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How many Girl Scout cookies constitutes gluttony? What about the Thin Mints? Is 8 too many? I've only had 6. I want more though. Is that wrong? Then I don't want to be right. We need to try to save some so we can make chocolate ice cream and mix crumbled up Thin Mints. [Homer drool here] mmmmm, chocolately-minty ice cream.

Ah spring. These are the days of false hopes. You feel the sun on your arms with that little undercurrent of cool that swirls up. Yellow forsythia haven't yet exploded yet but there are daffodils and a few hardy tulips that the 3 year old wants to rip from their earthly perches. No, I say, leave them there, they'll last longer. Looks of extreme sadness as she's still holding onto the dainty floral just in case it should accidentally become removed from the rest of its stem. Just in case.

She waits a few moments before asking about this other one, right there, can I pick it? No, baby, let's wait til they're lots of them. But we'll have another chilly snap that will make my leaving windows open over night seem fool-hardy. And I'll be glad that I didn't rush us all off to the garden center to buy impatiens and petunias.

Our cat situation is reaching critical mass here at chez hayes.

I've had cats since a small black and gray tabby, that we named Tigger, waltzed into my mom's teller window. How old was I? 9 or 10? He lived to a very cranky and skinny 18 years old. Later, in my first big girl apartment, I found a lovely little creamy Siamese mix kitty. Cashmere, I called her. She was a sweet little nuisance. Unlike Tigger, Cashmere didn't have much longevity, dying from a kidney condition. Even her follow-up, Cosmo, a lovely 6-toed calico, didn't make it to 8 years. I think a friend unkindly pointed out that cats seemed to expire like dairy products under my care. Nice. Like I didn't already feel horrible about losing my companion. Cosmo was pretty awesome, those extra toes were fascinating, except when they were dipping into my glasses of water.

Sancho, our black cat, was a stray my brother adopted when he was in school and when he was graduating and moving away, it seemed best for the kitty to come stay with me. He is a crotchety old man these days. I've been giving him insulin shots twice a day to treat his diabetes for over a year now, but recently he's started urinating on things again. In nice san serif fonts it seems like not much of a big deal but having a pet that pisses on your belongings is unbelievably annoying. Frankly, it pisses me off, this pissing. If I can smell it HERE there are probably some places I haven't found yet. So I'll up the insulin. The other uncomfortable thing to bring up is the expense; $135 for insulin and needles every two months, $32 a day cat sitting when we go out of town. See, one of the reasons people get cats is so they can leave for a week and have a neighbor stop in every day or so to throw some kibble in a bowl. We could've paid for the cats to fly out to Seattle in a passenger seat for that kinda cash!

There's also the horrendous, screeching cat-brawls that happen several times a day. The instigator of these brawls is Meep, the companion we adopted for sancho. Is this irony? The fact that the cat we got to be friends with Sancho instead routinely attacks him? There's sancho, trying to mind his old business and Meep is either creeping up behind him to pounce suddenly, or is just hovering in his personal zone enough to raise his hackles. Or if I should accidentally cause Sancho to hiss, which is ridiculously easy these days, meep takes that as a sign to attack.

So, you want a cat? Free!

Peanut butter sticks to the roof of my mouth, cementing the bread there like ceiling tiles. It’s sucking the moisture out of my mouth and making it a vast dry wasteland of sticky. Peanut butter was invented by pygmy P.I.s looking to find new ways of catching field mice.

It’s barely light outside and the chirping outside is just warming up with the sun. Richard and I are slumbering in a tangle of quilts and pillows. I wake, most mornings, to a quietly voiced “hi mama” or a touch to my elbow or back. Other times she crawls onto the foot of our bed but she is so active in her not-waking us up, that I’m not sleeping with all the thrashing and tossing of her two elephants.

There are many mornings when just the soft padding of a little girl into the bathroom and into our room wakes me from my dreams. I can hear the soft sounds as she lays on the rug to let us wake up a bit. I wonder what she’s thinking about. Cartoons? Breakfast? Going to daycare?

I stumble out of bed and we go downstairs to eggos, coffee and cartoons. And sometimes, if I’m lucky, she crawls into my lap with her bed head and pajamas, her knees and elbows pulled in and her head tucked under my chin. Sweetness until we dash off in flurry of jackets and bags to the day.

[I'm feeling vulnerable, hold me....] 

Today is one great big public service announcement, or at least several smaller ones. And that’s just a fancy way of saying that I have nothing but random snippets to share.

I know this is probably a very obvious observation but I’m realizing that self-absorbed people are, by nature, unable to be self-aware. They’re so busy thinking how important their issues and thoughts are they can’t be bothered to realize their impact on others. Hence the too loud voice, the inability to hear himself say “like like like like”. It’s driving me crazy. How do you kindly say “Dude. You talk like an idiot” without insulting someone. Oh. I stopped being general and got a little specific didn’t I? Least I’m not using any names....

