poor molly

WTF

Molly the Cat’s fur on her back has started to thin. It’s been happening for the last few days. I looked up what it could be and finally settled on stress. I assumed it was because she is frightened of the big blue exercise ball in the living room. Molly, who is not scared of anything and whose main pleasure in life is to hover over and taunt poor big cat Miles, is disarmed by a big inflated piece of plastic. Granted, the ball is about ten times her size. If that thing rolls around, she’s under the bed in no time.

So, I thought it was stress. I’d read in one of my many books about cats, with their frightening photos of cat diseases, that emotional stress can cause compulsive over-grooming, which causes baldness, or that it could be the affects of changing hormones. I was still worried, but there didn’t seem to be anything else that would cause the alopecia.

To my dismay I began to notice this morning that Molly was scratching herself more than usual, which can only mean one thing. Fleas.

Sure enough, when I lifted up her belly to examine it, I saw a flea flitter across her soft, white fur.

Damn! Fleas!

Where the hell did she get fleas? The poor girl isn’t allowed outside, so the fleas must have come in to get her. Luckily I had a tube of Advantage in stock, so I quickly administered it. Just to be safe, I checked Miles and saw a flea running across his tummy.

Damn! Fleas!

I ran out of medicine, so I just ordered a new batch.

The presence of fleas just makes me feel so powerless. I have to live with the fact that my cats are always going to be vulnerable, no matter how much I try to keep them safe.

Advantage is the best medicine on the market for fleas, so I know she’ll be happy in no time, and as soon as the new medicine comes, so will Miles. He hasn’t even started scratching, so I’m happy about that. I just hate that nagging feeling that I’ve failed in some way. That I’m a bad parent.

joy to the world

I nearly bought Christmas decorations at the Walgreens in Holyoke last night while on an errand to pick up some envelopes.

I came so close to buying an impossibly precious stuffed santa and snowman doorhanger until my partner in crime asked me (over the phone) if it was cute enough to buy or only just cute enough to shoplift.

It was, alas, only cute enough to shoplift so I bought my pack of envelopes and left the store.

Aren’t you relieved that we don’t shoplift?

techie

I went through a very cool video production training over the weekend, which has now turned me into a techie in the worst way possible. It’s so bad that when I picked up a new coffee maker at the mall last night (my other one pooped out on Saturday morning) I walked through Best Buy and proceeded to make the employee attending to the video cameras seem really dumb by asking questions he couldn’t answer. If he has any brains in him, he’ll read up on the product he’s supposed to be selling. So it’s possible that in the long run I have helped him perform his job better.

Part of me does this kind of stuff because I am a woman and I think it catches electronics salespeople, especially men, off guard who may look at me and think I wouldn’t know what I was talking about. I admit to a big chip on my shoulder about that, with this sport being the way to satisfy it.

And it’s not like I know tons of stuff, which is all the more reason to berate these people for not knowing the basics of their products. See? I am helping.

Oh and look at my coffeemaker! It’s so cute (and I got it way cheaper at Target).

why do they call it a martini anyway?

So I went to the martini party, and it was quite fun. The marketing dude at a certain local weekly paper is really good at throwing these things. They are also behind the crazy art parties at Open Square. We got appetizer on top of appetizer and two martinis with our entry tickets. One was a contest-winning drink, the other was any martini of our choice. I chose a latte martini, which is not even really a martini. But that’s fine by me. I can’t really handle real martinis.

The winning martini, a graceful ginger-lemon concoction employing fresh shaved ginger, was invented by someone who is prominent in the music scene. We were floored when they called out her name.

Before I got there I kept trying to figure out who in the world goes to these kinds of parties? As it turns out, some people got really decked out. One table of beautiful people featured a young woman who looked kind of like Penelope Cruz with a bob haircut and the guy next to her broke out his tux. A tux!

I decided on a black dress with a very plunging neckline. If I hadn’t caught myself I may have actually gone out in public, but my modesty got the better of me and I slipped on a camisole underneath it. Seriously, I could have knocked someone over with the cleavage.

As it turns out, several other women at the party had the same Bond Girl Means Show Cleavage idea. I would not have been the only one knocking people over with my breasts. My partner in crime wore a black shirt and charcoal gray pants. Sort of if a casual George Clooney decided to star in a James Bond movie.

Hey. That’s a very good idea.

what does james bond wear?

I’m going to this tonight.

For some reason they want you to dress up like you are from a James Bond movie, which I suppose is the essence of the name of the winning drink: The Killer Martini.

What does James Bond wear? Besides a tuxedo.

And a Bond girl (besides a bathing suit)?

I was always partial to the Roger Moore era, although in hindsight I think Sean Connery’s 007 was much more handsome. As far as Bond Girls go, nobody does it better than Barbara Bach (although I want to know who is to blame for that movie Caveman).

Loss

Tuesday will not go down in the books as a good day. Two major losses, one less significant, one much more brutal and devastating, but both taken on their own have shaken the core of my friends right now. The most over-arching loss leads me to a question: How do you comfort a friend who has lost a parent? Does she want you to cry with her? Would she like you to help her somehow dull the pain, at least for now?

After a long night at work, sitting in front of a computer, I immediately came home to this blog, seeking an answer to these questions.

The other loss? A friend who was unsuccessful in tonight’s election. So important, yet so not as significant as another loss that happened on the same day. But still, how to cope with both?

It feels like these losses are in two totally different boxes that got delivered on the same day.

a look at search results

Here are some recent searches that landed people at my blog:

huge manatee

oh the huge manatee

Maddy Morgan

tschotchkes

Oh The Huge Manatees

unemployment rate Holyoke MA 2005

lisa on yoga zone

crusty clown real name

why do italian grandmothers wear black clothing?

That last one is a personal favorite.

randumbs

- These class action lawsuits, not so much for the class action but for the money in lawyer’s pocket action.

- I must have been too focused on the mayor of Chicopee, because I missed this story about riots in Paris.