And now, on a lighter note – sleeping with cats. Sleeping with Tojo the Psycho Cat, specifically. Somewhat surprisingly, this is usually a more than just pleasant experience.
Lately (for reasons too long and boring to go into), I’ve been sleeping in the guest bedroom – which, as readers know, is Tojo’s room, mainly because all the other cats hate him so much. That’s where he mostly lives, playing with and arranging his Beanie Baby dog and cat army (and the flamingo, who always seems to get tossed on the floor for some unknown reason), rearranging my guest room in ways I don’t quite understand how a relatively small cat manages to do – I’ve long since stopped to go open the door and look when the odd thump or bang emits from that room.
Tojo is great fun to sleep with, though. All his other psychoness aside, he actually is one of the most affectionate cats I’ve ever owned, and is surprisingly snuggly. He will curl up in my arm, or alongside my arm or leg, snoozing away and purring loud and happily and doing what an ex-boyfriend’s mother used to call “making biscuits” (patting with his paws) on my arm or leg.
And sleeps the sleep of the DEAD. That cat does NOT wake up unless I actually am getting up and getting out of bed and moving. I have rarely seen a cat that is THAT unconscious while asleep, other than my brother-in-law and sister’s cat, Mouse, who is missing a few important brain cells anyway.
I’m so used to sharing a bed with various pets that when I’m spending the night away from home, sometimes it takes a little getting used to having a bed to myself and falling asleep.
And sleeping with cats is not always so pleasant. When Schuyler, who passed away this summer, was healthy and big, he was great to have cuddled up with you in the winter and some nice extra warmth – not so much in the summer, and even more so with his habits of sleeping on your head (our family research over the last 40+ years shows this to be a definite black cat thing) or biting you sometimes – not hard, but not very comfortable, and another black cat thing – in places you would rather not be bitten. He also had really bad breath as he got older and more sickly, so that was even worse.
But Tojo is just a delight to snooze away a rainy morning with. I woke up several times yesterday and just got a kick out of him, purring and snoozing away, unconscious like the dead, occasionally stretching and so obviously happy and comfy and snuggly, just so peaceful. And you think, how on earth can this relatively small and – right now – very, extremely peaceful little being be such a psychotic chaotic maniac tearing through the house like the Tasmanian Devil most of the time, terrorizing the other cats and sometimes a dog or two, and just generally leaving mayhem in his wake everywhere he goes?
In any case, I truly treasure our fun and sweet little naps together. As I should, because those hours before he wakes up again are like the eye of the storm in Hurricane Tojo.
As much as I write (and write and write and write) about The Replacements and Paul Westerberg, I guess one would think I should be writing this on my music blog instead, but I thought I’d write about it over here because it’s not about music and I thought some of you (especially you moms) would dig reading this tale.
Apologies to all my readers who still insist on using Internet Explorer as a web browser. I guess y’all must have thought I’d lost my mind last week. I was alerted to the odd-lookingness of my blogs late last week by my mother, and at the time I blamed it on her web browser, which was technically true because if you use Firefox or most other browsers, you likely didn’t notice anything at all different.
But apparently a very small change in HTML I made last week sent Internet Explorer into the equivalent of a grand mal epileptic seizure. She & I had discussed the problem she was having viewing the blog again on the phone earlier, so I fired up IE myself to see what she was seeing, and yup, it was alllll messed up. After we got off the phone I thought about it for a while and poked around a bit, and then discovered the HTML culprit and promptly removed it.
So it’s all fixed now, and I removed a couple of other tinier things that apparently had an issue with Internet Explorer too, so now all you IE diehards should be seeing the same things on both blogs that everyone else does. This is why…
On another note, I saw something at Aunt B.’s today that made me think once again, as I often have in the past, that it’s probably a good thing that I am so ancient that we didn’t have webcams and other such video equipment so easily at our disposal when I was a teenager and in college, or cell phones with cameras and all those sorts of things, or most especially YouTube. Because I would have never gotten anything else done because I would have been making goofy videos or video blogs all the time, no doubt.
