Overly Verbal

So here’s a sobering statistic:* in 2007, I only kissed seven different boys.** And I went on dates with 14 other boys but did not find it necessary to kiss them. Is 19 first dates in one year not a good sign that I’m trying? I can’t decide.****

I will say that I spent approximately a third of the year engaged in relationships that left me not looking for other kissing partners, so if we say 15 first dates in 9 months, that doesn’t really sound like a lot, does it? Should I be trying harder, or is it really remarkable that there were 21 different boys that I even felt like bothering to eat dinner with? (Funny thing is, I can literally remember no details whatsoever about two of them. I mean, I know I sat and talked to those two for a while, because I wrote it down in my calendar, but they’re just names on a page. That wouldn’t be so weird if they were consecutive dates long ago, but they both fell in between dates that I remember. )

At any rate, if I intend to avoid my destiny and not die alone in a doublewide trailer with 47 cats, it’s pretty clear I need to do something differently. But what does one do?

Okay, so one can try signing up for online dating services that one has never used before. I try to stick with the free ones, because paying money to meet strange men (whom I’m only going to like one-third of) doesn’t make any sense to me, but I’ve been told that it is that attitude that is precisely the problem, and if I really wanted to meet my match, I’d be willing to do almost anything, including paying up to $30 a month for the privilege of being fed profiles of men who are allegedly “perfect match”es for me but literally begin their “personal statement” with the word “Sup?”. (And no, I didn’t make that up. I’m not saying I’ve never started a conversation by asking “Sup?”, maybe I have. But if I did, I was probably drunk, or asking someone if they wanted to eat dinner.)

Anyway, against my better judgment I went ahead and paid $60 for two months of this service – which is only a dollar a day, and, yeah, I guess it would be worth a dollar a day to meet a man who actually suited me. I mean, I pay more than that every day on food for the cats – and I get to the part where I have to write a personal statement, and I read the “tips”, because I clearly don’t have any fucking idea what I’m doing, or it would have worked already, right? And the tips include such gems as “Your [website redacted to protect Jennifer’s privacy] profile will be read by everyone who sees you, so be sure to share something of yourself. But not too much! Extremely long narratives are often not read completely.”

What the hell am I supposed to do with that? First off, the “personal statement” is limited to 1500 characters, and I can’t think of a single situation in which 1500 characters is “extremely long”. 1500 words is kinda long, I guess, but 1500 characters? It’s only this much:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Duis ut ipsum. Vestibulum ac metus ut est luctus fermentum. In quis augue a sapien pulvinar eleifend. Vivamus lorem tortor, eleifend tincidunt, ultricies nec, suscipit ut, enim. Fusce pharetra. Donec lorem risus, sollicitudin eu, sollicitudin id, consectetuer in, orci. Mauris risus mauris, vestibulum sed, bibendum id, blandit non, neque. Mauris vitae ante non eros tristique euismod. Nunc quis ligula eu orci eleifend tempor. Proin mollis tellus id turpis.

Phasellus semper lectus id nisl. Quisque sed eros. Phasellus nisl. Suspendisse potenti. Duis eget quam. Integer ac mauris. Nulla id diam vitae est porta mollis. Nunc adipiscing tellus sed leo tempor ornare. Quisque in ipsum. Sed nec ante. Curabitur mi nisl, adipiscing id, consectetuer gravida, sagittis vestibulum, tellus. Sed tincidunt nonummy arcu. Etiam id purus. Nullam mi nisl, venenatis non, fringilla et, malesuada eu, diam. Mauris nonummy egestas tortor. Etiam vel turpis. Vivamus malesuada iaculis urna.

