Day in the Life of an Idiot

 Last night, the lady who expressed interest in Clover/Six came over for an introduction. 

You know how there are some people out there who make an amazing first impression? Well, this lady, whom I will call C., did NOT. Shawn's impression of her, afterwards, was that she was an aging hippy. I felt that was a bit generous and would have just called her a kook.

But I will get to what gave me that impression in a bit. Let me first lay out the story so far. Shawn had been communicating with C. via Facebook messenger and C. was clearly already feeling a bit uncertain about taking on Clover/Six because she looked into the cost of spays and, yeah, the prices are pretty insane. C. pointed out that for that price you could get three cats, all pre-spayed/neutered, at PetSmart and she is not wrong. We did not want C. to lose out on Clover/Six just because medical care was too expensive, however, so we told her that if she made an appointment we would happily pay half. She had never had to have a cat spayed before and so we gave her a bunch of different leads on places. She seemed very reasonable and grateful that we were willing to do so much to rehome Clover/Six. 

So, we arranged for a meet and greet. 

We got Clover/Six out on the porch and C. came over.  The thing that seemed the most important to C. was that Clover/Six be a perfect match for the cat already at home and then proceeded to tell us that her cat at home as "some kind of eating disorder." According to C. this cat is insanely skinny, seven pounds, maybe, and for the longest time when she first got this cat it wouldn't eat any food she put out for it. She tried everything, even cans of tuna. The vet could find nothing wrong with the cat, except that she continued to lose weight. If I remember her story correctly, the vet offered some expensive solution (this part was not clear, since I was trying to puzzle out how a cat could have an eating disorder that wasn't something like a thyroid problem,) and C. had a flash of intuition and went to Cub and bought a whole chicken. She then simmered it down to soft meat, removed the bones, and the cat "om nom nom!" which she vocalized in such a loud voice that Clover/Six who had been sniffing about, startled and hid under the table. 

This current cat of C's, however, still doesn't gain weight.

End of story. 

ONE RED FLAG.

So, we were like, "Mmm, okay." Then, we tried to finalize ideas about how we might do the spay for Clover/Six. She seemed to want us to keep Clover/Six through the spay and recovery since she's never dealt with any of that before, and then proceeded to tell us another wild story about time she spent in Mexico helping out some free spaying clinic there. I will tell you that I only partly followed this story because I got very hung up by the implication that instead of anesthesia these folks "used some rope." I kept wonder if she meant to tie off the tom's balls, like you do with goats, or like to choke them until they passed out????

TWO RED FLAGS.

At any rate, I lost of details in this story of C.'s because I never got a chance to ask clarifying questions before she was going on to the next story.... which involved how she introduced "some kind of eating disorder" kitty to her DOGS.

First, Shawn and I exchanged glances because C. said when she saw how small Clover/Six was that she was glad because she needs small cats because her house is so tiny. So, now we were readjusting our mental image of this household because why would you need a cat of a certain size when you already have TWO DOGS and a cat in this so-called tiny house.  But, that's not even the story that had us on edge. She listened to Shawn explaining how we have been carefully trying to introduce a new cat into the mix in our house, and then said, well, when I introduced "some kind of eating disorder" cat to my dogs, I just put her in the basement and told her to "come up when she was ready" because the dogs never go to the basement. Wouldn't you know she was up in two minutes. Oh, sure there's a lot of barking and hissing (again, she demonstrated this with loud noises that made Clover/Six jump,) but you know cats and dogs, am I right?

I made a sort of semi-agreeing comment like, "Yes, I guess they all settle out eventually," but I was thinking: SO MANY RED FLAGS.

She left without making any real plans to come back, too. I don't want to be too judge-y, but holy crap am I judge-y.

This is how Clover/Six looked after C. left:


Image: Clover/Six curled up in a tight ball on Shawn's lap. She jumped up and acted the most lovey she ever has.

So... we're back to trying to figure out what to do. Shawn and I spent a huge portion of the night after C. left trying to decide if there was any way we could tell C. that we had a change of heart and was just going to keep her.

To that end, we attempted a bit of interaction, but, like clockwork, Willow came dashing out of the room she'd been in to immediately corner poor Clover/Six under the bed in the bedroom. If anything, Willow's reaction to Clover/Six has been getting more intense. (My going theory is that Willow can tell that Clover/Six is actually pregnant and does not want another cat's kittens in her territory.)  Clover/Six meanwhile is also getting broody and so when she gets scared by Willow, she's been lashing out (not painfully, but definitely unhappily) at Shawn and me. 

Clover/Six has to be rehomed.

