All 3 Cats Fail Typing 101

Nope ........teaching is not my long suit nor is learning to type the cats' strength, obviously.  Oh well, it was a good idea.

Still struggling with my eye ailment. Seeing (?) doctors almost daily.....no one agrees about quite what it is or how to fix it.  Am slightly better in the left eye but I really need it in my right.  Am just slogging onward, hoping for the best.

Thank you all for your good thoughts and  prayers.  I luv 'ya.

sunday

Hi darlings.....just a quick line  to let you know how much your encouraging words mean to me.  Thank you all a million or more times.

I think I am a little better...of course, both eyes have now got it, whatever the hell "it" is.  Two high class eye specialists are  still scratching their heads and prescribing more and more "cures".....Ha!

There is some improvement........going to doctors almost daily....it will probably cure itself before they figure it out. I am in some misery but not as bad as before.......oddly, my spirits are not too  low.....I must really be crazy but I am hopeful.

Will keep you updated.  Am teaching the cats to type.

Lo Finally Kvetches

Beware my darlings......You may not want to read any further.   I am getting close to the end of my rope.

I have frequently mentioned, with tongue in cheek, (how did that expression ever get started?)  that it  becomes a full time job for us old folks to tend to all the body parts that keep breaking down.  No longer have tongue in cheek.......I need it protruding slightly to enhance the decibels of my scream and shriek....eeeeeeeeeek........aaaarrrrrrrrrrrgggghh.........shit, piss fuck!

I have fallen into the clutches of yet another ailment........a severe eye infection.  The good news is that it has stricken me in my bad eye.  The baaaaad news is that  it can spread and  I suspect that it may be  settting up housekeeping in my good eye too.   Sigh.     If that should happen I will not be able to blog till it clears up enough for me to pry the eyelid open so I can sort of see the monitor.  I am  already on so many meds lined up here, left and right, that I cannot see the table top on which my laptop rests and unless they really begin to work  soon I fear I am doomed to a blogless spell of undetermined length.  And, of course that means that you all will suffer because of my malady......what a bummer.  There actually is a disadvantage to the internet.........A hundred people or so may be feeling deprivation  because of my malaise.  Sob.

So sorry.  (however, there are a gazillion other blogs out there to keep you tittilated so I don't feel too guilty).

I will try to keep you posted.   If necessary I will dictate a few words for Florence, my caregiver, to enter for me.

Too bad I don't have Seeing  Eye Cats.........

Monumental Frabjous Blog Day

Can a person be proud, grateful, amazed, sheepish,  tickled, embarrassed, pumped up  and humble all at the same time? 

It seems one can because that is how I feel on this amazing day which happens to be :

         *          the one year anniversary of my timid and feeble entry into the blog world

                      and

       *            the day I acquired my 100th follower

I am too overcome by emotion(s) to blog today.  The only words in my vast vocabulary which come to mind are

Thank you All so much..........I love you dearly...........
      and aw shucks........

A Failure Too Monumental to Bear

Horrors, horrors !  I thought I had learned to accept the occasional failure with wry humor and grace, but really, this is too much.

The awful truth is........My thanksgiving cookery efforts turned out to be so vile that I can hardly believe that I was the one who perpetrated that inedible mess.  And yet, the cats can neither chop, mince, slice nor reach the stove controls (nor, in truth, would they be bothered to do so even if they could) and, since there is no one else here, I guess I must accept the  blame.  Sigh.  Like that wonderful guy, Pres. Harry Truman, said....long  before most of you were born,....."The buck stops here."

I have been making turkeys and dressing and cranberry relish for more years than......well.....than most people.......during good times and bad, weathering Thanksgivings tinged with both depression and ecstasy, and somehow things always turned out OK. (not always delectable and to die for but generally somewhat yummy)  So where did I go so wrong?  I can only assume that it happened  because I attempted to be flexible and try doing a few things differently.  (This must prove that it is indeed better to be immovable, stubborn as a mule and totally resistant to change........see, I always knew those self-help gurus were full of crap).

Anyway, many moons ago, a little while after man had discovered fire, I decided to try one of those "cook-in-the-bag" methods to make my turkey, and it turned out tasting like a stewed creature, hardly recognizable as a roasted turkey, though I must grudgingly admit it was certainly moist as promised....sort of like a soup chicken. Ugh. (Don't misunderstand.......it is fine for a soup chicken to taste like a soup chicken, but not for a supposedly roasted turkey.)    It ended up  being the basis for lots of enchilada casseroles, pierogies, turkey salads and feasts for the neighborhood cats whose mothers had obviously not ruined their taste buds by providing them with the real thing at an early age.  I cannot tell you what could have possessed me to decide to try it again after such a definite disaster......but then, I cannot always explain my actions, even to myself.  I figured that if I used the Bag method for the first 2 hours and then removed it and allowed the creature to roast in a normal fashion and brown and crisp up nicely for the last hour it might come out both moist and tasty.  Faulty logic.  My ingenious thinking managed to produce a turkey that not only tasted stewed but was so dry it stuck to the roof of one's mouth like peanut butter.    No amount of applying the juice from the bottom of the pan seemed to help much but I figured that at least the cats would have a feast for weeks.