In fringilla hendrerit turpis. In arcu justo, malesuada nec, sollicitudin eget, mattis ut, purus. Vivamus in tellus non sapien adipiscing rhoncus. Nulla dictum dapibus diam. Morbi lobortis facilisis velit. Suspendisse eu ligula ut leo laoreet lacinia. Maecenas porta, purus vitae venenatis dictum, neque odio luctus justo, quis laoreet leo nibh sit amet magna. Suspendisse dictum enim et nunc. Mauris bibendum, sapien id viverra fringilla, eros nisl scelerisque lectus,

including the spaces.*****

Secondly, am I to write a short narrative? (If so, how?) Or am I to just accept the fact that I’m only interested in boys who read “extremely long narratives” completely and therefore write an “extremely long” narrative, instantly eliminating those boys who can’t read up to 1500 characters at a time without getting a headache? Do I need an editor? (If I had an editor, would that be cheating?)

I know what I’ll do. I’ll give up and try again tomorrow.

But in the meantime, I’m quite amused by something else I read on this site today. Some people are apparently intimidated by meeting new people. It will likely come as no great surprise that I am not one of those people, nor that I enjoy wordplay. Get this – the word intimidated has the word “date” in it!

Speaking of cheating, on New Year’s Eve, in an effort to keep would-be drunk drivers off the streets, an agency in DC provides free cab rides home. Given that I am not a would-be drunk driver, I am not going to utilize this service, because I always take a cab home. Some people think I’m crazy, and should save $25 bucks or so, because all of the money to pay for this service is likely donated by liquor companies, but it’s not just that I always take a cab, it’s that I don’t understand how people do wind up using this service – you’re automatically labeled a “would-be drunk driver”, plus they know where you live. It’s New Year’s Eve – did you think you weren’t going to get drunk?

So Happy New Year, don’t drive drunk, and be careful about those people who are driving drunk.
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* Why are the sobering statistics the ones that drive you to drink?

** Unless I somehow manage to kiss an additional boy in the next five hours, which seems highly unlikely. In fact, although I am going out dancing this evening, I think I am going to make it a point to either be in the bathroom or standing immediately next to a gay man when the clock strikes midnight. I already have a lovely “kissing a boy who you weren’t supposed to be kissing on New Year’s Eve” memory, and I don’t want to ruin it.***

*** Oh okay, I’ll share. We’d been flirting during happy hour for months even though he had a girlfriend, showed up at the same party, kissed at midnight, and it was fine, but awkward, because we weren’t supposed to be kissing each other, especially in front of an apartment (over)full of people, even though we wanted to. Then 20 minutes later he followed me down a hallway, said “That wasn’t really good enough, was it?” and then kissed the hell out of me. Oh, to be young and living in New York City, kissing irresponsibly. (Oh, go ahead, judge. Like you’ve never kissed someone’s boyfriend/girlfriend before.)

**** And, yes, I do realize that 7 + 14 = 21, but I’m not counting my encounters with 2 of those 21 men as first dates. In one case, I had already been on a first date with the man, months and months before it became 2007, and in the other . . . it’s a long story, and one I’m simply refusing to go into here.

***** If I ever again in my entire life have to explain the “Lorem ipsum” thing to someone, I am going to shoot myself in the head, so if you aren’t already familiar with the concept, go make yourself so. Thank you in advance for your cooperation in this matter.

My cats sure do match nicely, don’t they?

So Manuelo called me last night to discuss with me the fact that I had not written here for so long. (And that I have no goals in life. He didn’t yell at me, or berate me, or harangue me, he just discussed it with me.) I tried explaining to him that I hadn’t written here because I had nothing to write about, and he went on a lengthy monologue about all the things I could write about even when I think I have nothing to write about, so here’s a list of things that have happened to me in the past four days. You be the judge of whether I should have bothered writing them down.

Molly and I went to the vet today to get her rabies shot. I was going to take a picture of her to commemorate the event, but she wouldn’t sit still. In fact, she acted like a little maniac: trying to crawl up my leg, climbing under the sink, looking for ways to jump onto the highest flat surface in the room we were in. She thinks going to the vet is not the most fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon, especially the parts where they stick a thermometer up your butt and poke you with a needle, but we don’t have to go back for a year, and I’m thinking by then she will have forgotten. In fact, I think she’s forgotten already. She might not be the brightest cat I have ever met, and sure, she sometimes drools (the farting is subsiding, though), but she is gorgeous, and she’s one happy cat, and Mouse hardly ever has to hit her because she’s being annoying. She also got a new collar today, and looks much nicer than she did before, and later we are going to trim her nails, which should be an adventure.

