Ladies and Gentelmen, I Present You With the Most 80s Music Video of All Time. No, Really.

And I don't know whether this is really sad or kind of cool, but I actually have this song in my iTunes--along with a couple other Zebra numbers. I've been a fan ever since I saw them open for Loverboy in '83.

Oh wait. Really sad. That would be really, really sad. Not cool at all.

God, I'm a dork.

This one's for Lisa.

What You Are
by Audioslave

When you wanted me i came to you
When you wanted someone else i lived through
When you asked for that i set myself on fire
And if i go
Far away
I know you'll find another slave

cause now i'm freed
from what you want
now i'm free
from what you need
now i'm free
from what you are

when you wanted love i cut my veins
and when you wanted love i bled myself again
now all i've had i still love you
i'd give you up forever
and here i go
far away
i know you you'll find another slave

cause now i'm free
from what you are
now i'm free
from what you need
now i'm free
from what you are

then a vision came to me
when you came along i gave you everything
but then you wanted more

cause now i'm free
from what you want
now i'm free
from what you need
now i'm free
from what you are
hey
now i'm free
from what you want
now i'm freed
from what you need
now im free

You are one of the strongest people I know, and you will survive this. You never deserved all the pain and all the drama. But you win: you ended up with the most precious prize there is. A prize he never deserved. I have been where you are right now. I love you and wish I could really be there to hug you and tell you how wonderful you are.

Things I've done in the past week (bullet pointed edition and in no particular order)

• Bought, loaded up, and quickly fell in love with my 120GB iPod (after my old 40GB one bit the dust)
• Went with BH to get our marriage license
• Endured a bit stink at work over a project I worked on and worried if I might get canned
• Felt grateful that I rarely delete my e-mails because I had an e-mail trail that exonerated me from the big stink
• Realized that my digital camera is very broken and that getting it repaired would cost almost as much as getting a new one
• Got my oil changed for the first time since buying my car in April. Apparently these new Hondas only require an oil change every 7,000 miles/6 months. Bargain!
• Bought a bustier at the shee-shee lingere store in order to ensure my girls are boosted to maximum boobocity during my nuptials
• Settled up my final $795 with the vet's office. After $5,000+, I end up with ashes and a paw print. Sigh.
• Rocked the vote.
• Picked up my wedding dress from the seamstress.
• Spent about $235 at Costco on food and booze.
• Had the most fun bachelorette weekend EVER with my girls at a rented lakehouse.
• Ate way too much of the Costco food and drank too much of the Costco booze during said weekend.
• Laughed so much and so hard that my guts hurt for days.
• Got a bunch of mystery bruises.
• Had a robot dance-off with Thelma Jane.
• Sang my ASS off at Rock Band and American Idol for Wii.
• Witnessed Lindsay's superior Rock Band guitar skills.
• Discovered that I have a new found respect for Dennis DeYoung AND that I never knew the words were actually, "Come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me lads."
• Decided I really want a Wii.
• Finally finished this. Ordered this.
• Made pasta with the fresh pesto that Julie made for the bachelorette party but that we never ate.
• Saw lots of deer a ton of butterflies and a gray fox.
• Saw lots of McCain/Palin signs on the way to the lakehouse.
• Discovered that The Geej can sing harmony, no problem.
• Witnessed an impromptu performance of a number from "Godspell" that included tambourines.
• Made reservations at a crazy expensive restaurant for dinner during our honeymoon.
• Started stressing about packing for the honeymoon.
• Saw deer in my neighborhood.
• Learned that I shouldn't send out negative energy into the universe, and how I should, instead, visualize a happy world.
• Learned about the Hugh Hefner/Paper Maiche connection.
• Made a much needed mani-pedi appointment.
• Worked my ARSE off in order to have a few blissful days away from work.
• Caught up on Badger's blog and realized she seriously hurt her damn foot.
• Neglected this blog.
• Tried to make it up to my tens of readers by doing a lame bulletpointed post.

DUDES!!

I am so FUCKING ready for this weekend, I can't even begin to tell you.

In short, the past three weeks have sucked donkey. Big time. Most of the suckage has had to do with work. But the remainder of the suckage has had to do with the whole Earl dying thing. And then, if that weren't enough suckage, it has been compounded by the extreme money hemorrhaging that's been going on between wedding preparations and the whole sick/dying cat fiasco.

But, on the bright side, the weather if freakin' amazing, I'm taking tomorrow and Monday off, and I discovered this never-before-posted video of Earl on my hard drive today:


And also, I went and treated myself to a brand new 120 GB iPod classic today. Yes, I'm poor, but like any good American, I've still got credit. Whoot!!

