Okay I apologize in advance but this will be very RANTY. Normally I sit down and try to compose my thoughts before I post, but today I cannot.

Because OMGWTF GUYS GUYS OMFG EARWIG.

Now normally I pride myself on not getting skeeved out by many things. I like mice and snakes and rats and other things that normally make women go EEK.

(Okay, well there’s fish in their natural habitat. But dude. Come on. That makes perfect sense.)

I had gone out to bring in That Baby’s swim stuff off the clothesline. I came in and put it and the handful of clothes pegs down on the kitchen table.

It was then I felt something tickle my hand.

I don’t normally scream like a girl about stuff, but OMFG THERE WAS AN EARWIG CRAWLING ON MY HAND.

And I screamed like a girl.

There is very little on this earth as DISGUSTING as earwigs. Well, earwigs and centipedes. SHUDDER. And there are so many in the backyard right now it is horrible. One must have come in on the laundry.

I screeched and flailed and flapped my hands about like a hysterical bird, and the thing went flinging off. Stinkerbelle was laughing hysterically and I was trying not to retch as my skin crawled in twenty-seven different directions, so doG only knew where the damn thing landed.

It was somewhere in the kitchen, there where I was standing.

I looked all over the place, but not too hard. I didn’t want to lift something on the table or whatever only to get a sneak attack from Disgustobug.

I was so skeeved out. I wanted to vomit.

Fortunately or not, we have white tile floors, and after a bit of looking about I FOUND IT. It was cowering under the kick of our island, hopefully stunned and dying from the impact of my flailing and the velocity with which it smacked into the floor.

But it didn’t die. It MOVED.

Now I own three cats. Used to be four. So what else are cats good for, except bug hunting? I thought to myself “How I wish Bubby were here! She’d get rid of the damn thing for me.” Bubby was the CHAMP of bug hunters. Didn’t matter where they were in the house or where she was, I just had to call out, “BUBBY!!! Come get the UGLY BUG!” and she would be ON THE CASE.

But Bubby is not here. Cinnamon is afraid of individual air molecules. Lucy is the cat version of Cosmo Kramer, or maybe that squirrel from the Ice Age movies.

So I called Duncan.

And I am here to tell you right now, for the record, that OMG DUNCAN IS SO USELESS.

I SHOWED him where the earwig was. I pretty near PUSHED HIS DAMN HEAD NOSE TO NOSE with the ugly bug.

And, thanks to the Stupidest Cat in the Universe, who just SAT AND WATCHED it, I think it’s now taken refuge under the island.

I mean, as it crawled around looking for a hiding spot, the thing practically CRAWLED UP HIS BUTT.

And he was all “BUH??”

****SMACK****

So now, I sit outside watching That Baby in her pool, hiding from the Earwig Of Doom in my kitchen. I am still experiencing full body shivers of disgust and creepitude.

The Earwig of Disgustingosity and Vileness is RAMPAGING WILLY NILLY AROUND MY KITCHEN.

Duncan likely went off and fell asleep somewhere, completely unaware of anything around him.

I miss Opus.

Thank doG BDH is coming home early today.

It is hard, watching someone get old. Watching as even the simplest movements get harder and harder. Watching their frustration as they can’t do the things they have been doing for so long. Watching them waver, and stumble, and weaken.

I have been watching Opus very carefully this past week. I am trying to be there for her if she needs it. Mostly she doesn’t. Mostly she just sleeps.

Sometimes, The Bubby of old comes out, and she comes to me and demands something. But even then, it is hard for her. Her once lusty bellow has become a weak mew. She cannot lift her head up to look up at me without losing her balance. And she doesn’t come to me that often anymore.

When she does, I am trying to take advantage of it. I cuddle her. She cannot tolerate much of a cuddle anymore. It is hard on her old bones, hard to balance on my lap, and she’s nothing but skin and bones anyway so I imagine after awhile the petting becomes somewhat uncomfortable. But I try to anyway.

I talk with her. I explain to her what will happen. I tell her our routine for the day — waking, breakfast, napping, lunch. All the things she normally does. I tell her that she will get a visit from the Doctor. She will be coming to give her a needle. It’ll sting a little bit, but if she just relaxes, she’ll get drowsy and then fall asleep. I tell her that after that, the Doctor will give her one more needle. And after that, she can sleep as long as she wants to. Nobody will wake her. No noisy baby will bother her, or bothersome Duncan or Lucy. Her old bones won’t ache anymore. Her stomach won’t bother her. Her hearing and eyesight won’t be a problem. She can rest.