Trying to put away all of the leftovers from my Christmas dinner, I realized I was in desperate need of new food storage containers. So I bought these, from Rubbermaid. Stuff like that makes me inexplicably happy: there are six different sizes of containers, but only three different sizes of lids, they nest nicely, and I feel better organized already.

I watched the movie Thumbsucker, and I loved it (and the Justin character reminded me of someone but I’m not saying who (but even if I did, you wouldn’t know who I was talking about, unless you were him, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t read my blog anymore)). I watched the movie Inland Empire, and I wish there was some way I could get those three hours of my life back. I watched a lovely documentary: Steal a Pencil for Me. (And I think I’ve made a new Christmas tradition of watching a movie about the Holocaust on Christmas Day. I didn’t mean to, I just feel like that’s how it’s going to play out.)

I bought some yarn to make a scarf, even though I already have 18 finished scarves (8 of which I made myself) and 1 scarf already in progress, and even though I need to spend about 20 minutes finishing my sweater so I can actually wear it, and even though there’s a certain baby somewhere that is unknowingly awaiting a knitted item that also needs about 20 minutes worth of work. (I’m much, much better at starting things than I am finishing.)

I went to work and came back, three whole times, returning early one day to let some men fix my heat, and while I do have heat now, I have no faith whatsoever that I will continue to have heat for the rest of this winter. This makes me sad on several levels. First, I believe I deserve heat, and aside from being able to afford to buy cat food, the occasional book, and high-speed Internet access, the only other real reason I even have a job is so that the inside of my home can be maintained at a comfortable temperature. Second, if you look at historical weather data, this part of Virginia is crazy-ass cold in February and March, but reasonably warm in December and January, and if my heat dies when it is crazy-ass cold outside, I will not be a happy person. Third, I am way too skinny, and therefore far more susceptible to cold than other people are. And in spite of the many times my thyroid has tested normal, I’m convinced it doesn’t work right. In fact, I have sometimes exhibited symptoms of this weird syndrome (which may or may not herald hypothyroidism, but that’s the opposite of what I think is wrong with my thyroid). Either way, if cold is a trigger to a phenomenon you’d rather not experience, wouldn’t it be nice if you were certain your heat was going to keep working? Why yes, yes it would.*

And that’s just about it. I remain convinced that it is better not to write at all than to write something completely boring, and also convinced that if everyone would just get their owned damned blogs then I wouldn’t have to do everything, but Manuelo tells me I have readers to consider, and so there it is, the last four days, and while I found them mostly satisfying and relaxing, I understand that you find them boring and not worth reading about. Don’t blame me, blame Manuelo.

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* Sure, emotional stress is also a trigger, but I am the least stressed I’ve ever been, I think, excepting those times when I have to visit my laundry room, when my stress level does have a tendency to rise.

So it looks like everyone in my household got what they wanted for Christmas.

Mouse wanted a nap:

Molly wanted a house where she could live, and it’s just icing on the cake that there happen to be squirrels to look at out the window:

I wanted the little ones to be friends:

(Okay, and I also want a guy to come to my house and fix my heat, because it’s starting to get cold in here. But three out of four ain’t bad.)

Here’s hoping you and yours got everything you wanted for Christmas.

I have absolutely nothing to write about but food and cats:

I had a really nice cheeseburger for lunch yesterday.

I think Molly is farting because she’s eating too fast, swallowing a bunch of air. I spent some time yesterday with her just sitting on the kitchen floor watching her eat, that’s my conclusion, and I believe this will pass once she gets used to the idea that this is her home, and she will not ever want for food again, or have to wait for a volunteer to have time to feed her and a hundred other cats. So, although the problem is not yet resolved, a resolution is in sight.