The reason I'm taking a long weekend this weekend is because a) I TOTALLY deserve it after how hard I've been working lately and b) it's my weekend-long bachelorette shindig!! That's right--my awesome friends (most of whom are featured in the blogroll over on the right) have rented a big ass house out at the lake for the ENTIRE weekend so that we can chill, imbibe, laugh, and relax. God, I need it.

So the next time you hear from me, I'll probably be moaning about how worn out I am from the weekend. But I'm sure it will be absolutely worth it.

I'm still here.

It has been a long, busy, exhausting week since I wrote my last post. I was at a work meeting/event from Wednesday morning until Sunday morning, and it was intense and totally wore me out. Today, I was still recuperating and, as a result, felt super hungover all day, without the alcohol input. In other words, all of the pain without the fun. I'm just PRAYING that I'm not getting sick because I simply don't have the time. Plus, I've got a kick ASS bachelorette celebration to attend this weekend. So...yeah.

I'll be checking in again with you freaks very soon when I don't feel like I'm on the verge of utter collapse.

In Memoriam

First of all, thank each one of you who commented on my posts about Earl or sent me e-mails with condolences when you read that he was no longer with me. I honestly can’t begin to tell you how much that meant to me. Second, I learned something in some of your comments. I learned that my silly love affair with my sweet, chubby kitteh had affected some of you in a positive way. Badger, for instance. She never actually had the pleasure of meeting The Great Purring One, and yet she referred to him in conversation as the only cat she’d ever liked. That, my friends, is saying something. And there are those of you who found my posts about or photos of him funny or touching and, because of that, you ended up liking him too, even though you’d never had him perch on your chest and look at you with lurve in his big, green eyes. Of course there are my friends who WERE lucky enough to encounter this sweet, gentle soul and who were—without exception—charmed silly by his personality, often in spite of themselves. He was like that big, loveable guy in high school we all knew that never met a stranger and never had an enemy. The guy that made everyone he met happier than they were before he’d come into their lives.

My story of Earl, for those of you who don’t know it, is the following: Within weeks of my first husband up and leaving me after nine whole months of marriage, this ugly little kitten—the product of two frequently-fornicating strays we’d been feeding—showed up in our garage. I say “ugly” because I’d never found orange (or “ginger” as they’re sometimes called) cats particularly appealing. Plus, he had ENORMOUS paws that were totally out-of-proportion with the rest of his wee self and he purred entirely too much and too loudly, in my opinion. Although his moocher parents were skittish, this little guy didn’t have an ounce of fear in his tiny body, and walked right up to me the first time we met while his ma and pa bolted away. I scooped him up, he turned on that motor, and the rest—as they say—is history.

I wasn’t looking for a new pet. I had the grand dame, Ellen, who was around 10 at the time, and I was about to say a heartbreaking good-bye to the Siberian Husky my soon-to-be-ex was taking with him. So a kitten was not something I wanted or needed. Or so I thought…

But he quickly moved into my world—much to Ellen’s dismay—and forced me to care for something small and helpless. He snuggled with me in a way that Ellen had never deigned to do (she was nothing if not uppity), and made me laugh with his goofy antics every single day. His kittenish charm never left him, no matter how enormous he got, and that motor of his did not stop running until—literally—the last beat of his big, sweet heart.

It may sound corny, but I am convinced that Earl was an angel, sent to help heal my shattered heart, just when I felt my most lost and alone. And now, mere weeks away from marrying the man of my dreams, he left to go continue his heart-healing work with someone who simply needs him now more than I do.

Here are a few of my favorite photos of him—some you may have seen before, some that I’ve never posted. Please enjoy. One of these days, I will have another B.O.C. (Big Orange Cat, for those of you who haven’t yet been indoctrinated into this fervent cult)—you can count on that. But I will never, ever have another Earl.

A Very Good Boy.

Night night, little fat man.

Earl

June-ish, 2001 - October 11, 2008

Cancer fucking sucks.

It's cancer.

High grade lymphosarcoma of the intestine. I'm just stunned and sad and freaked the fuck out. He's my sweet baby, handsome mama's boy, my little fatty snuggle partner. He can't be sick. He just can't.

But he is.

Update/explanation about Earl

Sigh. God. Where do I begin...

