Yeah, Sometimes I Am

While choosing a sweater, Mrs. Rodius asked me if I liked the orange one. I said no, I didn't. She asked which one I liked better. I said the yellow one. She explained that yellow does not go with her skin tone. I told her I thought it was funny how she asks my opinion about these things and then explains why I'm wrong. She said she doesn't tell me I'm wrong, but in this particular case, I WAS wrong.

Later, at home, she embarked on a lengthier explanation of clothing color and skin tone and hair color and which one goes with the something and the other thing. I was trying to pay attention. Well, actually I was trying to look like I was paying attention while I tried to listen to Edward Norton telling me about Strange Days on Planet Earth. At some point during her explanation, I laid my head back, closed my eyes, and snored.

First she said she was going to tell her mama on me. I pointed out that her mother loves me. Then she said she was going to tell MY mama on me. But then she got it: she said she was going to go on my blog and write a post about what a fucktard I am. So I figured I'd better beat her to it.

I love you, honey!

New Gadgets

This week we looked into a water softener system. We can put up with the calcium scale on the shower walls and on the drip tray for the water dispenser in the refrigerator door. But we have a suspicion that high magnesium levels in our water contributes to both of the cats urinary tract infections ("UTI's" to those of us in the business). High levels of magnesium in non-prescription cat food is known to contribute to struvites, which scratch up the bladder, which allow bacteria to develop. So if magnesium in the food is a problem, magnesium, a component of our hard water, in the drinking water is probably a problem, too, right?

But yeah, it turns out our water comes into the house on the wrong side. Two plumbers explained why this is a problem, but I kind of spaced out and went away to my happy place for a few minutes while they were talking, and I can't really recreate for you here their explanations. But both of them said it meant we'd either have to spend tons of money digging up our driveway or spend tons of money digging a trench and running pipe all the way around the house. And yeah yeah, we love the kitties, blah blah blah, but thousands of dollars of plumbing work? Uh, no.

So we're getting the kitties a $370 countertop water distiller instead. We've been double-filtering their water (the refrigerator water's got a Pur filter on it, and we run that water through a Brita pitcher filter, too), but apparently to no effect. So we're going to distill their drinking water instead.

Part of me feels like a heel, like if I explained this to, say, a random sampling of my co-workers, a high percentage would point and laugh at me. $370? For cat drinking water? Heh heh. Sucker. Then part of me thinks it's not just the compassionate thing to do, but the smart money. We could easily spend that $370 on one, or maybe two, UTI's. So let's be proactive! You've got to spend money to save money. Or something like that.

And then part of me was sad that we wouldn't be getting the calcium scale-reducing benefits of the water softener. And I swear my skin's been drier and itchier since we moved here. So I just bought a $70 shower filter, too.

Heh heh. Sucker.

Brain Stains Are Hard to Remove

Holding young Thumper on my lap, I reached behind me to get a book to read to him before his nap. As I did so, my ear rested against the back of his skull. At that moment, he chose to grind his teeth. The sound reverberated inside my own skull, and my brain suddenly exploded. And I died. The end.

Brainwashed and Right on Time

For as long as I can remember, I've tried very hard to be punctual. Being late, or even the possibility of being late, gives me anxiety. I am often early in order to avoid being late. I'm not sure when it began; perhaps my mother would say that this concern with punctuality did not begin when I was a child. Whenever it began, I hate being late. I try not to get mad when other people are late, but mostly I steam. I fume. And then when they show up, I say, "Oh, that's OK." And then they do it again the next time, and I fume some more.

I don't generally consider myself an uptight person. When Mrs. Rodius and I met, I was a lazy slob, and she was a tightly-wound neat freak. She and her sisters had and have the highest standards of cleanliness, inherited directly from their mother, of any people I've ever met. I wouldn't go so far as to call them obsessive-compulsive germophobes, but hey. You draw your own conclusions. Over the years, I've increased my standards, and she's lowered hers. Otherwise, we might have killed each other. Or divorced. I know that she pines for a home as clean as her sister's, but neither of us really want to commit to that level of time and attention, and we've reached a sort of happy medium. We don't clean the bathrooms as often or vacuum as often as we used to back when Mrs. Rodius was crazy. We rarely dust. There are piles of opened mail, baby equipment, and other various daily detritus piled on the kitchen table and counters. But now, I find myself doing things, and my mother would certainly confirm this, that I would NEVER have done as a child: this morning, I swept up bread crumbs to maintain the cleanliness of the kitchen floor that I swept and mopped on Friday. Am I becoming one of them?

