Sticky, Sweet, & A Little Overdressed

OK, right off the bat, here’s the sucky thought du jour: I can’t decide if we should go through with the trip we were planning to Europe. Though I’m in luck if I need to travel, because I’ve got bags under my eyes that could hold my entire wardrobe. Why? Because we spent the night in a hotel room with all six cats while we fogged the house for fleas.

I cannot properly do justice to the level of annoying this whole flea thing is. And it’s not just fleas annoying me. Allow me to whine for a moment.

• I’m pretty sure I saw somewhere that it’s the hottest August ever on record in Nashville. Even if it’s not, it should be. So let’s just get that out of the way right now, ’cause the extreme heat sure isn’t making anything (or anyone) easier to deal with.
• Remember the rats? Well, they’ve apparently nested underneath and in the walls in the back of our house. (One of my coworkers suspects that this is where the fleas are coming from, but I don’t know if there’s any way to be sure.)OK, and side note — this is a bad story. Feel free to skip to the next bullet — Karsten went out weeks ago and got rid of the junk pile, busted up the old deck, and started digging out the weeds around the house. He hit a nest with tiny wriggling ratlings (it’s easier to call them ratlings than “kittens” when your aim is to get rid of them). It was an awful scene and he was devastated at having hurt them but the aim is, after all, to eliminate the population from our property. So as a compromise, whichever babies weren’t already killed from the impact of the shovel got carried off to an empty lot a few hundred yards away.But anyway, even after all that there are still rats in the walls, and we’re not sure how we’re going to win this one.
• Baby Clyde is doing better, we think. He apparently had a blockage in his digestive tract so when they x-rayed him, his stomach looked totally full even after a day of intense vomiting. Not sure how or why, but the next day’s x-rays showed his stomach clear and his lower digestive tract filling up, so the vet was satisfied that things looked to be on the right track. But I’m still nervous because we don’t know why he was having trouble in the first place. Which in my mind means it could happen again anytime. But considering I thought he might be dying on Sunday night, I’ll be relieved if all we’re dealing with is a bad case of indigestion.
• And the fleas! The fleas are driving me nuts. I mean, it’s just exactly the kind of thing that really gets to me. I can’t take any kind of insect in large quantities. I won’t even release ladybugs in the garden ’cause they freak me out en masse, but individually I’ll let them crawl all over my hands and arms. A whole mess of bugs I don’t like under any circumstances invading my living space? Definitely gonna mess with my mind.
• One of the other cats, Blackberry, has had a long-standing problem with urinating where he shouldn’t. We’ve fought it for a while, but it had been getting worse recently. Took him to the vet and found out he has a pretty serious bladder infection. Uh, OK. Now I feel like a terrible cat person. So we’ve been giving him pills twice a day for weeks, and if you’ve never had to give a pill to a skittish cat, well, you just haven’t experienced life.
• Between the overages in the house renovation and the flea/rat/vet/hotel expenses, we’ve depleted our checking account to levels we haven’t seen in years. It really sucks and it makes me feel anxious. I think having had the experience of losing nearly everything we owned and getting as close as you can get to bankruptcy without actually filing, I’m having traumatic flashbacks to my anxiety level at that time. Our situation right now in no way resembles our situation then, but it’s hard to shake an experience like that.
• Oh, and I’m trying to accomplish about a million things simultaneously in the next few months at work. So there’s that, too.

I’m really trying to keep everything in perspective by remembering that we have a house, we have our health, and we’re not broke (yet). But the amount of stuff we’re having to deal with is enough to make me whimper.

So yeah, I can’t decide if we’ve now spent enough unbudgeted money on all these various problems to mean that we should hold off on our long-awaited vacation. The vacation that coincides with our 10 year anniversary. The vacation we’ve been trying to take since 1999. The vacation we could really freakin’ use right about now.

You see what I’m saying? We’ve been really looking forward to this. So to put it off, while it certainly wouldn’t be the end of the world, would hurt and would suck and and and. Yes, we’d get over it. But it would be a big disappointment.

Anyway, it’s not time to decide yet. For one thing, I don’t think we’re out of the woods with the whole pest control issue, so there may actually be even more money to spend. But also because we still have a little time before we have to make the decision, and I may yet come up with some genius plan to make everything work. Hey, it could happen.

Mais il y a peu de chances. Le sigh.

Grace at Blackstone’s,
originally uploaded by Kate O’.

Grace of Graceless in Love at tonight’s blogger meetup at Blackstone’s. Ain’t she cute?

