A Farewell to my Stevie Cat (and an important PSA)

After five and a half years of being my best friend, our kitty, Señor Stevie Nicks, succumbed to heart disease*.

If I had known it was coming I would have taken the time to have a few more days with him to do all the lovey things people do:

Chasing butterflies

Spinning in a field of flowers

 

Drinking milkshakes together

Going for boat rides in Central Park

Snuggling at home

   

But he was sick... and scared, and we lost him so suddenly. He was barely showing any signs of illness, still eating and playful, sleeping with his butt in our faces, drinking milkshakes, and rowing boats, but then he was gone just moments after getting him to the vet, leaving me and Mike shocked and devastated. I don't know how I have managed my whole life to avoid the up-close death of a pet with as many as I've had. It's a really horrible concept and I don't know who came up with it but I would like to unsubscribe, RIGHT NOW.  In the end, I am glad he chose us and we did everything we could to give him the best life possible. I love him so much and I will never forget my sweet Stevie cat.

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*Stevie died of cardiac arrest from an enlarged heart. He had a grain allergy, to the point that he couldn't even eat poultry that was fed grain or he would itch terribly and barf/poop/gain lots of weight. We found him a grain-free food that had all the nutrition he needed to keep him healthy, in theory. Unfortunately, I am finding now, much too late, that grain-free pet food currently on the market seems to contain some ingredient that might interfere with taurine uptake, which cats (and dogs) need to avoid heart damage. The FDA is investigating this, but there are things you can do in the meantime.

Please, if you are feeding your pet a grain-free diet have their taurine levels tested IMMEDIATELY (or as soon as you can afford to).

If they don't have allergies, stop feeding them a commercial grain-free diet. If they do, please, get their taurine tested and consult with a vet on how best to proceed. Once they have symptoms, which, in Stevie's case was only abdominal breathing, it is often too late, but the damage can be reversed if it is caught early enough with taurine supplementation. No one should go through what we're going through now, losing our pet so young, so please, share this information so every cat lives long enough to replace us as the dominant species on the planet.

Warning, Meteorites!

I honestly had no idea what this sign meant, despite driving past it countless times when driving through my friend's neighborhood. I always thought it meant "Look out for Meteorites!" You've gotta give it to me though, it DOES look way more like a meteorite than an eye. In fact, I think, when informed that it was a Neighborhood Watch sign, I actually said, "What do meteorites have to do with crime?"

I like to imagine it being left over from the Cretaceous Period. If only they had had a Meteorite watch... if only.

All things pass into the night.

Burger Times

I am entirely unable to fathom why, when you go to a fast food restaurant and order your food without bread, they then become completely unable to put condiments on meat and cheese. I get the concept that they are most likely accustom to putting the ketchup and mayonnaise on the bread, but it really isn't that hard.
In fact, every time they refrain from putting condiments on my sad and lonely bunless burgers, I am somehow able to put condiments on it, myself, so clearly it is not rocket science.

Today, at our local Burger Royalty restaurant, I took note of the very handsome older gentleman who works there. When I say handsome, I mean, nearly as handsome as 60 year old Clint Eastwood. I have to assume he either was a ranch hand who murdered his employer and has recently gotten out of prison on parole, or that he raped a 14 year old in the 1960s, because I cannot come up with another reason that some one of that age, who is so attractive, would need to (or choose to) work at a burger joint. He was, incidentally, standing right behind me while I told my mother this theory. If I go missing, it was probably him.

Also, RE: Bunless burgers... FORKS AND KNIVES, assholes. Seriously.

By Tuesday, I will no longer be a liar.

I've been lying to you all.  I've shamelessly misrepresented myself.
Last week, there was a mix-up and I missed an appointment to get my bangs trimmed (that is my fringe for OG English speakers).  I've needed a bang trim since before I went to NYC in fact, and instead of drawing myself as I actually look, I have continued to draw myself with cute short bangs. I'm sorry.  But there is a reason.

Now, I am cute.  I have no doubt about it, but when my  bangs get to a certain length, it causes some sort of illusion wherein I look like a frumpy cross dressing cave man.

Perhaps it is the hair in my eyes that causes this visual disturbance, but it can only be combated by wearing more makeup than I usually have the patience to wear, and since I don't draw any realistic features on my cartoon representation, it is easier to just create the same effect by making my bangs the right length.

Believe me, I did it for you... and also for me... because I'm vain and don't want to be hassled by scientists thinking they've found a missing link.