That's what I wonder: As I age, am I becoming an uptight prick with standards way out of whack? Is it just an Austin hippie thing? There is virtually no one that I know who pretends to care even on just a theoretical level that punctuality is mildly important. Am I crazy? I found myself giving a lecture on punctuality the other day, explaining that I think that being late is disrespectful and communicates that you don't care very much about the person or people that you agreed to meet at a specific time. I got the feeling my lecture was less than convincing.

And I've been in other people's homes. I've been to the homes of friends who were expecting me. When I buy things off of Craigslist and am invited into the homes of people who knew I was coming, more than occasionally the word "squalor" comes to mind when I see the conditions in which they conduct their daily lives.

Am I crazy? Have I been brainwashed by my crazy in-laws to believe that it really is easier to maintain a clean home than it is to clean a dirty one? Am I the only one out there who regularly shows up fifteen minutes early in case I run into traffic or other easily predictable delays? Let's get together for lunch and discuss it. Say, 12:00? I'll be there at quarter 'til. I'll be fuming until you get there around 12:30 or so. It's a date!

Thumper thinks you look like you need a kiss.

His Fingernails Now Have a Chalkboard

The boy's two teeth are now four, soon to be six. Unused, as he is, to having something hard against which to work those two bottom teeth of his, he is spending much of his time today rubbing his four teeth together. It produces the most horrifying sound. It gives me chills. I have actual shivering sensations going on over here just thinking about the sound. Lord, please let this period of experimentation with tooth texture be blessedly brief. Amen.

Die! No, Don't Die.

This is a post about mixed emotions and guilt. It is not a post about what a horrible, callous person I am. I promise.

Sometimes I wish the cats would reach the end of their lives already. I don't feel good about it, and I don't really wish they would die. But sometimes I really do. Sort of.

Before we had a child, I almost felt like the cats were our children in a way. We took care of them because we loved them. They helped to fill our home with a little more love and affection, a little more cute and fuzzy. They filled a need deep in Mrs. Rodius' heart. And they killed bugs.

Then Cat #1, who had colitis and an unpleasant tendency toward diarrhea and a willingness to express his unhappiness at feeling poorly by peeing on our possessions while angrily staring right at us, developed diabetes. Shit, piss, vomit, and now injections! Yay! And as a bonus, the guilt for choosing not to move him across the country with us and not wanting to continue trying to control his uncontrollable roller coaster blood sugar numbers. Mrs. Rodius still occasionally sheds a tear for him.

Then Cat #2 was murdered in our living room. Cat #4 demonstrated a life-long tendency toward struvites and infections despite the expensive surgery that saved his life. That surgery has prevented subsequent blockages, but he still gets at least 2 or 3 bladder infections per year.

Cat #3, perhaps in solidarity with Cat #4, has also decided that regular urinary tract infections would be a wonderful way to spice up life. She also has seasonal allergies that give her rashes, making her scratch her ears to scabs and overwash so that she has bald spots. It's wonderful to wake up at 3AM to the relentless "flapflapflapflapflap" of a cat obsessively scratching her ears. She also hates Cat #4 and likes to have screaming fights with him. Also at 3AM.

Now Cat #4 has been acting, well, a little iffy. He's been vomiting white foam. He's breathing heavily. He's spending more time alone under the bed. He may have lost some weight. Thumper and I took him to the vet this morning, and now I'm waiting for them to call and tell us what's going on. I'm hoping he'll be OK. I'm hoping that it's not that he scratched a big wad of carpet fuzz off of the scratching post and ate it so that he has an intestinal blockage that will require surgery to remove. I'm hoping it's just a minor, easily correctible problem so that he'll be back under the bed tonight, back attacking Cat #3 and puking on the patio. But part of me, just a small part of me about which I'm not proud, hopes that it's something catastrophic. Something big and incurable. Something fatal. Something painful so that we won't feel as guilty about euthanizing him. And maybe, and don't tell Mrs. Rodius I said so, but maybe something contagious.

I know, that's horrible. And not just to the cats, but to Mrs. Rodius. Her cats are a part of her. Each one owns a little piece of her heart, and she will hurt so whenever they meet their ends, however it may happen. But I think maybe her need for them has abated somewhat. That if these cats move on to meet their maker, perhaps she won't need to find new cats to save. Because, yeah, they're our cats, and I love them too, blah blah blah. We made a commitment to them when we took them in. But now, with Thumper, the coughed-up furr balls and the scratched-up furniture seem less endearing somehow. The constant cat litter maintenance seems more tedious. And with the reduced income that came with staying at home with the baby full-time, the regular expense of vet bills and antibiotics and prescription food seems extravagant. Irresponsibly extravagant, even.

I know, I'm going to hell. Definitely going to hell.