Our area lost power for a while last night. Turns out it was birds. Weird.

ETA: Oh, and I also want to say that people have no freakin’ clue how to drive when the power is out. When stoplight intersections have no power, people barrel right through. We had to drive out of the neighborhood to find food, and it was a white-knuckle experience getting through the intersections. Idiots.

The ugly: we spent the entire weekend obsessing over fleas. In 8.67 years of living with multiple cats, they have never had fleas. Admittedly, our cats have been outside (on leashes) more lately than ever but I also think the flea population must be larger this year, probably due to the heat.

Anyway, we’d “treated” the cats with some over-the-counter Hartz crap a few weeks ago, but it obviously didn’t do a thing. Meanwhile, the problem was getting worse. I’ve been busy with work so I couldn’t do much about it myself and had been trying to be patient since I knew Karsten was already dealing with the rat problem in our back yard and I didn’t want to overwhelm him. Besides, he seemed confident that the Hartz stuff would work and that the fleas were minimal anyway. On the contrary, it seemed to me that if you spot one, you can assume there are dozens/hundreds/howeverthehellmany you can’t see. I regularly noticed fleas on the cats, so I printed out web pages with tips on killing fleas and left them on his keyboard. I suggested he just call an exterminator and get it over with but when he did, he only asked about the rats. He just didn’t seem to feel as much urgency as I did about having to coexist with the fleas. It was all starting to freak me out a little. Last week, when I stood in the cat room and could see the fleas jumping around, I had a major meltdown. Karsten felt bad for not realizing how upset I’d been getting about it, but I assured him that everything would be fine it we could just rid the house of fleas. So he picked up the Advantage flea treatment from the vet on Friday and we started treating the cats first thing Saturday morning.

Each cat had to be isolated so they wouldn’t lick the stuff off of each other, which meant that we could only treat three cats at a time: two of them were stuck in cages while a third got to be loose, but stuck inside a closed-off room. Meanwhile, we vacuumed the house, sprinkled boric acid powder on all the carpets and fabric surfaces and used a broom to push it down into the fibers, and washed the curtains and bedclothes in the hottest water and dried them in the hottest drier they could withstand.

By mid-day Saturday, there were dead and dying fleas all over the house. So I went around and vacuumed everything again yesterday, but they’re still dropping off. It’s gross, but it means the treatment is working, so I’ll take it.

The bad: it was miserably hot outside. I mean it. Hot. It was 104 yesterday. It makes me feel like I’m melting. And since we wanted to escape the house once we got through each day’s flea treatment, we were limited in our options.

Though actually, that didn’t go too badly: we ended up going to see a movie (”Becoming Jane”; it was OK), eating out for every meal (all the food was great), thrift shopping (I found some cute stuff), and hanging out with some Sam and Alyssa Cornett, two songwriting friends who were visiting from Chicago (which was fun).

So I guess the bad was really just that every time we stepped outside, we felt like we were about to melt into flesh puddles.

The good: even in my jangled state of mind, I wrote a few songs. Hanging around songwriters last night got me all fired up. When we got home, I dashed off two songs in fifteen minutes along with a few other ideas I’ll come back to eventually. One of the reasons I was so inspired was that, although the songs our friends were playing last night were written well and were enjoyable, they were so consistently about relationships ending badly that I felt double-dog-dared to write a heartfelt song that wasn’t about that. So I did.

Karsten and I both just went through the rigamarole to get our passports processed, and although we have several months before we’re planning to take our European vacation, we’ve heard enough horror stories about delayed applications that we decided to pay the premium for express processing. It was definitely pricey (I think it added something like $100 between the two of us) but it was worth not taking the risk that we would have had to skip the trip.

Anyway, long story short: Karsten’s passport arrived two days ago, just a week and a half after he sent in the application. I’m seriously impressed.

(Of course, mine has yet to show up. Watch it take, like, 10 weeks.)

Pyramid Achieved!!!,
originally uploaded by GingerGE.

Ginger captured a great series of pictures of some friends forming a human pyramid at our porch-warming party, concluding with this successful pyramid.

(L-R, bottom row: Allen, Jim, Derek; middle: Karsten, Joni; top: Amy)

What’s even more hilarious to me than the pile of humans is the pile of junk visible behind them. Yes, our various renovation projects are causing us to amass quite a heap of trash on our back deck. When we finally do our major renovation, we’ll dispose of it, but until then, we just look, well, trashy I guess.

