LifePundit

The Concert Begins at 3:58 p.m.

Okay, Obama gives the British Prime Minister a set of DVDs that not only resembles the gift that you keep on hand in case somebody shows up with a present and you didn't have one for them, but also won't play on DVD players in another region. The PM can't watch the DVDs unless he gets a player made for the American market.

I won't go on, because I know that some of my readers and friends are Democrats. But there is more and bigger stuff that makes me feel like We Are Not in Good Hands.

And it's everywhere. I find out (by chance, but that's another story) that Lily has an orchestra concert on Friday that begins at 3:58 p.m.

Who schedules a concert for 3:58 p.m.? (And if they dawdle until 4:00 for it to begin I'm going to start pounding the floor.) I hope that the school administrator who scheduled this thing has an enormous sense of humor and thought we would find this funny. If not, our schools are truly being run by people with no sense.

How I Killed the Local Bookstore

A few months ago the world's best bookstore, The Happy Bookseller, an independent bookstore, closed. It died, and I'm the one who killed it.

This local bookstore, whose founder was president at least once of the American Booksellers Association (or whatever it's called), did so very much to promote regional and local authors. They generously hosted a big bash of a booksigning for an anthology of the best stories from the S.C. Fiction Project -- and I got to be there and sign copies of the book because I had a story in it. Heaven! That was before I killed the store.

They're at least 15 miles away from me and one of the most pleasant places in the world. The people who worked there were readers. The only thing it lacked was a store cat, but I forgive them for that.

I didn't mean to kill them and I did it slowly (Saintly Brother says he helped). I started ordering my books on Amazon. Like most crimes, I started small. A few things here and there that the local bookstore didn't have. Then it got easier and easier. And soon, I wasn't going to the bookstore at all. I had (and have) become an Amazon 'ho'.

But don't worry. I'm giving back to my community's literary institutions in another way. I just got a notice that I owe the public library $144.00 in fines and the cost of overdue books. Oops! (I can assure you that the overdue books will be quickly returned.)

Do you think they'll arrest me?

Maybe buying my books on Amazon is cheaper in the long run.

Dense Fog Advisory

There's some kind of little weather-tracking thingy on my toolbar that frequently pops up with a red stop-signed shaped thing with an exclamation mark in the middle. It's supposed to be a dire warning about an urgent weather alert that's been issued.

In my opinion, urgent weather alerts should be the sorts of things that save your lives. Tell me it's urgent and prod me with your pop-up exclamation point if I need to know about a lightning storm that's going to zap everything in my house (it's happened before) so I can run unplug stuff. Tell me it's urgent and send up your little stop sign if I need to stop what I'm doing and get in a closet because a tornado is coming. Or a hurricane. That's urgent.

But for Pete's sake, if all you've got to worry about is dense fog, leave me out of it. In fact, I think I know where the real dense fog is -- between somebody's doomsday-hungry ears.

We Are Low on Cats, or, How I Couldn't Manage Tiger's Diabetes

Can there be a worse blog post than how sad I am that my cat died? Well, my cat died, and the only crying on the Internet's shoulder I need to do needs to be the helpful sort.

1. First off, a diabetic cat is hard to manage. Especially if they are the indoor-outdoor type. Try as I might, I couldn't manage Tiger's diabetes. I gave him insulin shots twice a day as directed. I increased the dosage as directed. But I'm not a vet. I don't think we ever got it right, and Tiger's blood sugar fluctuated wildly. I rubbed Karo syrup on his gums when I thought he was in an insulin crash (turns out his blood sugar was sky high, so I only made it worse). I gave him insulin when I thought his blood sugar was high, and it turns out it wasn't.

A few days ago he went into some kind of crisis, and we had to put him to sleep. We miss him. That's good, because that means he was a character whose personality we enjoyed immensely (most of the time). And the other thing that's good is that he had a life where he did whatever he wanted (until he was put outside for stealing food off the table or the baby bird was snatched from his mouth), he had no notion of his own death or sickness, and he got to boss the dog around. Even the neighbor's dog. He had a good life. Go out. Get a cat. They'll make you happy.

