catsitting

10-2-99

I did that thing this morning where I involuntarily wake up at the time I normally get up for work. On a weekday I have a hell of a time waking up when my alarm goes off at 5:30. This morning my dream turned lucid, the way it does when I'm a smidge from waking, then my eyes opened on the dot of 5:30. Naturally, I couldn't get back to sleep. I did finally manage to drop off and woke up again at a decent Saturday morning time.

I was, strangely, energetic. I got up, ate a bowl of Peanut Butter Crunch (ay, the things I do when John's away) and called my mother. I'd gotten this e-mail from her late last night and I had to call and marvel over Michiganian strangeness.

We had one of those strange deaths here...Well, not Adrian, thank God. This one was in Onsted. A 14 year old girl wrote a boy a note saying she liked him, and he not only rejected her, he was pretty insulting about it. All his friends got into the act, and they were really brutal especially on the bus. She told her parents she didn't feel well enough to go to school the next day, so she stayed home. When the bus dropped her little 5 year old sister off that day, the bus driver said she was looking at what she thought was a really odd Halloween decoration on the porch. She said she had a funny feeling about it, and she sent another kid to get the 5 year old and bring her back to the bus. Two men in a pick up truck stopped behind the bus said they kept looking at this Halloween decoration on the porch while they were waiting for the bus to move. They said they couldn't figure out why someone would have such a realistic dummy hanging from the porch but nothing else up for Halloween. . . .You guessed it. She had hanged herself right out there where the school bus kids would see her on the way home from school, and she did it right before the bus would be coming. Her parents work a late shift, and they were in the house sleeping. The guys in the truck decided to get a closer look when the bus driver took so long and they found her, assumed the parents weren't home, and called 911. When the police got there, the parents woke up and were beyond shocked. You'd better believe there'll be some workshops on bullying in Onsted this year!

Things just get stranger by the minute.

Bizarre. And right after the kid at MSU who wandered into a closet, locked himself in, and suffocated before anyone found him. I'm morbidly awaiting the third weird story from my home state.

I washed, dried, and folded 11 loads of laundry today. Pretty much every non-dry-clean article of clothing that needed to be washed, plus every sheet and every towel in the house. I washed a lot of stuff that I'm giving to Goodwill, like all those single-bed sheets and old sweaters and stuff. I've been carrying these damn things around for years, just because I wanted to give them away but never got around to washing them. I'm averse to throwing away perfectly good stuff, especially when I'm only throwing that good stuff away because I'm too lazy to wash it and give it to someone else. Tomorrow I'll do some sorting and get the stuff together to take to the dropoff.

Eleven loads of laundry takes up a big chunk of one's day. I spent the other parts of the day sort of hanging out, feeding the cats that I watch when John's band is away. I stayed at Rob's house for a couple of hours, hanging with Babs and Tipsy: "the kids." These two cats are perpetually stoned on catnip. They have a little tub of it that they push around the house all day, and I suppose whenever the effect starts to wear off they fire up the "bowl" for another hit.

What's really funny is that they exhibit classic stoned behavior. Babs is totally laid back, always greeting me at the door and crawling on me for a neck rub. Tipsy is paranoid, checking really fast to see who's coming and then hiding under the table where she can keep an eye on me. Every time I stand up she jerks backward, and if I move in her direction she sprints for the bedroom.

Rob's cats are not allowed on the couch. Babs, of course, sits on it anyway when Rob isn't home. I sat down on the couch today and Babs tentatively put her front paws up on the couch, looking to see if I'd shoo her down. Who am I to interfere? She hopped right up next to me and kneaded my leg. Tipsy looked on from the floor, incredulously. Her facial expression was sort of: "What are you doing?? What are you doing?!! I'm telling!!" I'll bet when Rob comes home the first thing he sees is Tipsy running to show him the tiger-stripey cat hair on the couch.

I heard those very words from the feline mouth of Sable, at Becky's house. I opened the door to Sable's accusatory yowling. Sammy, normally the more outgoing cat, hung back near the dining room. When I got inside I saw that someone had pried open the bottom cabinet door where Becky stores her empty plastic bags. Several dozen crumpled up plastic grocery bags were strewn about the kitchen and dining area.

Ouside of laundry and catsitting, today was uneventful. Not that laundry is eventful.