Ridiculous/Awesome

This:

Plus these:

Plus this:

= What I drove behind the entire route to work this morning. This woman was like a giant stick of Bubblelicious on two wheels. I was about to say that there wasn't even a photo to illustrate the best part of her ensemble, but then I searched on a whim and found it:

Yessiree Bob, ladies and gentlemen, that is a bona-fide motorcycle helmet con artificial pigtails. Wow.

So I followed her for 33 blocks on this thing (she was actually making pretty decent time) and this is how my thoughts progressed:

Blocks 1-5: "Ugh, pink, eew"

Blocks 6-15:"Well, she certainly did commit to a theme, I'll give her that."

Blocks 16-22: "She's kind of awesome."

Blocks 23-30:"She must get about 300 miles per gallon on that thing."

Blocks 31-33:"I'm a huge jerk for driving a car and I'm probably responsible for global warming."

If I got a Vespa, though, it would be pale blue:

Mmmmm, pretty and efficient.You all know I'd be hell-on-wheels on that thing.

A Cat is not a Doggie

So, the cat's gone. After a week-and-a-half of trying really hard to like her; we just couldn't make it work, but hey, at least I learned a really expensive lesson: I'm not a cat person. They're just too damn smart. I don't like the way that they look at me and seem to know exactly what's going on and how to get what they want out of the situation. I much prefer a doggie mindset, which is more along the lines of "LOOOOVE. PET. OOOOHHH, TREAT! WALK WALK! LOOOOVE!" Granted, she was very sweet as far as cats go and I was glad that we were able to get her out of the Humane Society and into a nicer foster home, but I'm just more able to love and take care of this:

(This would be little-Sadie-face as a wee pup)

than this:

Granted, kitty wasn't mean or ugly as this guy, but she did hiss at me a few times which hurt my feelings. And the final episode where she clawed and headbutted her way out of the cardboard carrying box as I took her to her new foster home didn't do anything to endear her memory to me. I really did like her, though, and she's a very nice cat and I hope she goes to a home where she's loved since I wasn't able to provide that.

Also, she was expensive.

So, no more animals for a while. I'm not ready to be a mommy to anything with a heartbeat for for a number of years (on the upside: my houseplant fatality rate is down at 1.5 casualties out of seven total--RIP Pocahontas the Palm, and I have to admit that Pancho the Dragon Tree looks like he's not long for this world.)

P.S. When will spring happen? I hope at least by the summer equinox.

Just to Watch Him Die

I met my mom for a smoothie on my lunch hour today. While we're in line, she hands me six folded-up twenties and says "Here's $120. I want you to hold onto it for me."
Immediately, I jump to the conclusion that Mom has whacked somebody in Reno for a modest fee of $120 and the Feds are finally onto her, so she needs to keep the hot money in safe hands for a bit. Turns out, she was on her way to work, forgot the padlock for her little personal effects locker and didn't want to keep that much cash unattended in the break room. She's perfectly justified, of course; those other 50-year-old Minnesotan ladies she works with at Williams Sonoma always looked like petty thieves to me, too.

Here, Kitty Kitty...

So we went and got a cat last Saturday. Found her at the Humane Society and she was all sweet--not at all like the mean cats I've met over the years--and snuggled up against us and begged us to take her home (she's 5 years old and her previous owner died). So, despite the fact that I'm not a cat person by any stretch of the imagination, take her home we did for the following three reasons: 1) She's cute, 2) She's a Bengal, so she doesn't bother the handsome yet sneezy Boyfriend/Roomate's allergies, and 3) She was, as a Humane Society cat, much cheaper than one would normally pay for one of her brethren. We stripped her of her atrocious former name and christened her Lyra, after the main character in the Phillip Pullman kids' books (double geek alert!) It's pronounced like the old Italian currency, not like Tyra Banks, because even though they used the latter in the movie version of The Golden Compass--which thoroughly butchered the spirit of the books, by the by--that's how Boyfriend and I both read the name in our heads. This is her:

