Thursday, March 29, 2012

Bad Manners


I'm looking at my battle scarred hands, my right one in particular, as I put the third and final bandage laced with Neosporin over that bleeding claw gash on my third finger.  I've entered the twilight zone of battles with a little half grown cat, over which one of us has the rights to the food that is sitting on my dinner plate.  I'm losing...I'm losing big time to a little six pound furry fluff with the determination of a hundred gnashing piranhas anytime the concept of food turns on that light bulb in her head.




Restless Andee pins this youngster flat with the threat of gnashing teeth whenever she crisscrosses over him in her mad erratic rush each mealtime, trying to claw food from the can I hold just out of her amazingly lengthy reach.  She gets pinned to the counter top quite often during meal time, slowing her down each time for maybe a few seconds...maybe.  Zoe just runs for cover to her underworld of beds.

This cat, Lacey, will follow me to the ends of the earth...if I have food.  I've become the wild eyed piper of cat town dancing each morn and eve with a tantalizing dish of eats, leading this frenzying yowling fuzz ball down the carpeted path to bedroom to inhale her meal behind a hastily slammed shut door.  Andee and Zoe thank me.

Zoe declined to be a player this eve, and opted to just stay put in her comforting underworld of beds.  Andee poked along as usual causing half-pint to stay in her bedroom prison an extraordinarily long time, as usual.  Now all was calm...Lacey, gorged on eats and asleep on the top perch of cat tree; Andee, stuffed with lots of slow munching treats; and Zoe with her empty belly, half an hour later, sad eyed waiting for her meal in kitchen.

I fill the electric coffee pot and turn it on, little bubbles becoming big bubbles, creating my wall of sound that will drown out the silent preparation of Zoe's eats.  Zoe, Zoe, Zoe...a bit dim with that space between her fuzzy ears, blew my cover with three short loud meows before I could rush her dish to her favorite dinner spot.

My hand still on the dish; a wild glob of flying feet and chomping teeth, which sometimes goes by the name of 'you little shit', attacked Zoe's meal.  Zoe evaporated to her safe place while I unthinkingly picked the #!!$%&# fuzz ball up...let me rephrase that...while I unthinkingly tried to pick the #!!$%&# fuzz ball up.  Three puncture wounds and a zillion scratches later I gave up and let fuzz ball lick the dish clean.  Zoe just may not eat tonight.

I've found my threshold of misery...it's just two short steps that way...then my brain will fry and I'll be in loony heaven.  How could I let a little six pound furry fluff get the best of me?  Last night I just wanted a small toasted piece of sesame bread with a bit of butter melted over its surface...that's all...just a measly dumb idiotic piece of simple buttered toast.  Warm toast on plate, knife in hand, I peeled off the plastic lid and whoosh!!!  I know I saw a blur appear and disappear!  My butter tub was empty...what?  There was no one in sight.  Did I already go bonkers?  I walked around the counter island to see a growling fluff of fur gulping down the cup of butter she had snagged.

Last week I had my broiled fork-skewered chicken and apple sausage sitting on my plate minus the chewed end that I was happily swallowing as I began my meal.  A faint flash of something streaked across the table and my plate was empty.  Why, that little!!!!!  I chased her into the living room, then back into the kitchen, then back to the living room, then back to the kitchen, then under the dining table.  I wrestled her to the floor and was only able to rip that chunk of sausage from her clinched teeth because it was still skewered with my fork.  I won...yahoo!!!  I had my chewed up linty sausage back.

Two weeks ago a pungent odor attacked me as I unlocked my front door and stepped in.  What's that smell?  Ewuuuuu!!!  Why can't I remember what that smell belongs to?  Dustin got sick, the dog walker's note says; and she found two empty chewed up NuCat vitamin packages of 60 treats each on the floor...empty.  Dustin must have consumed a quart of water, pee peed many more times than usual, and upchucked in the living room, a very large upchuck.  Oh, goody.  One more in the hall and three in the bedroom I later discovered.  It was determined Lacey opened the cupboard and tried to eat the treats, but Dustin finished off most of them.  All edible cat paraphernalia was then begrudgingly transferred to pantry with a door that latches.

No thing's safe.  She knows new food is about to appear when the oven timer signals with its buzzing.  She's been caught numerous times trying to open that butterfly lid closing trash can in the kitchen.  The day she figures out sitting on one side and prying up the other works, we are so doomed; so we switched it with a top lid closing one only to find her later hanging by her front toes with her head under the lid, scratching the stainless steel in vain with her hind feet to get a boost into trash heaven.