Faulty logic again.  My own spoiled- rotten cats obviously felt sorry for me and humored me by eating some of it while it was fresh out of the oven and liberally ladled with juice.  But, the second day  they looked at me as if I were a crazy person and at the plates of turkey as if I were trying to poison them and demanded their canned cat food.  And this morning I received the unkindest blow of all.  When I awoke and went out to the porch buffet to take in what normally are empty dishes licked clean by stray kitties and possums I found, to my utter horror and shame, the hardened lumps of minced turkey virtually untouched.  So lovingly offered.....so cruelly rejected !

To make this tragedy even worse,  I ruined the stuffing that I normally make which is so delicious that I usually prefer it to the turkey itself.  Having tasted a wonderful stuffing made by a friend last year which contained sausage and mushrooms I decided to include those additions to my plain seasoned bread, onion, celery recipe and threw in some wild rice for good measure hoping to create a masterpiece.  I could hardly  believe it when it came out tasting like nothing much on the fabulous scale and highly revolting on the "don't ever make this again" side.  Instead of putting containers of this into the freezer for future delectation I dumped it into the garbage this morning.......some things obviously cannot be saved.  Sob.

However, I think the piece de resistance to this whole horror story is the fact that the fresh cranberry-orange orange relish that I usually make also came out  barely edible because the orange that I used was oddly sour and I put in too much sugar trying to compensate for this flaw.  However, God was good to me in this case.....no slurs or rebuffs to be bravely borne.......the jar slipped out of my hands as I was putting it into the frig and festooned the entire kitchen floor with glass and cranberry colored sugared fruit and it only took me about an hour to gather it all up and wash to floor 17 times to get rid of the stickiness.  I must assume that Escoffier personally oversaw the imposition of this punishment on me for having committed such a crime in the name of a culinary effort.  At least I did not have to personally empty the jar into the garbage........it ended up there without my having to overcome my usual reluctance to waste food.

So what is the lesson this effing, bleeping, experience has taught me?  I am not sure, but I know one or two things.....tenks gott I did not try also that new pecan pie recipe.........and I am fucking thankful I do not have to eat my home cooked Thanksgiving Dinner for a whole week.

A Crazy Person Celebrates Thanksgiving 2010

It always strikes me as strange and quite sad that there should be one day in the year reserved for giving thanks for blessings received.

I know, I know......you are having to cope with that creepy Pollyanna Stearns again today, but in my old age I have developed a peculiar desire to express my enormous gratitude (aloud) every time I escape a disaster or have a good thing happen.  For instance I am not just paying lip service when I say. "Thank you God (*)" every time I trip but do NOT fall  down, each time I break a glass and no fragments fly into my good eye, whenever I am chopping veggies with my wicked looking cleaver (my favorite chopping tool) and I clip a corner of a fingernail but escape removing the first joint of the finger, etc., or on the more positive side, when I gaze awestruck out into the little hummingbird feeding area outside my kitchen window ( incidentally, that is where I slipped last March and broke my hip.....(**)) and see 6 or 8 of those incredible creatures zipping around like jet planes, fencing with each other and gobbling nectar within a few feet or inches from my fascinated gaze.  There is hardly anything I am NOT grateful for these days and I cannot help acknowledging it every damned minute.  It seems totally vile and insensitive not to. 

* ( When I say, "Thank you God" I am addressing not an ordinary  religious icon, but that ineffable spirit that permeates every tiny particle in the universe and keeps them from either crashing together or flying wildly apart (even faster than they are already doing that).)

** (When I fell and broke my hip I did NOT say,  "Thank you God"  but,  so help me, I realized     later how lucky I was that I did not hit my head on the bricks and end up a vegetable in a coma).  

So what does all of the above have to do with anything?......you may well ask since it obviously takes me forever to get to the effing point....... which is that I am not doing anything special in the way of giving thanks on Thanksgiving.  In fact, due to the onset of a spurt of insanity, I actually made my turkey, cranberries and stuffing yesterday since, for the first time ever, I had taken the turkey out of the freezer on Monday and it was nearly completely thawed in the frig.  What the hell, I told myself, if you do all the stuff today you can really relax and enjoy Thanksgiving tomorrow, and so I did!