I am making a full-blown Christmas dinner even though I don’t celebrate Christmas and even though no one is coming over to eat it with me. It occurs to me now that I might have invited any one of a number of different people, but I didn’t know I’d be making dinner - I shouldn’t go to the grocery store around the holidays, because I am easily suggestible. And so a turkey breast is in the oven, and I’ll make a maple sweet potato puree, Brussels sprouts with bacon and apples, stuffing, caramelized glazed carrots, mashed potatoes, a lovely green salad, fruit salad, and dinner rolls. (I think that I really do have to have Thanksgiving at my house again next year. Something in me wants to cook.)

Last night Mouse and Molly played a game. I believe it is called, “Let’s Drive Jennifer Insane!”, and it involved chasing one another from the couch to the bed and back for something like half an hour, with occasional meowing, but only by Mouse. It was simply adorable for the first twenty minutes, but then I really wanted them just to go to sleep, even though I was quite happy that they’ve decided to be friends and play games together.

Oh yeah, and I have no heat. Just wasn’t working when I woke up this morning. Somehow, although it is only 42 degrees outside, the temperature inside has risen from 66 to 67 since I woke up (granted, I did bake some banana-oatmeal bread and then leave the oven open after). No big deal, I guess, and Goethe has graciously offered to lend me his space heaters should the need arise.

I was thinking, though, as I was putting the turkey in the oven, that while the heat can surely be fixed, no amount of renovation to my current kitchen will make a bigger refrigerator fit in there, or a bigger oven, and I resolved to make a valiant effort to meet my match in 2008, so I can live the American dream, or at least those parts of it that I actually appreciate – I don’t really need a white picket fence, have no desire to keep a dog in the yard, but I would like having a proper dining room. (I’m assuming, anyway, that my match will either already have a fantastic kitchen, or else want to get me one.)

And here’s something that sends my love of marshmallows smashing right into my sense of humor, but I’m waiting until after Christmas to buy it, hoping it will be on sale, because I don’t have a real job. I especially appreciate the tradition of leaving the crèche empty until Christmas Day, putting the baby Jesus out only when he’s actually arrived, and I can’t wait to do that next year!

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* Yesterday’s cranberry upside-down cake was sort of a bust, though. I’m not sure who created the recipe I used, but here’s something about cranberries – they float. You know, like in a bog? So my upside-down cake is more like a regular cranberry cake with a gooey top. It’s still delicious, however, and next time I’ll try a different recipe that involves cooking the cranberries first, which seemed like altogether too much trouble but is obviously completely necessary, if you want the cranberries to be on the bottom, like they’re supposed to be.

So Mouse won’t eat salmon oil. Molly won’t even taste salmon oil, although earlier she tasted a magazine.* There are no other types of supplements in my local pet store, except some sort of soft treat, and Mouse isn’t supposed to have soft treats because his teeth are bad. (Molly, I’m told, has mild gingivitis, but since she’s only four, I’m perfectly willing to have her put under to have her teeth cleaned. She’ll bounce right back, I’m sure, but I think I’ll wait until feline dental services are on sale.) The smallest bottle of any non-fish-based oil supplement I can find on the Internet is 12 ounces, and I’m already stuck with approximately 3.78 ounces of salmon oil I have no use for, so I’m not buying any bigger bottle of something they might both turn their noses up at.

Speaking of noses, earlier in the hallway we had an episode where noses touched. And there was no hissing at all. Maybe a little frowning, but I think that was more out of confusion than out of any real dislike for one another.

Anyway, I read on the Internet about a book that has a recipe to make this fancy non-fish-based oil junk, and someone mentioned that it actually smelled good, so I went to Barnes and Noble. And while I could not find the book in question, I did buy a different book: The Ultimate Cat Treat Cookbook: Homemade Goodies for Finicky Felines.

