The Recipe

Ingredients: One 8-9 lb cat named Marshall who likes little rituals and routines. One neighbor who is deaf, and her VERY extended family (4 generations – between 3 and 8 people living there at any one time and they own at least four cars). Certain days the street cleaner comes — if you’re parked on that side of the street, you get a ticket. One kitty-gym scratching post by my front door. One front door comprised of 36 panes of glass.
I go home for lunch almost every day. It’s a nice break from the office, and I get to spend some time with my cats. It’s easier to park out front, so at lunchtime I enter and leave through the front door.
Marshall likes to jump up on the kitty-gym scratching post when I’m leaving – I call it “the kissy-place”. If I tell him to go to the kissy-place, he jumps up for his kiss goodbye.
Last week, all of these things collided like the story of the Old Woman and her Pig. I was home for lunch and was ready to go back to work. I told Marshall to go to the kissy place. Just as he was jumping up, the deaf woman next door burst out of her house screaming at the top of her lungs – members of her family were outside and she wanted them to move their cars because the street cleaner was coming. That scared the life out of Marshall, who decided the kissy place was not such a great idea and went the opposite way. Through my feet. In order not to snap him in half and perhaps fall into/through 36 panes of glass, I elected to take a dive sideways onto my lounge chair. That gave my ankle one of the better twists I’ve had in a while. So tomorrow I get to see an orthopedic surgeon.
No moral, no point. Just seeing if I could put this story together coherently.

Attack of the Killer Picture

There are a few laws of physics that apply only to me. If it is flying through the air, it will hit me in the eye. If it is falling, it will land on my foot.
I have a picture in my bathroom. It’s quite nice – an undersea series of colorful, interesting fish in a very sturdy metal frame. But I’m not very good at hanging pictures. And I sometimes have balance issues. Especially when I first wake up.
My bathroom is 6×6. Amazingly, everything fits in there that should, but sometimes maneuvering can be difficult. A year or so ago, the size of the bathroom, my balance issues, and lack of picture hanging skills all collided. Quite literally. At 5:00 a.m. I knocked the picture off of the wall. The sharp metal corner went into my foot. The picture is quite heavy, and that is NOT a mess you want to deal with when you’re not awake. Going from not awake to in shock isn’t good either. The picture survived intact.
I eventually recovered. I have an interesting scar on my foot now. Some months later, I knocked the thing off the wall again. Fortunately I got my feet out of the way. This time, the glass shattered. My brother works for a photographer and reglazed it for me.
This morning, I knocked the picture off the wall again. This is turning into a habit. This time, it landed on a miniature ceramic bathtub that I’d been using to keep cat toys in. The small bathtub never had a chance – it shattered. I loved that little tub. And now my oldest cat is upset. She doesn’t see very well, and doesn’t like it when things change.
The picture is back up on the wall. Biding its time