I tell her how much I will miss her. She looks at me with her old, old eyes. I hope that she understands.

I tell her that I do not know what will happen. She knows me well enough to know where I am coming from.

I want to believe in Heaven, and that I will see her again. I want to believe in capital-H-Heaven like I was taught as a child. I really do. I want to believe it, but I mostly don’t. But I hedge my bets, just in case. I tell her that if there is a Heaven, to go and wait for me there. I tell her to keep the divot in the middle of the bed warm for me. I want to believe I will show up somewhere one day and she will be there, demanding to be fed and petted and doG knows what else. I tell her these things.

She looks up at me with her old eyes. She knows me well enough to know that I haven’t a clue, but hope.

I want to believe in some sort of reincarnation thing. I want to believe in some sort of lifeforce that does not leave. I want to believe that when she dies, her life force will stay on and maybe stay with me. I want to believe that maybe she will be here to comfort me and love me as she has done all this time. I want her to stay with me because I need her.

I tell her that I hope she doesn’t feel like she is no longer needed. She saw me through my entire adult life so far. She saw me through bad choices, bad boyfriends, bad jobs. She saw me through a good relationship and showed her choice was final by sitting on the candidate, the Big Damn Hero. She saw me through a horrible miscarriage, and through long, tiring, demoralizing infertility treatment. She saw me through adoption, and the arrival of That Baby in our lives. She saw me through to a family who could now rally around me and take care of me.

But I still need her. I have no clue about motherhood. I didn’t have a mom. I don’t know what moms do or be. I am flying by the seat of my pants here. I haven’t got any idea how to deal with what motherhood will bring. I need her to comfort me on my bad mommy days. I need her to enjoy dance parties with That Baby and me. I need her to cuddle after a long day of parenting.

She looks up at me with her old eyes. She knows me well enough to know that I need her, that I will miss her. But she knows me well enough to know that I will think of her instead of me. She knows me well enough to know that I will let her go.

She’s ready to go. She needs to go.

It’s been a tough week. But we’re getting to a place, after all the waiting and the watching and the talking, where I think we will be okay with it. We will not be without tears. But we are getting used to the idea.

SCENE: An afternoon at The House of Peevish. Stinkerbelle is in her exersaucer, watching “Annie” and waiting for the post-lunch poop. Mom is in the kitchen, having some lunch. The cats are in various states of repose around the room: deaf, elderly Bubby curled up with Cinnamon on a blanket under the window, Lucy sunning herself on the windowsill, Duncan curled up under an end table amid the toys.

A breeze blows.

The baby gate, leaning up against the wall, catches the breeze and falls to the floor.

Baby Gate: BLAM!!!! (Well, it doesn’t SAY “blam” but it falls down and makes a ridiculously loud “blam” noise.)

Various cats freak the hell out and scramble for cover. Even deaf old Bubby is up and on the alert. Cinnamon and Duncan are poofed to a ridiculous size. Lucy falls out of the window.

Stinkerbelle: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! (belly laughing uproariously)

~ THE END. ~

Our house is a bit of a mess these days. Keeping the house clean has become somewhat of a Sisyphean task. It is hard to stay on top of the cleaning, especially since our littlest one came along.

No, I am not talking about Stinkerbelle. I am talking about out littlest CAT, Duncan.

Okay, so he isn’t actually the littlest — Bubby takes that in a walk, all elderly 6 1/2 pounds of her — but he is the youngest. And he’s like the feline world’s version of Peanuts’ PigPen. Without the wit.

That cat is a one kitty mess. Everywhere he goes, everything he does, generates a mess. He’s a one-kitty destruction crew. And because he’s somewhat happy-go-lucky and always good natured, he has a hard time learning what bad behaviour is, which is a challenge to us. When it comes to learning “No!”, he’s about as sharp as a sock full of soup.

Don’t get me wrong, I love him. I love him just as much as any of the others. But it is hard to be patient with him when he is constantly making a mess.

