Lucy Talks

Decided since I had to turn the oven on for dinner, I'd just keep it on and make cookies.  Frakkin' gas oven heats up the entire neighborhood.  Used a Kitchen-Aid for the first time.  Man, that is a thousand times better than a hand mixer.  Oh, yes.

Baked from a recipe given to me by texaswillow, and it didn't turn out quite as well as hers usually do.  But you know, that's just because she's got this cookie thing down to a science (pretty much all she does during November and December is bake cookies and work.  lol  Luckily, I'm a taste-tester for her new recipes.  And she lets me lick the paddles sometimes.  While we cackle at the TV and make rude comments on the various attributes of the eye-candy presented for our delectation.  :D

Anyway, I subbed generic splenda for the sugar, and it didn't make any difference to me in taste, so one thing down in the quest for healthier cookies.

Now I haz cookies.  Chocolate chip, of course.  I want to try the oatmeal-chocolate chip next.

Since I had to be in there anyway, I went ahead and made two days worth of tea.  One less thing to do tomorrow.

Now I can finally sit down and eat the dinner that's been cooling for forty minutes.  lol

Landlord:  Have you ever heard the song Bare Necessities?
Me:  From the Jungle Book?
Landlord:  Yes.
Me:  Dude, I'm 48 years old.  Of course I've heard the song.  :starts singing it in my head:
Landlord:  Well, I'm only a year younger than you and I've never seen the movie all the way through.  I'd never heard the song.

No.  He did not just say he's never gotten all the way through Disney's Jungle Book.  Nuh-uh.  Now I'll have to find a copy somewhere, 'cause that just doesn't sit right.  I mean, this new crap they make?  I can take or leave that, but Jungle Book?  No.

Of course, his point was that he'd been listening to the radio and Louis Armstrong had recorded a version of BN back in the 70s (it was 1973 on the radio tonight).  My point is Jungle Book.  lol

Now, back to editing, betaing and writing.  In that order.  And no cookies until I'm done editing. :stern look at self:

Wow.  I wrote a whole post without talking about....that show.  :)

The other day, I was comparing buying books on Barnes and Noble to buying them on Amazon.  Mentally, I was doing this.  One of the things I really hate about BN is that books can have starred reviews with no text, and reviews can be left anonymously.  This does not help me decide whether or not I want to read a book, nor does the anonymous factor give me confidence that it's not someone close to the author just leaving bucketloads of five-star reviews, which is why I generally read the reviews on Amazon, even if I'm buying a book for my Nook.  :sigh:  So, I'm ranting about it in my head (yes, I do this) and it occurs to me that I could copy all my reviews from Amazon over to BN.  Not that I think I'm the best reviewer in the history of reviewers, but even if my reviews don't help anybody, they can't hurt.  So, yeah, that's tonight's project.  Yes, I know I'm strange.

I get to spend the weekend with a friend, catching up on the TV on her DVR, stuff she saves to watch with me.  We have loads of fun, giggling and cackling and ogling, and commenting on whether or not certain characters reflect well on their real-life counterparts (mostly, this relates to military and police, because we like both).  She has promised me there will be chocolate, and since my landlord/roommate still hasn't sprung to fix the frakkin' washer, I'll get to do my laundry.  Huzzah!

I'll be staying in Dallas this year for Thanksgiving.  My girlfriend is having some issues at home and doesn't have room to put me up.  This is sad-making, because I so look forward to being home in SA every year and spending time with her.  We love to antique together, and we try to always fit in a trip to Bussey's just to see what's out there.  We've found some really fantastic bargains out there in years past.  Thanksgiving is pretty much the only time I see her until I'm able to move back home.  Plus, we host Airmen from Lackland every year, and that's always fun for us and them.

I'm slowly but steadily working my way forward in the No Takebacks comm, and there have been some really fascinating conversations about pilots and BSG in general, plus LOTS of pretty pictures.  I've only managed to watch the mini on my new DVDs, but I did luck into season three on swapadvd, and my TV friend mentioned above has said that she wants to watch BSG, too.  I will just adore watching BSG with her.  And maybe corrupting her into hot!pilots! fandom.  ;D  Plus, I have to find someone to clean the surface of a couple of the DVDs I have.  The mini has forty seconds that are messed up (the President's my Captain Apollo moment with Lee) and the last DVD in 2.5 looks like it might have a tiny scratch.  :(

Um, no, not that kind of someone. Sheesh.

I had few friends when we lived in Florida. I was a brainy, skinny angry girl and didn't make friends easily, and there were still some who chose to befriend me.

One of these was a guy down the block, whose younger brother (I think) was part of my stepmother's babysitting gaggle. Back then, everybody called me Gay, short for my full name, and he nicknamed me Enola or something, after the Enola Gay: http://www.theenolagay.com/plane.html.

The family was black. I caused quite a stir one day when I walked to the bus to pick up somebody (on a day I'd stayed home from school) with this little black baby in my arms. Kids will talk, and boy, they talked about me. I got my 15 minutes of fame, and that's about it. lol

Anyway, he was nice to me at a time when I really needed it, and he was one of the people I missed most when we left Patrick AFB. I've looked for him off and on ever since I discovered the wonders of Classmates and Reunion, with not a speck of luck. About a year ago, I started Googling people I was thinking about, and this guy's name would come up, but the age would be wrong, or the guy would be white (and since he's not Michael Jackson...) or something else wouldn't fit.

I still haven't found him on Classmates or Reunion, but I did find him on Google yesterday. The age is right and I found a yearbook photo and it looks just like the guy I knew when I was 12, only older. Wheeee! He ended up finishing school in the Phillipines at Clark AFB, and a Google search brought up an online alumni site for Wagner High at Clark AFB.

