Nice Kitty...

My friend Milah says that Louis scares her.  Louis, my sweet little tabby, scary?  Just because he appears in the basement out of nowhere and seems to be able to walk through closed doors?  Look at that widdle kitty all snuggled up with giant Christopher.   He's not a scary cat.

Now this—this is a scary cat:

In this photo, Marie is expressing her extreme displeasure about my running the sweeper while she's trying to nap.  I have as little as possible to do with this cat.  She terrifies me.  Last summer, she bit me in the hand because a June-bug landed on her head while we were lounging on the front porch.  She believes, apparently, that I am directly responsible for the June-bug touching her—after all, it was my shoddy construction of the screened porch that allowed a gap large enough for a June-bug to pass through.  So she bit me.  And I took antibiotics for a week.  You may have noticed in the photos of the kitchen that there's no flap on the cat door.  That's because Marie didn't like it touching her when she went through it, so I took it off.  It was either remove it or listen to her yowling and attacking the cat door while I'm trying to sleep.  Marie lives in the box springs of my bed surrounded by her collection of ponytail holders, bottle caps, pennies, and bread-wrapper ties and comes out only to eat, visit the litterbox, and terrorize the other cats and me.  I discovered her lair when I up-ended the box springs to move it to another room and heard her treasures clattering down.  Then I saw the gigantic hole she ripped in the fabric of the box springs.  I would duct-tape it shut, but I'm afraid she'll kill me.  I have not yet put up the Christmas trees because she's claimed one of them as her territory.  She tore open the box and crawled in amongst the branches.  When I lifted the lid of the box, her eyes glinted at me and she hissed.  She was curled up in there like a rattlesnake.  I shut the box.  Maybe I don't really need a Christmas tree in the dining room.  Once, she tempted my neighbor Carl into reaching out to pet her. "Oh, what a pretty cat," he said. Marie doubled in size like a puffer-fish and ran sideways on three legs while trying to claw Carl with one of her front paws.  "That is not a nice cat," Carl remarked.  No, that is not a nice cat.  Not at all.

Braving the Basement

I did it.  I braved the basement.  For most people, that's not a big deal.  But at my house, it requires a little prior planning and some nerve-steeling.  After all, the basement is the scene of the weirdness that happened this spring.  I haven't been down there since that happened.  Go ahead, click on that link, read that post, and then tell me you'd honestly spend a lot of time down there! 

So, once I get up the nerve to go down there, then I have to wrangle the three cats into the bathroom (the only room in the house with a door that shuts tightly), move my laundry room table to the other side of the room, and roll up the area rug that covers the trap door.  Then I have to yank the trap door up, catch the ring on it with the hook in the wall, and hope it doesn't slam shut and imprison me down there.  After all that, then I have to drag four boxes of Christmas decorations up the basement steps.  Make that five boxes—I forgot I bought another Christmas tree at one of the after-Christmas gigantic sales last year. 

And the weird basement did not disappoint.  After I dragged everything up the steps, I went downstairs one more time to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything.  "Meow," Louis said from on top one of the furnace ducts.  "You're supposed to be locked in the bathroom!" I said as I pulled him off there and carried him upstairs.  "How did you get the door open?"  When we walked around the corner, I heard the other two cats scrabbling to get out of the bathroom.  The door was still closed.  Hmmmm....

Cain't Keep A Man

This weekend has been...interesting.  A little unsettling.  Frustrating, even.  I was temporarily knocked for a loop, but now that I'm myself again I'll tell y'all all about it. 

As the more astute among you might've guessed from the title of the post, I find myself single again.  I truly have no idea why.  For the past several days he hasn't returned my phone calls or texts.  Maybe he didn't like the lasagna, cause that's the last time I saw him.  Since he's completely silent on the issue, I'm left to guess as to what went wrong.  That irritates and frustrates me no end.  Have the common decency to call me and say something like "It's just not working out" or "I met someone else" or any one of a hundred stock phrases that folks call on in this situation.  If it's one thing I can't stand, it's a man with no spine.

But what irritates and frustrates me even more than that is the attitude of some of my family.  I told one of my cousins, who is like a brother to me, what happened.  He said, "Face it, honey, you just cain't keep a man."  This is a little Southern-attitude town we live in, and my family tends to have a very traditional view of gender roles.  To say that a woman "cain't" keep a man can cover a lot of ground (she's most usually either a bad cook or a bad housekeeper) but it always, always means she has some glaring character flaw and it's all her fault that the relationship went sour.  A woman who can't keep a man is destined to be single forever, and in my family a single woman over the age of about 30 is viewed with equal parts suspicion and pity.  This I have known for years, so I should've known better than to go ranting to my mom about the situation.  "Well when you run into [Reed] in the future, I want you to be nice to him," she said. Why should I be nice to someone who can't give me a five-minute polite brush-off?  Because he's from a good family?  Because women are supposed to know their place?  Because in my family, but for a few notable exceptions, women put up with all manner of bad behavior just to stay married and eat crow once a week for supper?  Well, I'm sorry, but hell no.

Looking back on my short relationship with Reed I can recall several things that irritated him:  that my hands have calluses and a couple of scars, that I'm quick to speak my mind, that the sound of a fire engine's siren is usually followed my the sound of my phone ringing and one of the guys telling me what happened, that I have more tools than he does and am more handy, that most days I don't wear makeup, that I sleep til noon more often than not...  But all those things are who I am.  I can't change that—and more importantly, I don't want to.  It's my life and I love it.  I am blessed with a beautiful house and the ability to work on it myself, an unconventional job that I really like, a quick mind, and friends who love me just the way I am.  Someday maybe I'll find that one guy who loves me just the way I am.  Or maybe that's not what God has in store for me.  Either way, I'm still me.  Faults and talents and all, I'm still me.  And if being true to myself means that I can't keep a man, then I'm alright with that.