Case #1: The distribution of litter

When Duncan goes downstairs to use the litter boxes, he is a mess waiting to happen. Now, I am sure in his little kitty brain, he wants to be a good boy, so when he goes in the box he digs and digs and digs, with such great enthusiasm and effort, and when he’s done he shows equal effort in burying. However, with great enthusiasm comes great mess, as litter gets sprayed for metres around. It is everywhere.

Now, that would not be so bad, but sometimes, just for fun, he rolls around in the litter that SOMEBODY sprayed on the floor. And so then, after a nice happy roll on the cool concrete of the basement floor, he comes upstairs happy but just filthy, and that dust and litter gets tracked everywhere.

Case #2: Plants

Duncan loves plants. He loves to eat plants. He loves to dig in plants. He loves to sit in plants. So, what very few plants we have have fallen victim to his enthusiastic horticultural appreciation. He’s chewed most down to nubs. Dirt is sprayed everywhere. And one of these days, we’re going to find a pot smashed to bits, when he tries to sit in one and realizes he out-bulks the potted plant by a ratio of 3:1.

Case #3: The Foyer

If I had to name one place where Duncan’s efforts are most evident, it is in the foyer. It is his favourite place to be. And why wouldn’t it be? It’s where the kibbles and the water are. And for him, eating requires killing his prey first, so he fishes a kibble out of the bowl, chases it around until it is good and dead, and then perhaps eats it (if he doesn’t get distracted — so walking around in bare feet can be an exercise in painful if you step on an errant kibble). He brings toys down and leaves them in the kibble bowl, so he can find them again. He bathes toys in the water dishes, and if he feels particularly adventurous, climbs the water dispensers (which, by the way, can’t take the weight of his bulk and slide around the tile floor, spraying water everywhere). And nothing, NOTHING, is more fun to Duncan than to run headlong into the foyer and slide on the mats like they are his own personal surfboards. Good luck opening the door with 6 feet of bunched-up mat and rubber anti-slide mat pushed up against it.

Case #4: The World As Toybox

Everything in Duncan’s world has toy potential. Everything. Just in the last 12 hours, we have taken some of Stinkerbelle’s toys from him. He fished a bunched-up wrapper out of the garbage up in the attic, and this morning we found it in (where else?) the foyer. As I swept up the kitchen this morning, he dove headlong into the schmutz and scattered it everywhere. And when I shooed him from doing that, he chased the broom. And, the piece de resistence… He chases poops around the basement floor.

Before we brought Stinkerbelle home, someone’s advice to me about keeping on top of the cleaning was “Start as you intend to carry on”, meaning don’t set your expectations too high and set yourself up for failure.

Well, somebody should have told us that before Duncan became a member of our family, too.

You’d think we’d learn. But no. We stroll headlong into situations where we are willingly going to find ourselves disappointed. It’s like we are genetically programmed with a really strong stupid gene.

We have a house in which our little, elderly, often sickly cat has left her mark on the world numerous times over by peeing on the walls. Not just the walls, mind, but any vertical surface she can back her bum up to. For reasons both medical and behavioural, she’s stunk the joint up but good.

In recent years, she’s been better. Part of this is because we’ve addressed the health issues behind the peeing. Part of it is because we keep her in the luxury kitty cage for the entire night and whenever she is unsupervised, to curb the peeing but also to encourage her to eat and put some weight on. And part of it is because we watch her like a hawk and divert her whenever we think she is looking for a place to happen.

But recently, she peed in a most inconvenient place: the cat tent. Now, this is a cheap $12 nylon tent from Ikea, but the cats? They LOVE it. They have all their toys in it. They play in it all the time. (We call it “going camping”.) It is endless hours of amusement.

And Bubby peed in it. Recently. At least twice. The little bastard.

It’s disappointing when that happens because she HAS been getting better, for the most part. And we’ve been really vigilant about cleaning up after her. And we have shampooed carpets and washed walls and baseboards and, for the most part, gotten rid of the smell. Of course, cats can smell pee that is — literally — decades old. So we keep going over the same spots, trying to get rid of it all.

So today, I was out at the vet buying cat food, and I saw they had tents on sale. $30 fabric tents. Luxury camping. So I related the story of the peeing and the Ikea tent and how I want a new tent but can’t rationalize paying $30 for a tent that’ll just get puncture holes in it and barfed in and peed all over.

