My cats are nuts- and yours?

Does anyone else's cats have spasms? I mean sudden millisecond entire body flings into the air from a standard sitting or walking position- and then everything is fine again.
How about the I-just-pooped full throttle laps? Do they feel that much lighter and freer, or are they running from the hideous smell?
I used to laugh hearing my neighbor yell at her cat- I felt like part of a club.
"Get down!" she'd boom. I was pretty sure it wasn't her husband up on the counter.

The Apartment and the Procrastinator

Me- Hey, did you know the oven is grey inside?
Apt-Did you finally clean that thing?
Me- I've been wanting brownies. I almost tried cooking them in the microwave.
Apt-I remember the black smoke last time you turned the oven on.
Me- Yeah, I guess two years of turkey grease and overflowed casseroles aren't good.
Apt-I'm amazed you haven't lit me on fire yet.
Me- Whaddaya mean?
Apt- Smoking ovens, Christmas trees up until March... .
Me- I liked the lights!
Apt- That's a good thing- I think the strands were holding the branches on.

Two year itch

I hate packing- long gone are the days I could relocate all my belongings in two car loads. I hate floundering in strangers' mystery dirt, fighting the heebie jeebies with elbow long rubber gloves, hip boots if I had 'em, an illicit love for my Dirt Devil rug shampooer (please don't tell the mop-we're most touch and go.)
I love our back/den/family room (in a walk through with piece meal furniture, how articulate can ya be? have you seen the living/dining/computer/library room?) Unable to find a square enough carpet stray at Home Depot I jimmy-rugged for two vertical country-blue and one horizontal (the front 1/4)aqua- with pressed board pine color TV stand, white book shelves, cherry end tables, black metal futon with blue sheet, raspberry armchair massacred by the cats, and cream walls- but I've played off the blue and bright and it incredibly works. There's a photo of a sunrise over the carribean in Cancun, our last full day there- off to the left the rays are gold caught in the clouds and a sailing boat anchored down. Sometimes I accidentally take a great photograph. I blame it on the camera.
Plus my walking routes. Best times to walk- sunrise and after supper. Summer mornings while the dew is still droplets and I can smell the roses I pass, stop 1 mile from home for something to drink and read on the last leg.
So this stuff is great but it's been two years and I'm ready to go- redecorate, make new walks, gain different views, chance more windows, better daylight, bigger closets, a change of sleeping and waking sounds, try gardening another soil and suncover.
The Big N is careful with money- something about savings and having enough. I tend to answer others' concerns with I don't know how I'll do it - but I will . I'll be fine. So in the argument of We can't afford that! Sure we can- it'll be fine! he tends to win. And I tend to sulk.

Wonder Lost

I have never tried typing with one edge of my butt barely on the chair but my kitten is kindly sharing her nap spot so I will try!
Oh, it's been a long five days of wondering if I go through with this wedding.
See, one of the most fabulous words I've ever heard is 'wanderlust'. I get shivers of thrill when upon sighting a U-Haul. My dream auto is a mobile home. I dread packing but love to move somewhere new. Stagnation is my biggest discomfort and fear. I want to live in different states, work different jobs. Is that ADD or being unfocused, noncommital?
Or is it wanting to sense what I can because, as far as I know, I'm goin' around in this life just once.
But I love my fiance. And what's more impressive, he loves me. Unconditionally. (I ask what god he pissed off in a former life to get this gig.) He is willig to move, some. I will still travel and travel alone is good for the spirit.
The wedding is in 15 weeks. Last week the bridesmaids finished dress needs and the order went out and I dropped off my wedding gown for alterations. Then I had an anxiety attack. Just a little one. I think this was me going over the premarital cliff.
I've had major support lines - thank you Mom, Jason, Kelly, and Jen-and am slowly calming down.
15 weeks - Holy cows!!!

Talented Kitty

My fiance asked, did Annie do that?
Yes, I said. While I was sleeping she dragged this giant purple towel from the laundry basket, draped it over the chair, and made herself a tent. (She made a lot of noise hammering in the pegs, said my friend.) Wasn't I surprised when I got up and saw it!
He just smiled wryly.

