Things you can find in the cat´s bushy tail

Today I haven´t even thought of using my poisonous bottle to remove the smell of cat urine in the car, so I assume it doesn´t smell any longer. I know I could be wrong. But, be that as it might, I have other things to report...

This morning (that is, at around 10 A.M.), when I stumbled down the stairs to let some cat out, probably to do something he also could have done in the litter box, I almost stepped on something I first thought was a very round little brown stone - but which turned out to be a cat turd... And I have a suspect for this turd: it must have been Frissi, with his very furry tail, becuase it wouldn´t be the first time he unwillingly brings inside things that should stay outside. Once, a few years ago, I saw something moving in his tail (when the tail was still...) and that time it was a live worm... It must have creapt into his tail when he was doing other things in a hole in the ground, and then it probably got lost among all that hair, and ended up inside instead. When the cats come to sleep in my bed I usually prefer not to look too close at Frissi´s tail... who knows what I could find...

We´re watchnig Spanish TV right now, and I´m quite surprised to hear that Spain has passed a law that gives homosexuals the right to marry, to adopt children etc. That´s great! You´d think that the Scandinavian countries would pass that kind of laws, but in Finland homosexuals can only "register" their relationship, but they can´t marry. Personally I don´t understand why anybody would want to marry (I blame my marriage on the US... Had to get married so I wouldn´t have to live in DC on a tourist visa...), but then again, there are many things in this world that I don´t understand, and I still have to accept them... And the reasons why homosexuals would not have the right to do what they like when it comes to marrying each other or adopting children are all so absurd, like "it´s against Nature...". So...? Nature usually sucks! So if it´s agains Nature, good!!

(Here comes something completely unrelated to kitty litter - or or gay marriage- but I found it interesting anyway--) Today I found a website where I could check out which of the jobs I´ve had since 1974 that will have an impact on the money I will eventually be able to cash in when I retire - that is, if I ever have a chance to get any money if I retire. I fear that when - or if - I reach the age of 63 the rules will have changed, and there will be no retirement age, I´ll have to work untill I´m 95 if I'm healthy, and if I´m not, the next generation - or the one after that (the kids who have grown up killing people on the screen since before they could talk...) will swiftly put me out of my misery as soon as I´m no longer a working, tax-paying citizen... Anyway, about the website, it was interesting to get access to information that showed (among other things...) that I have had quite a few different jobs in my life, so far...

But if I could choose, I think I´d prefer to be a cat (at least if I chould live in my house...). Some days, like, today, when I have too much unfinished work, and at least one more month of heavy work loads until I can maybe take a few weeks off, I would so much like to be a cat... I wouldn´t need to do anything but pee in an old car now and then, eat, sleep, chase anohter cat up a tree, eat something, sleep, go for a walk, sleep, do cat-things, eat.... sleep... And since my cats are all castrated, they don´t even need to try to get laid.
Oh! I do wish I were one of my own cats...

The Pissan Study

I have now firm proof that my senses have been damaged by this massive exposure to kitty urine... Today when I was driving to work in my Nissan Pissan I thought to myself "Oh, the smell seems to be gone..." and I felt no need to spray the interior of the car with the probably extremely poisonous liquid I bought last week. But then why does Kjell say he can´t even sit in that car, that it stinks? Either he is manipulating me to keep using the old car, so he can glide around in our "non-pissan" Toyota, or he´s telling the truth, and or Pissan does smell, even though I really don´t notice... (wonder when the next stage will kick in and Iwill start craving it?)

To get an answer, I decided to perform a controlled test.... I brought 2 human noses, and 3 kitty noses close to the open back door of Nissan-Pissan, making sure I was standing close enough myself to have the time to catch any creature, human or cat, if they´d start behaving in a suspicious way (that is... opening the pants and exposing certain body parts, in case of the humans, and placing your behind in a pissing position, in case of the cats...).

One of the humans swore he couldn´t smell anything any longer. The other human just put her head inside the car for a moment, and came out with a disgusted look on her face and said "This car stinks!!!"

