Time off from this blog

Uh-oh, I haven´t been dedicating much time to this blog lately... Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Rebecca, my one and only regular reader, is off on some wild two-months long adventure in South America - and I just assume she wont´t be rushing to the nearest internet café every few hours just to know if I have finally cleaned out my kitty litterbox or not... And since she wont´t be cheking in on this blog every hour (nor sending me guilt provoking e-mails asking for updates...) I have now been taking some guilt free time off from this blog...

But on the other hand, I feel I have the obligation to report that at this moment I have two extra cats in my house - but on the other hand, one husband is missing. No, in case you thought I had traded him in for a couple of cats, you´re WRONG... (but knowing me, maybe that´s exactly what your first thoughts would be?). These two cats belong to Jonas, and they have been spending time in my house every now and then since they were little, so even Liffi, the grumpiest of my own cats, just tells the visitors in plain cat language that he does not like more cat company in the house, then he mainly ignores them - he doesn´t even pick a fight...

The big one of the visiting cats, also named Otto, but I call him "Ludensvans", so I won´t make our Otto confused - has a very annoying habit... When the door is open, and he´s running around outside, chasing birds, trying to get on the nerves of the resident cats, or just doing other random cat things, he allways goes inside to use the litter box! Why can´t he take a crap in the neigbour´s garden, as my cats do?! I have a feeling he saves himself all day, so when I come home he rushes in and goes straight to the box. And this cat is a real shit producer... He eats like a pony - and shits like a horse. So, sooner than I thought, I might reluctantly have to clean out the litterbox...

Tonight I´m going to a highschool reunion... None of my few friends from that time will be there, so I might be in for a looooong and boooooring evening. But in case it gets unbearable I can always claim I have some cat feeding to do at home, and then leave the place with some kind of dignity. [To claim illness or invent some other bad excuse would be too obvious, but nobody is going to doubt it if I leave because of the cats... ]

Home alone with the cats - and Pissan

Now I´m stuck at home with my four cats, and our Nissan-Pissan - not that I think it smells anymore, but who knows...
Kjell just took the other car and left for a wedding, 500 kilometers away from here - I could not go, too much valuable work time (not to mention blog time...) would have been lost. And I´m too exhausted right now to even think of a long car ride - and besides, for some strange reason we often manage to start a fight just before we go on a road trip - don´t ask me why, but it´s a minor family tradition by now...
I think I have to go to the supermarket to get some expensive cat food - Frissi, the furry one took a bird again yesterday, I take that as a way of complaining abuot what I´m giving him... The funny thing about Frissi is that normally he´s the clumsiest of all our cats - I´ve seen him fall down from chairs, tables and other pieces of furniture when he has made unsuccessful attempt to get his furry ass on top of them. Frissi really likes to put furry parts of his body on the table while we are having breakfast... he knows that if he keeps insisting long enough, one human or other will throw him some nice human food... he starts with a paw - then he puts his pretty little head, on the table, lookin in the eyes of the nearest human, trying to get a non-verbal message through... "I´m staaaaaarving!" he says with his eyes - and mouth...
Got to go! Don´t know what they will do if I don´t feed them properly.

My week (an update...)

