Oh, how funny things get sometimes. My family has bad luck with animals. Especially animals and their skin diseases and pests. Every cat we have adopted from the Humane Society has come home with ringworm – which unfortunately is not like the chicken pox. No, the ringworm pox you can get over and over again. As my mother so frequently reminds us.

Well. Pippin died sometime around Mother’s Day, for those of you who didn’t know. It was sad – very sad actually. My dad was sad. That’s how sad it was. And I didn’t really want to get another cat after Pippin. He was pretty much the perfect cat. That’s what my Dad said (see? Told you it was sad). But Kate had Kiki who she didn’t really want to keep and the little Kikister decided to adopt me. Kiki is a catsit case. One of Kate’s friends asked us to catsit and then never came back. So Kiki is my cat now. She has a very very strong personality. And she didn’t come to us with any bad parasites or mites or anything.

Enter fleabitten one and two. Colleen, the youngest of our family, decided since Kiki is moving in September with me, that she needed a cat of her own. She adopted Madeline, a long haired black cat with a really very bad disposition. Madeline doesn’t like people. Madeline doesn’t like dogs. Madeline doesn’t like other cats. Madeline has ear mites and fleas and is malnourished. And her catsit case sister, Elise, has them too. Not to mention, they are both big fighters and Kiki is getting the brunt of it. Her poor little furry face is all cut up with scabs and scars from those two little scoundrels. And our entire house is infested with fleas. Two weeks ago, my mother thought it was spiders when Colleen woke up with 20 odd bites on her legs. So we completely cleaned out our rooms of old papers and boxes and spider bombed. Then my mom started getting bites, the kittens started scratching more and it all clicked. Fleas suck. I have no flea bites. Maybe I’m naturally repellent to fleas.

Last night – we went to go see a sneak preview of “Monster House.” It was supposed to be a kids’ movie similar in spirit to “The Goonies.” If you think about it, the Goonies isn’t really a kids’ movie. They say the F-word, people get shot and die, and crushed, and lots of frightning things happen. This movie had all those elements too. Including the F-word, but that was supplied by members of the audience (there were teenagers behind us). Not to mention, while Jas and I were happily eating our popcorn, butter dripped down into a puddle on my jeans and onto the floor. I have a fist sized grease stain on both legs and we almost fell and broke our necks when trying to walk out of the theater at the end of the show.

With only two weeks of work left, I’ve been savoring all the quiet weeknights of enforced imprisonment at the Gallery. Nowhere else do I have such distraction free reading time. Or blogging time, for that matter. Unfortunately, I’ve been plagued lately with horrible reading choices. Excepting the Thursday Next series, I haven’t enjoyed a single book I’ve read since The Enchanted Castle. Salman Rushdie just went way too far along the allegorical road for me to follow and I had to give him up. And I eagerly checked out one of LA Banks Vampire Huntress series when I saw it on the shelf at the local lib. I like vampire stories, I usually like woman power stories, and I’ve seen this on the bestseller shelf – so I figured I would enjoy these. Oh, how wrong was I. Not since the fateful day of “Eldest” have I read such horrible stuff. Blatantly a first novel, it reminded me of reading my friends and I’s highschool fiction stories. And add in a little “black people power are the best ever and must talk much ebonics yo” flavor as well. *sigh* It’s a shame really. So I’m taking flight back to safe ground in George Orwell and EM Forster. Classics for a while to clean out my traumatized system…

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July 16, 2006

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