I'll have the C cup with fries

My stepfather once told my mom how nice it would be to go to the Bar and Griddle Factory for lunch.
Maybe-
except it's the Bra and Girdle Factory.
Stuff get so much funnier misread!

http://www.sleeplittlekitty.com

2:30AM. Me and a bowl of broccoli and bags of wrinkles under my eyes. Fiance snoring in the bedroom. At least he was when I gave up on sleep two hours ago.
http://www.mum.org/catrules.htm This was cute! If you think kitties are adorable and amusing when being persnickety.
My little grey tabby, Sylvia, and I met six years ago. She was a kitty who'd grown up on the streets of Asbury Park and was picked up by a family run pet shop in Sea Girt. The day I met her was her third day off the streets. Her spay stitches were still fresh. Hers was the second cage I looked into- she let me snuggle her , I fell for her face, and two days later she came home.
It's difficult, literally, to remember our first months together.
The Sylvia I know now is the kittie who spent a week lying on the bed and staring at the floor the first time I went on vacation and left her (at home with my live-in boyfriend whom she knew well.) This is the kitty who leaves my side just long enough to nibble, drink, and litterbox any time I am sad, or sick, even if the sick lasts for days. The kitty who climbs on me for snuggles, keeping all her nails tucked in, even if she has to teeter on the side of my leg.
But in the beginning she would have none of snuggling. She'd climb up my leg for her food. If I got down to play with her she'd swat at my face claws extended. All this was okay.
I assumed she had never lived in a house with a human and that my getting down to play was to her an attack. If she hit my face I backed off and we tried again later. In baby steps we learned each other.

Oops!

I changed a phrase in my first post from rotting muscles to rotting mussels-a little difference there!

The Graceless Me

I've been around people with a grace so honest and smooth it's brought tears to my eyes. Me? I'm the type to knock your sandwich on the floor and step on it when what I wanted was to help. The girl who calls out the answer to the other team in Charades. One of my two historical moments among my friends was asking So how's Katie? to the man just dumped by his girlfriend of three years. Eliza Doolittle at high tea with the Queen? Yes, those anti-social skills would be mine! I'm quite familiar with the silence that follows a guffaw; I've caused many.
Harold once gave me his dog doo analogy. You step in dog doo and lift your foot to scrape it off, but stumble and put your other foot in it then step in it again with the first foot while trying to clean the second, and so on. I remind myself of this story when I have made a mistake and the harder I try to fix it, the worse and worse it gets.
Have you ever had a day you're so tongue tied or clumsy it becomes fun because of the crazy situations and phrases your befuddled mind creates?
How much more tantalizing are headlines when you read them incorrectly? The governer did what with four crayons and a sheep?


Do you know aside from the getting married part of my wedding day I am looking forward to the cake part the most? Actually, to the icing part. I hope the cake will be good but to me cake is a crap shoot. Sometimes the cake is really worth eating- but the icing is always good!
One more good thought for the day- Maybe it's a 2-for-one special.
I grew up and lived most of my first 28 years within 3 miles of the beach (dried seaweed and rotting mussels are two of my favorite scents). Other favorites of the beach? Watching this skinned peach globe of a sun skirt the edge of the ocean and rise upward lighting the boats and the sea in pinks and golds.
Feeling the urge and the fury of grey rushing waves in my wind burned sand stung flesh standing counting lightning bolts traveling swirling skies up the coast.

The Imaginary Divorce

Somewhere in Pennsylvania lives my ex-husband. Or my ex-once upon a time sort of Husband. For privacy's sake, let's call him Harold. (Are ya' reading Harold?)
Harold and and I (or, Harold and Maude) loved each other very much. "Stupid for each other' was the chosen phrase. They never planned to and actually planned not to see one another every day, but neither could get through the day without simply wanting the company of the other. They stayed up all night talking. They sat around all day talking. They shared and shared and shared. And had some kinky, wonderful sex with fabulous cuddling after.
After two years of this Maude decided they should move in together- or, Harold should move in with Maude who had her own place. (Maude didn't know herself as well as she thought.) Harold eventually crossed to Maude's fence post and brought his belongings with him. (Harold never saw it coming. Unfortunately, neither did Maude.)
The trouble started on Day... One. And it was probably over crumbs. Harold's. On Maude's counter. Note I didn't say Harold's counter. It was never Harold's counter.
Maude went a little crazy. Maude is obsessive compulsive. Harold is obsessive compulsive. Harold and Maude continued to talk, and have sex with cuddling, and wrestle each other to the floor with glee only with a lot more sighing and eye rolling and fights that ended with one of them driving away- in a trail of burned rubber.
Eventually, they redivided their things and Maude moved very far away and after a long, long time got engaged to somebody else.
Maude and Harold were never really married and so never really divorced, but they feel in their hearts they were both.
And they still love each other, in a different way now, and talk for hours-only now the conversations are peppered with other memories; Separate Rooms! -Hooooonneeeeeeeee! -Get your chin hairs out of my clean trash can! - Get your underwear clothes line out of the kitchen! You were snoring so I rolled you off the bed!