And the office manager mentioned a new cleaning product they had, an enzyme cleaner that they use for all their pee stink needs. Only $18. And she said that it works like a charm for them, and it’s the only thing they use.

I was skeptical.

Over the years, we have seen it ALL in terms of cleaning products when it comes to cleaning up after Opus. We’ve tried soap and water. We’ve tried Lysol. We’ve tried all sorts of household cleaners for all sorts of surfaces containing all sorts of ingredients. We’ve tried OxyClean. We’ve tried those crazy-ass orange extract-y scented cleaners. We’ve tried other enzyme cleaners. We’ve tried cleaners that basically said, right on the bottle, “LOOK. THIS CAN EVEN CLEAN UP AFTER TINY TABBIES WITH BAD ATTITUDES AND RIDICULOUSLY POTENT PEE.”

And yet? Has a single solitary one of them worked?

YOU go sit over there in the corner and take a nice long sniff, and you tell ME.

SO.

Did I just turn and walk away, safe in the knowledge of experience? Did I tell her no, and keep the 18 bucks for groceries? Did I make a deal whereby I would pay her only if it worked?

Oh no I did NOT.

I walked out of there with a big ass bottle of enzyme cleaner, with promises that if it works for the vet’s cleaning needs, it will work for US.

And I came home, and started scrubbing the tent, and wiping some walls, and testing it on stains on the carpet. It’s still early. The jury is still out.

I am not optimistic.

What a maroon.

Another Monday has arrived, and not a moment too soon. For it has been a weekend of rude awakenings. A weekend of shocks to the system. A weekend where my comfy existence has been shaken, not stirred.

Okay. Maybe it hasn’t been SO dramatic as all that. But still, once I recount the events of this weekend, you will shake your head in knowing agreement and say “Tsk, tsk” in an entirely sympathetic manner to yourself, safe in the knowledge that is was not YOU, and for this you are grateful.

For my weekend involved (but was not limited to): excruciating pain, a glimpse into my own future, and a naked strange man.

Oh yes. That’s right.

A NAKED STRANGE MAN.

I know.

(This is going to be a LONG one. And involves nakedidity and toilets, among other things. So be forewarned.)

First, let me start from the beginning, for that is a good place to start.

On Friday, as I mentioned in the Friday Fun, it was 25 glorious degrees outside, so it was a good day to do yardwork. So I got out the various tools of the yardwork trade: my little weed basket, some hand tools, a rake, some gloves. I started by cleaning leaves and debris out the front garden and trimming the shrubs which had been so unceremoniously chewed down to nubs by the rodents over the winter. Then I raked the front lawn of all the dead grass, and moved to the back lawn and raked a little bit of that as well. But the back lawn is too big, so I decided to clean out some gardens. I pulled leaves and dead grass and some early weeds out of the side garden. I started on the back garden, pulling weeds and trying to get a start on taming the unruly periwinkle which is slowly taking over.

While I was working, Duncan was at the screen door watching. Now, Duncan is a big boy, but he has a very quiet little baby voice. He chirrups and peeps rather than your standard cat meow. So he sat at the window and peeped and squeaked at me while I worked. I wandered to the back garden. And I heard this strange noise. It was a cat, but none of the cats I know. I know all my cats’ sounds, and this one was unfamiliar.

And then I turned around and realized: it was Duncan. He had found his “big boy” voice, and he was shouting for all he was worth for me from the window.

It was odd. It was this strange yodelling, and a volume I was unaccustomed to hearing from our baby boy. Now, for whatever reason, all our cats speak in “sentences” and “paragraphs” — rather than utter single meows like most cats do, they often string a whole bunch of sounds together, like “meowmeOWmyowMEEEEEowmyowmyowMEOWmeow”. It’s quite a cacophony when they all get going. And so, here was Duncan, hollering in paragraphs in his big boy voice from the patio door.

I laughed. Silly woman. I didn’t know.

When I got tired, I went inside. And when BDH came home from work, I went out to help him bring his gear inside (as I have been doing of late, since he has his arm in a splint). And when I turned from the car to go back into the house, there was Duncan, trotting off across the porch, through the porch rails, and racing away between the houses for freedom, tail in the air and looking as happy as Larry.

Little bugger had ESCAPED. All that yelling had been him stating his NEED to go OUTSIDE.