She's finished off several half cans of pumpkin, dragged loaves of bread and packages of cheese off the counter with me in hot pursuit, ravaged biscuits and turnovers before they can cool on their wire racks, inhaled broccoli and salad fixings raw before I can grab her (although she seems to prefer her veggies al dente, from what she has stolen off the dinner plates), and races from counter top to freedom with anything that smells of food...plastic cat food lid covers, syringes used for the cod liver oil bottle, used forks and spoons, you get my drift.  She's a regular pain in the butt...causing us to flip coins to determine which of us will be unlucky.  Which of us will have to take their turn to check out the new sound coming from the kitchen that Lacey was just sited entering.

It's with heavy heart and a slight smile that I resort to this final act of desperation.  Do you think she'll fall for it?



 



Thursday, March 22, 2012

The Dangers of Reading...Part Five


Fluffo curls up the corners of her mouth as she gets ready to show her fangs.  "Oh, look!" says her human of insignificance to her human of significance, "she's smiling at me.  See, I told you she would eventually like me."  She holds that look until a rough stroke on her back sends her diving headfirst into her underworld of beds.  Hiding in the darkness of folded blankets and stinky pooh piles of man clothes, she licks the fluff around her razor sharp claws, removing the ink stains and paper bits.

She's decided she hates reading...abhors reading...puke-it-all-up loathes reading.  No one could have possibly tried any of that stuff written on those deceptive pages of her humans book shelves...no one.  She knows.  She's tried them all, and failed miserably to achieve her ultimate feline Zen.  Okay, to be fair...(Fluffo is surprised she didn't choke to death on that brief insane thought)...discovered from her midnight hours of online surfing, she acknowledges a fleeting interest in reading that piece of utter gibberish her human of unpleasant significance thinks her readers find oh-so-clever; especially the posts about the dangers of reading.

Ooommmmm...Ooommmmm...she collects her thoughts, frees her mind, and reluctantly lets go of her anger issues.  Clearly she is perfection more, and her  human of annoying significance is perfection less.  She's perfecting the empowerment of creative revenge her human of irksome significance unknowingly has planted into her psychotic imagination.  Cleverness radiates from her being illuminating her corner of her underworld with a soft glow of satisfaction.

Her human of despicable significance NEVER EVER reads that collection of children's books she adds to year after year.  She'll never discover the licked, scratched, and bit pages between those cutesy covers until Fluffo's misunderstood life has entered the after world...pure perfection, Fluffo thinks...pure perfection.

It's the midnight hour when darkness reigns, when all is silent in sleep, when the eerie glow of that monitor screen illuminates Fluffo's toes tapping lightly on the keyboard to open up Perfection...More or Less.  She's fired up to perfect her techniques of creative revenge, this wondrously effective concept that has her feline Zen bulging at its seams.  Fluffo, Fluffo, Fluffo...perfection most foul...is at it again.


  



Monday, March 19, 2012

She dwelt among the untrodden ways








          She dwelt among the untrodden ways
            Beside the springs of Dove.
          A Maid whom there were none to praise
            and very few to love;

          A violet by a mossy stone
            Half hidden from the eye!
          --Fair as a star, when only one
            Is shining in the sky.

          She lived unknown, and few could know
            When Lucy ceased to be;
          But she is in her grave, and, oh,
            The difference to me!

                           William Wordsworth



  

Saturday, March 17, 2012

10, 9, 8, 7, 6...


A bit of frivolity as I give my noggin a rest from trying to conjure up my next Panama saga installment, a feat that is appearing harder to accomplish than sitting non-comatose in a dentist chair for seven hours straight listening to all that drilling and smelling those teeth burning.  


Stuff that is a bit hard for me to embrace with open arms.
  • Boiled Okra - a veggie only slime lover's embrace.
  • Cold Coffee - without a microwave, I'm one of those people who make five cups of coffee just to be able to drink a full cup of steaming hot brew each morning.
  • Cleaning a Toilet's Innards - almost an incentive to quit eating.
  • Sewer Gas - have you ever been forced to stay at THE JOB for 8 hours smelling this stuff?
  • Seed Ticks - ever look down at your sandaled feet while standing on a mulched hiking trail to horrifyingly see a brigade of these tiny critters rushing up your legs?  Need I say more?
  • Upchucked Cat Hairball - ever step on one of these things?  Blood curdling cries have been heard miles away when this happens!
  • Stuffed Up Nose - murderous trying to sleep with a plugged nose and waking up with an impossible to swallow dry mouth, although it's an envious plus in a sewer gas situation.
  • Heartburn - the older I get the more I burn.  Someone has a demented sense of humor on this award for a life lived long.
  • Doggie and Kitty Butt Scoot Marks on Floor - somebody hurry up and invent a potty tissue for pets, and a manual for training.  I once blamed husband for his dragging shoe scuff marks on kitchen floor, only to later catch a fuzz ball's furry butt in action...not an enjoyable revelation :'(
  • Onion Soup Stinkers - something worse than sewer gas!