One ingredient called for in many of the recipes is goat’s milk. I don’t have a goat (but I’m gonna go check if there are any in the laundry room later), and I looked but couldn’t find any goat milk at my local grocery store (I was afraid to ask, actually. What’s Spanish for goat?) . So I figured I’d try soy milk (because goats are so much like soybeans). Another ingredient is flaxseed meal, which is supposed to be just the best source ever for Omega fatty acids, which is just what Mouse needs, so I bought a bag of flaxseeds, and later I will either make flaxseed meal or destroy my coffee grinder trying, and then I will bake some cat treats, and then you can all disown me once and for all, or else when people say, “So, what’s your friend Jen like?” you can say, “Oh, she makes delicious muffins. And cat treats. No, but she really is cool. I swear. Oh, never mind, no she’s not. She’s whacked.”

Funny thing is, the book I intended to buy also has recipes for making your own cat food. As it happens, a prime example of my occasional inability to accurately judge character had dogs while I was dating him, and cats, and he made his own dog and cat food, and while I outwardly took that in stride, secretly I thought, “Well, at least I’m not so far gone that I make Mouse’s food from scratch.” Somehow, though, my now having two cats makes creating cat food from scratch seem less like an insane thing to do and more like a practical one. Doesn’t it? In any event, I’m going to start small, try to get some flaxseeds into one or both cats, and then take it from there, so I don’t think there’s cause for an intervention yet.

But stay tuned. I’m getting there.

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*She’s cute as all get out, but I don’t think she’s half as smart as Mouse is. Sure, he sets a high bar, and sometimes he licks paper too, but I think all the farting is diminishing her potential grandeur.

So I went to do my laundry earlier, after dark but early enough so that I figured no one would be passed out drunk in the laundry room yet, and someone had propped open the door with a rock, probably so that the drunk guy would have an easier time getting in there later. And something caught my eye just past the door the drunk guy was behind last time. Why, what’s that?

Oh, a mattress. Of course. I usually store my mattresses flat, in the stairwell where the drunk guy is known to sleep. Right after I prop the door open with a rock. I know the guy said he was looking to get help, but I don’t think this is the kind of help he needs.*

But it’s Christmastime, so maybe they’re staging a live nativity scene in the laundry room later, and they couldn’t find an actual manger. If I see any donkeys, I guess I’ll know.

Seriously, though, this is getting a little out of hand, no? I’m not doing anything about it now, because my laundry is finished, but in the cold light of day this problem might need just a little more attention.

In more pleasant news, Molly and Mouse are well on the way to being best friends. Or at least no one hissed at all today, which is new, and no one is currently hiding under anything. And Molly’s only scratching on scratching posts, which is awesome.

Now we’re all going to get in bed and watch a movie. Because after going out last night I decided that going out at all is silly, really, and if there was suddenly nowhere at all to go out to, that would be just fine by me. Sad, but true.

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* If all of the machines hadn’t been empty when I arrived, I might have thought my neighbors were washing his sheets and blankets, since there were none in sight. I’m pretty sure that guy does need help with his laundry. (And I’d drop off a pillow for him, but now that I’ve got two cats, I’ve got twice the need for old pillows to serve as cat beds, so I can’t spare any. In fact, if you’ve got any old pillows lying around, I’ll take them.)

After spending the entire day perhaps overly worried that while I was at work there were two small, delicate cats in my home who had only known each other for a few hours, I decided that going to work on Friday would not only be unnecessary, but foolish. So it’s a five-day weekend! Yay!

And have I got plans? Big ones: I’m going to go to the grocery store, make a cranberry upside down cake, pamper the little fuzzbusters until they each believe that they’re the most important one, take Molly to the vet for her rabies shot, re-learn how to play Norwegian Wood on the piano, purchase an additional litter pan, figure out where to put it, read all the old New Yorkers that are lying around, find a real job, write some long overdue e-mail, concoct a plan to make Mouse ingest Omega-3 and -6 fatty acids, sew buttons onto all the things that need buttons, get rid of the old furniture clogging up my living room, knit a cover for the new throw pillow, determine whether Molly dislikes the sound of the vacuum cleaner as much as Mouse does, do the laundry (during daylight hours), figure out how to feed two cats two different kinds of food without driving myself mad, design (and then actually send) an electronic New Year’s card, fix my desktop computer, make banana-oatmeal muffins, force my DVR remote to understand how to turn on and off my TV, and make a list of all the other things I want and/or need to do.