Trippin' 20/20

It's a system shock to open your inbox and see an email from your very first boyfriend. For kicks I'd found his name on www.classmates.com and emailed him.
We met over the phone of a mutual friend where I was staying the night in January of 1988. I don't know if it was a hoax or if she really hoped we'd like each other. He was 15, I was 13, and we talked for hours that night-or maybe one hour but when you are talking to the first boy who really seems to like you, even one hour is a very long, very good time.
We didn't talk again after that until March. Sitting together in Mrs. Spanarkle's science class, studying minerals, my friend said he'd asked for my number which I enthusiastically gave. I think I can visualize how my room looked to me the first time he called.
I can still see the blue of his eyes that shocked my system so the first time we met, for just a moment, outside of my grammar school- he on his bicycle and me about to board the bus.
Our first romance only lasted three weeks, until the end of the school year- but I felt magical for all of them.
That wasn't the end of it. We spoke several times over the summer and bumped into each other early that September in the high school library- I was a freshman now. My infatuation never waned but we didn't really date again until my sophomore year and his last year before leaving for college in Florida. The sweet agony of knowing I would lose him but helplessly loving him! I wanted to marry him then and for the rest of high school as we would continue to date every time he came home on break. I really thought it could happen.
That was a different lifetime. For both of us. Hearing from him spurred me to see what a different person I am now. Outside, too. I have lines around my eyes now, and often under them. I know pains I couldn't have imagined at 15.
I do not know any more about his life or past now than he does of mine but I do know he is a husband and a father. And neither is he that slightly too skinny kid riding his bicycle to school.

The best years of your life

I went ahead and subscribed to classmates.com.
The best years of your life. The adults that say this are the adults who were popular. The kids who sat behind you on Mondays jabbering and giggling about the weekend games and parties. I wasn't one of these kids. I was the kid who dreaded lunch room seating day; dreaded wandering the crowded cafeteria hoping some kind soul would take pity on my frightened face and offer me a seat for the year at her table. I was always grateful knowing it was a burden and took some strength to be seen with me.
For that kid, school is awful- one instance after another of swallowing humiliation and biting your lip until the gym taunts- that are somehow both ignored and allowed by the instructor to continue- to be over at the bell so you can withdraw to the mercy of a locker room stall and cry.
Is it possible to ever become a confident adult after being bullied and ostracized for 13 years?
I was told all along to ignore it. Ignore it and they will stop. They only tease because they get a reaction.
My mom regrets this now-wishes she had taught me to fight it off, to stand up for myself.
I'm almost 32 and all of this anger and shame is still inside; a coiled sickness.
I guess I keep hoping some day I will see these people again and they will finally accept me, finally think I am good enough.
I need to stop needing this- I need to finally feel okay with who and what I am. I don't know how to do that.

Marital Advice

The most frequent verbal response I get when asking for marriage advice is... Don't. You lose your independence. You give up your freedom. And the biggest and most oft uttered warning... the sex stops.
On two occasions, after the sarcasm wound down, I was offered actual advice from the voices of experience.
From advisee number one-Talk. And do things together. If he asks you to go somewhere with him, go. No matter how boring you think it will be. No matter what you are doing that seems more important. It isn't.
The second? Variety. Don't let the sex get boring.
What do you think?

