11:39 p.m. - 2005-05-25
No good title comes to mind.
Okay, so where did I leave off...?
Oh, the fear of grass. Yeah, Packet doesn't trust grass. When the weather is nice, she likes to go outside. Used to be, I'd only trust her to stay near me with a leash on, but now she's rather paranoid. I think she prefers the leash if we're going out to the front yard, but lately she hardly wants to go outside at all.
Summer before last, I took Packet outside to play in the grass because she's a cat, and that's what cats do, they munch on grass, roll around, and puke. Well, I put the cat in the grass, and she rears up on her hind legs like a 3-year-old begging to be picked up, with her front paws extended way up to me, then loses her balance and just falls backward into the grass like she's taking the Nestea Plunge. Then, she immediately stands back up on all fours, but somehow getting on her tippy-toes and at the same time trying to not make any contact with the ground - walking the same way I've seen other cats walk in the snow, with their gut all sucked in - and she's looking at me the whole time with these giant, fully-dilated eyes just full of accusation. I picked her up and took her back over to the paved parking lot, and she was fine.
God, she can be so weird sometimes.
Well, last year, she ventured as far as the edge of Cody-no's patio (Cody-no being the obnoxious 4-year-old that lived next door until last week). We live in a 4-unit building that faces sideways (of all ways to face), and we're second from the end. Our patios are separated by a privacy fence, but you can go around the fence if you walk through (ominous tones here)....the grass. It was summer, and I had Packet outside on a leash, and she was happily sniffing everything in sight, because her motto is, "Everything is a mystery which must be solved by my nostrils!"
But then, she wandered over to the grass, sniffed it for a good 2 minutes, found a halfway-bare spot, and walked around the fence to Cody-no's patio! While I gushed about what a brave girl she was being and how proud I was, she proceeded to greet the pavement (that's what she does whenever she gets outside) by rolling onto her back and letting out a weird, chattery noise that sounds like "Nyeh-reh-eh-eh!"
When she finished greeting the pavement there, the sniffing began anew, and this time for realz, because Cody-no had a lot of toys on his patio. She made it over to the other edge of the concrete slab, but couldn't find a bare spot. Then it happened. To this day, I have no idea what "it" was, or is, but without warning she completely flipped out. My cat dragged me by the leash back across Cody-no's patio, around the fence, onto my patio, where I finally let go of the leash, and she launched herself into our closed door. I caught up, opened the door for her, and she ran at top speed - trailing the leash behind her - up to Darren's computer room and hid behind the bed in there. She didn't come out for like an hour. I still don't know what she saw that freaked her out, but now she's ultra-super-duper wary of anything that goes on outside. And that's the story about her fear of grass.
Not to say she doesn't enjoy fresh air. She's downright demanding when it comes to opening her windows. When I get up in the morning, she stands by her food dish because she wants me to feed her, then she goes downstairs and sits by her patio door because she wants me to open it.
Today, I had to go into work instead of working from home, and it sucked. It's so distracting to work around people now - so much to talk about, catch up on, stare at. Plus, we had a "celebration" today - management brought us all in to give some very rehearsed-sounding speeches praising our hard work and dedication. We were rewarded with finger-food. Apparently, they don't appreciate us enough to supply flatware. There were meatballs with pretzels stuck into them (so you could pick them up), carrots, some weird roll-up made by spreading cheez whiz on a tortilla and rolling it up, then slicing it into pieces, and chocolate-covered strawberries.
At least I got to see some of my coworkers. Seriously, if not for the people I saw, I would have dismissed today as a complete disaster. When I go "in-house" (that's what they call it, even though "going in-house" entails me leaving my house), I sit over by the geeky people. Today, we got to talk about Star Wars, since Darren and I saw it last night. Nobody else thought that Hayden Christensen (Anakin) looks like Joey Lawrence from the "Blossom" years. Oh, well.
I found out that there's a fundraiser tomorrow to raise money for the people who are walking in the Chicago Walk for Breast Cancer. The walkers found out today that they have to raise an additional $500.00. By next week.
Load! Of! Crap!
But tomorrow's fundraiser is being held at a bar. My plans for tomorrow:
1. Sleep the fuck in for once.
2. Do two hours of overtime (it's mandatory, and they'll probably add more before Sunday, but fuck 'em).
3. Make an appointment to get my hair trimmed. Susie says to go to the International School of Hair Cutting Beauty or whatever it is over by Cross County, because they spend extra time playing with your hair. For cheap. It might not be even, but hey - my hair's gonna curl back up anyway. No one will notice.
4. At some point, wander over to On the Rox and get trashed for the sake of finding a cure for breast cancer.
I know this is getting long, but I have to write about the dinner I ate in the cafeteria at work. After the crappy finger food they tried to feed us at the "celebration" this afternoon, I found myself quite peckish around 7pm. The cafeteria had monterey chicken with mashed potatoes and peas, so I got me some of that and took it outside to the smokers' cage to eat it. The sun was setting, there were no bugs, it was very nice. The birds were all hopping around at my feet, waiting for me to drop something, and one of them even jumped up on the table and came right over to the edge of my tray. So I flipped a couple of peas at him. He ate the mush out of the peas and spit the slipcovers out, but as he ate the peas he was giving me this look, like, "Peas, bitch? I'm all cute and hop up here to beg for peas?"
So I asked, "What, did you want chicken, you sick fuck?"
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