Of course, I might have been rich & famous by now, too, but that’s beside the point.
I should probably put some gas in my car and drive to Nashville tonight, because it’s been like 90-something degrees here for days (my car’s outside temp gauge on Sunday read 101), and some snow and ice might be nice for a change.
Notice there’s no talk of Goosepondery over here. But I’m still putting my money on ‘Coma. If anyone can find the GSM, she can.
(Technically I guess the category should be ‘Coma tales, but seeing as how the category was begat of Squirrelly’s now-confirmed ice cream headache remedy that I impudently laughed at when I first heard it, plus Squirrel Queen Tales just sounds funnier…)
Yeah, so my Mom opened up an e-mail the other night to find that she was the beneficiary of thousands (or millions?) of dollars left to her in the late Luciano Pavarotti’s will.
The persistence of that particular flavor of spam scam really amazes me. How many years has that thing been going around the ‘Net? Do people really still fall for it?
I think my favorite influx ever were the ones in German that were coming to one of my Gmail boxes for a while. I don’t speak nor read German, but I could pick out enough words and deduce from the format that it was the same old same old. Heh.
One thing I almost always get in my Christmas stocking every year (we’re Episcopalian, that explains it, right?) is a few miniature bottles of whatever liquor or liqueur – usually Bailey’s or Kahlua since I drink stuff like that in coffee often in the winter, but sometimes other stuff. I don’t drink much liquor as a rule and my tastes tend to run to anything that tastes like Kool-Aid. I like many Schnapps – green apple, cinnamon, butterscotch, peach (Pucker in the peach preferably, the rest is too sweet). I like white rum, vodka, and that’s really about it. In the last couple of years, I’ve scored some little bottles of Stoli and some vodka from the Czech Republic. It’s also a well-known fact I like orange soda.
So what better after a really crummy week than to pull a Keith Richards and celebrate the end of this awful week with Keef’s favorite drink, Nuclear Waste – orange soda, cranberry juice, and vodka. Although I’m kinda beginning to think about halfway through that this might taste better with some of that Malibu Rum I’ve had stashed in the kitchen for months instead.
But it’s okay. Depending on where you read, some recipes don’t include the cranberry juice – just straight orange soda and vodka, I think better with the cranberry juice though. Some recipes claim it has to be Sunkist (which I can’t stand) and some say orange Fanta (which is what I’m drinking). It’s all right, but I’m probably still going to dump some of that coconut rum in there before the night is through.
On another note, you might want to have a couple of your own favorite beverages and then go look at this. (Please don’t tell anybody that my first question to ‘Coma when she first pointed it out was, “Are they kangaroos?” – let’s just keep that between you and me.)
Travis and I hung in the same crowd back in my old college days in the ‘Boro, and I have on my bookshelves a VHS copy of an early video comedy effort he and some mutual friends made back when they were still in high school, so it’s been a big kick to watch his progression to now becoming nationally known. I wrote here on the Zone a while back about how our initial meeting way back in 1987 didn’t go so well, but in recent years we have caught up and chatted off and on and a nicer and more pleasant guy you couldn’t meet, so I’m doubly thrilled for his success. It’s awesome when good things happen to good people.
The Red State Update bits (all of which can be found on YouTube and the guys’ site) are what’s made them so famous now, but I leave you with one of my favorite Travis and Jonathan bits, Travis and Satchel, which both makes me laugh and creeps me out a little ‘cos Satchel both looks and sounds a little bit like one of my older male relatives (and dummies kinda freak me out anyway). Enjoy…
Please bring me a set of Bob Krumm and Bill Hobbs action figures this year for Christmas.
I know it’s a little early to be asking, but I believe you can also get the Roger Abramson, Sean Braisted, and Rob Huddleston ones as an added bonus if you act now. I would very much like those too.
I understand the Kleinheider and Brittney Gilbert ones are always included when you have the whole set, so that’d be great.