A Little Bit o Yum

I have been watching the neighborhood ice cream parlor sign for the lovely phrase, "Opening in 60 days". Not just because I love their fat-free, no sugar added raspberrry vanilla swirl in a waffle cone (runner up to my favorite cone of all time- soft vanilla swirl with rainbow sprinkles :)
I know spring is coming! Everyone up here tells me Maine doesn't have a spring. Well I've experienced three of them.
Spring is going for a walk and getting an ice cream then wandering across the street to watch Little League baseball games. Spring is warm enough to sit in a chair in the backyard in the afternoon and evening with tea and read the most recent greatest book you ever found. Opening the windows...and leaving them open all day. And all night-the best sleeping weather parallel to autumn wrapped up in soft blankets, breezes that smell like leaf buds and earthworms and new rain rolling across your face. Whoops and hoorays and whistles all wadded up inside and it's all you can do to sit still through one more hour of work or school until you can get outside and scream and run and breathe and just be.
May you enjoy some spring fever this year.

Pantyhose and Mike

I went away to college when I was 18, and had a blast-I was really (really) quiet until the end of high school; then BLAM! I've barely shut up since.
Welcome to Millersville University in Millersville, PA. Check your map. Look for Lancaster. Look for a proximal, unnamed blank spot. That's Millersville.

Millersville claims ownership of the largest universiy campus pond in the US. It's a double pond linked by a foot bridge in the center of campus populated by huge gold fish (i think) and ducks on a strict schedule of aquatic duck lovin' and flying to the island in the middle and navel oranges always wedged in the honey-comb chicken wire fence.

I first sat at the pond with my friend, Mike, during college orientation. I met Mike at the math placement test when I was late and grabbed a seat beside him. I offered him a piece of gum. We agreed math stinks. Then we skipped the next session to get a soda. There the dye was cast, he alludes. That was June 1992. I was in his wedding party last May, wearing my first tuxedo.

A tuxedo is by far more comfortable than a dress. You don't worry about panyhose, ironing, static cling, or the color of your panties (which stay put in a tux). You don't need to find a cat's cradle style bra made of chicken wire and elastic or torture yourself with double sided tape. Nothing falls out, rides up, or falls down. If you really enjoy the buffet there's no need to stand upright the rest of the night or go home early. The waistband adjusts!

Next time you need a fancy dress, I highly reccomend a tux.

The Glutton in Me

so my fiance's all cuddly in bed and i'm hooked to this laptop like it's gonna give me orgasms stuffing Nut Lover's Minatures in my face like they're field mice on speed and I'm a starving kitty.
This blog stuff is all new to me... today! so bear with me! I think it's gonna be fun. (Wow- the same improper English twice!) I didn't feel like cooking dinner tonight but wound up cracking open a can of tuna and adding dill, lemon, ginger, and black pepper. It got served with cooked-in-the-microwave-green beans and tomato-basil quinoa. It actually worked!
I got chocolate bits on the keyboard.
I have class in 7 hours. I suppose. Off to bed with my fuzzy kitties. Night!

Earthworm Relocation Programs

I decided to go back to college for the BS I've regretted never getting. Not knowing what you want to be when you grow up is expected and almost romantic when you're 18. By 31 I should know! I should also be a grown-up by now.
I had my first Art History exam today and I'd forgotten how boisterous a classroom can be preceding such an event; cries of Ohmygosh who painted that! and what's a patina? to I'm going to have a heart attack! We've all sat like good little students, mute unless called upon, for four weeks and suddenly we were a united front. We can kick this thing! Did you bring your white flag? (lorezobotticellodonamedici...Ahh!)
I am a Practical (boy, capitalizing that p takes off a lot of pressure!) Nurse. Nursing is a career you really can't discuss casually. Guess what I found at work today ! When did people get so squeamish?
I grew up at the seashore in New Jersey (one summer of hypodermic needles...let it lie!) and for me the smell of salt and rotting mussels is home. But now I live in Maine where the smell of pine trees is home.
I am somehow feel most content and beautiful covered in horse and smelling like one or head to toe full of mud splotches and compost moving earthworms from root ball to root ball.
My favorite outfit is pajamas after a long day, I love Anya Seton, and one of my favorite meals is a fresh cup of coffee and a hamburger.
And if anyone has marriage advice, I'd love some! I am getting married on July 1st... 4 1/2 months!