Good thing the people in the photo are so gorgeous, they distract the viewer from the trash pile. Maybe we could hire them to hold this pose until we clear the trash pile out.

Tell me: what can you always count on to make you really laugh?

Karsten: Oh! I guess I thought that was gay.
Neighbor-friend: Like, homosexual gay?

The Fug Girls get self-deprecating about blogging:

Occasionally I change out of my pajamas in the morning and into a different pair of pajamas.

Thought some folks might enjoy that reference.

Just got back from a hot, sticky run in the hot, sticky heat, and in my delirium and shaky state, I managed to break the end of a plug off in the Treo’s headset jack. Great. I managed to get the end of the plug out of the Treo, but the headphone is shot now, unless anyone can reassure me that I can replace a plug on the end of a headset cord and have it sound OK.

Random ways my brain works,
originally uploaded by Kate O’.

Every time I see this package in the break room at work, I imagine a “Coffee Singles” dating service for people who love java.

him: I need to see a movie with lots of explosions and death.
me: Oh, did you call your dad?

I wonder about the organizers of Bonnaroo, and whether they intentionally scheduled the festival for the weekend of Father’s Day. You have to figure that with 80,000 some attendees, there are bound to be a whole lot of arguments about missing the family cookout or whatever.

As I am not attending Bonnaroo nor is my father living nor am I within proximity of any kind of family cookout, I have no such dilemma. My dilemma pertains more to simply getting through Father’s Day with the least amount of psychological trauma.

Here, in no particular order, are a few ideas that have occurred to me thus far:

• Stay in bed.
  Tempting. On the other hand, Karsten points out that it will be there all day. I can always keep it as a fall-back option.
• Go for a walk in a park or other natural space.
  Good possibility. It’s especially meaningful if there are a lot of birds around, since my dad used to love to watch the birds. But it might be too hot for this to be a pleasant experience, so I’ll have to wait and see how the day shapes up.
• Sit on the front steps and try to enjoy the beautiful day.
  Already getting a jump on this one. Sitting out here with my laptop and a pot of coffee. But again, in an hour or so, it will probably warm up to where this won’t be pleasant anymore.
• Do day-job work.
  Yeah, no.
• Write a song or three.
  Very probable. I did a little last night and was surprised at some of what came out.
• Clean, tidy, organize.
  I’ll see how I feel. This would be helpful to do, but I just don’t feel motivated to do it.
• Organize files on my computer.
  Same as above.
• Plan the porch party.
  I need to do this, and it might be fun. So maybe this will be a good stay-inside-while-it’s-hot activity.
• Go back to bed.
  I know, I already talked about bed. But it’s sounding like such an appealing option.

I do genuinely wish a happy Father’s Day to anyone out there to whom it applies. And I genuinely wish good alternatives for anyone who needs them.

The power just went out briefly at work. On a Friday at 4:20 PM, that means one thing: “early weekend!”

Well, it also meant that I ALMOST lost changes to some mockups I’d been working on. AGAIN. I made these same changes yesterday and then had to shut my force my laptop to shut down after it froze up, so I somehow lost those changes even though I’m sure I’d saved them - but the document was still open so it must have gotten horked.

And then I had just made the same changes again when the power went out. Luckily I’m on a laptop, so the battery was my backup power supply and I was able to save my work.

Maybe it’s a sign that I’m not supposed to be redesigning this page.

And maybe I should heed that early weekend call after all.

Yeah. Sounds good. I’m out. Have a great weekend everybody!

I’ve just seen the cutest bird ever. (I tried to get a picture, but it was all a blur.) That is all.

CeeElCee and girls,
originally uploaded by lesley s.

Doesn’t this totally look like I’m saying “mine, all mine”? After all, we’re talking about BadBad-mf’in-Ivy and Ginger-f’in’-SNAPs here, people - I don’t know why CeeElCee wasn’t fighting me for them. He must have known he was no match for my mad girl-claiming skillz.

Come to think of it, I may have tried to fight with CeeElCee one other time last night. I don’t remember why, but I kind of remember saying that he and my inner fag could take it outside, but CeeElCee wisely deferred, admitting he’d have his ass handed to him. I really don’t want to fight CeeElCee - I adore the guy! - but I’m thinking maybe he just brings out the scrappy in me.

I keep forgetting to mention that the guy who’s painting the tippy-top of the front porch (which I’m thrilled Karsten isn’t going to do himself) is the son of the guy who wrote (co-wrote?) “Lucille.”

Now, come on. How Nashvegas is that?