So, I haven't corresponded with him yet, haven't actually found a means to do so, to be honest, but I have found him.

God Bless Google. I shoulda bought stock in their IPO.

ETA: After further research, and nearly two weeks with the alumni site being offline for some reason, I finally got back in, and hey, there's even more stuff than there was before, like an alumni directory, browsable by anyone. I used that information to look him up in Superpages, and got a snail-mail address and phone number. No luck with the email address, but I remember how to write an actual letter.

Well, read at your own risk. Or don't. You might not want to today. I am still dealing with my pet's death, and today just bites emotionally. Many rhetorical questions and mixed tenses ahead.

So, some days there must be a rule that says "I am the daughter and it is my right to make your life as sucky as mine appears to be, so there." Like we don't have more important things to fight about, I was fighting with her because she was helping, for crying out loud. WTF? I need a nice three week rest in a spa with medication, I swear. She's bored, so therefore she's hungry and cranky and just generally a pain to be around. Gameboys and books aren't enough. Whatever.

You know that Zach Malloy song, Early Morning Phone Call? Yeah, that's the one. He's from here in the metroplex, btw. Until recently, whenever I'd hear that song, I immediately thought of my cousin, coincidentally named Zack, who was a fabulous person all the way around. Police officer, volunteer firefighter, big brother extraordinaire, one of those people who make you want to be a better person. Always polite and courteous. I still miss him. Anyway, back to the point, if there is one. I had a cat, two cats, actually. One, named George, was MY cat. Didn't really like anyone but me, though he tolerated others or hid away while they were around. Quite the opposite of my other cat, Merlin, who is a lapslut for anyone human. George was a gift from my aunt, the Manx breeder. Merlin was a gift from the friends who star in the remainder of the story.

So, awhile back, my mother died. Not really emotionally impacting. And lest that sound harsh, I knew she was dying. Knew, in fact, that she was killing herself as slowly as it is possibly to do with alcohol, and in denial until the day she died. Of more impact was that I spent five grueling weeks cleaning out her house. Trash, crap, unbelievable amounts of just junk, a three bedroom house sorted down to a storage unit after all is said and done. So, I only worked with my Mon/Thur client, and made next to no money. Unfortunately, two days before my mother died, I had given notice, gladly, at my apartment. Only I forgot to look for a place to live in all the working day and night at my mom's house.

I have wonderful friends, two of whom offered to put me/kid/cats up until I could dig myself out of the Fort Worth style pothole I got into financially. Things went fairly well. I pitched in on groceries, paid the cable bill, picked up and dropped off kids, bought cat food, just generally helped around the house when I thought about it. I'm not the perfect long-term houseguest, but I tried.

About a month ago on a Saturday morning, the two parents were out of the house. Kid and I were vegging. I was thinking about a shower sometime soon. I hear this sound, like an animal in pain. Kid beats me to the back door and starts yelling that the dogs are hurting a little dog. I'm running out the back door, still behind Kid and she starts screaming, "George, George!" I get out there and start issuing orders while a corner is falling out of the bottom of my elevator. Who knew a cat would have such impact on my life? He's meowing like he knows that momma's there and she'll fix everything. I tried. I got on the phone with the vet, tried cat CPR, drove (defensively, of course) like a madwoman to another vet who was closer, only to have them tell me that he was already dead, and charge me $45 for the privilege of cremating his body. You know it would have been more to have his ashes returned to me than it cost to cremate my mother? Somebody's got a freakin' racket. I go home, take a very long shower, can't stop crying all day. My friends return, one at a time, because their boy called them (he was a rock throughout the trip to the vet's). The first one's there when I get out of the shower and she combed my hair for a few minutes - something that used to soothe her as a child, and told me that there were a number of adoptable cats on the Moonlady list. The other one just said she's really sorry that this happened, and I'm left feeling a bit empty by the apology. I've known this girl since I was 15, well over half my life, and her apology is just so mechanical. I wonder if I really know her at all. Apparently, I have expectations of how people will act when their animals are responsible for killing my cat, and boy did they fall short. I'm still wondering why no one's reimbursed my vet bill, or why I had to go on Sunday to buy more cat food (we buy it from a feed store in Garland), and why no one, still, has hugged me or sat down on the couch and held my hand, or really anything. I'm still wondering why the person who belongs to one of the three dogs still didn't know three days later what her dog had done because no one had called her. She was heartfelt in her apology, using words like horrified, embarrassed, stunned and the like, and asked during the course of the conversation what I wanted/needed to make me feel better about the whole thing. I didn't know then, and don't know now. She came and got her dog because I asked her to do it and had just gotten a place where she has room for the dog.

And now, to just make my day, Kid wants to watch the final episode of Touched by an Angel. Guess I need to find the tissues.

The next day, I spent as much time out of the house as I could, because I just didn't want to be in the same place as those damn dogs, and continued to try to avoid being home as often as possible. It took nearly two weeks before I stopped being so angry at them I wanted to rip them apart. I moved out two weeks ago, to a residence hotel down the freeway. Though it's small, the privacy is very welcome. Now I feel as though the friendship might possibly recover someday without the constant reminders that my cat's murderers are running around scot-free. I know, calling dogs murderers, right? I don't know what else to say. I left Merlin there, since he's related to all but one cat in the house, and adopted the oldest boy almost as soon as we started staying there. Things have started seeming more normal, and we've made it to school and work on time or early (something to which Kid seems deathly allergic - she inherited that from my mother, without a doubt ).

I had a tough day, the first day back at work after George died. My client was very understanding and shared some memories of her own pet, and since a big part of my job involves being left alone to just do my work, I coped by being very busy. I've been busy a lot the last few weeks.

My aunt has told me that there'll be another cat for me whenever I'm ready. Someday.