Do we let C. have her anyway, despite the red flags? Or, do we turn C. down and keep looking? We do have one other lead, which is Shawn's brother Keven. He's had cats in the past, but hasn't had the gumption to replace the pair (Righty and Lefty) that he loved after they died several years ago.  Keven is also the sort to let cats roam outside, but he would also spay her and can afford the medical bills. She'd also have his whole house to explore and be an only cat. 

Currently, what we have done is contacted Keven to see if he's at all actually interested. He said yes, but who knows. Likewise, if C. comes back all ready and willing, we'll have to see if we feel like we have anything more than "mmm, you seem kind of like a flake" in terms of arguments as to why she shouldn't get the cat we promised her. 

It is a mess and it feels morally ambiguous. 

I still think that we are doing all that we can for this kitty, but I do wish that the path of "what if we just kept her?" was more open to us. It's possible that C. will be a perfectly wonderful cat mom despite all the conversational red flags. Who are we to judge? On the other hand, we're the ones who are going to have to sleep well at night with the decisions we make. 

Advice is welcome. We may not take it, but you should feel free to offer opinions on the matter.

ALSO, still only radio silence from the people who posted about missing Six. 

UPDATE: C. just contacted Shawn and backed out. Her reasons were that she basically needs a cat "ready to go" who doesn't need any care, such as a spay, etc., and because "it" bit her (which, yes, but C. pulled her tail after we told her that Clover did not like butt touches.) 

 Yesterday, Shawn and I made a trip to her work to pick up a laptop for use at home. She'd been using an old chromebook which was sort of working, but then suddenly decided that all this video conferencing was for fools. So, off we went to deserted building. 

We decided to drive down Grand Avenue, which is an area that's full of cute little shops and restaurants. We remarked to each other about all the handwritten/computer printed signed announcing various closures, and which places were still open: the fabric store! Hooray!  So, we decided that on the way back we should stop in an support a few of the businesses, particularly the bagel shop and the bakery.  

When I went into the bagel shop, the one other customer there visibly leaped away from me. This was only amusing since we were already easily a dozen feet from each other and he clearly had been at the counter telling the employees what kind of sandwich he wanted. The employees were also within six feet of each other because there really isn't room for them behind the counter to be anything other than elbow to elbow. This same guy also did the fast back-up when I headed to the counter to pay, which again, all I could do was eye roll, because, seriously, there is currently no other way for him or anyone else to pay without touching credit cards and standing a counter length apart. But, I guess some people figure that employees have some kind of immunity? Or maybe they don't actually EXIST other than to serve you and that the only people to be worried about are the other customers?  I wanted to tell him that I see far fewer people in my daily life than these poor employees (who probably have no sick time,) but then I am actually only one step removed from a confirmed case, so, the truth is, yeah, go ahead and keep your distance. It's just that he's being dumb to assume I'm the only worry he has in that place.

Otherwise, I had a nice chat with the people working at Breadsmith about their plans to try to stay open.

In other non-plague news, I got my cover art for Unjust Cause and it's AMAZING.  I can't wait to be able to show it off to you all. 

Oh, and Bleach is getting an animation of its final arc...

 Ms. Ball, who is Mason's kitty, has suddenly become quite thin.

We have a vet appointment scheduled for her ASAP, so we'll find out what's going on then, but in the meantime feel free to keep her in your thoughts. Here she is in better days, sleeping in her usual spot, on Mason's arm.



But, I didn't sleep terribly well last night, worrying about her.

You know how it is.

Otherwise, I spent a good portion of the day dealing with our internet/phone providers. Our landline suddenly stopped working, probably some time on Sunday. Like most people in this day and age, our landline normally only rings when a spambot is calling, so I didn't entirely notice we were offline until we missed the normal Sunday night robocall from Mason's school. Every Sunday, at 7 pm, Washington Technical's principle sends out a canned message informing us of various goings-on at the high school, like which of their sports teams did well and things like that. At that point we realized something was up. Shawn checked the neighborhood group and since other people who had Centurylink were experiencing problems, we waited to see if it would resolve itself.

It did not.

This morning I called and had a guy come out to investigate the situation. Turns out, we had never actually had our phones shifted to fiber and were still running copper to the house. It was supposed to have been disconnected and removed when we got fiber YEARS ago.  So, the technician took care of that for us. Our barbaric, old-fashioned landline is once again up and running.

Spambots everywhere may rejoice.

The guy was at our house for HOURS though. It turns out, a large part of his time was spent on hold.... to his own company.

APPARENTLY, Centurylink requires its technician to use the exact same horrific phone tree that customers use.  He apologized for taking so long, but apparently the first person he got connected to, didn't understand the issue, told him the line was fine, and hung up on him. So, he had to go through the whole rigamarole of WAITING ON HOLD AGAIN until he could talk to someone who could _properly_ test the line.