I have some advice for TV producers too. Hey, Studio 60, I don’t CARE if those two couples get together. I don’t even hardly care what the characters names are any more. BLECK. What drew me to the show was the tension as they put a comedy show together each week but now you’re spending so much kissy kissy/ are they/aren’t they energy you’re making my inner 17 year old boy (who’s raring for some action) ready to start flinging knives at the furniture. Get your head out of the book o’ romance and get to making funny!

And Lost? Man, I loved you guys, and you can tell the writers came running smack dab into that “crap, what are we going to do if we can’t come to a logical conclusion or ending to this show? I guess we’ll, uh..., write about... Uh. JACK’S TATTOOS! Yeah! We’ll write about that.” Do YOU give a rat’s ass about Jack’s tattoos? It’s so very clear that after the fall shows ran, the producers figured out they better negotiate an end date so this whole train can head in the right direction instead of sending each car off into it’s own story line (can you say “Hurley’s Vanagon?).

And while I’m handing out advice and info, I think it needs to be said: women do not wear thongs for their own edification. Oh sure, some will say “I LOVE wearing thongs, I feel sexy” you are lying like a thong-wearing dog. You are too shallow to admit, even to yourself, that you wear them for the mens of the world. And there’s nothing wrong with that, just stop lying about it. You make us underpants-wearing girls look bad, or worse, LAZY. I’m not lazy, I just don’t like underwear up my butt.

As you were.

Do you read much? I read most nights before I pass out at 10:30. I read a lot of crappy vampire books and really sad childhood memoir books and then I’ll grab me some of them thar lit-ur-a-tur, too. My current book is of the lit-ur-a-tur variety. And it’s so tasty and divine I can barely stand it. I’ve read Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses” and thought, alright, he’s a writer of westerns, albeit spare and beautiful, perfectly phrased westerns. But that would be putting him into a tiny little pocket in which he does not deserve to be.

You’ve really got to check out “The Road”. I picked it up after a recommendation by my OTHER steady source of lit-ur-a-tur, Entertainment Weekly (oh how I love your slim little booklets that slide through my mail slot like the regular drip drip drip of a morphine line!). I’m only 50 pages into it and I just marvel at this guy’s command of the language. Each line has so much subtext and subtlety. And it’s not like he’s all impressed with his command of vocabulary, because he doesn’t get all jiggy on the vohizzle or anything.

This story, you slowly learn, is set after an apocalyptic event of some sort, but he doesn’t say it all bold and scary or wordily like Stephen King might. This is SO not a disaster or sci-fi post-apocalypse book. He only slowly unfurls the hints and allusions to the fact that some really bad shit went down. There is a father and son who are traveling by foot, going south, and their tender relationship is so carefully drawn on the page, that I cared immensely about them from the start. I hope nothing bad happens to them. That would totally bum me out.

I guess I should finish the book before reviewing it, but really it’s so stellar this soon into the thing, that I can’t help raving! Read any good books lately? This one surely won’t last forever! Tell me in the comments!

Woo! I'm in the midst of that quasi time change limbo where I'm constantly calculating how much sleep I'm losing or gaining! But happy knowing there will be LIGHT after I get home tonight! On a musical note, check out this Basement Jaxx song. I needed some peppy tunes to get my sluggish blood moving and this one does it for me! What's your favorite "get me moving" song? leave a name or link in the comments! Come on! I need the pep, baby!

Pop culture, gotta love it. I was thinking about the TV shows I watched when I was a kid and there are two that no one seems to remember except me. It's enough to give someone a complex. But then I found their opening themes on youtube! Remember these?

The Banana Splits

Lidsville

Shocking what used to pass for kiddy entertainment! And please! Tell me you remember these shows? Humor an old gal?

Dark quiet night. My eyes pop open and peer at the too-bright Hello Kitty alarm clock to see what the hell time it is. 3:37? AM? For the last 3 nights my eyes have popped open at 3:37. Now I hear the culprit wailing across the edges of the darkness, a train. I imagine Tom or John or Waylon laying on the horn with a relish seldom seen in traindom. Perhaps they’re safety fetishists, if such a thing exists. You should see them put on a seat belt! It’s orgasmic! Or maybe they’re trying to stay awake at this deep, dark, dead of night. Perhaps they take perverse joy out of knowing that somewhere they’re disturbing someone’s sleep. See that devilish grin creeping up their face? Distorted already by the wad of chaw they have pinched in between their cheek and gum? He contemplatively spits into his tobacco-juice-filled soda can, and hits the horn again for good measure. Maybe his ex-wife even lives on this route. Dammit. Back to grumpy sleep.