Honestly, Cat, the squirrel doesn't want to play...

Aha. Yes, I'm back. Sorry to be away for so long but what with being invited to 60 weddings occurring between May 17th and May 20th, I've been a little busy.

Well...okay, that was a lie. I wasn't invited to any of the same-sex weddings. I didn't even crash them. In fact, if you ask Rany, I was "too damn pissy" to go watch as history was being made for me and others like me. And that is true. I was upset, mainly because it is legal for gays to get married in MA now and I still can't get married legally because my beloved is not a US citizen. If we got married, it would screw with her status here and we can't have that. So we're looking for a nice place to go for memorial day weekend so we can have a little committment ceremony of our own. On our anniversary.

*many many days later*

Ah so, I haven't been keeping up as well as I should with this thing. So here goes. Watch very carefully as more than a month speeds by...

My last day at work was May 26th (my job is only 42-weeks-a-year). I miss working at the Brown & Brew and I miss taking two buses every day. I don't miss filing. I will *never* miss filing.

May 27th was my brother's anniversary.

May 29th was my anniversary. And my friend Allison's birthday which I just NOW remembered. Fuck. Damn. Hell. Crap-a-doodi! (mental note: email the girl ASAP and grovel. Grovel muchly.)

Rany and I did not go out of town for our anniversary nor did we have a ceremony or anything. We had no money, once again, and I was panicking about the rent.

Early June was about sleeping in. LOL. I don't think I was meant to work before 10am. Rany is sure I was never meant to do manual labor at all and tells me that I have the feet of Royalty that were never meant to touch the ground. She swears that one day she will have so much money that she will hire four well-oiled men in loin cloths and leather strapping to carry me around on a litter made of gold. To which I said, "Will there be pillows, so that I may nap as I am carried from place to place?" Rany looked askance at me. Apparently I was supposed to be more impressed by the oily men than I actually was. LOL.

Buster, the amazing cat-dog, has firmly identified himself as an indoor/outdoor cat--which means he spends an inordinate time wandering the neighborhood only to return and sleep in our bed. It does not mean, however, that he is wash and wear. Him and water--no, no.

He has also been terrorizing the local fauna. One day he cornered a squirrel on our screened porch. Another day, while Rany and I were simply enjoying a nice day on the porch-couch, he alighted the stairs with a bird in his mouth. The bird was still alive, though roundly disturbed, and Rany and I shooed the cat indoors and corralled the poor birdie out the door with snow shovels.

Recently we realized that the cat has both times attempted to leave the woodland sacrifices not at our door, but at our upstairs neighbors' door. He has been trying--unsuccessfully, poor dear--to seduce our upstairs neighbors! For which he has been given the name Cat-Whore.

In fact, Buster has many names and many personalities to go with them.

Pretty Baby

Used exclusively for his cuter-than-cute modes (generally when he is sleeping) or for the times that he reaches up for our shoulders, wanting to be picked up like a toddler and carried around the house, purring like a jackhammer. Also used for the "Mommy's Home Dance", a ritual shared by Rany and Buster alone.

Prince Djibouti

For when he is lord of all he surveys. When he is Prince Djibouti, we are but his humble subjects expected to cater to his every whim. We bow and scrape before him and he deigns to allow us to continue breathing. He is vocal with his displeasure but not violent, for he knows where and when we sleep and holds this over us silently but expertly.

Fuzzy Sack of Cat Meat

This moniker is reserved for when he is at his most odd or irritating. For those special times where he walks into a room simply to yell at us for whatever slight, real or imagined, he may have suffered at our hands. For the times that he inexplicably rolls right off the bed and then shoots daggers at us like it's OUR fault he's so clumsy. For those times that he insists the only comfortable plact to sit in the WHOLE WORLD is right on our chest, covering our left ear and eye and making the watching of Cold Case terribly inconvenient. For when he decides that your singing voice is less than he expected and howls you down when you try to sing.