I can pull that off in five days, I think.

In other news, Molly is an interesting character. We believe her to be about four years old, and she’s got an awful lot of energy compared to Mouse, but I think a lot of that is simply because she was holed up in a tiny cage for more than six weeks. She’s absolutely precious, even with the running around like a maniac simply because there’s now room to run around like a maniac, save one thing: she’s quite flatulent. I have never had a flatulent cat before, and I’m hoping it goes away soon, because it is not at all cute, and she’s liable to pick up a nickname or two if she doesn’t stop. We’ll ask about it at the vet, of course, and I’ll read about it on the Internet should that be necessary, but how such a tiny cat can be quite so smelly is right now completely beyond me. The weird thing is, if you get up real close to her when she’s not farting up a storm, she smells like one of those air fresheners you might hang from your rear-view mirror if you were a Middle Eastern cab driver trying to cover up the smell of your hashish. Plain and simple, she needs a bath. I don’t think she wants one, but she needs one, and so I guess that’s one of the things I’m going to do with my five-day weekend too. Should be fun, and I know you’re all envious because I lead a fabulously exciting life, but really, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

To that end, I’ve gotta go dancing now, because the DC goth/industrial/alternative scene is dying a painful death, and I, among others, have been tasked with reviving it, some seven dollars at a time. I’m not shy about telling a night club owner or promoter about ways they could make my attendance more likely, especially insofar as it comes to easily-fixable things: if your dance floor separates from itself as the night wears on so that gaps emerge that will swallow my heel and make me break my ankle, I’m not coming back until you fix it. Unfortunately, outside of the obvious elimination of dancing hazards, my only other suggestion as to how to improve the scene is to somehow locate young single men who possess emotional maturity roughly correspondent to their age, because, yes, I do go out dancing to dance, but it would also be nice to occasionally meet a new, attractive, intelligent man who was not so damaged as to act as if he was twelve. I guess there’s nothing that can be done about that, and I know that part of the whole deal with this scene is the “drama”, but still.

I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow, unless I’m too busy negotiating cat interactions to write.

So this is Molly:

She’s only been here for about an hour, and she won’t sit still long enough for me to take a good picture, and she’s already hissed at Mouse, but I think this is gonna work out pretty well. And later, when I’m not trying to make sure no one is accidentally injured, I’ll tell you more about her. For now, I have to re-discover a number of things I forgot after ten years of having a mellow, older cat. Mouse, for example, is too sophisticated to eat yarn, but I’m afraid Molly might not be, and there are baskets of yarn everywhere. Mouse is also well aware that one simply doesn’t eat raw catnip, because it’s better dried, but Molly is not yet that civilized. And Mouse is not as prone to getting behind things as Molly is. Just a minute ago she was behind my monitor, earlier she was behind the TV, and if she finds out that there’s a behind to the refrigerator, she’s going to get filthy.

Finally, Mouse was declawed before I adopted him, but Molly was not, and so I’m afraid that Mouse (when he eventually comes out from under his chair) will teach Molly that it’s okay to scratch on whatever you damned well please. It is, of course, if you’re Mouse, but Molly’s not Mouse, and we’re all going to have a little adapting to do.

But it’s going to be fun, and I think giving a home to a cat who’s been living in a shelter for more than six weeks is just the kind of thing that would make the baby Jesus happy. Isn’t that the reason for the season?

(Also, yes, I know she looks just like Mouse. I told you that the other day, and if even one person leaves a comment about the fact that I am so obsessive-compulsive that even my cats match, well, I’ll still be nice to them, because it’s the holidays, but they really ought to reconsider their comment, because making fun of my OCD makes the baby Jesus sad.)