2. If you have a cat, don't let it get fat. Tiger carried a lot of extra weight around for several years of his life to the point where people would see him and say, "Now that's a fat cat," and that predisposed him to diabetes. Sure, he looked like a street-fighting man, all swagger and beer belly, but it wasn't good for him. Maybe if he'd been a healthy weight most of his life he'd still be here. I've had lots of fat cats, and I'm going to love the ones I have in the future (and the remaining cat, Izzie) enough to not feed them when they don't need feeding. I don't get to eat everything I want. Why should a cat just because they're cute and know how to ask for it?

 Finally, one last Tiger story. A few weeks ago it was very cold and he looked like he wasn't feeling that great, so I kept him inside until the weather got kinder. Then I gently laid him out in the sunshine, like he was an old person pushed out of the nursing home in a wheelchair to soak up the sunshine and fresh air. I ran to the grocery store. When I got back, there was Tiger, enjoying the sunshine -- and what little was left of a very fresh Blue Jay.

Spring is coming, and this will be the first year in nine years that we won't be chasing Tiger across the yard with a baby bunny in his mouth. I'm not sad about that. Did you know baby bunnies could scream? (And they did. It's a sound that will make your hair stand up.)

Tiger, Mighty Hunter, Incorrigible Trash Can Turner-Overer, Attacker of Grocery Bags Before I Could Unload Them, Vet-Slasher and King of the Neighborhood, RIP. Or, don't eat all the bluebirds in heaven before I get there.

I think this just turned into one of those "my cat died" posts. Sorry.

The Fat Cat Diet

Our vet has an obese white office cat (long-haired and maybe a few pounds less than the cat pictured). I see him every time I go in to get Tiger's blood sugar checked or to pick up more insulin or needles.

When I was recently there, I saw a great big fat white cat -- shaved and sitting in a cage. The cat looked pissed.

"Is that your office cat?" I asked.

"Yes. We shaved him so he could see how fat he was," the receptionist said.

"So the cat could see how fat he was?" I asked.

"Yes. So he'd be ashamed and lose weight," she said.

This is crazy. Does a cat care if its fat? Maybe excess poundage is a turn-on for cats. Who knows how a cat thinks? Does this cat have a mirror? Is he vain?

He sure was shaved. He looked like a cat army recruit. I asked, "Did it work?"

"No."

I stared at him. They had a big sign on his cage that said, "Do not feed, no matter what he tells you." And then instructions to feed him one spoonful of a special food in the morning and one spoonful at night. And he looked mad.

"Why's he in the cage?" I asked.

"Because he's so mad he's on a diet that he's been swatting us."

I've been thinking about this a lot. Instead of going to a spa-resort to lose weight while getting massaged and fed slices of cucumber down by the pool, what about going to a local place where they lock you naked in a room with mirrors and stick a spoonful of food through the window twice a day?

A Master Procrastinator Reveals Her Secrets

There is no one who is better at procrastinating than me. I have some articles that were due last Friday. They are interesting articles I'm writing for one of my favorite clients. But I am stuck. It isn't writer's block. It's .... being a master procrastinator.

I will tell what I did today in hopes that you can learn from me. Writing this post is also one more task to help me achieve my procrastination goals.

Here’s what I’ve done today instead of finishing my articles:

• Vacuumed

• Mopped
• Cleared kitchenette area and cleaned it up (I’m talking moving furniture into the living room until we decide what to do with the old stuff) to make room for when the new table and chairs come tomorrow
• Reorganized part of laundry room (!!!)
• Six loads of laundry (no folding, though; we’ll be clean but wrinkled)
• And get this. Went to Lowe’s and bought stick-down vinyl tile, cut out the damaged part of the laundry room floor, and used a box cutter to cut the stick-down (non-matching) vinyl tile squares into shapes that resembled the part of the floor I cut out (not a very workmanlike fit) and stuck them down. They pretty much look like dooky but at least the old vinyl that was rolled back, tearing, splitting and catching on the laundry room door and breaking off into pieces is gone. Who knows. It looks so bad I might get a new floor out of this (way overdue), if Paul even notices it. However, that was not my intention. I thought I was suddenly a vinyl floor installer. The guy at Lowe’s told me how to do it. (I had to reglue part of the old floor around the edges where I cut the piece out). And even though I had picked up some stick-down tile a few months ago and finally decided which color was the closest, it was discontinued, so I picked out a color on the spot. Uh oh. The existing floor is a golden white; the pieced in squares are a grey-white.
  