OK, so I haven´t been writing much lately. But considering the week I have had to endure - for being stupid enough to promise to do something I should have known from the start would fuck up my summer - I should consider myself lucky to be alive. Since I fear I might go crazy if I don´t slow down a bit, I now sit down to write my weekly kitty update, or whatever-update, with a glass of white wine by my side, and a snoring husband a few steps away... HE is enjoying his (paid!) 27 weeks vacation (or 9, or whatever...) to the fullest, goes from one garden party to the next, sitting up until 3 or 4 in the morning - because HE doesn´t have to think about work... And all this is just FINE - I wouldn´t mind one bit - if I could just do the same! Imagine how much I hated all those happy, free paid-vacationers partying down the street at my friend Majvor´s house, when I had to drag myself away from the party, with the intention to go to bed early to be able to put in my 12 hour workday?
And I should mention that I have been to a few parties myself - oh yes! But at this age it isn´t too easy to try to combine heavy working with parties 6 days a week... Nowadays, to do that, some things have to wait until later. Like - my blogs. [Now one of my Spanish readers is getting restless too... Mierda! I´ve gotten myself into el infierno de los blogs... As if I needed another thing to feel guilty about at this point in my life! It has gotten completely out of control -- I think I´ll start a Portugues-language blog, and I wont tell ANYBODY, I´ll write once every few months, and nobody will be angry with me... ] But don´t think I have been completely off line for not updating my blogs - oh no! I´ve been wasting nauseating amounts of valuable work time reading other people´s blogs - and I have even managed to identify one of the bloggers as a guy I once had in a radio piece 5 years ago... But I won´t tell him I´m checking his blog every day - and getting irritated because he hasn´t written since last week. I´d feel embarrassed if he´d know that I know a lot about his romantic adventure abroad....
But let´s see now, how many parties have I actually attended since last week?
On Friday we had guests coming to our new "Kulturstugan" - I stayed up with them until 4 a.m.
Saturday - guests arrived at our house around noon, and then it was fiesta continua until 1 a.m.
Sunday was the hottest day of the year - and I spent the hottest hours of that hot day watching childrens´ theater, in the sun, with my guests, my nephew and my mohter... In the evening, there was a garden party down the street... planned to go home early - got home by 1 a.m
Monday I was probably more dead than alive - can´t even remember what I did that day - except that I worked, of course!
Tuesday - birthday party on an island off Jakobstad. One of my old friends turned 50. I didn´t actually have the time to go there, but I went anyway. It was fun - but I didn´t manage to put in my required 12 hours of work, since the boat for Masskär left at 4.30 p.m (and I have never, or at least not since I was a flight attendant, managed to get to work at 4.30 a.m....)
Wednesday - got to work around 11, I think, with just a slight hang over. The computer crashed just when I was about to save what I had been working on for the last 4 hours... Fucking great!! I allowed myself a minor (10 minutes...) nervous breakdown, kicking, screaming, crying, chain-smoking 2 cigarrettes in a row - and then I started over. Got home around midnight to find a party going on in our garden. Kjell had dinner guests. Joined the party until 2 a.m
Thursday - since the radio program that was going on air tonight, was NOT ready, I had to get in "early" - that is 10.30 a.m. By then my dear husband was barely awake - since he is on vacation, dammit! (I want a loooong paid vacation too!!!). I was done around 3 p.m - with plenty of time to spare... but usually I try to get my stuff ready the night before, so I won´t get dead-line angst. I didn´t have time for any angst today, though...
Punished myself by riding my bicyle home. Bad idea! I had terrible sidewinds and headwinds the whole 21 kilometers. [As if I wasn´t exhausted enough before that...]
Tomorrow is probably a new day. I should go to a wedding on Saturday, 500 km from here. Kjell will have to go alone. I´ll close my door, unplug my computer, and just stay in bed for the whole weekend. Or if not, I´ll work. One more La Palma-program to go...
No, I´m not even going to mention the litter box - I´ll empty it when the first snow falls, or by christmas, whichever comes first.
I´m going to go downstairs to give the cats 1 chance to spend the night inside, and then I´m off to bed.

Paying the price

One good thing about having a Nissan-Pissan is that I am much more inclined to take my bicycle to work, instead of driving that supposedly still smelly car... This is probably good for me, I mean, I´m not the person who usually gets a lot of exercise - but it also means that I get to see more roadkill than I would care for - but so far I haven´t produced any major roadkill myself... One tiny bird with short legs and underdeveloped wings almost got in my way today, but that´s all - unless you count all kinds of flying insects trying to enter my mouth, my nose, my eyes etc. Halfway to Jakobstad my face usually feels the way Nissan-Pissan´s windshield looks... I had a close encounter with a huge bee (i think) but it didn´t get into my eye thanks to my sunglasses.