So today after work I stopped by the animal shelter, because the SPCA never sent me an e-mail. And I played with one cat, and she was a nice cat, but no one knew if she was friendly around other cats, and she was pretty young, and an older cat would be a better companion for Mouse. And so I met another cat, and it was love at first sight. (I suppose it will not surprise you that she looks much like Mouse.) (And I suppose it will surprise you even less that I am super-excited about integrating sub-categories into the “gratuitous cat photos” category here.)

So on Wednesday after work I get to go pick her up, assuming I can get the Nutsack Arms Condo Association to provide me the paperwork I need from them before then. I’m sure I can, because if they give me any trouble, a) I know a lawyer, and b) hell hath no fury like me wanting to adopt a cat and someone getting in my way. (Seriously, though, I will call them in the morning and ask them to slip a copy of the covenant under my door when I am at work, and if they don’t do that, I will simply stay home on Wednesday morning long enough to visit the office and pry a copy out of their cold, dead hands.) (And if that doesn’t work, I’ll just forge some paperwork, because I am sometimes just the tiniest bit above the law.)

Anyway, apparently when she arrived at the shelter her name was Precious, and then they renamed her Pattie, but both of those names pretty much suck. If she was a boy I would name her Spencer, or Sebastian, maybe Maximillian, but since she’s a girl I’m leaning toward Penelope, so we could call her Penny.

Other names I consider appropriate for a girl cat are Samantha and Alexandra, both of which shorten to boy’s names (and I guess Maxine would work too, but I don’t like it). Olivia would shorten to Ollie, which would be pretty damn cute, but I don’t think you should ever call a cat Livvie, so that won’t work. And Elizabeth could become Ellie*, or Izabelle Izzie, but the “iz’ sound grates on my nerves, so those won’t work either. I’m fond of both Chloe and Zoe, and Lily and Daisy, but those might be too girly. Hannah’s a good name for a cat, as are Amelia, Molly, and Phoebe; Madison or Madeline would shorten to Maddie, and Danielle would shorten to Dannie, so any of those might work. (Things I refuse to name her include Minnie, Mickie, and Mightie, because I already have a cat named Mouse.) Obviously, this is a gigantic issue, and I will not run out of things to write about on my blog until my new cat has a new name. (Whew!) Anyway, if you were inclined to leave a comment suggesting a name for Mouse’s beautiful new friend, she and I would both be grateful, because we’re currently at a loss.

And we shall not speak now about how badly I feel having left her to sleep in a shelter for two more nights, but I can’t pick her up tomorrow because there are no adoptions on Tuesdays, and I did not know when I left my house this morning that I would fall in love with a cat this very evening, so I arrived unprepared. And we really shall not speak now about how badly I feel for the first cat I met with, who was a perfectly lovely cat but just not the very best possible match for Mouse and me. (If only I felt as sorry for all of the boys I’ve met lately who were perfectly lovely but just not the best possible match for me (and Mouse).)

In related news, when I arrived home this evening Mouse was mad because I was later than I was supposed to be, and yesterday when I gave him his wet food I put salmon oil near it, so he couldn’t eat it. Today I mixed the salmon oil right in, leaving a lumpy pile of smelly disgustingness on his plate, and he wouldn’t eat that either, so a can of cat food was completely wasted when I opened another one and didn’t adulterate it. He ate that one in no time, so now we’ve got to either figure out another method of getting him to ingest salmon oil or purchase a different kind of Omega fatty acid. I’m going with the latter, and hoping that my new kitty cat, whatever her name, will like salmon oil. She’s pretty skinny, because the people who surrendered her to the shelter reported doing so because they couldn’t afford to feed her, so I’m thinking she just might fall for eating nasty-smelling food that’s actually quite good for her. If not, let me know if you’re in the market for a 4-ounce bottle of salmon oil (give or take two teaspoons).

Finally, I am well aware that I have fallen from great heights and am now resorting to writing entire entries about what I shall name my new cat, so you don’t have to point that out in the comments, thank you very much. I will take my pleasures where I can find them, and if that’s the worst I have to do to get by, I’ll consider myself lucky.

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* You know what else shortens to Ellie? Elvis. Good idea, naming your female cat Elvis? I think not.