OWWW! GETOFFGETOFFGETOFF!! YOU RATFUCK BASTARD!!

Reserved for those times that his displeasure with us (read: usually Erin, aka "The Chew Toy") turns to violent means of expression. He has a pattented "Rapid Repeat" bite/scratch combination that leaves one the bearer of multiple bleeding wounds after only nanoseconds. The infractions that can induce this particular response are waking him when he is not in a good mood, removing the sheets from the bed for ANY reason, and/or moving your hand away from him slowly and non-threateningly.

Perv Kitty

Used exclusively for those times--uncommon as they may be--when Buster becomes enamored with my right foot as it lies beneath the blankets when I am sleeping. In his romantic haze, he mounts my foot, bites the blanket over my toes to keep me restrained, and then cat-humps me. It is MOST disturbing behavior and only Rany can get him to stop (she is the Alpha in our household. I rank somewhere below the food dish on the scale of importance.)

Anyway, we love him and that's all that matters. ;)

Mid-June has arrived and I am steadily looking for summer work and now near to panicking. Though I have some options to make lots of money, they currently involve being put through sleep deprivation experiments at a local hospital. Hooray for medical research!! You too can spend a week in a hospital not sleeping and pay your rent! LOL

So now we are mostly caught up!

I promise not to be away so long now.

Here's to cats and their willing slaves...

210 minutes more...

The main computer program that I use at work was hit with the SASSER worm yesterday and, as a result, they had to shut the server down at noon today to "quell the infection". They will be sending an email out to let us know when we can get back into the system and that sums up why I am here now. I am hoping that I can get back in before too long because I do have some work to do but then I have the hardest time concentrating on this job, so part of me hopes the server crashes for the day.

I'd love to be on the porch-couch right about now. From my little prison cell window I can see that the sun is shining and a breeze is blowing and I would love to be dozing happliy on the porch-couch in our little screened in porch. Maybe the amazing cat/dog would nap with me.

...

Yeah, and maybe the laundry fairy will fluff and fold my laundry while I sleep tonight, too.

There's always so much to do to keep up with being an adult, you know? Laundry, bills, cleaning, washing dishes, cooking, work, writing, art. And we don't even have kids yet! And only one medium-sized cat!

I plan to go home tonight and take care of my chores fairly quickly (there's not much left to do on the laundry and the checkbook should only take a few minutes) and then I will play some more Diablo II: Lord of Destruction (while the rest of the US watches that damned series finale for Friends. Why don't they just call it what it is? The Whitest Show on Earth).

I am working on a Barbarian character now. His name is Havok Bloodborn and I hope to take out Diablo with him. He is very lucky in the getting of rare items so far and for that I am grateful. He killed Blood Raven with little difficulty but nearly bit it while fighting some boss bitch in The Cave. I have got to get his cold resistances up.

That means I now have at least one of each type of character:

Imhotep, the Necromancer
Havok Bloodborn, the Barbarian
Immaculade, the Assassin
Snow Raven, the Assassin
Gabrielle, the Amazon
Gar, the Druid
Kahlan, the Sorceress
Seftiri Amahit, the Sorceress
Sethan RedHorse, the Paladin

My highest level character, Immaculade, can't even make it through the doorway of Diablo's lair yet. What a disappointment. The rest are either too new or still stuck in Kurast trying to kill the council members. I don't know where I have gone wrong. Who knew that raising a baseball team of demon killers would be so hard? If only I could get them all together as a team to fight the Prime Evils, well then I might have a chance. If they didn't try to kill each other first.

I can see it now...

"Gar, you rat fuck! What on earth made you unleash a TORNADO??" Kahlan, Sorceress of the Sisterhood of the Extra Hold Sprayable Gel, leaned her 44-106 cold damage, +3 to Frost Nova Sharp Pointy Stick against a boulder and did her level best to get her hair out of her eyes.

Gar, the Druid, shook his head derisively but refrained from saying anything. Most of the rest of the party assumed that was because of the dead +3 to all Elementals wolfhead he was wearing and not because he was necessarily a man of few words. After all, how intimidating can a demon fighter sound if his voice is muffled by a dead animal head?

