Just Checking In

I’ve been slack and remiss at blogging. Great ideas come to me, and some of them actually find their way to paper; once there, of course I have to edit them to death, thus attaining the standard that I always aspire to, and it all takes time – something I don’t always have. So I’ll just check in now with a few tidbits from my always busy life:

The Kitten. What can we say? She is an absolute terror. She harasses the older cat, Melcore, endlessly; will jump on Melcore’s back, play with his tail and even bit him in the arse as he walks across the kitchen floor. I’m surprised he hasn’t killed her, though he will hiss at her sometimes. When she’s not torturing him, she’s torturing us. All feet shall be played with and attacked and the more they jump, the funner it is! I tell my kids this joke: what’s the difference between having kids and a cat? When the cat is bad, you can just put it out, but you can’t do that with kids. So out goes the cats, but in the kids stay.

The little terror resting up for her next onslaught….

My fatigue. It’s generally better, and that makes life 100 percent easier. It’s very difficult to live life with no energy.  Possible but no fun. It bit me yesterday but I’m better today. That’s good: there’s enough to do around here, that’s for sure!

Water. We have no water. Well, that’s an exaggeration. We do have water: a bit of it, sometimes. As long as no one washes their clothes, takes a shower, flushes the toilet or draws tea water for the electric tea kettle, we have water. Do more than a few loads of laundry – no water. Teenagers take showers like we live in a rain forest – no water. Too many flushes – no water. The water slows to a trickle in the evening, as it did in other droughts, but this drought is different, and much worse. Wake up in the morning, and there is a trickle; be washing dishes mid-day, and suddenly a trickle, and at evening-time: a trickle. A trickle leads to: off goes the water pump again at the breaker in the basement, since we don’t want burn out the jet pump in our well. Two hours later we are desperate – someone has pooped!  On the pump goes and we have water right up until we don’t. Perform steps again. Repeat until bedtime.

Elections (US). I read a guys blog who is usually right on but unfortunately not so optimistic about this countries trajectory into the future. He writes about this strange thing called the 2016 election here and ends his blog thusly:

In history, elites commonly fail spectacularly. Ask yourself: how could these two ancient institutions, the Democratic and Republican parties, cough up such human hairballs? And having done so, do they deserve to continue to exist? And if they go up in a vapor, along with the public’s incomes and savings, what happens next?

Enter the generals.

To end on a happier note, the world may be about to end, kittens can attack us unmercifully, our health may suck at times and who really needs all that water anyway, but if we’ve given up everything and have become a disciple of Jesus, everything will work out well for us – and very well – in the end!

Back to School

We have pretty much finished our Back to School shopping this year with a few overlooked items still not yet purchased: a gym mouth-guard, a flash drive and something else. I forget what.

I find this Back to School stuff somewhat bizarre, I have to admit. It is not a holiday, really, but a consumer event that takes over the stores for a month before school starts. Walk into a store, and there you have it: Back to School sales, Walmart being the worse perhaps. They have the school lists in case you forgot yours and, also for your convenience, everything’s all there right when you walk in: aisles of notebooks, paper, glue sticks, backpacks, calculators and on and on it goes. You can also find pencils for like 47 cents, so there’s deals to be had. Wow.

Back to School, however, is not alone; it’s in a constellation with other holidays. We rotate holidays through the Big Box Stores these days and the lesser ones as well. Start with Back to School, then take that down and put up Halloween, then Thanksgiving and, with Thanksgiving the Black Friday abomination (another newly spawned holiday for capitalists), then we begin setting up for the grandest of all consumerism holidays: Christmas. It’s all there, from pens to Turkey to Candy to gifties wrapped in Santa Claus paper, from Frankenstein to chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

Who would want anything else?

I wonder, though, if we have really plumbed the depths of useless capitalistic holidays as we ought! What about Groundhog Day, where you’re expected to buy expensive toys and food for your pet, and did you know that June is National Candy Month – can you imagine what they can do with that? I looked online and found that yesterday was National Pet Rock Day. Yes, September 4^th was that, and how did you celebrate it? Did you buy a Pet Rock? And why not?

