14 year relationship vanishes in a week
last weekend after 14 years of cohabitation, my cat logan and i parted ways. logan is a lovely cat, sweet, loving, quirky. her one caveat is that she refuses to pee in a litter box. 14 years of peeing on the floor begins to wear on a person. years of peeing on carpet and wood floors wears them too. i’ve struggled with pee vs. cat for a long time and cat always won. a few months ago dog was added to the equation and push finally came to shove. my sister has a husband who has a dad who works at a place that has a farm and the farm has some cats and logan is now one of those cats.
i feel guilty and horrible and generally rotten that i abandoned my cat. i felt like logan was my cross to bear and i just dumped my cross at a farm cause my cross happened to pee on the floor. that’s the one side of me…
the other side of me feels an incredible weight gone from my shoulders. i’m enjoying a life free of pee.
i visited logan on saturday, one day shy of her one week anniversary of farm living. now i’m sure i’m just anthropomorphizing here, but the you’re dead to me glare that i received from the cat that one week previous was my best friend sure looked like a “i hate you for doing this to me” sort of look. it was painful. i had to leave.
i miss logan.
one cold and windy sunday
yesterday at 8:30am i found myself at the starting line of the gear west duathlon. i was feeling very lucky to have made it there since fifteen minutes previous i had been driving about the countryside completely lost and in a state of despair. but i made it in time thanks to some driving luck and my brother-in-law hector who helped me get my bike set-up and my butt to the start. at 8:43am my wave left the start line and i began my journey. two hours and seven minutes later i finished.
i’ve done a couple other duathlons and while i went slower during this one my endurance is actually better this year. i have hope that at some point during the summer my speed will improve and i will be better than ever. of course my better would still be pretty bad, but i am just thankful to be fit enough to compete at all.
the course was a 5k run, 28k bike and then a 4k run. it was kinda hilly during the bike and we ran a lot on grass; not my favorite course. my least favorite part of the day was the bike. it was so cold and i couldn’t generate enough heat to stay warm. i spent at least 10 miles on the bike where i was pretty miserable. by the end of the bike part of the course my legs were numb from my knees down to my toes, brrrr.
a shout out to the hector-man who saved my butt getting me all set up and ready to race. as i was getting off of the bike and set to run the last 4k, he had already finished. did i mention that his wave also started about five minutes after mine? he’s pretty good at this stuff; he’s training to do a full ironman triathlon this summer. crazy stuff - go hector go!
larger than a piece of chocolate cake
mazie is really into her toes. she spends at least 30 minutes a day examining the space between each toe. sometimes while trying to change her diaper she throws a fit because i want her to put her legs down so i can get the stupid diaper on and she wants to keep her legs up so she can continue looking at the space between her toes.
this is a reasonably new obsession, probably two or three weeks old. it seems that she is interested in finding any dirt or small bits of stuff that might be in between her toes. she doesn’t necessarily want to remove the bits, but she does want to identify that the bits exist.
some say perhaps it is a manifestation of an inherent weirdness placed in her genetic code by me or her dad; we both teeter near the brink of mild ocd. i’d say the perhaps is warranted.
buddy j - a.k.a. the husband
today my buddy turns 35. since it’s his special day i thought he deserved a special post. happy birthday buddy!
…well, he turned 35 a little over 5 months ago. i guess better late than never. i had this idea that on his birthday i would write him a post about how great he was and blah, blah, blah and i wouldn’t tell him and then he would get it in his RSS feed and it would make his day cause i’m not very good at saying nice things. so i saved a draft that i meant to beef-up on his birthday, but then his birthday came and went and i tried a bunch of times to write something nice, but it just never came. it seems i have more problems than i thought.
so, 5+ months after the fact, happy birthday buddy j. i can’t really do the mushy stuff, but i can say i love you and i like that you are my husband. you treat me with respect, kindness and love, you are smart and have lots of interesting ideas, you are full of life, wonder and joy and you are a great dad. thanks for being you.
the green lantern
“just wait until i bring this to a meeting and everyone has their red lights and i’ll have my green light. the most awesomest thing i’ve ever seen”….jamie thingelstad
as random, strange and riddled with grammatical hmm’s and ha’s as the above quote may sound, my husband said it. he was referring to a pen light that he received for his birthday from his mom. it’s a green laser used for looking at celestial things in the nighttime skies. my husband is a gadget man. he loves to buy, receive, talk about, give advice on and play with new, fun technology. sometimes, he drives me crazy.
the end.