As my mechanic Tor would say: "What the fuck. Excuse my language, but What. The. FUCK."

The worst part? This guy spent several hours of his workday in our "Silence of the Lambs" basement, looking around at all the weird ass stuff we have collected down there. I wonder what he thought of my ceramic head? Or the sad, empty gerbil cage that we haven't quite gotten the nerve up to part with yet, despite the fact that the gerbil has been gone for years (I mean, it's a cleaned out cage, but still.)

I, meanwhile, had a lovely afternoon. naomikritzer came over to chat and we gossiped like old women over lunch (I made homemade pizza in a cast iron pan), while the technician sat on hold in my basement. 

Mason came home late today because his robotics team is having a bake sale to raise funds. For health safety reasons, they have to cook/bake everything they sell themselves, in the school's culinary arts classroom.  So, the whole team was there making cake pops until almost 7 pm. The team (@4229Magnetech) posted a picture of their efforts on Twitter (Mason is in the maroon shirt in the middle, mostly obscured by other people):



In other news, I _finally_ formally accepted a pinch hit for Yuletide, so if I disappear for several days, it's because I am frantically writing that. I actually already wrote a couple of treats for people this year, but I hadn't accepted an actual assignment.  

Wish me luck!

Hope you are all doing well!

It's Tuesday and there's a joke/not joke/tradition in my family that Tuesday are actually worse than Mondays, because with Monday's you're EXPECTING things to suck. Tuesdays always blindside you.

Today is not much of an exception.

I woke up this morning sometime around 3 am and I probably lie awake for a half-hour, which doesn't seem that bad, except it was punctuated by two cat fights and Shawn having several wake-up gasping nightmares.  (Apparently, one of them involved wrestling someone to death on a highway. "Mason, too" she said, in that sleepy way that meant she was falling back to dreamland, and I wanted to say, "Wait, what? Were you wrestling Mason to death or was it that Mason also had to wrestle someone to death?  And... why was it on the highway???" But, you know, nightmares aren't nightmares because they make sense.  They're often the most terrifying because they DON'T.)

Because we are aware that Tuesdays have sneaking-suckage, we've written it into the fabric of our family life that we try to lighten the load by going to Bruegger's for bagels on Tuesday mornings.  EVEN THOUGH we know that the Breugger's on Grand Avenue in St. Paul is chronically understaffed and has fairly poor customer service.  I think we do this partly to ENSURE Tuesday will kind of suck, but also because even though it's a kind of a hassle the bagels are REALLY good.... so it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy but with bonus tastiness.

But, before we even left for Bruegger's I opened up my email and checked in on social media and discovered that on a my Facebook feed there was a couple of guys who decided they needed to jump in and comment on something I'd re-blogged.  It was just a funny little poke at the Sad Puppies that said, "Sometimes I want to go up to the people who insist that feminism and progressive values are Ruining Science Fiction and remind them that their genre exists because a teenaged girl was stuck at a house party and decided inventing science fiction sounded more appealing than yet another tiresome threesome with Lord Byron."  Which, admittedly is a very HARD poke at certain people, but yet, somehow, I didn't expect that what these guys were going to argue and get in a snit about was whether or not Mary Shelley was the first science fiction novelist.

As I said in response to their malarky, this is not a debate I usually see.  Mary Shelley is fairly well recognized as the first science fiction novelist and thus its "inventor."  (In fact, when I linked to the Wikipedia article entitled "the history of science fiction" her picture showed up!  I didn't even know it would!)  

There may be, as I said, other people who dabbled in writing science into their fiction, but who the f*ck has heard of them?  Frankenstein is a book that EVERYONE knows, to the point that they think that's the name of the monster.  Therefore, Shelley is the default inventor.  I mean, if we want to quibble then people need to stop saying that Eddison invented... well, pretty much anything people think he did, because what he did was PATENT things. To the victor go the spoils. This is, after all the argument women have to put up with all the time when there were women in the shadows or as support.

One of the commenters seemed to want to discount Shelley because he wasn't fond of Frankenstein.  That's not how it works.  

So, yeah, that rilled me up. Then I got stuck in about six different traffic jams due to construction I didn't know about, including one on Maryland Avenue where I swear to god the "go/stop" sign guys were just randomly assigning which lane of traffic got to go by some arbitrary means rather than looking at the HUGE LINE OF CARS in my direction and the fact that there WERE NO CARS COMING IN THE OTHER DIRECTION.  

