There Will Be Puke
Do not adjust your sets! What you are seeing on my blog page is really true: no Twitter digest post this morning. Why? Because yesterday was one of those very, very rare days in which I did not post anything to social media at all! *gaaaaaasp!*
Something just occurred to me. If you are younger than, say, 25—do you even recognize that phrase, "do not adjust your sets"? I realized the moment I wrote it out that it dates me. It's not even that people don't watch regular TV anymore; all the streaming options notwithstanding, people still do. It's just that it's been decades since it was a common thing to have to adjust your sets. I can imagine a really young person reading that phrase and thinking, What the hell does that mean?
Okay now let's talk about what a remarkably shitty morning I had. Also, in retrospect, I did not handle it well. It's not like my cat is capable of rational thought. My getting enraged does nothing but add to his stress levels. You could argue that's animal abuse. So, I should shut that shit down. Get a fucking grip, Matthew.
Guru puked no fewer than three times this morning before I left for work, the first time being at around 4 a.m. He also dropped about four tiny turds on the carpet quite a ways away from the litter box. I'll get to that in a minute. The barfing at 4 a.m. was the worst because, a) it woke me up far too early; b) it made me conscious of the fact that I needed to pee; and c) I could not get up to pee without cleaning it up, which only woke me up even more. Once I got back to bed again, it took at least half an hour for me to even get into a light sleep, only to have to get up half an hour after that.
Guru jumped onto the bed to pester me as soon as I got into bed. I shoved him off and onto the floor, kind of violently, letting my frustrations get the better of me. I should not have done that. Guru has no understanding of my emotional responses.
And then? While I was doing my morning push-ups, I was interrupted by Guru's second bout of puking. I paused my exercises to get up and clean that, which was much more liquidy and had less food in it.
After I was done with brushing my teeth, shaving, and scooping the litter boxes, I was walking back into the bedroom to put my glasses in their case on my bedside dresser, and I stepped on something, with my bare foot, which at first I totally assumed was yet more puke. Clearly I had more mess to clean up, and I turned on the lamp on Shobhit's side of the bed so I could see better. It was not puke, it was about four different little turds, which must have been clinging to Guru's ass until he managed to get them to fall off, about ten feet away from the litter box. I knew it was him and not Shanti because Shanti had been sleeping soundly at the foot of the bed the entire time.
God damn it. Jesus fuck.
I cleaned that up. Guru kept meowing loudly as though nagging to get his breakfast. Shobhit said, "He's hungry. I understand." This may have been correct; clearly Guru was now on an empty stomach. Shobhit left for work just after I got out of the shower. Once my hair and makeup were done, I was set to leave—and then Guru commenced his other kind of yowling, the kind that clearly indicates he is about to puke. I attempted to grab him so I could hold him over the little box as I often do when I can for his puking, but he ran under the dining table where I could not reach him. And there, he puked again. Right after I cleaned that under there, I hit my head on the table while I was trying to crawl back out. I about had a conniption. "Fuck! FUCK!" I did not direct the rage at Guru this time, but I was just about at my limit for bullshit like that this morning. Really I should have just been more careful crawling back out from under there.
I gave him one of the pills that are supposed to help with his hairballs, with historically very spotty success. Shobhit had washed their food dishes before he left, so there was no crusty old food still on them when I finally fed them. Shanti had come out by then and was just sitting on her haunches kind of looking around, shooting the shit. She couldn't be bothered with any eagerness regarding the food. Guru was all over it, though. We'll see if I come home tonight to even more fucking cat vomit. God, I hope not.
I feel bad for Gary, the neighbor from the west building at the Braeburn who just yesterday let me know he can look after the cats for the two weeks we'll be in Australia. In the cat care document I'll be preparing for him, I will unfortunately have to be very clear and direct: "There will be puke."
In other news, I spent the evening at home last night, with Shobhit who actually had the day off of both jobs. He seems to be getting a lot of Tuesdays off lately. I'm glad, though; constantly working every day is exhausting for him.
He also picked me up at work, after going to Daniel's Broiler to pick up the glasses case he left there after meeting Mala and Vega for drinks last week. So we drove from my office to Trader Joe's on Capitol Hill, where he wanted to get some tortillas for dinner. He had otherwise made a cabbage and potato dish for dinner, which I was not super interested and ate very little of, thanks to it also being too spicy. But hey, it worked out! I weighed in at 153.1 lbs this morning—my lowest since November!