Gabrielle snorted at Kahlan. "That's why we Amazons wear our hair up in ponytails, Kahlan," she sneered as she pulled out three arrows from her quiver. She inspected them briefly before notching them in her Socketed Longbow of Life Suckage.

"And why we Assassins keep our hair short," agreed Immaculade, the Team Leader. She fiddled with her +85 Poison Damage Lee Press-On Nails and hoped that Hratli would be able to work his magic again to repair the chip in the one on her index finger. It was the third time in as many outings that it had suffered a break and she was looking forward to killing Baal if only to save the money she spent on magical manicures.

"Perhaps if you invested in some sort of helm," ventured Sethan earnestly, "you would be saved the trouble of untangling your hair and subsequently you would no longer need to curse at Gar. Or any of the rest of us, for that matter. You risk your mortal soul when you do that, you know."

"Oh go fuck yourself with your Holy Sword of Sweetness and Light or whatever you call it, you goody-two-boots Paladin peckerfest! Who asked you anyway?" Kahlan's hair was so tangled she wondered if she were going to have to go about using her Sharp Pointy Stick as a tapping cane instead of a weapon. "I'm never going to get this untangled!" she whined. "And then where will you be? It was me who froze those asshole council members long enough for you to chop them up, remember?"

"Do shut up, Kahlan," lisped Imhotep shortly. "Or I shall sick Globin on you."

Kahlan laughed. "That dirty little blood golem? He's only a level 13! I could shatter him like a fairy ice sculpture and laugh while he melted in the grass."

"You stand still, Ice Lady," grunted Havok Bloodborn, the Barbarian. "Me fix everything."

Before Kahlan could protest, there was a strange ripping, shredding sound and then the sorceress could see. What she saw first was a cloud of her own hair lying at her feet.

"AAAAAAAUGH! You moron!! You great, pea-brained Barbarian FOOL!!! What have you done to my beautiful hair???" She grabbed Havok's +100% Physical Damage Slash and Bash Double Headed Axe and looked into the blade as if it were a mirror.

"For the love of all that's GOOD and FUCKING HOLY!" she shouted as she saw what he had done. "You've RUINED me!!!"

The effect was rather...depressing. Using a smaller hand axe, Havok had sheared off most of Kahlan's damaged, tangled hair, leaving her with a shortened haircut on the top and sides of her head while the back remained long and luxurious.

Gabrielle raised one arched eyebrow. "Oh, I don't know, Kahlan. You'll be mighty popular at the annual Amazon Cunning Linguist Dance and Orgy with that look. Do you have some +35 Butchiness Flannel Body Armor or something? That would just make the look."

"Either that or a pair of Sturdy Hiking Boots of the Dyke," added Immaculade. "Tell me, Kahlan, do you own a Lab named Sappho by any chance?"

-----

See? They'd kill each other before they could even get to Baal.

Sigh.

Guess I'll just keep plugging along with my group of unruly only children.

Anyway, here's to five socketed shields and to finding unique items in every act...

Public Transportation: Fun for Everyone

I thought I was going to be late for my 7:40am bus today but I wasn't, thank the little gods.

The driver for my first bus is a very nice woman who calls me "sweetie" and has my transfer ready when I get on. I think she was bored or lonely today because she struck up a conversation with me just before my stop. It was a nice change of pace for the morning, where I usually stare out the window wondering what the Hell I am doing out of bed so freakin' early.

I like public transportation (bus or train, doesn't matter) mainly because of the opportunity for significant people watching it affords. I love to people watch. I don't know any of the people I watch personally so I give them little names in my head so I can discuss them with Rany when the need arises.