One cat was busy being chased up a tree by anohter cat, whom I later managed to lure close to the car by saying the magic word "gräääässss" (grassss - and if somebody thinks this needs explaining it just proves they don´t know me or my cats...). He clearly smelled something and was about to jump in, but I got him before he had time to actually start doing anything ... The third cat showed similar behaviour. So according to this non-scientific little study, a majority of the creatures participating reacted to the supposed smell of urine, which probably proves what I don´t want to believe: My Nissan-Pissan can still be considered a litterbox on wheels...
Sad, isn´t it?
But now I shall try to get a few more cats to come in... It´s chilly, so they´ll probably be eager to come in and use the inside toilet - and to sleep in my bed. One cat, Svarti, is already sleeping with his little black head on my pillow, and with all his 4 paws stretched out, trying to prevent me from sleeping in my own bed. But tonight I show no mercy - I need my bed!! and i need it now. [Sometimes I wonder if inhaling cat urine vapours in a hot car for more than a week will cause lasting damage to my brain? When I try to read what I´ve just written I think I might have a reason to fear the worst...]

Stepping in It

Since Rebecca not only has NOT yet started her own blog, but she even has the nerve to complain about my slow updates, I see no other possibility to fill this blog but to include her own very interesting kitty litter related observations...

[these items have now been removed, since 100 % of this blog´s readers begged me to do so...]

Human waste

I haven´t written in this blog for a few days, because I´ve been exhausted by the continuous exposure to the smell of cat urine - and also by my halfassed intent at cleaning up the mess I´m living in.
My car is now unofficially called "Pissan Sunny", instead of "Nissan Sunny" - because even though I personally didn´t notice the smell that much after a few days of driving around in it - others have convinced me that it does smell.... And I know for a fact that cats do notice it...

On Thursday, when it was still hot, and the sun was shining, and I was desperately trying to get at least some cleaning done, I had my "Pissan" parked outside, and I decided to leave part of the driver´s seat window open, because I didn´t want to make things worse and have the car turn into a piss-smelling sauna/litterbox on wheels (the only thing missing in that crazy set-up would be me driving around naked in this hot, smelly vehicle, while furiously beating myself - not with birch branches, but with a cat, held by the tail, so that I´d get the maximum of odour into the car, since so much exposure would have made me addicted - and insane... Note! No living animal was harmed by my little revenge fantasy...), and I went inside to drop off some things - cat food, what else? - and when I came out, Otto (by far our smartest cat...) was clinging to the car door, with one of his front paws inside the window, trying to squeeze his little head into what he thought was a nice and warm - and huge - kitty litterbox! I mean, it was evident that he smelled somehting, and he wanted desperately to get inside... That seems to be the reaction of any normal cat when they smell the piss of other cats - they´ve got to go there! And they´ve got to leave a sign that they´ve been there too... Suppose it´s in their nature. But we all know that I have a complicated realtationship with "Nature" - and when what trigges this "natural" reaction in cats is something inside my car, I really wish there was a way to neutralize this instinct to pee where others have done it before. But since I can´t, I just have to let tha car stand there, with just a tiny little opening of the window - unless I want to have all the cats in town standing in line by the car, waiting for their turn to pee in my back seat...
For obvious reasons I have been using my bicyle a lot recently.
But I did get some cleaning done on Thursday, before Kjell got back... Not enough, though, because every time I start an ambitious "cleaning up the house"-project, I almost immediately realize that this is impossible! No human being could have a chance to sort this mess out in one day (to be honest, probably not even in less than 10 years... )- and I had thought I´d do it in about 7 hours.

I have about 50 differente problem aereas - or different size "heaps". Heaps of clothes (or similar items), heaps of books, writing material, note books, articles I´ve printed out from Internet that I "will read one day" etc. I also have heaps of CD:s that I have used for my programs, and which should be put back where they belong. There are also mixed heaps, where you could expect to find anything except things from the fridge, since they ususally start smelling, so I´d get rid of them if they got into some kind of heap outside of their normal area in the refrigerator. Oh, and I forgot heaps of magazines (that I might sort through one day, since I´m sure there was one really intersting artilce in a magazine from July 1997...), and the ever growing heaps of old newspapers... I already have a year´s worth of Old News, that I´d throw out, if it wasn´t for that one article in one of the papers, the second week of October last year (or around that time...) that I just have to find - that is, once I get around to sorting through my paper heaps... So I really need a lot of free time, and an incredible amount of spare energy to start sorting through my heaps. And strange as it may sound to people who were born with "a sense of order" (or to people who for some reason have acquired a lifestyle where order is a high priority...), as long as I don´t touch my heaps I can usually find what I need if I look for something - but once I´ve tried to put things into some kind of order - forget it!! After that I have no clue where to start looking... Not to mention the confusion I´m plunged into when My Mother on some rare ocasion goes way beyond lawn mowing and starts messing with my heaps... We have had a few fights about this one. She doesn´t seem to get it, so if I leave her cat sitting for a lenghty period of time, say a couple of weeks, she sometimes seems to think that the work description includes a permission to mess with anything she might find offensive... like the heaps that can be found all over the floor. The "innocent reason" for doing it is that 'she just wanted to clean the floor and take out the rugs', and then of course she had to get to the floor first... Of course, nobody asked her to do anything about my floor either.

