt on top of it, and the original buyer had rejected it for that reason. We told them to put a "sold" sign on it.

I think my feelings can best be expressed by the following video.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XswTLOejeg

We settled on a bedroom suite too. We paid for it, but I think we got some good stuff. It'll be here Saturday, along with the mattress set. I can't wait. Maybe the softball between my shoulder blades will disappear after I get a new mattress.

After we bought the stuff at Haverty's, Tim said he wanted to call the lady at Ashley's back and tell her she missed out on a $4,000 sale because she didn't know how to take a hint. I told him not to do that. After all, it would be much more mature to blog about her and use her real name.

Better luck next time, Donna.

Labels: Good Old Fashioned Bitchin', it's not a cat blog

My teaching license is MIA. A long time ago I created a file and labeled it "Licenses." It contains my teaching license, our marriage license, some stuff Tim needs to renew his pharmacy license, etc. Important stuff. It was in one of the two filing cabinets. Now I can't find it anywhere. I know that I've seen it recently, and I get a cold feeling in my stomach when I think about it because it seems like it might have been in a location other than the one in which it belonged, but I can't remember where. Anyway, my job application to Dream High School is at a standstill right now because I can't remember my teaching license number and expiration date.

A kid called me a hoe today and nobody seemed to think it was a problem except for me. I can't believe they didn't suspend her. Nothing I can do about it though. I am done seething over it. But believe me, I did seethe.

I'm tired. I'm more tired the last 3-4 days than I have been the previous few weeks. Last night I told a friend I would meet her at 8:00. At 6:30 I realized it was going to take lots of effort to get off the couch. At 7:00 I decided she'd understand. I went to bed early, and when the alarm went off at 5:45 today (I've moved it back from my pre-pregnancy 5:15, since I can't spend those 30 minutes drinking coffee) I really thought it had to be some kind of mistake. But no, there it was before my eyes in plain green numbers. 5:45. I snoozed 'til 6:00, and dragged my tail all day. That young'un is sucking it out of me right now.

Pookie is unusually sleepy lately. He hasn't even tried to pierce my jugular a single time in the last 2 days. Maybe he's pregnant too.

It's still not a cat blog.

Back to pregnancy symptoms for a minute. Have I mentioned that I am spewing more vitriol than...than...I don't know what. I'm just pissed! All the time. For nothing. I'm miserable and I want other people to feel my misery. I don't want sympathy. I just want you to feel the pain of my emotional trainwreck. Don't ask me a question because the answer is f*ck off. Don't ask me to do anything because the answer is f*ck off. Don't tell me to have a nice day because the response is f*ck off. I just want everyone to effing eff off. Then I realize what a total bitch I'm being, and I want to cry, because it's ultra bitchy-- even for me. It's really hard not to cry. This is supposed to get better after week 10. I am either in 9 or 10 right now. I'm not sure.

Poor Tim. He's trying to be positive and keep me positive. It helps-- it really does. But he's getting more than his fair share of bitchiness lately and sometimes I really can't help it.

I'm hungry and fat and out of salad ingredients. All that remains are spinach leaves, and all I want is a Big Mac.

Okay, this is the last pregnancy thing I'll talk about today. At least I think it's a pregnancy thing because I've never had it before. There is so much spit in my mouth that it flies out sometimes. I have become the teacher that spits when she talks. The kids on the front row close their eyes when I walk by if I'm talking. Sometimes my mouth is so full of it that I have to stop and swallow to finish a sentence or it'll fly out. When I wake up, my pillow is soggy and my ear is full. I spit you not.

I apologize for that last part. Unless it made you giggle.

It's 9:30. Why am I still awake? This is not going to seem worth staying up for when the alarm goes off in the morning.

Labels: I'm knocked up, it's my pity party and I'll bitch if I want to, it's not a cat blog, it's not a mommy blog either, random thought whenever

It's not a cat blog!


Or a dog blog!




Or a cats and dogs blog!


Or a fat white anything blog!






And it's not a mommy blog either!


And for a good chickens in the city story, click here.

Labels: it's not a cat blog, it's not a mommy blog either

I have been having a problem with a certain feline waking me up multiple times during the night. First, he wakes me up around 4:00 a.m., usually because he's hungry. So I get up and feed him. (Then he wakes me up at 5:00 but doesn't demand anything-- he's usually climbing onto my chest when I wake up. And lemme tell ya that just feels fantastic when your boobs are in the state that mine are in right now.) At 6:00 he wants out. When I get back into bed at 6:03, the dogs start whining to be let out. Letting the dogs out is a multi-step process that always involves me being pawed and jumped up on, and invariably ends with me being too pissed off to go back to sleep. So to sum it up, I wake up at 4:00 every morning. Work or no work.

