February Break Hump Day

How’s everybody holding up? I’m getting tired of the Olympics. Well, really, I guess my problem is that in our cable-free environment, the time to watch the Olympics is from 8 pm until the kids fall asleep. It’s a bummer, because we have these big, long days available, but of course it’s just the regular daytime tv, and then my children are desperate to stay up for the Olympics. And it’s a freakin’ school holiday, plus it feels unpatriotic to put them to bed and watch something on Netflix (and I totally have things that I want to watch on Netflix), so I cave. But I really like it when they go to bed and I can clock out for the night.

Ummm, what else? I went grocery shopping yesterday, and after a long weekend of food and beverage excess, my grocery cart was comically detox-focused. So I took a picture. Because that’s how I roll.

Today J had a gymnastics marathon: team practice, box lunch, and open gym. Meanwhile M continued working on the snow fort they’d started yesterday. They were tremendously engaged in their endeavor for hours while I was inside doing other things. When they finally took me out to tour their new digs, I didn’t have the heart to remind them that they’re not supposed to walk around on our perennial garden and compact all our soil. Oh, well. If you don’t see any flowers out there this spring, that’s why.

M also took some time out of her busy schedule to try to con me into adopting two cats. I’m not sure why she thought that an endorsement by our current resident feline would be more compelling than the begging and pleading from our human children, but she seemed to think that Isis would convince me. I’d been working in the kitchen when I took a break and headed into the room with my computer. And there was Isis’s warm-and-cozy blanket that usually sits over the radiator. It was on my desk, pressed up against the computer monitor, and the whole area was littered with catnip. She’d Post-It noted the two prospective furry brothers that she’d found from the APF website.

So I walked around the corner and there was a terrible mess and no Isis to be found. Try as she might, M couldn’t get Isis interested in two-dimensional digital images of prospective housemates.

This is probably just as well, since the reason Isis came to us in the first place is that she wasn’t getting along with her last furry housemate. Maybe the girls have forgotten that part. In any case, I commended M on her efforts. She’d chosen the pair because it was a discount: M knows I like a good deal. Plus, I appreciated her creativity in attempting to stage a compelling and dramatic cat-love tableau, even if it did make a mess of my workspace. So she talked about it:

M: “Actually, my plan was to have Isis licking the cats. I smeared some chicken on the monitor.”

K: “You DID NOT smear chicken on my monitor. You DID NOT. Wait, really: did you?”

M: “Umm. . . no? No.”

K: “Seriously, did you?”

M: “Of course not.”

I let the screen go idle and sure enough, against the darkness there were two little smears that corresponded with the kitty portraits.