Weather in the 80's, rain mushy flooded gardens, I've had one
#%*&# of an afternoon.  Five minutes after snapping pics under the bare ash tree of my colony of lilliput tulips, something was crawling up my back.  Twisting my arm around under my shirt I grabbed it with my fingernails...TICK!!!  It's way too early for worrying about ticks, the garden exploding in green, having to poison the dog with his tick killing Trifexis, and spraying down my pant legs and shoes with pyrethrin.  Good Grief!  It's only the middle of March.  I haven't even decided which plants I want to order for spring planting...spring planting is usually another month from now.  I downloaded my pics and they're gone...poofed out of existence...a figment of my imagination...how could that be?  I made myself tick bait for nothing!  I'm going to bed, pull the covers over my head, and pretend it's still winter.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Evanescence

















             You are like a pale purple flower
             in the blue spring dusk

             You are like a yellow star
             budding and blowing
             in an apricot sky

             You are like the beauty
             of a voice
             remembered after death

             You are like thin, white petals
             falling
                     and
                         floating
                                  down
             upon the white stilled hushing
                       of my soul.

                 Angelina Weld Grimke, 1905



Friday, March 9, 2012

Madness in the Gardens







Un-agitate yourselves...rabid souls nowhere in sight...just a bit of matter and mind at war; and here I am again, gambling with the forces of the cosmos.  Mind tackling matter in natures realm of all things green and brown, all things living and dead, all things under my control that are so totally out of my control; even though I try to convince myself that my physical and mental input is worth more than a mere 2 cents...that my own grain of sand stands out in the 598,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 centillion grains of sand of this complex place.








I'm addicted to playing the game of chance with Mother Nature, Old Man Weather, and the sinister Grim Reaper of all that inhabits my significantly insignificant gardens.  The gardens are always in sporadic flux...some plants magically pop up in opportune places, but most plants discouragingly pop up in the worse places imaginable.  Don't get me wrong...I love my weedy good guys half to death and my weedy bad guys totally to death, and fortunately for my weedy bad guys, they are becoming the death of me.








I long to be a workaholic expat, but the city of my transplanted origin won't let me divorce myself from worrying about those teasing embraces of my weedy buddies.  Exasperating laws are on the books telling me to embrace the concept of my city overcharging me an enormous fee for the privilege of euthanizing my entire yard with swirling blades of steel if I fail at their definition of weed control.  Where is that flame thrower when I truly need one?  When will I ever be granted the luxury of sitting back with a steaming cup of cream laced coffee, relaxed, and beaming with pride at the perfection laid before me? 








I wait for good weather.  I wait for good weather on one of my days off from THE JOB, which is turning into an oxymoronic concept of magnificent hallucinaconic proportions.  Rain, torrential rain, lightning, endless misty drizzle, frost encrusted, hail, straight-line wind, not so straight line wind, tornadoes...good grief, the list goes on and on and on; then it all terminates into the gooey, ooey, glob of hellaciously hot, muggy, uggy, super sweat drippy kind of heat stroke summer that I've been dreaming about all winter.










I'm hounded by the scythe of eternal quietness swishing closely behind like the pendulum of some gigantic clock.  I've lost track how many times that sinister Grim Reaper has smiled as he enters an X by my name in the Big Book of Mistakes below the Off With Their Heads category under the column of Significant Blunders; you know, blunders that terminate those green little tykes existences with an ill placed tire tread hiking boot gardening shoe...poof!  It's always the good that finish last when it comes to an encounter of the worse kind with my murderess shoe...guaranteed 100%.  








So, winter of little winter...here I've been and still am...with saws, pruners, scissors, work gloves, buckets, trash cans, brooms, rakes, weed whackers and a few extra visits to the bone manipulator thrown in on my quest for that picture perfect perfection: gardens that mimic those luscious, stylish, unspoiled, unsoiled, flawless garden images I see in every gardening magazine.  A quest I'll never let common sense extinguish.

















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