Shit happens

If anyone wants one, there's a kitty carrier lined with cat shit on my balcony, free just for you.

I'd been planning to take the Fatass with me since before Mom died, but our moving plans derailed that temporarily. Didn't want three animals freaking out about the new place at once.

So this weekend, I finally brought the Fatass home.

It took a little coaxing with the end of a rolling pin to get her out from under my father's bed. Ten minutes later, we were on the road. That was when we noticed the smell. A lot of Queens smells like shit. I mean, the Mets play there, so I assumed the smell was coming from somewhere nearby. But the smell followed us to Brooklyn, then to the front door of our apartment. No doubt the Fatass had been eating burritos for lunch. Even opening all four windows didn't help.

We stopped for a beer before bringing the cat upstairs, not looking forward to braving the odor. The beer was good. The ambiance was OK. The right side of the bar was exposed brick and fancy booze. The left side looked like somebody's angry girlfriend tore all the pictures off the wall and left the stupid poster of the bull with the ring in its nose.

Thirty minutes later, we were hauling the cat and her stench into the elevator, and I battled between laughing so hard I couldn't stop crying and suppressing my gag reflex. Her shit is foul, y'all.

When we finally got her onto the balcony, the problem was clear: The Fatass had shit smeared all over her back paws, and the inside of the carrier looked like another cat had exploded out of her ass.

Once we cleaned her off, she scurried under the bed, and then we remembered: We hadn't introduced her to the kitty litter box yet. Devon broke out the mop, and the Fatass' internal monologue went something like this: "Oh, hell! Blue foamy thing! Back! Back! Damnit, my claw's stuck in the blue foamy thing! Sons of bitches! Run for the closet!"

The only one who seemed happy with the situation from beginning to end was Fitz. Her internal monologue was more like: "Something's going on! It's going on over there! What's going on? Can I see? Oh boy, it's still going on! Yay!"

I'm pretty sure the Fatass is gonna kill us in our sleep.

Can we call the exterminator?

My new apartment comes with its very own 4-year-old girl. I wish I'd known that before I signed the lease.

As we were unpacking our boxes yesterday, Fitz made herself a new friend. The kind who never leaves. The kind who wants to play with our swords. She and her mom finally left, for the second time, and Devon laughed when I put the chain on. Can't be too safe. A 4-year-old is notoriously hard to shake off when you wave a tiny dog in her face.

We celebrated the move out of squalor with the traditional move-in feast: frozen pizza and beer. After a lunch of frozen burritos and Vitamin Water. After a breakfast of Dunkin' Donuts sandwiches and coffee.

I am well-preserved.

Haiku of hatred

Oh Fitz, how I hate
you when you pee on the floor.
You do it always.

I hope nobody's squeamish

I'm pleased to report that Fitz is still not dead.

After an hour of barking her tiny head off, she finally got to see the vet, who put her under, cleaned her gums and pulled four teeth. Despite what all the cool kids told her, eating cat shit is NOT good for oral hygiene. Just say no, Fitz.

She was barking so much that I had to take her outside. A large dog left a large-dog crap right in front of the door, and when the vet's assistant came out to clean it up, she looked at me and Fitz accusingly, and I was like, hell no. THAT shit did not come out of THIS dog.








THAT shit* --------------------------------------------------------------- THIS dog

It's gotta suck to be a vet's assistant sometimes.

Fitz spent the next few hours groggy, but she was back to normal in no time, and back to her favorite thing in the world -- fucking her small black blanket.

It's gotta suck to be a small black blanket sometimes.

*A reasonable representation of the shit in question.

This post has 100% more cooch

Warning: If you're offended by blog posts about cooch, turn back now. This one has a whole lotta vagina.

In anticipation of No More Bush Day, I decided to go to the gynecologist and get my gear checked out. Truthfully, I would have done this anyway, because it's good to get your gear checked out. But the fact that my appointment fell a few days before the Big Event was still pretty neat.

I waited 90 minutes in the middle of a work day just to get into the exam room. Ninety minutes. To give you an idea of how long 90 minutes is, just in case you can't imagine that much time, 90 minutes is enough time to read two copies of Fit Pregnancy and half of Conceive magazine (because that's the kind of material you find in an OB/GYN office). Ninety minutes is also enough time to make my blood pressure go up to 120/90, which seemed to baffle the assistant, who couldn't figure out why I'd be a bit peeved about the fact that I was half an hour late getting back to work and I HADN'T EVEN GOTTEN INTO THE STIRRUPS YET.

After 15 minutes of more waiting in my socks and a front-opening medical gown, I finally got to see the nurse practitioner, who looked down at my chart and asked, "So, you're 38?" And I was like, "Hell, no," and now I need to qualify that, because it sounds like I think 38 is old, and a lot of people bigger than I am are going to kick my ass for calling them old. When I'm 38 I won't have any problem with being 38, but, until then, I'm all, "Dude, no!" But now that I think about it, I don't need to worry about all the people over 38, because they probably have arthritis and brittle bones and stuff.

When the poking and prodding was over, she mentioned that my pressure seemed a little high, and I insisted that it was probably fine, but she took it again, because it would be really bad form to have me drop dead of a heart attack on the way to the elevator. It was 98/70 that time, and she apologized for making me wait for so long, which was cool because I didn't even have to bitch about it. I just had to make it seem like I might die, which I wasn't even trying to do. And it's only now that I realize that Fitz totally played me.

Anyway, if you have a cooch and you haven't had it examined lately, you should totally do it. Just bring something to read.

My dog is immortal

I can post about this now because a few days have passed and Fitz is totally fine and not dead.

I had the day off on Friday and went over to Mr. Kiwi, where I bought, among other things, a gigantic brownie that I planned to share with Devon and a friend later that night. I came downstairs from folding the laundry to find half a brownie and a very guilty-looking 7-pound dog.

I don't know what I expected -- probably for her to drop dead right on top of the brownie. So I IM'd Devon and told him I'd probably killed his dog, and he was pretty nice about the whole thing, and all I could think about was the ferret-in-the-dishwasher incident with his ex-wife, and wondered whether he was wondering why these crazy bitches keep killing his pets, and I realized I should never have children because I couldn't keep a dog alive for three months and I should get a tubal immediately -- or even give myself a tubal because it would be faster than trying to convince a doctor to sterilize a 30-year-old woman with no children and oh, shit, I can't, because the knives are in the sink with all the other dirty dishes I haven't washed yet because I suck, and Fitz, you're a pain in the ass, but you're harmless and sweet, so please don't die.

I managed to squeeze all that in while I Googled vets in Brooklyn. One told me to bring her in, but not to him, because he was closing in 40 minutes. He gave me the number for another vet, who told me to call the ASPCA Animal Poison Control hotline, which wanted to charge me $60 just to tell me whether I should bring her to a vet or not. In the meantime, Devon found a vet nearby who, after making sure there was no pot in the brownies, told him she'd be fine and to keep an eye on her for signs of toxicity, like hyperactivity and vomitting.

So I spent the rest of the day carrying her with me up and down the stairs so I wouldn't miss anything, which probably pissed her off, but that's what she gets for eating chocolate and making me think she was going to die. She spent the rest of the day sleeping.

So Fitz and I have come to an understanding. I agree to let her be her neurotic, crazy-ass self, and she agrees not to catch the death.