(Please wrap them separately, though, since I hear the Kleinheider action figure is now only available in the version with the yanking chain attachment and the included bumper sticker that says “Pungent is a GOOD adjective!”.)
Thanks and Happy Late Easter,
Lynnster
P.S. If the Newscoma and Hutchmo Mondo Awesome Organizers with matching action figures are available also, those would be nice too. Especially if the Newscoma one comes with the Mabel attachment. Thanks.
P.P.S. Please leave a set of all of those action figures in Aunt B.’s stocking this year too.
P.P.P.S. It might be a good idea to hide her video camera and change her YouTube password while you’re there. I’m just sayin’.
Just a big hearty welcome to any overreacting business people or legal eagles who should have known better, should they drop by and visit The Lynnster Zone.
I hope you like reading about Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs, Skittles, Australian garage rock & surf music, aging Minneapolis indie rockers, and my ex-boyfriend. Enjoy!
(Hmm, matter of fact, if you’re in the legal profession, I might like to talk to you about the couple or three four or five thousand or thereabouts bucks the Freeloader Ex never paid me back, come to think of it… nah, never mind. But anyway, happy reading!)
(UPDATE: I don’t like to leave stuff hanging “vague” and there are probably two dozen links I could post at this point, including some wonderfully eloquent stuff at Newscoma’s, but Aunt B. sort of managed to very succinctly wrap up stuff I’ve been inefficiently blabbering in my usual too-rambling way for hours with a few excellent, clear and concise points, so I’ll just link that here over to Tiny Cat Pants and you’ll get the basic gist of what this is all about.)
(Sometimes when I think I’ve seen the dumbest things ever… eh, people just slay me.)
Y’all! All the women I know online and/or off – married or single, parent or childless, those with nieces and nephews and those with none – all of you need to go over to Dirty Catholic’s place and check out these two videos IMMEDIATELY. They’re a hoot!
(Guys will probably find them funny too, but probably not as hilarious as the gals.)
Hmm, so it occurs to me I now have links to Dirty Catholic, Martiniministry featuring Recovering Baptist, and famous ex-and anti-Mormon Heather Armstrong of dooce. Because I am such a completionist (sic? – completist?), I should probably start seeking out other blogs loosely based in the same vein regarding other sects. I guess I could represent the Episcopalians, except (A) we don’t really have anything to get pissy about, and (B) I can’t really think of any good Episcopalian jokes off the top of my head and “Catholic Lite” is only funny so many times, and (C) same goes for singing, “There are no Episcopalians down in Hell” **.
.
.
.
** (They are all up above, drinking beer and making love. What?!?! That’s how the song goes!)
Go over to B-Mo’s and do this, and report there and report back here. Because this one amuses me greatly.
Ironically enough, my answer is the same two days in a row, except yesterday was a dark blue sweatshirt and today’s is light blue. At least I’m not working in my pajamas today.
Oh, by the way, I realize it hasn’t been all that pleasant around here the last week or so. We’ll soon get back to fun and games around here again, promise!
I have had an ongoing headache that refuses to go away this week, and I’ve just been feeling pretty crabby in general, so I’m kinda going light on posting right now because it would just be “crab crab crab, blah blah blah, sucks sucks sucks, hate hate hate, crab crab crab” some more.
However, this from Everything is Wrong with Me made me laugh today, even though it’s pretty gross (which is often par for the course with Jason): “…I probably could have eaten a lump of raw ground beef and four perfectly cooked hamburgers would have appeared from my colon twenty minutes later.”
Click here for the post in its funny but rather pitiful entirety.
Jason writes about his bowel habits rather often. In the course of regular blogreading, I seem to know an awful lot more than seems reasonable about other bloggers’ internal waste removal systems, both nationally and on a more local level. Color me bemused, yet slightly disturbed.
My retarded friend Stevie Kane, who is monitoring my Last.fm playlistlive by RSS feed tonight (GEEK!!!) and making sure to e-mail smartass commentary after every track, can kiss my butt here, and I don’t care what anybody says. Bread’s “Everything I Own” is still one of the best lost love songs EVER.