As luck would have it, I needed a feel-good moment today, and my coworker Mic just happened to send this link around. He took this video of a baby panda in the Atlanta zoo, and it is soooo cute, your eyes will sting with the unbearably fuzzy cuteness of it.

Courtesy of Digg, I present to you the top 10 worst lyrics ever, as rated by BBC 6 Music.

U2, Toto, Duran Duran, and Oasis all made the list.

But are there worse examples? I can’t think of any offhand that are truly awful, but one springs to mind because of how much it missed the mark. In Dwight Yoakam’s “Ain’t That Lonely Yet” he sings:

Once there was this spider in my bed
Got caught up in her web
Of love and lies
Spun her chains around my heart and soul…

Aah! It bugs me every damn time I hear it. Spun her chains? Since when do spiders spin chains? I mean, he could have gone for the extra internal rhyme with “bed/web” and done “Spun her threads around…” or even gone suggestive and used “Wrapped her legs around…” or probably dozens of other possibilities, but “chains”? Bad. So bad.

What lyrics bug you?

It cracks me the hell up that Barbie has an RV with a hot tub. Well, it simultaneously cracks me up and weirds me out a little. Well, a lot. OK, it simultaneously weirds me the hell out and makes me a little sad. Yeah. Cracks me up, weirds me out, and makes me sad. That’s about right.

Our front porch guy told a story about his 1st-grade daughter getting called an “asshole” on the playground by a little boy in her class. She told the teacher, who brought them together and talked to the boy about his use of language, and he promised not to use the word again.

A little later, they were back out playing, and sure enough, the little boy called the girl an “asshole” again. The girl went back to the teacher, who again gathered the two children up and started to admonish the boy, when the little girl contributed her advice for the boy: “You should really try not to be such a bitch.”

Would you be more inclined to translate “little disaster” as “kleine Katastophe” or “Katastrophchen,” since our intent is to use it as an affectionate term (as in “Unsere kleine Katastrophe” oder “Unser Katastrophchen”)? Or is there a better translation altogether? I wouldn’t want to miss out on getting the best humor value out of it.

I need to find a way to get one of these for Karsten.

I backed out of the backyard into the alley this morning — naturally, we’re parking out back these days — and was detoured when I got to the end of the alley by Morgan Park Place construction blocking my normal route out to I-65. So I didn’t drive by the front of our house, as I like to do each morning.

Ten minutes later, I got a call from Karsten asking if I’d driven by the front of the house this morning. Strange that he should ask, I thought. No, why?

Well, apparently, someone nicked seven boxwoods from our front yard garden.

Let me just repeat that. Some clever burglar determined it worth his or her while to yank boxwood shrubs out of our garden. Small ones! I mean, have you seen our garden? I’m definitely not claiming it’s the most splendorous garden in all of the South or anything, but it’s got some pretty nice plants in it. The underwhelming hedge we’ve been attempting to grow with a bunch of young boxwood plants is pretty much the least appealing thing in the yard. And this wasn’t just a random act of boredom — someone took the time to grab seven of these things.

Now of course after explaining all of that, I’ll admit that I’m now dreading the disappearance of nicer plants in the garden — they’re sure to be the next to go.

Karsten and I have been told by folks who’ve lived in the neighborhood for a while that plant thefts used to be more common when some vendors at the Farmer’s Market used to buy plants from folks off the street to resell them, no questions asked. We’ve heard that this practice has been discontinued, so I have no idea what the boxwood thief is planning to do with the young shrubs. By ripping them out of the ground as he or she apparently did, the thief probably shocked them enough that they won’t do well when replanted (especially since pretty much all vegetation is still in recovery mode from the Great Easter Freeze), so if the idea was to plant the boxwoods, it’s not likely to be a happy outcome. Maybe I’m mean-spirited, but somehow that makes me feel a little better.

Also worth noting is that, a few weeks ago, someone apparently stole a young but still pretty large tree from the front yard of the house next door (which is for sale — the missing tree was noticed about an hour before they were having an open house). Earlier that day, I’d seen a guy riding by on a bike carrying a shovel. Not to say that’s related, but it could be. Apparently it wouldn’t be the first plant theft in the neighborhood involving a getaway bike, believe it or not.

We were already planning to install a period-appropriate iron hoop-and-spear fence, but all this makes me want to get right on it. (We already have enough motivation because of the bird feeders that keep getting stolen.) Karsten’s calling the guy today to see when we could get started.

I think we should pitch in and get this for Brittney.