My Haitian Friend
She is a wonderful, round woman who dresses colorfully and is known to laugh out loud for no reason at all. Sometimes she is so happy to see the bus arrive that she cheers when it pulls up to the curb. She always gives me a great big smile when she sees me. Listening to her speak in Creole is like listening to a happy brook gurgling away in a mossy forest. Usually I see her in hats or headwraps but today she had her hair uncovered and she had a brand new 'do! She looked GREAT!

Human Jerky
You wouldn't know it by the name but I actually feel very sorry for this woman. She is a career smoker who smokes these long, white cigarettes almost without pause. Over the years this has aged her face and skin to such a degree that she looks like she's been turned into jerky. She carries a little grocery bag with her sometimes and it always contains one package of Junior Mints. It doesn't matter what time of the day it is, she always smells of alcohol. She never speaks and she looks both forbidding and like she needs a friend.

Locomotion
This person is not a bus passenger, rather she is a woman who I see from the bus as she walks to work every morning. She has a no-nonsense look about her and she walks quickly and with purpose. No one gives this woman attitude...or if they do, they don't live to tell about it. One day I hope to see her smile. I think that would be a sight.

Chit and Chat
This is a pair of women who work in the mall and every morning they twitter and chatter in their back of the bus seats. Their native language is something asian and it sounds like they are engaged in rapid-fire tongue calisthenics or something when they talk. They are both very happy women but you can tell they don't like getting up as early as they do.

Mushroom Lady
All through winter and even a little into spring, this woman wore a tobaggan style hat that made her look like a strange variety of mushroom. It was always easy to recognize her and since we often travelled on the same buses, I saw her nearly every day. She seems a generally unhappy woman but I have nothing to base that opinion upon except for the fact that I have never seen her smile and she is not very talkative.

The Contingent
This is a group of people I only know from my transfer stop in the square. They all seem to work together but they are such an odd mix of people that it is hard not to stare at them when I see them at the stop. They are

Gram
A lovely librarian type, all curves and soft smiles. She seems to be the "Mother Hen" of the group. She has no prejudices and seems to be the center of the group.

Banana Head
A young, tall African-American man who wears a black knit hat over his hair, which fills the hat and distends it out behind him, making his head resemble a banana or some sort of UFO. He has a intellectual feel about him and I imagine him to be a jazz aficionado or a writer. I suspect he keeps his hair in braids or dreds and perhaps is required by his workplace to keep it under a hat. Or perhaps he keeps it under his hat because he is bound to do so by his religion's rules. I have heard that certain faiths require a person to keep their hair covered until it has reached the desired length or stage of completion.

Vampire Goth Lesbian Penguin
Last but definitely not least is this young lady. When I first saw her, she appeared to be a relatively conservative young woman who happened to be slightly overweight. About a month ago, I saw her in full makeup, with her hair done and I thought "wow, what's up with her?" And for the longest time, she reminded me of someone, though I couldn't figure out who. After I saw her with the makeup, I realized she reminds me (unfortunately) of Danny Devito's portrayal of "The Penguin" but without the grisly hair, the white makeup, and the dead fish.

A week after I saw her with the makeup, this young lady went through the most astonishing transformation. One day "plain Jane", next day "Vampire Goth Lesbian Penguin". She showed up at the bus stop with a bull ring in her nose. It had two tiny purple triangles, one on each end. She wore a black leather bomber jacket, black leather shoes with plaid highlights, black slacks, colorful tops, and carried a satchel. Her makeup went from glam to goth, changing to a watermelon shade of lipstick worn both on lips and under the eyes.

Today, she wore cargo pants, a lime green top, and--oddly enough--a fishing cap complete with lures. I do not pretend to understand but I do applaud this woman. If she has any fear, she doesn't show it.

Scrub Brush
This man has hair the exact same shape and (by the looks) feel as a toilet scrubber. He gets off at the Dunkin' Donuts on Main and always, always, always darts right into traffic to cross the street. Obviously he has absolute faith in the MA law regarding pedestrians and the right of way. Since I sit on the side of the bus that would have the best view of his demise, should he get run over, I feel somehow responsible for his fate and so I always watch until he is safely across the road.