It was, quite frankly maddening, the lot of it.  The people on my Facebook feed reminded me of climate change deniers.  They were denying something that every one else finds REALLY F*CKING OBVIOUS and not able to come up with an answer to "Okay, who then?  Who else wrote something this influential BEFORE Shelley?"  And, that's really the key.  I mean, it's a matter of influence as well.  

AARRRRRGGGGH.

Oh, yeah, and I almost forgot. In preparation of our once-every-other-year (bi-annual?) trip to Bearskin Lodge on the Gunflint Trail, I took my car into Dave's. So, I'm stuck hanging out at the Dunn Bros. coffee shop in Roseville.  Again, none of these things that happened this morning were THAT big of a deal, but I kind of feel like I'm suffering from a thousand pinpricks, you know?

And... screw you deniers, Mary Shelley invented SF. Full stop.

Oh, but I was going to say, I have a couple of things I should tell folks about.  1) I will be signing books at the Mall of America's Barnes & Noble on Saturday, June 11 as part of their B-Fest Teen Book Festival.  (Here are a few more details: https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780061787270-0) 2) I was gathering up things to DO while up in the land of no Internet and I discovered that I've nearly finished the PLOT part of UnJust Cause, the book I was posting as a work-in-progress on Wattpad. So, I cut and pasted all the chapters into a Google Doc and then printed it out.  My plan is to revise the book while we're up North so that I can have a really good start on finishing it and turning it into an e-book.  So, if you've been patiently waiting for the sequel to Precinct 13, it's coming very, very soon!  

For those of you who have been following the story thus far, you know I've been painting our fence. This is the fence that goes between our house and the house to the south of us, which is a Section 8 rental. We've been passing acquaintances with one of the families that lives in that house because they have kids Mason's age and are, by chance, also lesbians. Today, while I was finishing up their side of the fence, Ebony (who may be genderqueer/trans because the kids call her 'dad,' though the partner uses 'she' to describe Ebony.) Regardless, Ebony and I exchange a few words about the fence and my work and how I'm mostly painting myself. Then, we have this very... interesting conversation.

Ebony: (somewhat angrily) "You like not working?"
Me: (confused, because WTF, I have a paint brush in my hand. I am clearly working), "What?"
Ebony: "I said, you *like* not working?"
Me: "I have no idea what you're talking about. I have a job at the library, I'm a sub. You might not know that because I work odd hours."
Ebony: "I ain't getting up in your business, but she [meaning Shawn] makes the money, right?"
Me: "Uh... that kind *is* my business."
Ebony: "Yeah, I guess it is. So, you're like the stud?"
Me: "THE WHAT?"
Ebony: "You know, like, the stud."
Me: "The stud? You're hilarious. I wish." [Because at this point, given the context of this very odd conversation, I'm thinking, 'are you thinking Shawn's my sugar mama or something?]

We say a few more random, though friendlier things to each other, and Ebony goes back in the house and I go back to painting, laughing at the idea of being Shawn's 'stud.'

Later it occurs to me that maybe Ebony meant 'butch,'* since s/he's no doubt seen me doing odd jobs around the house. It also dawns on me, while I'm retelling this story to Shawn that maybe the issue is that I also had a very short interaction with Don, Ebony's landlord, earlier. He came by for some reason and--though I tried really hard not to--I overheard Ebony tell Don that they were short on rent and that they'd have to make arrangements to pay him later. Thinking about this, I figure MAYBE Ebony really came over to harass me for my perceived status as 'richer.'

Which I guess, from Ebony's perspective, we are.

I mean, we don't rent, we own. We can very clearly afford groceries on a regular basis. I *do* actually get to stay home more often than not--though if I could find a full-time job that would accommodate Mason's schedule, I'd probably take it (though I do love the library a LOT.)  

So, maybe she was just mad about her situation and poverty in general and thought to harass me, because it seems like I'm doing so much better--and, you know, we are.  No mistake.  But it's a matter of degrees, and the distance between Ebony and Nicole and Shawn and I is not nearly so great as it is on the OTHER side of our OTHER fence, with Catherine and James--James also stays home, because Catherine is a college prof at Hamline and they own not only that house, but rent their upstairs AND own properties in Philadelphia.  They regularly travel to Africa and just sent Mali, their daughter, to a college out East for a summer writing program. They might actually be middle class (it's so hard to tell in America, these days.)  

I also get anger as a response to this.  I've felt it in much less dire situations.  

It was still, possibly, one of the weirdest conversations I've had with ANYONE in a long, long time....

---
Edited to add: 'stud'--d'uh, I should have gone right to the urban dictionary.  Stud is, in point of fact, a word that means butch lesbian.  I am Shawn's stud.  So, as a bonus, we got to be completely crossed-wired despite both speaking the same language and ostensibly from the same culture (lesbian.)