Anyways, back to Back to School: I don’t think it was like this when I was a kid. Back to School meant a few pencils and a notebook, and we were done. Those days are long gone. We now have lists a page long of Back to School items with everything from Flash Drives to glue sticks to of course pencils, paper, notebooks and even Kleenex! Yes, Kleenex. You would think the school system would at least provide Kleenex but, no, Kleenex is now on the backs of the parents to provide, and you wonder what is next. (I wouldn’t be surprised if my kids will have to bring their own toilet paper in the future, so I put this in parentheses in case some school administrator is reading this now and suddenly gets a great idea!)

Looking at this objectively, we can ask: is there something amiss in all this rush of consumerism in the name of education? I think so. The thing is, I do pay property taxes every year, and these taxes are not insignificant. You would think if you paid thousands of dollars in property taxes on an annual basis, you wouldn’t have to provide Kleenex so Junior could blow his nose in class. You would think so, but it is not so.

Hmmm.

Perhaps we should celebrate something other than rank consumerism and stop turning all our holidays into excuses for such. Maybe holidays should be about important things rather than just buying more stuff. Maybe. I’m for that, but for now I have to go. There’s a flash drive I have to get for tomorrow and a few other things, but at least I already have the Kleenex.

Kitten Terror

Is it right, I ask, to live in fear of a kitten?

About two weeks ago two of our dear children asked to get a kitten from one of our friends, whose cat had a litter of five adorable little things. We just had to; there was no way around it. The cuteness was far too cute to just let go and to give to another family who might not appreciate all the cuteness after all, and the issue was already decided before me and my wife had even said, “Yes.”

In my wife’s and my world, we were somewhat railroaded into it. In an attempt to retain some semblance of control, we of course made a number of counter demands: they had to take care of it, I (the Dad) didn’t want Mom to be cleaning the litter box because the teen girl just couldn’t do it, we don’t want her room to stink. Things like that: all reasonable demands that will probably not amount to anything in the final analysis, since it’s always the parents that end up taking care of the cat, the dog, the lizard, the gerbil, the goldfish or whatever species from the animal kingdom that is now inhabiting our house.

So we got the kitten, and – I have to admit – it is adorably cute. There is nothing like a kitten for cuteness, and me and my wife had to bow: the little animal was way too much fun to watch as it made a beginning of walking, explored its surroundings and cuddled with us.

But then something happened, something sinister. The little animal got out of my daughters room; now the barriers could not contain it. Out it was in our living area, underfoot, and there it was running across the floor after a paper wad blown by a breeze; or climbing up on the couch and walking on the back behind people’s shoulders. It seemed to be everywhere, and we found it in the Day Room under the couch and exploring the refrigerator when it was open. Then it took a huge step for kitten-hood: a small leap for a kitten, a great leap for us. It plopped itself down the stairs one step at a time, and now it was in the bottom floor of our ranch house.

Still, it spent most of the time in the kitchen\living room area, and this became a problem. It had no fear, this cute kitten, and if you were walking across the kitchen floor, minding your own dear business, it took this as a challenge and attacked you, and if you were standing and pivoted even a 1/8 inch, that was grounds to charge. It would charge and we would dance to be rid of its tiny claws and nips, and the more we danced, the more it attacked, and now it was having a grand old time but we were jumping like a bean.

This is what we live with now.

I texted my son, who encouraged this entire endeavor right from the start, that I now live in fear of this kitten. The living area in our house is no longer mine, and just being there is difficult. Several times it got so bad that I just had to take the little devil and put it out in the Day Room. There it was, looking through the glass of the door, waiting to come in. When the door was opened, it was back – with all its nips and tiny claws.

And then there’s our lazy, once-fat-but-now-on-a-diet cat, Melcore, who adjusted to the new kitten fairly well. He sniffed the little thing at first but seemed too wrapped up in lazing around and begging for food to take too much notice of it. But I did see this with my own eyes: when the food came out, both cats would run and – yes – the little devil would push the big cat out, and he – confused – just wandered into the other room until she was done eating. Who said life was fair?

Such is the life in our house now. Who would have ever thought such a cuteness could be such a terror? And what will happen when she gets older? Who knows!? This house might not be big enough for both of us, and one of us may have to go. Let’s hope its the cat.