Mr. Bobblehead
A very sweet old man who likes to go to the mall to get out of his house. Time and age have crooked his spine in a way that looks painful to me and his head shakes back and forth incessantly on a very thin neck. He puts me in mind of what Icabod Crane might look like in his declining years. He watches everything that happens on the bus and I believe him to be a fellow people watcher like myself.

Mister
This man seems to be itinerant and hangs around outside the Campus Convenience store which is the bus stop at which I catch my evening bus. He impresses me as a life long alcoholic and he is unable to speak with any clarity, so he is reduced to simple hand gestures. Most often he will ask if you happen to have any cigarettes. He doesn't seem to be in anyway dangerous and yet whenever he is near, I get slightly creeped out.

Ah, there are so many! I shall have to continue at a later date with my observations on fellow travellers.

Until then, here's to travelling by bus and always forgetting a book to read...

Scapula: (n) {scap-YOO-luh} commonly known as the shoulder blade, also another word for "excruciating pain"

Argh, the pain. You ever get your shoulder blade out of joint? It happens to me a lot, though I couldn't begin to explain why. That, and ankle injuries. Though this year I did happen to have a doctor explain to me why I am so prone to twisting (and therefore spraining) my ankles. Turns out I have unusually high arches.

Yep. My arches are too high. Basically, if you were to dip the sole of my foot in ink and stand me up on a piece of paper, the resulting print would have the ball of my foot (with toes) and my heel and a "wafer thin" line on the outside edge of the print connecting the two sections. The doctor said I should probably invest in arch supports for my shoes, especially if I was prone to falls.

PRONE TO FALLS?? How did I reach the age of 34 without this gem of wisdom?? Prone to falls, eh? Oh, I don't know. Let's see, shall we?

Age 5, 1st grade.

Completely mangled the left side of my face while playing tag on the blacktop at recess. I was IT and was chasing the others when I completely failed to turn after running headlong towards a brick wall. Face + speed + wall = hamburger meat.

Age 7, 3rd grade.

Broke left wrist while running down a hill because my mother was calling me and I was late for dinner.

Age 8, 4th grade.

Broke left elbow while using front walk as ice slide in the worst blizzard in PA in 50 years.

Age 11, 7th grade.

Sprained left ankle twice and right ankle once. Left ankle--sprained while tying shoe while on moving swing. Right ankle--sprained when walking down front walk of friend's house after slumber party. Left ankle--sprained while walking home from basketball court. Spent 9 months either on crutches or recovering from sprains.

Age 17, Freshman in college.

Tore ligaments in left ankle when slipped on a chicken dumpling in the dining hall of my school.

Age 19, Junior in college.

Tore ligaments in left shoulder, severely bruised knee when falling on a speed bump while engaged in a foot race with a woman in high heels. (I was wearing sneakers.)

Age 25, customer service representative.

Broke 5 ribs falling down 4 steps.

Age 29, administrative support.

Snapped my achilles' tendon in the left foot while hopping on one foot during warm-ups just before the curtain rose on a play I was in. I did the show (complete with two dance numbers) anyway. The injury required surgery to repair.

Age 33, stagemanager.

Severely bruised left forearm while attempting to rescue claustrophobic actress from closed coffin.

Age 34, actress.

Broke two toes falling off stage on closing night of Julius Caesar.

Age 34, administrative support.

Strained right achilles tendon while running to catch train.

Double sprained right ankle, sprained right hand while walking down sidewalk on the way to interview potential cat adoptee.

So yeah, I'm a little prone to falls. And did I heed the doctor's advice? No, I still don't have arch supports. What kind of dolt am I?

I know there's a word for people who are afraid of heights but I wonder if there's a word for people who are afraid of high heels, specifically the wearing of them. Most people assume that I don't like high heels because I am a lesbian, but no, really it is because I don't like sprained ankles.

By the way, today just BLOWS. I had to get that out of my system.

Oh well, here's to ace bandages and tangled webs...