None of our cats are allowed outside. We believe there’s no need to let cats outside — they are perfectly content inside, they live longer and healthier lives as indoor cats, and the world is too dangerous a place for housecats. But they still WANT to go outside, from time to time. This phase passes, but Duncan is still very young, so that has not happened yet. Thankfully, I caught up with him without too much trouble, and ushered him back indoors with much scolding. And we all settled in for the evening.

On Saturday, we were getting up early to go to Buffalo for the day, so I thought it best to get to bed early. My arms were a fair bit achey from the day’s work, particularly my forearms, so I took some extra strength Tylenol before heading to bed. But I could not get to sleep, and the pain in my forearms was getting steadily worse. After an hour and a half of tossing and turning and trying to sleep away the ache, BDH came down to go to bed. I was exhausted, and by this time, my arms were really sore. The pain started in the ends of my fingers, and throbbed all the way down each finger, through my hands, through my wrists and into my forearms, right up to the elbow. And I was irrationally tired.

So BDH got some ice packs from the freezer, wrapped my arms and hands in them, and read to me until I was ready to go to sleep. Finally, around 11:45, I was ready for sleep.

At 1:30 am, I woke with a start. The Tylenol had worn off, and I was woken by pain. This was excruciating pain like I had never felt in my life. Here’s the thing: many of the pain receptors in your body are concentrated in your hands as an evolutionary early warning system to protect the body from danger. So when I tell you it was hurting, every. single. nerve. in my hands was feeling it. I was in wretched shape, and seriously considering waking BDH up to take me to the hospital.

But I knew that it was just strain from the yard work, and they’d laugh me out of the ER. Hells bells, even BDH was saying I was a pansy. So I took some extra strength Advil instead, and an antihistamine — hoping it was enough to knock me out. And I went to bed with my arms wrapped in more ice packs and a freezer pack clutched between my hands, like I was praying (for pain relief or death, I didn’t care which).

I slept through the night, and got up the next morning very, very early. And I ate Advil for most of the day, which was actually quite a good day.

But it had been a long day, so yesterday we just planned to relax around the house and watch movies. So at intervals during the movies, one or both of us would head downstairs to get beverages and food and whatnot. And on one of these jaunts downstairs, mid-afternoon, I thought about how nice and sunny it was outside, and we still had our curtains drawn. I decided to pull the curtains so the cats could sit in the sun.

I opened the curtains to see our neighbour, suntanning naked, on his back deck.

EEK. I was, to say the least, stunned. Fortunately, he was lying on his stomach, so the damage to my retinas, not to mention my psyche, was minimal.

I have seen men’s bums before. Truly. However, generally speaking, they were bums I actually WANTED to see. Not bums of 50-year-old neighbours. I mean, EW.

I went up to the bathroom. BDH was using the bathroom, so the door was closed.

“Ummm?” I said to the crack in the door. And then, since the windows were all wide open, I very quietly related to BDH what I had just witnessed.

“You want I should go down and close the curtains again? While you go bleach your eyeballs?” he asked.

I thought it best. And I went upstairs and tried to dispel the image from my mind with a whole lot of snacks and John Cusack (who, to his credit, in the 20-something years in which I have been the unrequited love of his life, has yet to show his nether regions on film or otherwise. It is a relationship that works well for both of us, I feel.)

I slept hard last night, what with the not sleeping on Friday and the long day on Saturday and the ocular trauma on Sunday. And I got up this morning and headed into the bathroom, as one is wont to do when one gets up. And, as I went to sit down, as one is wont to do at times like this… I felt a searing pain through my knee. And I crashed down onto the toilet seat with a thud.

Just the act of bending my knees and supporting my weight to sit had caused me real, significant pain. And when the time came to get up, it was no better.

I’ve had bad knees since my late teens, the result of many years of hard sports training and an incredible amount of pounding during years upon years of jumping. So knee pain is familiar. But lately, it’s been getting worse. And suddenly, the future flashed before me: Grip rails on the wall beside the toilet. A house without stairs. Knee replacement surgery. My future looked pretty inevitable, and — let’s face it, my vanity kicking into high gear — pretty nasty.

I shuddered. The future is almost here. And I am GETTING OLD.

So, no walks for me today. Safe to say, no gardening either. And the doors will stay closed, in case any errant cats feel the need to explore. Probably I should keep the curtains drawn, as well.