Maybe it’s the heat.

Maybe it’s the humidity.

Maybe it’s just this.

These are not my dishes. The sink was empty, I swear, five minutes ago when I unloaded the dishwasher.

I don’t know what it is but I have been rethinking this whole motherhood thing.

When I got myself into this mess I really thought it was going to be a lot of fun, filled with Kodak moments and sitting around by the fireplace while the kids played at my feet.

Really, I did. I was that stupid.

I don’t even have a fireplace.

I don’t want to be a mother anymore.

There I said it. And for the moment I don’t regret it. Not one little bit.

The summer is too long. It should have ended last week.

Everyone needs to get the hell out of my house and leave me alone.

I haven’t been able to write anything even close to halfway decent because every five minutes someone wants my attention. I don’t even know what they want anymore, I stopped listening, and caring, a few weeks ago.

If I have to tell a certain someone to put the damn cat down one more time my head is going to explode.

I don’t care what she said and I don’t want to hear anyone telling on anyone else.

DO NOT start a sentence with Can I…? because the answer will be no.

If you want me to buy you something, go get a job, there are plenty of sweat shops where a seven year old can work.

Or, let me work so I can earn some so I can buy another stupid Webkinz that gets forgotten after three minutes.

I have had to hide in the garage to carry on a phone conversation for more than 30 seconds, and they still find me!

Did I mention I work from home? I know I have, I know I say it all day long.

Mom has to work. I actually say this in the third person, like it makes a difference and that Mom might be someone more important than me. Someone worthy of having a phone conversation without a bazillion different interruptions and PUT DOWN THE DAMN CAT NOW!s.

Of course, it might not just be motherhood. It might also be this.

This is what I stumbled over getting out of the shower this morning.  Apparently it started to thunder while I was taking a shower.

A shower is not a sure thing for me. If I don’t get in the shower before 9 am it isn’t going to happen and God help anyone who knocks on my door or wants to meet with me to discuss business.

If I’m not telling someone to put the cat down I am telling the scaredy dog that he needs to stop following me.  And that doesn’t mean to hide under my desk getting tangled in the keyboard and mouse cords. Even though that is exactly what it means to him

Why won’t anyone listen to me?

And who the hell messed with my camera putting on some high resolution bullshit so everything looks just wrong?

I can’t even find the right words anymore.

This is what I have to deal with, and I am not dealing very well.

I need a stiff drink and new pair of completely impractical shoes.

Only 43,232 minutes (give or take a few) until school starts.

As much of the country has, we have been getting rained on quite a bit. We’ve also had a fair amount of humidity. And it really sucks.

Apparently it sucks much worse for my cat.

That is not my cat but I, the woman who blogs about just about anything, didn’t bother to take a picture.

Let me explain.

This past weekend it was tropical. Yucky, sticky, unbearable humidity. The kind where half an hour after you take a shower you are asking yourself if you forgot to put on deodorant.

And then we had tornadoes.

With lots and lots of lightening.

Stanley, the bassador, hates thunderstorms. He hides under my desk and gets tangled in all the cords. We manage to cope.

Dini, the cat, never seemed to care about thunderstorms, loud noises or little girls who hug her and squeeze her and call her ‘George’. Dini always went with the flow of things. ‘Chillaxin’ could have been her middle name if it wasn’t already ‘shut up’.

Not this weekend. Something happened, I don’t know what it was, but the cat was acting kinda funny.

I walked into the kitchen to see her sitting by the back door. A place she spends a lot of time, usually at 2am, because she likes to go in and out of the house.

She was sitting there all normal except she was fluffy. Really fluffy. Her hackles were raised but so was the rest of her hair. She looked just like she would had she taken a spin in the dryer.

I really wish I had taken a picture.

Instead I called my son up from his room to take a look at the cat. We both stood there and laughed at the cat who got a little irritated with us and walked into the living room.

She sat in the middle of the living room, fluffy, and stared at the floor. She looked as if she was sleeping, and she could have been. She has been known to fall asleep sitting up.

I tried to pet her hair down but it just kept popping back up.

I was a little worried about her because this had never happened before, at least to my knowledge. For all I knew the cat got fluffy each day but I just missed it.

For a moment I thought about calling her vet but realized it was Saturday night and I would have to call the emergency clinic to talk to anyone.

And really what was I going to say?

“Hi, my cat’s all fluffy, is that normal?”

She wasn’t doing anything else strange, she wasn’t breathing heavy or fast, she was just really fluffy.

Eventually the hair raising ended and all was fine. The dog was still wedged under my desk but there was nothing I could do about that. He would come out when the sirens stopped blaring.

Yesterday I was still wondering about the fluffy cat thing. I thought about Googling it but I have been watching too much of the OCD Project and have started to pick up their phobias, one of which is if you Google something it becomes true. Which doesn’t really work here because the cat had already been fluffy but for some reason I was apprehensive about asking Google.

So I asked a few friends who laughed their asses off at me.

And then they suggested, no, they actually goaded me, to call my vet.

Which I did.