We watched the final two episodes of season two of Sex Education on Netflix. That is a fantastic show and I think I might have liked this season even better than the first.
After that, Shobhit wanted to get back to impeachment coverage and I went back to the bedroom. I updated playlists for both The Cranberries and Pet Shop Boys, to account for both of their new albums (Cranberries's posthumous "new album" having actually been released last year, but I only learned about it like a week ago). And then, while listening to my updated Cranberries playlist, I decided to get the information I needed to finalize my Flickr photo collection of every trip to Canada I have ever taken. I've managed to count a total of 19 such trips (a weekend trip to both Victoria and Vancouver, which I have done twice, counting as one). It may be 20 though, because I think there may have been another drive north from Spokane with Mom once before the one for my 18th birthday in 1994, I just can't remember when. I do remember stopping at an A&W fast food joint, Mom getting a root beer float, and her accidentally making it overflow with foam when she pushed the ice cream down. She caught it with her hand under the table and then let it pour to the floor. I am almost certain that incident was not during the 1994 trip. In which case, I have been to Canada 20 times. To date, it is still the only other country I have ever been to. That's going to change in less than a month!
Anyway, in order to both narrow down the exact dates of the trips, and to make the photo collection on Flickr more complete, I found my old handwritten journal entry for the trip to Victoria when I was a teenager. For many years now I have thought it was in 1990, based on the state of my hair in photos I've seen in Dad and Sherri's photo albums (of which I do not have copies), but it turns out that trip was actually in 1991—April 2, to be exact. I took a picture of half that day's journal entry, cutting out the rest because it was not a very flattering depiction of either Sherri or of myself. There's no need to post that anywhere.
I also found the journal entry for my birthday, April 30, in 1994, when we took that second, aforementioned day drive north to Canada—what I had asked to do for my 18th birthday. Nothing on the photos indicated exactly what town we had gone to, but my journal entry (of which I took another picture and added to that photo album) noted that we wound up in a town called Creston, B.C. We also drove to another town, called Trail.
Then, I remembered doing a similar day drive to Canada with Gabriel and Suzy once, while we were in college. This one was a little more of a challenge to narrow down when it happened. I stopped writing handwritten journals in mid-1996, and I was sure we went while the three of us lived together in the duplex in Pullman, which would have had to make it 1997 or 1998.
But! I have had archived old letters in folders on my work computer for years; they were transferred from an old PC ages ago for some reason I can't remember, but I no longer had them on a home hard drive. (I just finished uploading them to Dropbox, I know you were worried!) This morning I opened about 20 different old Word document letters to Barbara one by one, doing a search for the word "Canada" until I found it. And from there, I figured out the most detailed account had actually been in one of the monthly newsletters I was writing at the time. I could not find an archived folder of the Word documents for those old newsletters, but luckily they all remain archived online, at my very old website dating from even before LiveJournal. It had been from May 1998, the month I actually finished college.
Something I forgot: Bob, the guy Suzy eventually left Gabriel for, was with us on that trip. I also forgot: that was part of an overnight trip we all took to Kootenai Wildlife Refuge in the Idaho Panhandle. I took only 10 photos that entire weekend, all during a short hike to some waterfalls in Idaho. I had even long ago figured out those photos were taken there and labeled them on Flickr as such, but had long, long since forgotten that was the same trip we all went across the border to Creston, B.C. Another thing I never realized until literally this morning: Creston was the same town my mom drove Christopher and me to the last time I had been to Canada, as a day trip up north for my birthday in 1994. I copied and pasted the account of that trip into Word here at work, then saved screenshots to jpgs so I could then upload those to the Kootenai Wildlife Preserve photo album, thus having a stand-in for the photos I never took in Canada that day. And now, that photo album is part of the "Trips to Canada (all)" photo album collection.
I also emailed Gabriel my full written account of that weekend from nearly 22 years ago. It was pretty interesting and fun to read, although my early-twenties attitude is kind of striking. I even told Gabriel in the email I sent him that I'm amazed he never punched me in the face.
In any case . . . I'm pretty certain now that I have gone into Canada twenty times in my life. Which is kind of a lot, really. It's time to start branching out!
[posted 12:17 pm]
