"owned"

I was going to start by bemoaning how difficult life is when you are owned by a cat.  Mr Twisty, a bicolor long-hair and the senior feline member of my family, had climbed back onto my lap again, sitting on his haunches in my lap and kneading my chest with his front paws.  He especially appreciates having me rub just below his ears on his neck, both sides at the same time.  If I attempt to type when he's doing this, he usually bites me.  Why I complain I don't know, I bought him because he bit me.  Short-sighted, I suppose.

However... I realized that Sweetie might take exception to not being included in the ownership, and then Merri Grayce (a canine, but they tolerate her well enough) walked past me.  With a stab of guilt, I considered my human companions:  my 8-year-old son (five days a week), my 15-year-old ex stepson (two days a week), and my boyfriend (whenever he can get me to say "yes").  Would they also not feel mildly insulted to have no claim to me (especially to have their ownership prioritized below all the critters)?  After all, I'm the one that cooks for them, does their laundry, brings them their dinner, tells them that once again they've misspelled "friend" for the fourth time this month ... do they not also own me?

If I take my awareness beyond that to employers, creditors and social obligations, suddenly I realize there are very many owners and very little me.  No wonder I chafe when I'm asked to take on another responsibility or do "just one more thing, really quick."  I'm a modern day slave, and I was never sold!  Even the dog (my canine owner) spends large quantities of time barking and complaining at me.

I'm back now.  Lucky for anyone who chances to read this, you didn't even notice my departure.  Someone came to the door - could my eight-year-old be bumped up a group in soccer?  too many children in his age group and he's SO big - How should I know?  To be perfectly frank, he's never played before, and moving him in with the bigger kids is more likely to frustrate him and make him feel like a failure, even if he is a head taller than some of them.  Then I went to unload my dishwasher and clean up my kitchen while making my kid a hamburger, only to realize I had yet to even RUN the dishwasher.  So I crammed the rest of the stuff in the sink into it and turned it on before I forgot yet AGAIN.

Walking back, I realized the old truth that even your stuff owns you.  You need to take care of it, find places to keep it, pay to maintain it.  If at this moment I were in the place of the rich young man who asked Jesus how to get to heaven, I'd sell every doggone dime of it.  Yup.  Make me free, God.  I can deal with free.

It's been too long already that I've been "owned."

Of Cats & Kings...

Okay, actually this is just about cats.  I wouldn't want to mislead you too long.  Though, I tend to ramble.  I don't know any kings though, to the best of my knowledge, so I don't think I'll mention a king again.

Over a month ago, my son brought home a cat.  The permission conversation went something like this:

"Mom, I'm at my friend's house and his cat just ate all the hamsters."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, his mom says she's taking the cat out and leaving it in the middle of the country at the side of the road.  It's gonna be really cold tonight (he was right, it was going to be about 4 degrees farenheit) and she'll freeze to death because she won't know where to find shelter (a possibility)."

"Ummm."

"So I can bring it home, right?  You won't make me let it freeze to death?"

Okay, now how can a mother who has raised her children to treat animals with kindness and respect at all times, say NO to a question like that?  I mean, yeah I was physically CAPABLE of saying no, but being guilty of hypocrisy when raising an adolescent can put you into very difficult situations during later conflicts.  So, we end up with a new cat.

A week later, my boyfriend is looking at the cat (he's a farmboy, or at least says he is) and declares it pregnant.  I'm a little hurt at this, usually I can spot a pregnant mammal a mile away, frequently before the mammal even realizes it's pregnant (like in the case of my sister, sick and tired all the time over one interesting Christmas years ago).  However, he's the farm boy, so I agree.  The cat must be pregnant.

Pregnant cats cost more to fix, and one litter isn't TOO difficult to give away.  So I figure we'll wait out the impending blessed event, give away the results and then fix momma.  Fast forward a few more weeks, say... yesterday.