OH, and my Coco Llama,  the actual piece that was in the museum in NYC is now for sale on eBay.  Share it with everyone you know. I still need to pay for that trip!

CLICKY to go to EBAY

Special Secret Family Recipe

Any time I hear about meat that is made from a "special secret family recipe," my brain immediately translates that as "IT'S MADE OF HUMANS!"

American Cooking Horror Story

I just got back from three weeks of being away from a TV, which of course means hours of watching TV to catch up on things I missed.

Most of it was cooking shows.  I have a bit of an obsession with them.  Anything that has to do with cooking and reality, I'm there.  I may not continue watching all of them, but I pretty much want to see each new show, at least once.  I just like learning new cooking techniques, and watching people being abused (when they submit themselves to it out of greed or desire for fame... I do not condone other abuse, just so you know).

I must say, though it is old news, I was really disappointed with "Extreme Chef" on Food Network.  I thought the title had such potential, but then when no one was shot/stab and forced to make 5 star meals to get medical treatment, I totally lost interest.



But it wasn't all trashy cooking shows.  After hearing so much about it, I had to check out the pilot episode of FX's "American Horror Story."

If you've not watched it, here is a teaser video:

 And here is an artist's rendition of me watching this show:

And of course, I cannot wait for the second season of "The Walking Dead" premiering on Sunday. Big surprise there?


And thank you to those who are sharing my link and making pledges to my Cheeseblarg Takes Manhattan project.  Even a dollar helps.  Every time you pledge or share (or contact said Late Night show telling them how awesome I am) you are helping me fulfill a life long dream... and again, there are rewards for helping!

Never say never!

I can't be the only one who feels guilty when choosing NOT ATTENDING when sent an invitation for an event on Facebook that there is absolutely NO WAY I could get to. I just feel that if I REALLY tried, I might be able to make it.

The Rock

The worst part about walking is getting rocks in your shoes.

Out of the frying pan...

Sometimes I need to vent.  Especially when I have oil burns on my neck and  face.

Happy Fourth of July!

Happy Independence Day, fellow Americans, and others who choose to celebrate, as I do, yet another year of no alien invasions.

I am spending my day making ridiculous amounts of food for 3 people and hiding from fireworks.

I really like fireworks, from afar, but the following excerpt from a conversation with my friend the other day will illustrate my main issue:

Of course, I had to clarify:

Friend: Sparklers are my favorite part of the 4th of July!
Me: I like sparklers from a safe distance.... like 15-20 feet.
Friend: Awwwww... did you have a bad experience with them?
Me: No... I just don't like being set on fire. I learned in "Trees, Conservations and People" in college that sparks cause fire.
Friend: ...I've never been set on fire in the 20-ish years I've played with sparklers...
Me: That is not to say I have ever been set on fire... that I can recall... I just would like very much to avoid it.
Friend: Sparklers are totes harmless if respected.
Me: I respect them, by staying 15-20 feet away from them.


In actuality, I was once singed by fireworks in a college homecoming display gone awry, at Gator Growl (Go Gators, and take your fiery death sticks with you) and as pretty as fireworks are, I am more than happy to enjoy them from far far away.

I Double Dare Ya!

As a kid, I was obsessed with Double Dare, and when I say “as a kid,” I mean,  I was in high school and was WAY too old  to be interested in the show. In particular, it was Family Double Dare that caught my interest, because I figured, if I were able to get on the show, somehow, my family would  be sure to be the biggest winners of all time.

Well, no, not actually.  As long as we never had to do a physical challenge where my mom and I were involved, we would have been the biggest winners of all time.

If you are unaware of the format of the game show “Double Dare” it worked thusly:

You were asked general trivia questions and you could either answer if you knew it, OR if you thought the other family were a bunch of morons, you could DARE them to answer the question, and then of course, they wouldn’t know because they were knuckle-dragging idiots, and they would DOUBLE DARE you back and then you would get four times as much money for knowing the correct answer.

If for some reason, someone in your family didn’t know the answer, which pretty much wouldn’t have happened in my family because, between the four of us, we would have known EVERYTHING because we are all trivia GENIUSES, you could take a “physical challenge.”  And that is where it would have totally screwed us.