Then, I had an appointment with a friend, which I decided not to cancel because that was yet another excuse not to write the articles -- plus she's leaving for Mexico tomorrow so I needed to wish her bon voyage, When I told her what I'd been up to she said that was an awful lot of work for procrastination and probably it would have been easier to just write the articles.  (I love her.)

 She also had some insight into how/why I get myself into this. When something is due, I take a militaristic approach to managing me. I say to myself that I can’t do anything fun until I’ve gotten my work done. She called this taking myself hostage. And, like any good hostage, I resist.

Then the next thing I did was to pick up Lily from school. But she didn't feel well, so I took her to the local

Doc in the Box. Lily is okay – unless she’s coming down with the flu, a virus or has a brain tumor on her pituitary gland. 

How comforting that last is.

There was guy at the doc’s who is one of those skating car hops at Sonic. He had just been run over by an SUV. The manager of Sonic stopped the SUV driver, who was mad that the car hop had “hit” his car. The guy looked pretty good for having been run over by an SUV. He was very chatty, a dreadlocked soul with tattoos who looked like the shock of it all was almost worse than the injuries, though I think he had a broken knee cap and was swaddled from hip to toe on one side with all manner of padded devices. I even overheard that maybe a hip was out of joint. Maybe he was chatty because they had him feeling little pain.

Okay, suppertime. Then I really will write those articles. I always do -- eventually.

No Snow Yet But Everything Has Closed

It was very warm yesterday. I think it was close to 70 degrees. We went out to dinner last night and saw teenagers in T-shirts, flip flops and even shorts.

And then -- it all changed. Cold! And maybe snow! I think we want it to snow so badly in S.C. that the mere possibility closes the schools and drives a panic at the grocery store. I was checking on the weather and found these great comments on a local TV web site, which I have cut and pasted here:

Dempseymom wrote:
I sure hope it does snow at least 3 or 4 inches I will be happy.

Redhawk2 wrote:
WOO HOO!!!
 

k262009 wrote:

u yall know it aint going to snow

bcinsc wrote:

Shoot, and I need bread and it's probably all gone now!

k262009 wrote:
it aint goin to snow by tommrow they'll pretend they never mentioned it

RayEdisto wrote:

THIS IS NOT A DRILL.... THIS IS NOT A DRILL....

THIS IS A STAGE 1 SNOW ALERT!!!

HURRY TO THE NEAREST KROGER, PIGGLY WIGGLY, OR BI-LO AND ARM YOURSELVES WITH MILK, BREAD, AND EGGS -- ONLY FRENCH TOAST VAPORS CAN STOP THE EVIL SNOW FROM KILLING US ALL!!!

...oh, and you might want to pick up some Hot Chocolate, too.

This has been a message from the South Carolina Snow Alert Network, stay tuned to this website for further advisories.
 
prayingblackman wrote:

OK OK warm tomorrow , rain possibly , warm sat maybe rain ? Snow possibly sun - mon nite ? ok ok Sign of times , Jesus is coming sooner than you think , Its gonna be sad sad sad if you wait to late !

SCsweetie wrote:

Gummibonbon wrote:
noooo snow! I already planted blueberry bushes and grape vines! No no no snow!!!


Why'd you do that? That retarted groundhog saw his shadow! =)

lakeman09 wrote:

Once again..it wont do a thing here because it never does anymore. The most we will get is a sily millimeter of snow or just plain cold rain. Be glad we wont get much if any. I'm ready for the warmer weather..not hot, but warmer. If you want snow, move up north.

rebeccasfreedom wrote:

Whoa...Wait... a THIRD chance for snow in SC in one year..!?!?...Hell has frozen over!

k262009 wrote:

i told u it aint goin to snow

For the real thing, here's the article with a link to gobs of funny comments at the bottom. As for the spelling in the comments, well, S.C. is not very high up there in our public schools. I guess they're closed for too many snow days when it didn't actually snow.

As for me, I wish it would snow so long as the power stays on. And then I want it to all melt the next day, which it always does. Happy Snow Day, with or without snow.

UPDATE Monday morning: k262009 was right. It didn't snow.