I look into my front room to find "momma cat" (her given name is "Sweetie," by the way) rolling around on the floor making this trilling meow noise.  My other cat, an altered male named "Mr Twisty" is standing beside her looking very confused.  Sweetie's behavior continues... then she ends up on her belly, butt up in the air, kneading the carpeting with her back feet and continuing to make her trilling noise.  Mr Twisty, thoroughly confused, rolls onto his back, gets underneath her and bites her on the throat.  She continues to make the noise.  So he gets up and bites her on the back.  She continues to make the noise, kneading the floor with her back feet.  By this point, I'm rolling.  The complete cluelessness of poor Mr Twisty, along with her obvious distress, were more than I could take.  Mr Twisty finally bites the back of her head.  She quits a moment, so he stops.  By now my laughter has insulted him, and he walks away.  Poor Sweetie begins to roll around the floor like a character out of The Exorcist.

A little later, my younger son comes up to me and says "Mom, there's something really wrong with Sweetie."

Ummm.  Birds and the bees time feline style?  What to say, what to say.

"Yes, I saw."

"What's wrong with her?"

"She's not pregnant."

"Oh."

I know he was still confused, but at least he didn't ask for anymore details...

My veterinarian insists that a cat will stay in heat UNTIL she's pregnant.  I'm hoping that it was just a marketing pitch to make me fix the one that died last October.  The yowling has gotten louder and I swear I'm ready to throw her out to the tomcats just to make her be quiet.  I'm giving it a week.  It's warmer now.  I'm sure if I left her on a country road in the middle of nowhere....

One of these days

Well, it's almost seven o'clock at night here.  I don't remember what I ate for breakfast.  Cookies?  Maybe.  I haven't cleaned my house in over a week.  Instead, I frantically did the edits, etc., required to put Becky's story (now called "When Tears Are Well-Spent" into a first novel contest.  I also realized when I had to do a quick edit of my first novel, "The Long Valley Road," that it actually suffered from nothing more than maybe 6,000 missing words before the climax. 

I don't have a lot of choices for dinner.  I'm considering cookies again.  Maybe I'll eat them with milk.  That makes them a little more healthy, right?

I remember lunch was a ham and cheese sandwich with some Jell-o.  goodie. 

I'm doing it.  Don't ask me why.  I'm chalking it up to total insanity.  I have two written, completed novels.  I have three more sample chaptered and outlined, waiting for me to develop character sketches and breathe life into them.  Novel #2 has entered a first novel contest on Gather.com.  No, I don't expect it to win.  There are 2500+ entries on the site now, and I long ago lost the arrogance to believe I'm "special."  I'm just a thirty-something single mom who doesn't have a whole lot to lose if she falls on her face.  Yeah, I'll have wasted some time.  Won't I have been wasting it either way though?  Novel #1 was "complete" but missing some meat.  I'm going to go ahead and add it.  To my surprise (I HATED the doggone thing when I was through with it), it is actually, technically speaking, not a bad novel at all.  Multiple characters, well developed, good management of point of view, pretty good grammar.  I read it with this amazed confusion:  why did I hate it so much almost a year ago?

I read what I've written and wonder if perhaps I'm in some kind of creative fugue... then wonder if all those whispers about bipolar mania and my addiction to it are true.  Of course they can't be.  I'm not crazy...

I opened up my heart, made it vulnerable and humble.  It didn't pay off.  The person I offered it to has not even responded to my email.  Instead I received only silence.  Maybe I am crazy.  Isn't one definition of insanity doing something the same way and expecting a different result?

So how are you, long-neglected xanga friends?  If you think of it, drop me a hi.  I hope you're all well.

Quick Post

Maybe one day I'll get back to this... I really should...

Anyhow - first novel is completed and in revisions.  Second novel, a lot of which I posted on here, is 10,000 words away from completion (thumbnail).

Hope you all are well!!!

well... wow... holidays made things nuts...

do i start becky's story over?  has been a long time since the people who used to read me saw it... and new readers will be incredibly confused...

it also gets me time to finish my other project, as well as getting caught back into it myself...

let me know ...