Both my sister and my dad are sporty types.  My dad grew up in a family full of boys, the smallest of whom was 6 foot tall, and they were all athletes.  Two of my uncles were professional athletes, in fact.  As I have mentioned before, we lived with our grandparents, the makers of this hoard of hulking jocks,  for a year, and my sister was taught to play football by my uncle Mike, the college all-star professional NFL quarterback.  I, on the other hand, had a penchant for crying when injured, or frustrated, or looked at, so I did a lot of jump roping while everyone else practiced valuable physical skills.  The one skill I did manage to foster was catching, probably to avoid being hit in the face with footballs, but that’s about it.
My mom, apparently, was kept in a cage like veal while growing up because while she is smart and funny and a creative cook, she is about as uncoordinated as they come.

So, we could have answered any question, but when it came to “physical challenges,” which included things like flipping rubber pancakes across a stage onto a tray your parent was holding, using a giant spatula,  while blindfolded and then dowsing them in “maple syrup” or filling a bowl with green slime to a certain fullness using only your head that has a bucket strapped to it, before 25 seconds is up,  it mostly likely would have ended with death and destruction.

And then there was the Obstacle Course at the end.  The winning family (read: MINE, obv.) would go through a course of 8 different stations, alternating family members, where you had to collect (and in many cases, find) an orange flag from each in a total of  60 seconds.  And again, my sister and dad would have done great, though at 6’4” my dad might have had some trouble getting through some of the obstacles.  And I might have done okay (I had serious fantasies about the sundae slide, in which I would conquer it with my mouth… though I was sure it was most likely not edible, it LOOKED like a big sundae.  Hell, I would still like to dig through a giant pool-sized sundae in pursuit of an orange flag) but I had my doubts that my mom would have gotten through her share of the obstacles and we never would have won a 13 inch TV or a Panasonic VCR or a Conair Hair Dryer.

My family doing the obstacle course would have been NOTHING like this, at all

And there was also the fact that I was about 5 years too old to be on the show. But otherwise, biggest winners EVER!

Barbies Vs Monsters

When I was a kid, I thought of everything in terms of Barbies.  That is, I would look at a baked potato container from Wendy's and think OMG, BARBIE HOT TUB! Every piece of plastic junk I came across was re-imagined as some sort of functional piece for my non-existent Barbie Dream House, which I suppose would have been more like a Barbie Squatter Pad, with furniture made out of food containers and product packaging and walls made of record album covers that opened out, or were precariously leaned against each other (no, no, those aren't record covers, those are full-sized wall murals of Prince and Cyndi Lauper!).

Now, I see my nephew doing similar things, but he re-imagines everything as monsters.
At the bank the other day, he warned me that the pneumatic tube carrier that you send your deposits by in those see-through canisters, was actually a monster that likes to eat your money, and it does so by pretending to be the bank tube sucky thing.

Which, I suppose is a pretty ingenious way of getting food, if your preference was money. 

And all the while, I thought it was a Barbie Transporter.

Terror- It's What's for Dinner!

I often say that I wish that dinner would make itself for me, but no.  No.... if I came out, and food was actually making itself, the last thing I would want to do is eat it.

House Stalking

Every once in a while, I become convinced that I am going to win the lottery so I begin detailed plans for investments and other extravagant purchases.

Part of that, recently, has been house hunting.  And hunting is precisely what I have been doing, because unless you live here in my city, you probably have no idea that the people who did the street planning in this town either had severe ADHD OR they were heavily intoxicated. Probably the latter since this is the wild west and cowboys are always drunk as hell on whiskey in westerns, right?

See, my town has a Cheese Drive*, a Cheese Lane, and 2 Cheese Avenues, and the address on the website just said "900 Cheese."

After three tries, I became convinced that expensive houses for sale in my town have some sort of cloaking device that makes them only visible to people who actually HAVE the money to even consider buying the house...

Today's hunt was made on account of a search for another house that I decided against (in my imaginary search for a house to buy). Even though the pictures of it were beautiful, and amazing, and perfectly the design I wanted, it was up a mountain, on a road that was at grade of approximately 30 degrees.  It was hard enough getting my car to agree to go up the street when the roads were clear, but I would have had to refrain from leave my house for 8 months out of the year when snow was on the ground, so my car didn't slide down the super steep hill, killing myself (and a lovely neighborhood full of frolicking children and rich folk who like jogging up ridiculously steep roads) in a spectacular fiery crash, because that is what happens when you slide down an ice covered incline, right?

But, actually, I couldn't find that house.  I found where it SHOULD be, but it wasn't really there, as far as I could see.

I did find the house today, on the fourth try.  On the second Cheese Avenue, that I didn't know existed, that was about 8 blocks away from the normal Cheese Avenue, down a one way street...

