Snowmaggedon 2010 - Part 1

Snowmaggedon 2010 - Part 1

I’m not a meteorologist. You know this. But what I am is someone with a memory and eyes. Normally when I hear crap like “record-setting snowfall,” I think about all the cars that seem to all be the best in their class. How the hell is that possible? How many classes are there? Could I just come up with a class and vote for my own car and claim that it was “2010’s best in-class?” I believe that’s the only reasonable explanation. But anyway, I figure that there’s probably some way to skew the statistics with regards to snowfall to make it sound like whatever we are in the midst of is the worst snow ever. It makes us feel like our meaningless life has purpose when we’re a part of history, even if we didn’t really do anything to earn it. But with another 12-20 inches predicted to come tomorrow night, that puts the weekly total at around 50 inches, which is three times the amount we normally get in one whole season. Those are numbers not even car buyers can disagree with.

I’ve seen storms that had a lot of hoopla beforehand only to turn out a small dusting and also storms casually mentioned on the news which debilitated cities for days. Well, they got this one right. I thought everybody was being little pansy babies, shutting down school on Friday and stocking up on water and toilet paper the night before. And why water? Do faucets stop working in the snow? Maybe I’ve just been blessed with decent pipes all these years.

But when the snow started coming and I saw all the salt trucks waiting in the on-deck circle on the side of the highways for the manager to call them to the plate, I realized this wasn’t one of those overhyped dustings. This was the real deal. And I needed cat food. We had enough human food and toilet paper at our place to last us through the weekend, and I was confident our plumbing system would keep delivering. But the cats needed to eat too. They were going to be stuck in the same damn storm. And because they never leave the apartment, I was going to have to get their food for them. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to wait in line at Giant for 2 hours just to get cat food. They’ll be eating spaghetti and clementines before that happens. So I figured I’d go way out of my way to the specialty pet store north of Baltimore on my way home from work. This made less sense as the snow was starting to accumulate, mostly because there was a moment of panic when I was about 2 miles away when I had a thought. If high schools, colleges and all government agencies were already closed for the day, what made me think a privately-owned, report-to-no one, independent pet store would still be open? Boy, I really hope I have enough pasta. Well, to make this story super anti-climactic, the store was open. And I got my kitty food. And to subtract even more from the drama, there was still plenty left. Probably enough for another 2 weeks. I think Jen just likes to make stuff up when she calls me to see if I’ll actually do it. Next thing, she’ll be asking me to go get bottled water.

Cat Scratch Fever: The 9th Day of Giftmas 2009

Cat Scratch Fever: The 9th Day of Giftmas 2009

If wearing my kitten's collar as a bracelet to remind me of her while she gets her kitty surgery makes me less of a man, well then I don't want to be right.

Poe is fine. And I did wear her collar around all day, partly as a reminder, but almost entirely for the sake of telling this story to people. I’ve given away all my man cards already, no point in hiding my hand. And as I found out when I went to pick her up, she learned how to hiss at no extra charge.

I had this same surgery done with Clementine, my Ohio cat. And the greatest part of it was seeing her wake from her anesthetic-induced haze. She pushed open the rest of the kitty door, wobbled the 7 inches to the kitty box I had placed in front of her, and laid down with her head and one paw in the sand and the rest of her, complete with newly shaved belly, on the rug, tail still in the cage. After fighting with gravity for a few minutes , she then regained her balance and, much like a sorority girl in heels after a couple Water Towers at Brick Street on a Thursday night, fell back the other way. Like the good father I was, I made sure she didn’t hit anything as she fell and managed to take a lot of pictures of the event to eventually show to her boyfriends when she brought them back to the house to watch a movie in her room with the door open. This continued with varying levels of pleasure for me for a couple hours.

However, this time Poe was kept to be monitored overnight, depriving me of the one minor pleasure that came out of shelling out $200 and admitting to myself and the cute girl at the counter, who noticed my collar/bracelet, that I was now a cat owner. That sucked. They wouldn’t even take pictures for me. And when I showed up to pick her up, they said that Poe was “being fussy” and I would have to take her hospital collar off when I got home because they refused to do it. This wasn’t a good sign. The next sign that wasn’t good was the one where the first thing Poe said to me when I got her back, was “HHHHHHHH.” I don’t know how to spell the violent, cobra-esque hiss that came out of her mouth for the first time ever, but that’s how it sounded.