Today all I have to do is eat, feed all the neighborhood kitties with turkey and watch the NFL football game later, in total comfort.  It all makes me thankful that I am crazy enough to have done what I did.  And that's a fact!

In Defense of Cat Ladies, Very Old People, and (particularly) Very Old Cat Ladies

Oh, hell, you all know I have been a sad excuse for a blogger these past weeks (or is it months?) but, as I told my  beloved cousin, Jessica, at lunch today, sometimes the Flame of Life burns  brightly in me but occasionally it flickers a bit and causes me to rest quietly, nurture the spark and send out for more kindling.........which is where I have been lately.

However,  as it happens, I am not the only crazy Cat Lady on Califa Street..........I have a neighbor (let's call her Marge) who is even a bit older than my 83 years and is, if possible, even crazier than me when it comes to trying to save every critter on earth.  As of this writing she is the sole support of Emily (her own kitty), Blackie (her porch resident for nearly 20 years), Whiskas, a gorgeous tuxedo who has been deigning to grace us with his presence twice a day for going on 8 or 10 years, an unnamed new gray arrival, and Pookey whom we share custody of,  sort of, plus many more too numerous to mention over the years.  These so called strays who visit her carpeted garage or sheltered front porch several times daily are treated to fresh water, endless kitty kibble and impeccably fresh canned cat food daily and then there are the days when she rushes to our nearest supermarket to purchase the freshly roasted chickens offered up in their hot food section because, as she firmly believes and as we all know, cats cannot live on cat food alone.

Without digressing too much I must mention that she is also dogsitter for a neighbor whom we shall call J who is owned by a huge brown Lab named Jackson.  Perhaps I had better let Marge tell the rest of this story since I am not sure I can do proper justice to it in my enfeebled condition.

"Well, Lois,  you know I love that Jackson and I am happy to bring him treats and fresh bones from the butcher and take him into my yard and  baby sit him whenever J finds it necessary, but sometimes I wonder about that boy.....I don't know how he manages to get the correct left and right shoes on his feet each morning and I worry about the fact that he is a husband and father as well as a dog and fish owner when he acts sometimes like he needs to be baby sat himself.

Now, I told you that he has given keys to both his Mother (who lives only 2 blocks away) and to me so we can take care of Jackson  (and the fish) when he and the family go on a little vacation and that has worked out just fine mostly, but yesterday was the absolute limit let me tell you.......(sigh).  Well, they went off on  vacation for 3 or 4 days (I do not understand how they can afford to take so much time off especially after the fortune they must have spent redoing the bathroom and painting the whole outside of the house and the new front door and all, but I guess that is none of my business....)  so his Mother called me and asked if I could feed Jackson this morning and she would come by later and give him his dinner and feed the fish, so of course I said yes and then after I hung up I remembered that when they put in the new front door they probably changed the locks and he never gave me a new key and she called me back a minute later about the same problem and we both wondered what we were going to do and I was so mad at J that I could have killed him then and there. (uttered in a smothered shriek)

Anyway, so I went next door into the back yard and gave the dog fresh water sure enough my key did not fit the new lock, but I noticed that they had installed a new doggy door in the back door and it was the super 3 XXX size so I figured maybe it would fit me and I managed to get down on my hands and knees and you know how hard that is for me what with my artheritis and the polymyalgia and all, and by gosh I managed to crawl thru and was able to get the dog food and shove it outside.  And then I realized that I couldn't get out head first  because the back steps were too steep going that way so I had to turn around and crawl out feet first and that darned dog just stood there and watched me the whole time like he thought I was out of my mind....which maybe I was.

Oh, and I forgot to tell you......while I was in there, just to be safe, I fed the fish with a couple of cubes of fish food in case we couldn't get back inside later.

So I filled his bowl and got him all fed and then I called J's mother back and told her what I had done and, can you believe it, when she came over that nite for the evening meal she did the same thing and managed to crawl in thru the doggy door just like I did...of course  she is a lot younger than me, but it is a good thing she has kept her girlish figure  because she was able to fit thru the hole too.  Well, Lois, I'd still like to kill that boy, but I think we did pretty damned well for a couple of old biddies.......what do you think ?" ........(proud as punch of course and rightly so).

Marge.......I think you were fantastic and I have only one other thing to say on the subject.

Dammit, I wish to hell you had called me so I could have watched it all.


Moral:    Don't ever underestimate the power of a determined  crazy old Cat Lady.