Anyway, I got around to cleaning my bathroom (the human equivalent of the kitty litterbox...) - which according to my dear husband looked like something olny a single, dirty male person would use. Maybe he was right, but I hadn´t gotten aroud to doing anything about it - until on Thursday. To show how brave I am, I went straight for the worst part (which by no means is cleaning the toilet bowl - that´s a piece of cake, and can be done by strong detergent and a longhandled brush...) - the hole in the floor under the shower!! You know which one I meen? this hole that lets the water through, but stops your bigger size jewellery, soaps, small shampoo bottles, shaving material and other things you might drop while in the shower from going down the drain... Well, that is by far the grossest part in the house! It had been smelling for some time, but I had managed to ignore it. But it was getting worse... And I know what´s in there - I´ve cleaned it out before (must have been long ago, but I have done it...) and it didn´t make me wanna stick my hands down there again (if houses would have asses - this would be the asshole of the house!).
Ok, to make a long, and gross, story short, I got out the gunk (- a disgustingly smelly mess consisting of hairs, mostly very long hairs - I must be shedding more than my cats - mixed with tons of dried detergent, and another ton of dead cells from human skin... it was so GROSS!!), and my neighbour was here when I did my dirty deed, and she totally agreed with me that I should throw away that whole thing that covered the drain hole, the plastic round thing - otherwise I´d have to get into close encounter with my own dead cells mixed with who-knows-what... So I threw the whole damned thing out, went to our friend Wallendahl to bye a new one (he said I was a wimp for not wanting to clean my own hairs and dirt from that thing, but reluctantly he sold one to me anyway...) and I got home - to find it didn´t fit!! Shit, shit, shit!!! Now my pride (and the fact that the store had closed...) gave me a burst of super human energy, and I managed to overcome my resistance, so I got the plastic bag with the gunk/drainhole cover out of the garbage bin, opened it, cleaned it, and got it back where it belonged before I even had the time to think about how disgusting it all was.
End of story.
The heaps are still all over my house, but I got the worst part of my bathroom taken care of. Cleaning the kitty litterbox is nothing compared to this, though...

One more smelly day

Yesterday I felt like I was surrounded by a faint, but clearly smellable, odour of cat piss, since I was driving around in my mobile kitty litterbox. I had a feeling people looked at me in a strange way, and didn´t I have an unusual amount of space around me in crowds.?.. It might of course be my paranoid imagination, but on the ohter hand, I might also be a walking stink bomb, because even if I can´t smell it, others will... I´m probably getting used to the smell of cat piss by now - and who knows if tomorrow I start craving it? [...as they say around here: You shouldn´t put a pine cone up your ass, because before you know it, your body starts craving it... ] I can just imagine myself trying to lure a reluctant cat into my car to get my daily fix of.... Oh no, stop it!! I´ve been sleeping too little too many nights in a row, so my brain is not fully connected to my fingers right now.
Anyway... today the whole country is winding down for our Midsummer Celebration- "Midsommar"... I thought the party started tomorrow, but it seems like everybody is already getting into vacation mode. And me, I have to stop writing, NOW! at this very moment and get this dump into some kind of shape before Kjell gets home... [left to my own devices I manage to turn an average home into an absolutely incredible mess in just a few days... and this house has been a mess for a while already ...] he was already on his way, speeding north, in our fast and non-smelly car, last time he called - he might be arriving before I know it... I have to call in the "grey panther brigade" (aka "My Mother)
More updates later - if I survive this cleaning binge [ha, ha, ha...]

Still pissing in the back seat...

This is just too absurd to be true!! My my car seems to have turned into a public toilet for every damned cat in the neighbourhood...
Yesterday I bought some anti-smell-stuff in bottle, somtehing that promised to get rid of all kinds of bad odours... (Wallendahl, who sold it to me, even uses it on himself, when he smells bad) . This thing even seemed to work - but not completely, so today I let the the car doors open while I had my morning coffee whit my neighbour - I thought it was OK, since she´s no cat owner... But the rumors of my "cat toilet on wheels" by then must have spread to all the cats in Nykarleby, and probably also to some neigbouring towns, becuase when I was closing the doors and was preparing for "take off", a nice looking cat, that I have never seen before in my life, jumped out of my back seat - and you guess the rest, I suppose...
I didn´t have to throw the cat out- he was leaving anyhow, since his smelling mission was clearly already accomplished... Damn!

Litter box on 4 wheels (or "pissing in the back seat...")

Well, I have a lot to do at work right now, but I just have to add this little update:
Yesterday I was very disgusted to find that my car had become a kitty litter box on wheels... I have no idea which cat to blame, but at least one cat has been pissing in the back seat of my old Nissan Sunny from 1986. It could have been Lill-Liffan, who was scared when Jonas, her owner (who borrowed my car over the weekend, while I was away...) took her to the veterinarian, out of town,to patch her up after some rough encounter with "nature". But it could also have been my own sweet Liffi, who was protesting when he smelled that another cat had been in the car - or maybe he was just showing his anger when a man who was not Kjell, was driving the car... (Liffi and Kjell have a very special relationship...) . I even came to think of the possibility that the cats might secretly have been reading my blog, and this was their way of saying "If you´re going to expose us, and our toilet habits, to the world, we migh as well give you something to write about... Smell this, bitch!!"
And it sure does smell...

Maybe I should be more careful what I write about the cats... just in case.

So I´ll write about something else...
Today is the longest day of the year, after this we´re heading back into the gloomy darkness of winter again - little by little...

Damn, I have so much work to do right now that it almost keeps me from blogging!

One more thing... Yesterday I got in touch with a friend I hadn´t talked to in two years -Michele, whom I met in a class about Jungian Psychology at Georgetown University ten years ago. She´s been living in Germany during the last 5 years, and now she´s moving to London. She told me she´s had a photo exhibition in a gallery in Paris... She never wants to move back to the US - meanwhile, I´m planning to go visit DC again... Soon. If I can get my shit together and see to it that I get some time off next fall, or spring...

Kitty update

I had to go away for a few days, so my mother was left in charge of the "turd producers", and when I returned, after 50 hours of exhausting activities out of town, my nose told me immediately that there had also been some activity in the litter box.
And I even know why this has happened...
My mother, except for being the self proclaimed "lawn police"[ - she´s very much into "Lawn and order"... ;-) ] around my place, also has the strange habit of going to bed really early, around 8.30 P.M, so she can wake up at 5 to and wait for the morning paper to arrive. Unfortunately she can´t see different sleeping habits as just another way people happen to be different - no, no, no!! - She is absolutely convinced that people who start their day early are somehow better, more sane, more industrious - and of course more virtuous human beings - which of course makes me a really, really bad person . And when she´s taking care of the cats, he's trying to pervert them and make them go to bed early as well - but they don´t! And they are no early risers, either - at least not all of them (we have some problems with Otto, who sometimes wants to get up before we do...) My cats are used to my habits, so when the kitties are locked up early, they usually haven´t been doing nr 1 nor nr 2, so they´ll have to make use of the litter box, even if it is summer, and they´d prefer to spread their turds outside...

So that´s why the kitty litter box was smelly when I arrieved home - and now you think I´ll tell you the good news that I have actually emptied it? But no such luck!! I was getting the plastic bag ready, and I was mentally getting prepared to "just do it" - when I suddenly realized I had no clean kitty litter to replace the contents of the now soiled litter box... But now it´s only a question of time before some changes will be made.

Even though I wasn´t away for more than 50 hours, there had been things going on with one of my "god cats" - or the cats that I´m the "god mother" of - in case there is something like being a "god mother" for cats... but, anyway, two cats that I saved from early death some time ago. Jonas, their present owner called me on Saturday morning, and needed to get the private number of Maria, the already once mentioned veterinarian, because Emma the female cat, whom I call "Lill-Liffan", because she looks a lot like my Liffi, had come home with a nasty wound, and he didn´t know what to do. Anyway, to make a long story short, the cat got a few stitches, and she now has some kind of tube coming out of her side and she´s on antibiotics. But she´ll be fine! It´s a pity these animals can't tell what the hell they´ve been up to... If she´d tell me who´s done that to her...
But now I have used up the time I´ve allowed myself to waste on blogs for this morning.