After about a week of this, I was fed up. Why the heck should I have to get up two hours before any other sane person just because a few animals think they're the center of the universe? To hell with that. So I decided that Pookie would go outside at night, and the last few nights it's been okay.



Last night I slept with my window open. At 4:00 this morning, there was a meowing in my window. I opened my eyes to see the eerie silhouette of a black cat sitting on the window sill. After trying to ignore him for a few minutes, I finally got up to let him in the back door that is closest to that window. He didn't come in and I didn't hear him out there through the door. So I went back to bed. Two minutes later, he was screaming into the window. He came inside that time, and I fed him and went back to my cool, comfortable bed to sleep for another 2 hours.

Enter dogs. One of them started whining. Thinking perhaps he'd just been bothered a little by the noise of me getting up to let the cat in- twice- I tried to ignore him in hopes that he'd go back to sleep. No luck. He just got louder.

Now let me digress for a minute to make sure you understand just how valuable these last two hours of sleep were. I have to be at some rich lady's house today at 9:00 to pick up a puppy. That puppy then has to be delivered to my cousin-- in Independence, MS, which is 20 miles south of Hernando, which is where my parents live. I got volunteered for this puppy delivery because I was flirting with the idea of going up there anyway, and they needed this dog brought up, so it just naturally became a concrete plan.

Anyway, I went to sleep last night after midnight because Tim and I watched American Gangster, which is about seventy eleven hours long and didn't leave me in any mood to fall asleep. In other words, today I'm going to drive longer than I've slept. And when I reach my destination, I will deal with some relatives that I haven't seen in a few years. And it's not the relatives that I mind. It'll actually be nice to see her. But damn. I'd STILL be at least mentally exhausted by the time I got there if A) I got more than 4 hours of sleep the night before, or B) there wasn't a little puppy that is sure to be whining half the way there, or C) I wasn't knocked up and prone to sudden extreme bouts of fatigue. Oh yeah, and D) I COULD HAVE MORE THAN ONE CUP OF COFFEE or at least a Mountain Dew! Today I've got none of those four things on my side. JOY! And the fact that I'm up early in the first place because of a dog and up earlier than THAT because of another dog? FEEL THE BURN!

So back to my story. The dog didn't stop whining. So I got up and found my shoes and went to let their punk asses outside. Could they just go outside and piss and come back in? No. First they tried to ransack the laundry room where their crates are located, then they tried to ransack yours truly. Stressful. They ran across the boundary of the fence and I tried to get their shock collars on them, which is kind of like trying to tie something onto a greased pig on crack. If it had teeth and sharp paws and wanted to hump your leg.

By the time I got the collars on, I was so pissed that I could've just shot both of the dogs right there and felt no remorse. I turned to make my way back to my bed for the one hour of sleep that might still have remained. Both dogs decided to run through the fence. They've never done that before. I had to get the hose on them, and also found it useful to scream at them at the top of my lungs. I hope the neighbors complain. I'd love someone new to scream at. (Or turn the hose on.)

Soooooooooo I FINALLY went back inside, but at this point I was covered in water and dog drool. I washed my hands up to my armpits and plopped back down on the bed, pissed.

Ten seconds later...

Meoooow?

And ten seconds after that, Pookie learned that he can not fly.

The cat I have a hard time blaming for being up at night. He's nocturnal. Nature compels him to get up at 4 a.m. and eat something, and because he's been domesticated he relies on me to help with that. I can tolerate it SOMETIMES.

But dogs? I hate dogs. I'm sick of dogs. FUCK DOGS. I'm telling Tim today that those bastards are staying outside from now on. It's warming up, and they're almost 100% grown up; they can handle the wild outdoors of our back yard overnight. Especially during the summer and fall.

From now on, anything that wakes me up to be fed in the middle of the night is going to DIE unless it has half my chromosomes. I have about 7 months left to sleep through the night. I'm not having these last precious nights of sleep ruined by something that isn't going to be picking my nursing home in forty years.

Labels: it's not a cat blog, pet tales

Pookie's back from the vet. They called at 10:30 this morning to say that he was waking up from the anesthesia and everything was fine, but they kept him until after 4:00 anyway. I was expecting to have a sleepy Pookie today, but as you can see he's as fiesty as ever.

(Pretend you don't see my jacked up feet and swollen ankles, please.)

He's playing in the living room right now, and he's been doing his usual crazy antics. But when he tried to jump up onto the computer desk, it was kinda sad. He didn't make it, and then he lifted his leg and started licking the area formerly known as his nuts, so it must've caused him some pain down there.

Other than that, you'd never guess he just had surgery.

Labels: it's not a cat blog

Pookie the ninja kitty gets filled wif da spirit.

Oh Lawd!!


Actually, it's just him sleeping on the couch.



He got a couple of vaccinations yesterday, and has been a little on the sleepy side today. Poor thing. He doesn't even know they're gonna cut his balls off in exactly three weeks. Shhh...don't tell him.

So, do you want a plumber update, or are you as tired of hearing about it as I am of dealing with it?

The good news is that our septic tank has officially been bypassed, and we are now hooked in with the city sewer, so I can officially shit on the jackasses that made it so difficult. The bad news is that whatever is causing the flooding still hasn't been resolved, even though the plumber worked on it for over three hours today.

He took a clean out cover off the side of the house right under my kitchen window, and stuck something up in there that was supposed to push a bunch of pressurized air in. It sounded like a generator. He did that for over an hour. It didn't work. So then he stuck some long line up in there and had a machine wiggling it around. That didn't work either. He can't find the clog, and the camera that he normally uses for those types of jobs has been loaned to a guy who is, conveniently, off this weekend. He says he'll try to get it back as soon as possible, and will return either tomorrow or Monday to (hopefully) finish the job.

A friend of mine got hitched this morning. It was one of those family-only weddings, kinda like I wish I had done, if only to save myself the humiliation of nobody showing up. They're having a party tonight with all their friends, and I'm going. This means I must rest, because even though I'm much better, I am still feeling a bit like a congested pirate. A sleepy, congested pirate.

Argh.

Labels: it's not a cat blog

Me, up at 7:00 a.m.? Yeah.

And that's nothing compared to the night before last. TH and I hit the sack slightly earlier than usual because he had to cover another person's shift, which required him to get up at 6:00 a.m. That sucks considering that he got home at 1:00 a.m. and is used to sleeping way past 6:00.

After about two hours of Pookie stop! and dammit, Pookie! TH got up and went to the extra bedroom. I have no idea what was wrong with him-- or what is wrong with him, I should say, because he normally lies down between us and goes to sleep. (The cat, that is, not The Husband.) Even if I want to sleep ungodly hours, he stays there patiently. If he does decide he's ready to get up, he just gets up and goes about his business.

At 4:30 that morning I realized that Millay (aka Satan) was in the house. I realized this because she stood in the doorway and stared at me with her gleaming red eyes, communicating telepathically that she wanted to be let outside. When I went to the door, I noticed that the cats' food bowl was empty, so I filled it. A few minutes later, Pookie returned to the bedroom, curled up next to me, and slept peacefully like God intended for cute little kittens to do.

I thought the problem was that he had been hungry the entire night, so last night I made sure he was well fed before bedtime. I even gave him the rare can of wet food to make sure his belly would be good and full. He didn't bother me most of the night, but he has been up since about 6:00. He didn't leave the bedroom like he normally does. Instead, he got behind the closet door and found something that would make a most annoying scratching sound when he rattled it against the wooden door. Then he got into a basket of magazines and made some more rattling noises, got up on my pillow and made bird sounds, climbed into the box springs under the mattress and scratched at that for a while...the list could go on, but to sum it up, he annoyed the piss out of me. So much so that I gave up sleeping and took up cursing. It's Sunday morning, not even 8:00 yet, and I've dropped 3 f-bombs so far. (I'm halfway through my first cup of coffee, so in a few minutes I should be less bitter about the lack of sleep.)

I don't know what the problem is, but I hope he goes back to being an ideal kitty soon. Two possible causes of this insane behavior:

1. We have left him alone more than usual the last couple of days. He's quite needy-- for a cat. (TH says he is Sweet Tea reincarnated.)
2. Before we left for the movies two nights ago, I put some Frontline on him. I have a friend whose cat hallucinates and freaks out and generally acts like a rabid monkey on LSD when she puts that stuff on him. Maybe Pookie is allergic too.

I suppose those of you who have chirren don't have any sympathy for my cat woes, do you? I don't blame you. It's not a real problem as problems go. One day maybe there will be a snotty nosed kid who looks like me standing in the hallway at 6:00 a.m. demanding my attention. And maybe I won't throw a magazine at him and go back to sleep.

Maybe.

Labels: it's not a cat blog