I know, I know.......I suppose all of you have been wondering where in the hell I have been since falling to my knees and gasping with relief after the election. Well, I am going to tell you but you may not like it.
The amazing truth is that once I was relieved of the terror and able to relax, my body wrought vindictive punishment upon me for subjecting it to so many months of misery. "Take that, you faithless coward!", it spat at me. Whereupon I immediately broke out in a case of the most humungous hives a person ever experienced.
I spent the next few weeks groaning, griping and scratching wildly at places impossible to reach like a flea ridden gopher. And, since so may of these hideous itchy bumps arose on my posterior, it was an ugly sight to behold me scratching, take my word for it. Thankfully, the condition departed leaving me relatively unmarred (rumpwise) just in time for me to shed my mangy gopher skin and don the crisp White Cap of Cat Nursie.
Many of you know how it begins. There you lie sleeping peacefully when a loathesome sound intrudes on your dreams......the dreadful urking announcement of a hairball throw-up. Only this was more dire and developed into a serious case of both a urinary and an intestinal infection...........no, no,......the cat not me.
Many days and thousands of dollars poorer I brought Gussie home from the hospital clutching 3 bottles of medication. Now, I do not know how you other animal lovers manage, but I know my own (and Gussie's) limitations. For the first 3 or 4 days I managed to somehow get two of the meds partly down her gullet at least once a day (one dose out of 2 ain't bad) .......the ones with droppers so I could squirt the stuff into her mouth between her clenched teeth. After that, it got a bit dicey......she became more and more wily and clever and elusive and I became weaker and tireder and increasingly incapable of crawling under the furniture. There was also a great deal of crawling under furniture pushing little plates of cat delicacies under same in order tempt the little beastie to eat something and not die of starvation there by negating all my efforts not to mention the waste of those huge medical expenses. Sigh.
All I can say is, tenks gott the diarrhea stopped and the normal peeing resumed and the eating urge returned so I did not have to feel guilty about not administering the 3rd of the medications which was a pill to stimulate her appetite. I can report that Gussie is fine now.........I cannot say the same for her Nursie. It takes a while for me to snap back (ha, that implies an elasticity which I have not been aware of having for the past 15 or so years).
That's OK.......I managed to accomplish something this year that I've never done before in my whole entire gonsa life......and that is to prepare and roast not one, but TWO turkeys for Thanksgiving!
I always make a turkey on Thanksgiving for me and Gussie. Usually she eats two bites while it's warm and I gobble down some lovely morsels while I'm stripping the meat from the carcass in order to package it up for sandwiches later and for the freezer for future turkey delights. Generally, after tending to and inhaling turkey all day, I seldom have much appetite for turkey till the next day.
All you ladies know the process.....You take the damned rock-hard bird out of the freezer about three days before the time is due and begin the process of defrosting. For me that includes immersing the bird in a sink full of water for a few hours, drying it off, finding/making room for it in the fridge, shoving it in before the space disappears, and repeating this process for three days till oven time arrives, all the while praying that the defrosting has proceeded nicely so that I can get the blasted bag of giblets out of the inside of the carcass. The actual preparation and roasting is relatively simple from this point forward but it still requires hourly checking, basting and all that tenting with foil to keep it from getting too brown on the outside while the inside still needs to roast a little longer...........(Oy, I hate pink turkey, don't you?) Consequently, I need to hoist my body out of my comfy chair half a dozen times or more and schlep into the kitchen to peer into the oven and do my magic. Many urghs, umphs and shitpissfucks escape my ruby lips during this activity. You know the drill.
Well this year I had a friend who lives alone and wasn't going to have any turkey so in a mad moment, I offered to do a turkey for her so she could have some on Thanksgiving and then enjoy the joy of leftovers. There's nothing wrong with this idea except for the fact that I can only thaw one turkey at a time and roast one turkey at a time. I should've thought of that much earlier, wouldn't you say?
Anyway, my plan was to start on Sunday with Turkey number one and roast on Wednesday when my friend would be here and could take it home. Then beginning around Tuesday, I could begin the defrost process for my own Turkey which I would cope with on Thursday in the normal fashion. And believe it or not, the plan worked to perfection. I was tickled pink, my friend was tickled pink and we decided that symbiosis was the greatest thing in the world.
I was going to posBobGod dammit lowlyt it up to your thesis up up up up up up upbelated what the hell are you doing stop it, for chrissake......what do you mean please say that again….Okay
...in case you are wondering what the hell that's all about, it is NOT Lo losing her mind in the middle of a blog. It is actually the Dragon speech recognition program which I have been attempting to use to write this blog and which caught me unawares momentarily while I cursed some errors I detected in the previous paragraph. I decided not to delete it, but to leave it for comic effect so to speak. This is how I amuse myself sometimes when I am bored with nothing to do…… I turn on speech recognition and dictate merrily, laugh uproariously over what it thinks I said and thereby brighten my whole day. (the up up up up is how it interprets my laughing). Actually I still have hopes for the program… I guess I am just a cockeyed optimist. But, I digress.
Where in the hell was I? Yes, I remember, I was about to say that I intended to post a belated list of things for which I am supremely grateful, but I gave the idea up because there isn't enough room anywhere for my list.
Let me just say that I am thankful 24/7 for my wonderful family of cousins, for you dear friends and for having conceived the idea of making two turkeys this Thanksgiving and having had the strength to carry out my cockamamie plan. That'll do for now.
up up up up up up up!
The New Yorker covers: September 26, 2011
3 hours ago