The peeing habits of the castrated male cat

I´m off to the grocery store to by catfood, because I just opened the last can, and I really don´t want to starv my little friends, since how would they ever have a chance to do anything worht telling about in the litterbox if I don´t feed them, hm? Of course, left to their own devices, they can find edible small animals around here, but I don´t really like it when they bring dead, or semi-dead, pieces of "nature" into the kitchen, those murderous little bastards!

Yesterday I made an interesting observation concerning the pissing habits of my cats... I had always thought that only "un-damaged" male cats do this thing when they turn their little furry asses toward a target, then wiggles the upright tail vigourosly for a few seconds, while they spray the target with cat piss... I´ve seen enough foreing cats do that to my car, my front door, my garden furniture etc, and in case I haven´t seen it, my nose can tell me they´ve been there. Now I have this disturbing feeling that it might have been my own little darlings who´ve be been pissing around all along - since I saw both Liffi and Frissi do this spraying thing yesterday, while I was sitting outside with some friends enjoying the first mild evening this year.

But how can I have been living with this false notion so long? Or maybe it is that castrated male cats do it, but in their case it doesn´t smell as bad as when normal cats do the same thing? This supposed ignorance of mine really bothers me now... Must remember to ask Maria, the vereinarian, when I see her... But since she opened her own practice I almost never see her. Before, when she was employed by our little town, she had time to have lunch breaks, and she often told us things about her work, with all the gory details, while we were eating our salad at "Café Kyrktuppen" [- the place that closed "for good" about 3 years ago, then was "born again" a few months later, just to be closed down for good (and this time it´s for real - they are already remodelling the place) a few weeks ago...] . I was always impressed by how much she seemed to like what she was doing, and I used to think that the main differens between medical doctors and veterinarians is that the veterinarians, in general, do like animals...

But, now I´m off to the store. More later. Maybe.

Close encounter with Nature

Woke up too early, that is, at around 8, which is way too early since I had been reading until 3:30 AM... These white nights really manage to confuse me - and my cats. It just doesn´t get dark... I have to trick the kitty population into the house when I go to sleep, and some of them have to be brought in by hand (usually Liffi). Last night I didn´t even manage to get Frissi inside - but he´s so furry anyway so he could sleep outside even in winter. Not that he wants to. But at least Svarti slept on my left side, as usual - I like to have him there, he doesn´t shed as much as Liffi, and his purring is nice and loud. But he has aquired the annoying habit of pushing me out of my own bed. He starts little by little, by changing his position, giving me slight pushes with the claws of his back paws, and as every normal (sleeping) human being, I instinctivel move away from those claws... He´s smart, though, since he doesn´t actually scratch me enough to wake me up, he just slowly but surely pushes me in the other direction, and positions himself in a 90 degree angle from me - and when I wake up this black cat has managed to take over my whole bed, while I am wondering why I´m suddenly so close to the edge (those last 3 words remind me of one of the more weird YES-albums...)
Ok, this will be the closest we get to a kittylitter update, as for today. There will be a lot more in the box when winter comes - I promise!

To get at least some of the frustration and anger from yesterday (and from the last few weeks, months --- years?) out of my system I decided to ride my bicycle to work today - it´s "just" 22 km (whetever that is in miles...). Everyone who knows me is fully aware of me not being a "nature" kind of woman - (who was it that said "Nature - it´s disgusting!"?) so my decision to go by bike meant I´d have to expose myself to a lot more contact with nature than I´d actually need - but I just had to do something to get my head back to "normal", and sometimes extreme measures are needed.

I´m now happy to report that I survived this overdose of fresh air and "nature"(big birds, smaller birds, yellow birds, long-legged birds, butterflies, trees, trees, and more trees - but no squirrels, no foxes and no moose.... this time) - and in just 1 hour and 15 minutes I made it to Jakobstad. Later Kjell is going to take my bike back home, because two rides like this in a row would leave my ass unable to perform its main function (that is, to be the fat thing I usually sit on all day... what did you think?)

Early meltdown

This morning I woke up too early, considering I had been updating some blogs until around 1.30 A.M last night - but at least the sun was shining, so I dragged my tired body downstairs to let the two black cats in ( Svarti, the black-black cat, and Otto, the one who has white socks) after their night ouside, supposedly doing -- well, cat things. And as the two black cats came in, the other two went out (the night shift cats came in to sleep so the day shift cats could take over doing their ... cat things), which meant there was no immediate need to deal with the kittylitter box, so from that front there´s nothing to report, but I can share some mental litter instead...

I went back upstairs to continue reading my the airdisaster related book (which has a titel I can´t even remember at this point... they´re all the same! But I love them) and found a funny expression that I wasn´t familiar with: "brain fart" ... I liked that! Supposedly because I´ve let quite a few "brain farts" out through my lips over the years. Some days I´m easily amused, so still chuckling I went downstairs to make some coffee and tell my dear husband about the funny expression. Halfway thorugh my coffee I see my mother coming in her car... and she is on a mission! Grass... She´s out to get my grass. It´s supposedly way too long, and even if it´s been raining for four days in a row, and it might be a good idea to let it dry first, there´s no stopping this woman when she can see an uncut lawn.

Anyway, to make a long story short - she mowed the lawn, and then went home in a huff because I wasn´t as happy as I should have been for her "sacrifice" - nor was I happy a month ago when I got this damned lawn mower as a birthday present. And now I´m seriously inclined to take that loud monster mashine down to the river and DROWN it!!

The problem is not my lawn... It isn´t for me, and it isn´t really for my mother either. The problem is that my mother and I have very different views on how important other people´s opinions on my grass should be. To my mohter, it´s a minor catastrophy if somebody (anybody! people she doesn´t even know...)might think that her daughter has not been mowing her lawn and otherwise kept her garden in a good shape, according to unofficial smalltown standards... While I couldn´t care less! So while we live in the same town, there´s always going to be trouble brewing.

And of course, what makes me boil inside is not so much this unimportant incident, it´s what this incident reminds me of - and that is something a lot more painful... To my mohter my opinions, and my feelings, have always been considered less important than what "people say". It´s always been like that, and somehow I´m used to it. But if this small town mentality catches me off guard - as it did this morning - it can still cause a furious mental meltdown.

I´ll allways have an ambivalent feeling about this small town. Most days I can handle my own ambivalence - some days it´s a bit more difficult.

Her last words, throug the car window, as she left (mission accomplished...) was "you should go live somewhere where no grass grows!"
Well, today it really is an option worth considering...

Copy of first entry (when I still thought I could manage a bilingual blog...)

So, Rebecca, now you can check in on my kittylitter habits - but don´t get your hopes up, I haven´t emptied that stinking old box in ages. And it´s not only because I´m a lazy old middleaged bitch - it´s because my cats are trained to do both nr 1 and nr 2 outside. The fact that there might be some poop left over from February doesn´t bother me that much - it´s dry by now anyway.Happy now? I´ll keep you informed on the kittylitter issues as they emerge. Consider this my birthday present to you! While you wait around for the next kitty update you can try to find out other unimportant stuff about my daily life - like... it´s now almost 1 PM, and I´m not yet fully dressed (and no, you naughty old woman, I´m not sitting here naked - but I´m not dressed either...) I was thinking of getting dressed a while ago, but then I decided to take a shower instead, so here I sit while I wait for my hair to dry. It´s not that I´ve been sleeping all morning, oh no, forget that! I woke up because it was raining so hard... This is beginning to look like a really shitty summer! That´s why I finally made up my mind and created this blog... Not that I am sure I remember my password anymore, but --- never mind.Outside it´s about 10 degrees C (whatever that is in F - it´s not enough, that much I can assure you), and Liffi, the cat we almost lost when he was so sick in winter, is sleeping in his favourite chair, but he´s sneezing... wonder if he´s getting worse again? I´m waiting for someone from work to call me and help me install "Java" - not that it can be that difficult, but I don´t feel like putting my energy into figuring it out. Now my stomach is screaming for food (it often does...), so I´ll stop writing for no, but please, Rebecca, now YOU get yourself a blog, so I can check in on your dead-line frenzies and your happy procrastinations ...And one more thing, Rebecca - Happy Birthday! And thank you for making me waste so much time reading other people´s blogs that I finally had to get my own....