Just now it´s a bad week for blogging... I have had to endure 11-12 hour workdays as a "punishment" for having spent way too many hours on the blogs during the last month or so... Partly this is Rebecca´s fault (and she knows it... having been the star in my radio piece on blogging and all...;-) - and also, she was the one who insisted that I start my own blog... Which I did. And now I have to pay the price... And yes, I do like to blame others for my own laziness and unability to get started in time...) - but I´m still waiting for her blog to appear...

Of course, as a freelance I have only one person to blame for my current situation, and that´s me - a fact that doesn´t exactly cheer me up :-/

Two or three more weeks of heavy work, then I´ll finally be able to take som time off - and at that point I might even consider cleaning out the kitty litterbox... (for now, it´s very far down on my "to do"-list)

But at least tonight I got 3 out of 4 cats to come in for the night... (I try to practice some positive thinking here...)

Stupid macho birds

There hasn´t been much going on in the cats´ lives lately - they just hang around, sleep, eat, sleep in my lap when I want to read the morning paper - eat some more, and every once in a while one of them try to cheer me up with a dead bird ;-/
Otto was on his way to the kitchen with a little yellow bird in his mouth yesterday... I hate it when they bring dead pieces of "nature" into my home!!! I have said it before, but it´s worth repeating... I don´t like to have dead mice, birds, small rats or other rodents inside my house!! hy can´t they stick to spiders, mosquitoes and flies?

And talking about dead birds...
Yesterday I was once again so stressed out that I had to take my bicycle to Jakobstad to - this time it took me only 1 hour and 5 minutes...
But what´s wrong with the big birds that lie dead by the road? I mean, they do have wings, right? Why the hell do they sit there waiting for the car to come so close that when they finally, lazily, try to get their fat bird-asses moving, they just don´t manage to get high enough - so they smash into car ... Usuallay they are crows, or something similar - black-grey in colour, big as an average size cat, and they take off like an old tired B52, or something... I saw two smashed black birds, and 3 other big birds, that looked like they had once been seagulls... The seagulls are a little bit faster when they take off, they look like they´d have a better chance of surviving, but still they seem to wait too long... Idiot birds!!

Mostly when I drive I can see a group of birds, from far away, they sit on the road, probably eating some other dead animal. So if I see them, they should see me, I think... But they just sit there. But could it be that they have some crazy macho thing going on -- The biggest and meanest bird says something like "Ok, the first bird to fly away is a sissy..." And then they just sit there - waiting for the car to come closer and closer, and as a consequence I have to endure the sight of more roadkill than I´d care for on this realatively short trip...

Suppose this thing will eventually turn all surviving birds into sissies, since the "brave, macho, big bad birds" will all be roadkill because of their stupid competitive mentality and their unwillingness to use their common (bird) sense. Somebody should go and slap them, and tell them "If you have wings, use them!" Dammit...

Nightly adventures of the cats

Last night - after dedicating way too much time to blogging - I couldn´t get more than 2 of the 4 cats to come inside, which is by no means unusual, considering that it is summer, and they like to be outside doing "cat things"... But when one of the cats, Otto, didn´t show up even in the morning I got a little worried. Who knows what he´s been up to? As far as I know, he could have been busy running around town, asking other cats for help to get into the "Nissan-Pissan" - or, if I let my more sinister side have a say, he could be dead, killed by a huge truck that usually drive through town, near our house, without even trying to stay within the speed limits - their attitude seems to be something like "You think I drive too fast? Well... then stop me!" Otto wouldn´t have been the first cat to die under one of those trucks.

Anyway, late this afternoon, when I sent my mother to my house (even knowing what kind of risk-taking that is...) she could happily report back that Otto had returned - and that he was starving! (Which reminds me I have to buy more cat food...) I really would like to know what exactly the cat has been doing all night, all morning and part of the day... But since he is a cat he won´t tell.

Svarti is my most faithful cat - most nights he decides to sleep on my pillow, after going around in the house, trying to fall asleep in different places - and I am happy when his little face is the first thing I see in the morning - because sometimes he´s been turned the other way...