Me: Hi, um, my cat was really fluffy the other night and I just wondered if that is something I should be worried about. She isn’t fluffy anymore, it went away.

Vet nurse lady: Is this a joke? Your cat was fluffy?

Me: No, it’s not a joke, she was really fluffy, like she had just gotten out of the dryer.

Vet nurse lady: Was she in the dryer?

Me: Of course not.

I explained the whole fluffy cat thing just like I did for you guys

Vet nurse lady: I don’t know why your cat was fluffy but I am going to have the doctor give you a call.

Now I felt stupid. This vet nurse lady was going to tell the doctor about my fluffy cat and have her call me. Obviously if the vet nurse lady had never encountered this problem before then the doctor wasn’t likely to know about it either. It was at this point I decided the cat had been fucking with me.

A few minutes later the vet called back, unfortunately the vet nurse lady hadn’t explained the fluff and I had to explain all over again. Or maybe she had and the vet just wanted to hear me say it. I don’t know but she too was laughing.

Vet: Did you take a picture?

Me: No, I was too busy laughing at the cat to think of taking a picture.

Vet: That’s too bad, that would have made a great picture. You could have sent it to those LOLCats people.

Me: So what’s wrong with her?

Vet: I don’t know.If she starts acting strange or displays other odd behavior you can bring her in. If she gets fluffy again be sure to take a picture.

This vet does not know I blog.

So that was it. I have no answer, I don’t know why the cat was fluffy and worse, I don’t know how to make her do it again so I can take a picture.

As promised, here are the dead things.

These are just some of the things the cat leaves for me each morning. Thankfully she didn’t decapitate them like she normally does. When she does that she leaves the eyeballs on the back door welcome mat. I don’t know what she does with the heads.

I think these might be moles but I’m not really sure. I didn’t poke them with a stick to try to turn them over to get a better look. They are a little bigger than a mouse and as you can see they don’t have long tails.

*update*

Shortly after posting this I noticed another dead thing in the yard. It’s been decapitated but the eyeballs are still attached as you can clearly see. I think it’s a bunny, sorry Katherine.

I’m not sure if this belongs to the bunny or is from a bird, it looks as if there are feathers attached. You can biggify if you want to take a closer look.

For the last week my neighbors have been lighting off fireworks. Not a ton but enough to scare the shit out of my dog making him hide under my desk.

Stanley is a beast of a dog even if he has very short, stubby legs. He takes up a lot of room and there are a lot of cables and cords under there. Cables and cords which he gets tangled in because he is a tard and scared.

I understand that people are excited about lighting things on fire and watching them go BOOM. But for the love of all things I NEED TO GET SOME FLIPPING WORK DONE please knock it the fuck off!

Yesterday, Stanley tried to wedge himself between the tower and my desk, he didn’t fit because there is only about two inches between the two. He settled for squishing himself up to the tower (because I refused to let him under the desk) and ended up turning off the computer because he was pressed against the power button. Thank God for auto save but I still had to reboot, which takes what seems like hours.

I’ve been tripping over the damn dog for over a week and now he has decided that he must go to the bathroom with me. My bathroom is tiny, there is not room for a person and a dog in there. He doesn’t care. He is willing himself to be small so he can fit into little spaces, presumably so the fireworks monster can’t find him.

I love my country, I love my dog, but I need to get some work done so if you could all please go blow your stash off somewhere else, like in the next state, I would sincerely appreciate it

I hate my cat. I am not a cat person, apologies to all of you who are but I have a cat for one reason only. To kill the bugs and little rodents around my house. Actually I don’t have mice in my house anymore unless the damn cat brings one in but when we lived at our other house she was a veritable mouse and bat killer.

The old house had always had a problem with mice. Before I got the cat I tried every humane way to get rid of the little beasties. I used this plastic no kill tube like thing that I was supposed to load with peanut butter. The mouse could get in but not back out. I don’t remember how he was supposed to be released into the wild (only to find his way back into the house) but it didn’t work. I also tried these little plates of glue with some birdseed stuck to it. This was not a no kill way since the mouse was supposed to get stuck and unless someone peeled it off it would starve to death and die. The directions said to just toss it out when it was full. Sort of like fly paper for mice I guess. These caught the dog but no mice. From there I resorted to mouse traps. These worked better except their little guts would be splattered all over the floor. I also caught my son’s fingers and the dog’s nose too many times to count. I did not want to resort to D Con since I had a toddler running around.

On Christmas, my neighbor sent me an email with a picture of 4 or 5 little kittens in it. Her friend had some kittens and they needed a home. Why not? So the cat was delivered and she proved to be a wise investment, of course she was free. She killed anything and everything that moved or thought about moving. She scared the hell out of the dog and established her reign over him in the first few hours of her arrival.

She was good at what she does best. She is a killer. Occasionally we would get a bat and she would climb onto the book case or the top of the door and throw herself in the air as it circled. She’d get the little fucker ever time. The cat was allowed to stay.