For the record, I do not waste any relator's time being shown the insides of houses I want to "imaginary buy", I just stalk the houses, driving by, looking at them longingly while playing Journey songs for them on my car stereo.

*The name of the street has been changed in case I really do win the lottery and buy said house, though living on Cheese Ave. would be pretty boss.

More terrifying than a barrel of monkeys!

I don't think "fun" is the appropriate adjective for a barrel of monkeys.  And who the hell stores monkeys in a barrel, anyway?  That seems really cruel.

OMG! 100th POST!

HEY! HEY GUISE!!! This is my 100th post! OMG!!! I started this blarg in November because I wanted to bitch about my computer's touchpad. It is still a jerk, for the record. I think it would work better if I only had one finger. Damn my other fingers for being within THREE INCHES of the touch pad, DAMN THEM!


So, I'd like to tell you about one of the most frightening experiences of my teen years.  I grew up in a house in Miami Beach in a kinda middle class neighborhood.  My sister and I were both lucky enough to have our own rooms but we shared a bathroom.  Each night, there was an ongoing battle (that my sister probably didn't know was happening... can't recall ever bringing it up to her).

See, I am taller than my sister, and I'm also neurotic, as I have mentioned, and I was much more reserved than she was back then. So, every night when I went to take a shower, I would carefully stick together the pink plastic curtain that covered the big window in the shower (who the hell puts a giant window in a shower?!?) so that none of our neighbors would accidentally catch of glimpse of me while I was naked in the shower, that had a giant window in it... at my chest level, for some damned reason.  Of course, this meant I had to blindly fish for the shampoo and conditioners that were on the window sill behind the curtain, but it seemed worth it, because I am neurotic. Every single night, I would go in there and the curtain would be wide open and I would stick it back together, and every time my sister used it, being NOT neurotic, she would open it with wild abandon to get to the shampoo like a normal person.

And so it happened that I got up in the middle of the night, one night, to use the bathroom.  I sat down, half asleep, and started to pee.  And then I noticed movement to my left, towards the shower where my sister had left the curtain open.  'Ah,' I thought to myself plainly, 'It's just the shrub under the window.' And then it dawned on me, in slow motion. 'The shrub... is under my bedroom window.... not the bathroom...." at which point I turned my head ever so slowly to the left and saw the following:

Okay, he may not have had a Jason mask on, but I swear to weasels, that is what my brain interpreted in the split second I saw it. And then he was treated to the lovely view of me scrambling off the toilet (thankfully, I had finished peeing), pulling up my pants as I crawled, on all fours, out of the room.

Once I got out in the the hallway and shut the door, I tore through the house towards my parent's room and woke them up shouting that someone was looking in the window. This resulted in my dad pulling on his running shorts, backwards apparently, busting through the front door and chasing the Peeping Tom down our street holding up his shorts (that were threatening to fall off)  with one hand and waving, what I remember as a machete (but could have been either an ax handle or a Louisville Slugger), in his other hand, barefoot. He might have been yelling too.

I can't remember if that stopped the battle of the open curtain, but probably not.  It did give me a sort of kinship with Rockwell though.

It's a Gas, Gas, Gas!

Gas-X is one of the best over-the-counter medicines in the history of medicines. I say this mainly because gas pain is one of the most excruciating, yet harmless conditions ever.  If you're gonna have that much pain, your entire intestinal tract should be rupturing spectacularly, you shouldn't just need to fart.

Perhaps that should be an ad for their product: Gas-X, it takes away that "gored by a velociraptor" feeling!

I'm not really lovin' it.

I went to Muh Donna's last night to get dinner because I was literally starving and wanted to get some calories in me for fairly cheap that I wouldn't feel bad about losing if my food poisoning/stomach flu symptoms continue, as they have been for the past few days.

Being without sustenance for a couple days made me stupidly optimistic, it would seem, because I looked at their menu and saw "OOOH! Fancy strawberry shake! That must be made of the freshest strawberries and organic whole cream ice cream! That sounds great!"

Somewhat unsurprisingly, their new strawberry shake tastes really bad and the faux strawberry syrup with extra red food coloring makes my mouth feel like it is being stung by scorpions.

It does have a cherry on top though.

No wait, the cherry was gross too. 

The Reality of Monkey Catchers

I was reading about Obama's visit to India and saw that they were deploying "official monkey catchers" to stop any possible monkey attacks. 
Monkey catcher SOUNDS like a super fun job, until you remember they are actual monkeys and not fun-loving cartoon monkeys.

Imagination:

Reality: