Friday Miscellany

Daddy, I Have Some Bad News

Atticus has a pattern in the morning. He doesn't sleep with us, so when I open the door in the morning he is sitting there, with a toy, or my glove, or some toilet paper... some kind of gift for me. This is not because he is generous and magnanimous, but because he believes by giving me a gift, he is immediately entitled to food.

The issue is, it is not time to eat food for an hour after we get up, this to ensure that on the rare occasion we get to sleep in, the cats don't wake us up expecting immediate food. It doesn't work, but the theory is solid, so we keep on going.

Anyway, I make an immediate B-line to the coffee maker. Me first are my two favorite words. Then I sit down and wait for the five lovely beeps that mean the coffee is done. Atticus sits on the arm of my chair and wails. Wails! And puts his paw out and sort of tentatively taps at my robe. It is as cute as it is annoying and let's face it, the reason bad habits endure is because they often achieve the desired result. The desired result here being 'attention-leading to food.'

The best part is how he looks when he is reaching his paw out to me. Very earnest, very concerned, like he is delivering bad news. "Daddy, I'm so sorry, but you have cancer. It will only go away if you feed me, now. Help me, help you." Lately he has escalated to climbing my shoulders and mewing loudly, like he was riding bitch on a Harley and howling at the moon. No shortage of personality, this cat.

We've Only Just Begun

Today is going to be a long one. Fridays used to be my light days as I am a contractor and therefore my schedule is subject to the whims of my customers... I don't know if you have observed this, but people don't like to work on Fridays! I was shocked myself.

But, this is not any Friday. It is a Friday before almost all my customers are going on vacation, or their manufacturing is shutting down, or yada yada yada. The old sign 'Poor planning on your part does not constitute and emergency on my part', comes to mind. Unfortunately, it does. This has been an exceptionally busy week and unfortunately, today is not the desired exception.

We are closing down an account tonight and as per normal, almost every manager needs to be present to help decommission the place and make sure the employees are minding their Ps and Qs and not doing anything that would get us sued later on. Up at 6:30 am I am hoping to crawl back into the sack by 1:00 am, 2:00 at the latest.

I wonder if the cat feeding strategy will work Saturday when I would like to sleep until 8... doubt it, but as a great philosopher once said, "There is always one hope."

Partying to Death

It is a shame that I am running myself so ragged for the purposed of celebrating the holidays. I have to travel over the next 2 weeks about 700 miles to go to various parties. I have already been to a couple and there are at the minimum 3 more before it all ends. None of this is helping me get into the spirit.

Our Christmas tree is an allegory of the holiday for me. The lights are stitched together from Frankensteined strings of lights because we didn't remember how many strings were broken at the end of last year and some brilliant person made the fine decision to put all the strings together and pack them back up, perhaps expecting them to magically heal themselves in the attic a la some Disney movie.

We didn't have enough lights for the top 3rd of the tree. Long story short (can I get a chorus of "too late?") no one sells incandescent white lights anymore because they are evil and kill the planet. Em bought the only string of lights she could find which are LED.

If you squint, you can imagine it looks like snow topping the tree because the color of the LEDs are so much different from the traditional lights. So we have a tree that is lit up, but maybe looks a little worse for wear, much like myself at this point. Some count down to Christmas with anticipation and excitement. I count down to Christmas with anticipation and excitement as well, but I think I am excitedly anticipating something different from most people.

Dear Mr. Thackeray

Em finally finished Vanity Fair and gave me a one word review. "Horrible." That's all I need to know. Though she did say it ends better than Harry Potter, I to assume that means Dumbledore is still alive at the end of Vanity Fair.