We moved a year ago and there is no mouse problem here. That doesn’t stop the cat however. If she needs mice or moles she finds them in the outside world and brings them back in the house. Or at least she tries to.

The cat is an outdoor cat in the spring, summer and fall. It isn’t until it gets to the freezing mark where she no longer wants to go out all night. My cat is like my ex, she comes in, she eats and she leaves, maybe, if she feels like it, she will stick around long enough to get a few tummy rubs. I did not want an outdoor cat but she had other ideas.

Which brings me to last night. It was warm yesterday, 40ish, and then the temperature dropped to below zero. The cat knew it was cold but she had been stuck in the house for days and needed to get out. She sleeps all day and night and when she isn’t she is feeding so I can imagine she feels a desire to move a bit. At 2am this morning, -10 degrees with a windchill of at least -20 she decided it was time to go out. She starts by meowing by the door until someone lets her out. When that doesn’t work she comes into my room and meows, loudly. Often she is just hungry but I make sure her bowl is filled before I go to bed for this reason. The problem is she doesn’t believe me and wants me to go downstairs and check out her food bowl with her. If I don’t get up she will continue to meow, loudly.

I go downstairs with her, muttering obscenities about her the whole way and telling her that she has food and doesn’t need me to go with her, trust me you silly cat there is food. We get down stairs and there is indeed food. Of course food isn’t what she wants. She runs through my son’s bedroom and climbs up to his window and meows more. My son is dead to the world. He is covered but so many blankets that I’m not even sure he is there. He could have snuck out of the house and I wouldn’t have known it. So I figure I will do what any good mother would do and I shut the cat in my son’s room and go back to bed. He sleeps soundly, if he is really there, so he won’t notice the cat meowing, loudly, to get out.

My bedroom it turns out is located directly above my son’s room and even if he can’t hear the cat I still can. I put a pillow over my head and try to go back to sleep. The meowing only gets louder and when I peer out from under my pillow I see the cat is sitting on my bedside table and is about to knock over my water glass to get my attention. Obviously my son is home.

Fuck! Stupid cat. I get up, grab the damn cat and throw her outside. Take that you evil being! I know I won’t get to sleep anytime soon. I know this because even though we have been playing this game for 45 minutes she is outside and will want to come in in about 5 minutes. I wait by the door.

She appears at the door, meows, loudly, and I let her back in. She looks at me like I am a horrible human for letting her go out in that bitter cold.

She has been curled up on the couch in my office ever since. Every time I walk by her I throw wadded up pieces of paper at her nose. She wakes long enough to give me the evil eye and goes right back to sleep.

My daughter has been begging me to post about her beloved Stanley. Stanley is a Bassador which is a mix of Basset Hound and Labrador Retriever. There are actually websites devoted to this kind of dog.

Stanley, who I usually refer to as the dumb dog, came from the Humane Society. We adopted him shortly after ex #2 left taking the even dumber dog with him. I love the dumber dog and he is always welcome here but there is something slightly off about him and he is constantly spinning. Having a very large dog spinning in the house with an infant was too much and ex #2 was forced to bring him with him. Dumber dog and dumb dog get along very well for the most part. We adopted Stanley because my son, who was ten at the time, was losing not only his step dad but also his dog. He got royally shafted and my father decided to get him another dog. He brought him to the pound and there was Stanley. Stanley was the only puppy in the whole puppy wing. According to the volunteers at the humane society he was part of a litter of twelve puppies but all of them had been adopted. They knew his mom was a Basset Hound and guessed his dad was a lab.

Stanley was one of the funniest looking puppies I had ever seen. I actually tried to talk my son out of this dog because he was so odd looking. My son fell in love with him the moment he saw him and that was the end of the discussion. We brought Stanley home, he had already been named after my parents’ Basset, the one with whom my brother would bay with every time an ambulance or fire truck drove by, and carried him upstairs. Stanley kept tripping over his ears since his legs were too short and his ears were too long for a puppy.

Of course all of his care fell to me. Son was supposed to take care of things like feeding and walking the dog but we all know how that goes. While he was away at school the bassador hung out with me and daughter. Daughter was the procurer of food and the dog decided that she was the one to latch onto.

Something happened when I wasn’t really paying attention. Daughter developed a relationship with the dog that today is a wonder. She talks about him all the time. She even married him a few years ago. I actually have wedding pictures. She thinks about him morning, noon and night. She draws pictures of him all the time. She talks about him to her classmates and teachers and when she writes stories they are always about Stanley. She dresses him up in her clothes and he lets her. Often I will walk into a room with the dog dressed as a princess or fairy or what ever other character he is playing, daughter will be on some other adventure but will have forgotten to remove the costume from the dog. He just sits there and waits for someone, anyone to take the silly clothing off of him.

I once read that a way to test the intelligence of a dog is to place a cloth or towel over his head, the longer it takes for the dog to shake it off the less intelligent he is. If this is truly an intelligence test for dogs than Stanley fails miserably. He will wait until someone takes if off of him, in fact placing a towel over his head seems to immobilize him.

Stanley is a sweet dog, funny looking but sweet.

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