I felt horrible. I’d just taken away her spirit. Not to mention her woman parts. I wanted to assure her that we were going back home to mommy and the fat kitty, but sticking my hands in that cage seemed to have the same effect of that time I managed to take the safeguard off the pencil sharpener back in 5th grade. So I put on her favorite CD, the Bangles. Not even that made her feel better. I told her how sexy the lead singer was, but then I figured she probably didn’t even like girls. Or humans. Or sex. So I put on Air Supply, the most asexual band I had. Same disgruntled meow. I started to realize it had nothing to do with the musical selection. After about 20 minutes of meowing, she started at the cage like the wood-chipper again. At least this was a familiar response. Maybe she’d go back to her old Poeness after all.

And it now appears as though she has. She’s back up on the counter breaking wine glasses and Sweetie is shitting on the rug again. Poe, it’s good to have you back. Kinda.

Kitty Climax: The 8th Day of Giftmas 2009

Kitty Climax: The 8th Day of Giftmas 2009

I’m not a big fan of Drew Carey, but I’m not going to leave my cat unspayed just to spite him. So I scheduled Poe’s little kitty surgery for this Wednesday. Unfortunately, due to a poor miscalculation based on data I just kinda made up, my cat went into heat a month before I figured she would. So now I have a poor horny kitty struggling through her transformation into adolescence as I type. And if you’ve never seen a cat in heat, it’s unbearable both for her and her owners. It’s like she’s on ecstasy. She rolls around on the rug and the bathmat and rubs her head on everything she walks by – the table leg, the TV stand, the sharp corner of a bike pedal. Everything just feels sooooo gooood. And she walks around sticking her ass up in the air looking around for boy kitties to come up behind her. She’s scratching at our cabinets looking for them too. And she meows all the time, calling out to these boy kitties to come beat down the door and satisfy her newly discovered womanly needs.

I’ve been telling people she went into heat already and about 37 people said “Yeah, I know how she feels, heh heh.” No you don’t. And if you were thinking that same thought as I was typing, you can either feel bad that you’re as predictable as everyone else, or you can be excited you’re just like everyone else, depending on your own self-worth. Also, some people tried to compare it to when dogs go into heat. Though I appreciate you trying to sympathize, you can stop. Dogs in heat and cats in heat is as different as getting out-of-a-bad-relationship horny and getting-out-of-a-20-year-prison-sentence horny. Now you show me a dog in heat who just spent a hair shy of 3 years in jail, and I’ll give you that one.

The last cat I had in Ohio was in a really bad way, as they say. Like a life-sentence-with-no-conjugal-visits bad way. She was to the point where if she didn’t get her kitty surgery soon, she was going to die. Not because of that, but because Seth was going to kill her. But really, it was incredibly annoying. It was to the point where I was about to take care of it myself just to shut her up. Kill two birds with one stone if you know what I’m sayin. You don’t have to tell me. I know how wrong that is. But really, I was thinking about going out to find a boy kitty for her, but I’m not that generous of a wing man. If anybody was getting pussy in that house, it was going to be me. Relax, that one wasn’t as bad.

So I dropped Poe off at the Kitty Hospital today and I am picking her up tomorrow. And I caught a stroke of luck. On the way there, Poe was stuck in the kitty carrier. She hates the kitty carrier. After about 20 minutes of meowing and trying to dig out of the plastic bottom of the carrier, she went to work at the metal gate. Like a crack addict trying to get to her crack. Her claws were flying off her paws like a tree-shredder. That horrifying experience was apparently enough to snap her out of heat. I guess if you were thrown into a cage that you could barely turn around in and thrown in a van for an hour, you’d probably forget how horny you were too. Even after a 20-year jail sentence. So the surgery went fine and I am going to pick her up tomorrow. Looks like I don’t have to have that father/daughter talk after all. Maybe a different one. About how I took out her uterus just when she finally wanted to use it.