Awww. Cute little spots and everything. Anyway, it's been a mixed bag of emotions since then since, as I said, I'm NOT a cat person which means I don't understand how they work and they don't understand how I work and that causes some stress. I had a mild panic attack as I was going to bed on Saturday night because first the little darling pees on MY side of the bed and then hides. Sure, she was frightened, but come on! I took it as a personal affront. Then, as I nestle down into the inadequate spare sheet/blanket combo we've used in lieu of the laundering linens, she starts prancing all over my nightstand and trying to eat the hyacinths and STEPPING ON MY GLASSES. I NEED THOSE. I DON'T HAVE VISION COVERAGE RIGHT NOW.
And right away, that turns into HOLY SHIT THERE IS A CAT IN MY HOUSE AND IT'S GOING TO PEE ON EVERYTHING which quickly morphs into I'VE TOTALLY LOST CONTROL OF MY LIFE AND P.S. THE SUN WILL NEVER COME BACK OUT (yesterday, update: after about a week of gray sleety misery, the sun did indeed come back out.) So, I hyperventilate a bit while Handsome/No-Longer-Sneezy coaxes me back into sanity, and the next morning I wake up with a crying hangover. No joke. My sinuses are so stuffed up that it feels like I'm recovering from three glasses of Three Buck Chuck (which is a lot for me.)
Little Lyra spent the night in the bathroom, and that's where she's stayed ever since, with supervised time to explore the rest of the apartment that she earns with good behavior. Over the last couple of days, with Kitty confined safely away from my glasses, I've grown rather fond of her. She's been sitting in my lap, purring like a motorboat, drooling like a St. Bernard (we recently realized she only has about six teeth,) and I'd enjoyed these times. It was nice having another thing in the apartment. I learned that "Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow" means "I'm happy to see you, please pet me" rather than "I'm going to pounce on your head and pee in your hair." We were coming to an understanding, and I was all set to write a nice, fawning post about my new kitty. Then, twenty minutes ago, we tried to give her some amoxicillin drops for the tooth she had pulled back in jail, and it was all "MMMRRROOOWWW..HSSSSSSS!!!...GRRRRRR!...SCREW YOU GUYS!!!"
Back to square two.

I still want my lollipop

So what is the perfect lunchtime activity for a dreary, dull, Coldplay-album-beige day such as this? Why, a visit to the Girlie Doctor, of course! Just the routine check-up, but as every reader with two X's knows, this is the most unholy of routine check-ups. I'm consequently typing with a gimpy, Band-Aided middle left finger, but on the upside, I just found out that my platelets are pretty much rock stars. This information comes courtesy of nice little blonde Minnesotan finger-pricking nurse, whose world I may or may not have shattered when she told me to look at a wall of baby photos to distract myself from the bloody-prickly-ickiness. "It's a shame I don't like babies," I said in a fit of pure knee-jerk reaction. "Well, it usually works," she mumbled. Not with this one, Prickly Nurse! Meet your match!

As I was saying this morning, (pre-humiliating-routine-checkup,) they really need to reinstate the lollipop system with doctor visits, because I'm having a harder and harder time going if there's no incentive at the end other than a plain beige Band Aid (also to be reinstated: festive Band Aids). With this in mind, I stopped by Jamba Juice for a reward on the way back to work and was promptly handed this:



A berry-granola-breakfasty-thingie FOR FREE. Now, handing a writer some free food that's not wrapped in cellophane (or--let's face it--that is, for that matter) is akin to giving him or her a pat on the back and saying "Buck up, Champ. Even if your publication goes all CBS or Star Tribby on you and find yourself laid off as a victim of the terrible state of the media, there's still the occasional, nutritious bit of free food in the world so you probably won't starve or have to write computer manuals just to eat."

So, regardless of the fact that it was just a really thick granola-littered smoothie suffering under a banana dictatorship, I ate it all up. Yum!

On Names

Sally Bamboo is a dear friend of mine--the first plant I ever christened with a good, Christian name. Dear Sally arrived carefully packed as a birthday present from my oldest sister, to celebrate my twentieth year. For three years she adorned various Boston College dorm rooms, and each summer when I went home to Minnesota, my adorable Russian roommate would take Sally to her parents' home in Yonkers for some TLC and some borscht. She'd return in the fall greener and perkier than ever (the bamboo, not the roommate) and then, over the next nine months, get progressively droopier and paler from the lack of sunlight and the underlying tension. When graduation came, my little Ruskaya and I had both formed an attachment to Sally, so we decided that the most judicious thing was to divide her seven stalks and each take a part. It was a painful surgery if ever there was one, but now three-stalk Sally sits as close to the window as possible in my one-bedroom apartment (i.e. glorified dorm with nicer floors), growing paler and droopier as the months march on. I could never figure out how Mama Kouznetsova tended the plant to make her so happy, but I suspect it had something to do with beets or Russian murmuring or Moorlik, the family cat.

Hello, World!

And now, the moment you've all been waiting for...
The one, the only, the incomparable Myrtle Schmeckpepper is dipping her toes in the above-ground blogging pool and anything could happen. Enlightenment? Probably. Hilarity? Depends on who you ask. Tyranny and social revolution? Probably not, but never say never. Mostly, we're looking at a little stone tablet where I may carve the countless little flashes of brilliance that flicker through my days and usually evaporate into the vast, empty universe where they hang out with plasma and quasars and bacteria fossils trapped in ice and all of the other cool things that hang out in the universe. But no more! Either that, or I'll just post pictures of puppies. A little from Column A, a lot from Column B.

Here goes!