A couple of weeks ago, Earl basically stopped eating. And you've seen pictures of him, right? Clearly this is an animal who enjoys eating. Anyway, I sort of chalked it up to the prescription diet food that our vet had put him on after his last visit. But then he started barfing, almost daily. Cats can be barfy, but Earl hasn't really ever been, so this started to concern me. Well, after this went on for several days, I started to get concerned. I took him to the vet last Thursday to get checked out. They did a through exam and work up on him (including X-rays and blood and urine tests), but couldn't figure anything out. He wasn't running a fever, but he was a bit dehydrated, and he did act like his abdomen hurt him a wee bit during the exam. But that was it. So they sent us home a couple of hundred dollars later with some antibiotics, and told me that if he didn't start eating/drinking in the next day or so, to bring him back in.

Next day: Friday. I ended up going out for the Karlabration--and after the hella week I'd had--ended up getting TANKED and spent the night in Karla's extra bed at the Omni. Next morning when I got home, I discovered that Earl hadn't eaten and had, once again, vomited.

I called our vet, who is open for part of the day on Saturdays, and took him in. They re-examined him, but then sent me to the emergency animal clinic with Earl's records so that he could be tended to there (since they were closing and didn't have the staff to do an ultrasound on him). So, off we go to the emergency clinic. And we wait. And wait. And wait. And finally we get sent back to an exam room. And wait. And wait some more. Finally the vet comes in and examines him, and looks over the papers and notes we'd come with. During the exam of Earl's (rather substantial) abdomen, the doctor says, "I feel something in there." He performed an ultrasound and, bingo, there was "something that shouldn't be there" in Earl's intestines. The doctor recommended, that since this had been going on for some days and Earl was getting dangerously dehydrated, that they should go in and do an exploratory surgery to figure out what the suspicious something was. I signed the consent forms, kissed Earl good-bye, and went out and bawled in my car in the parking lot.

They finally performed the surgery late Saturday night, when Earl had received enough IV fluids to be rehydrated, and the doctor called me to give me the report at 12:45am: They'd found a section of his intestine where the intestinal wall was swollen and enlarged, clogging the intestine itself up. So he'd removed this section and then sewed the intestine back together, and finished the operation. From what he'd seen, he said he couldn't tell what it was, but that the lymph nodes in that area looked unusual, so it might be lymphoma or a leiomysarcoma that, hopefully, had not had a chance to metasticize. But all of this is conjecture pending the pathology report.

Sunday, Geej and I went to visit Earl at the emergency clinic. He didn't lift his head, but he purred and made biscuits as we petted him. He still wouldn't eat, however.

Monday, I had to go get him from the emergency clinic by 6:30a.m. then transfer him to our regular vet for continuing care. The bill at the emergency clinic? $2,100 and change. Dropped him off at our vet's office, and he decided not to eat or drink all day long. So they asked me to come and get him so that he could go home to a less stressful environment so that he might be encouraged to eat. But before we left, we gave them $340 more.

Went home, and tried everything I knew of to interest him in food, but with no luck. He did seem happy to be there and got some much needed rest. And he went poop, which is a positive thing. This morning, however, his poor paw on the arm where his IV catheter is was swollen to almost three times its normal size. Poor baby!! And he'd thrown up during the night. Sigh.

So I dropped him off at the vet again this morning for some more care and administration of "appetite stimulators", and will be going back to take him home with me this afternoon. After I lay down my credit card once again.

He's such a healthy cat, that it's just killing me to see him down like this. Plus, I still don't know what the results of the pathology are, and if it's cancer, I'm going to fucking lose it. Seriously.

Thanks for your notes letting me know you're thinking of us. I really do appreciate it. And I'm sure that if he could, Earl would give you a big ol' head bunk to show his thanks as well.

I'll let you know what happens next.

Something to keep you entertained.

I have had the most awesome awful stressful fun exhausting tear-filled expensive weekend in a long time. I will write about it soon. I promise. However, it's currently 11:35pm, and I've got at least an hour's worth of work staring me in the face AND I have to get up at 5:20am tomorrow because I've got to transfer my cat from the weekend emergency vet clinic to his regular vet clinic by 7:00am.

So, instead, I'll leave you with this:

What the Geej would look like if she'd been a high school senior in 1994.

You can make one too--you pick the decade and the year--by going here. Now, have fun with that, and I'll be back soon.

Couldn't "live blog" the VP debate tonight because of two things:

1. We were out of wine.

2. BH and I were FAR too busy playing this:
VP Bingo!! We had three different cards for each candidate found on various different websites. Unfortunately, we didn't have dobbers.

In the end, I'm the only one who actually got a Bingo (or a "Palin" as it were). But I tell you, if they'd had "fundamental difference" on my Biden cards or "Ronald Reagan" on my Palin cards, I could've scored a freakin' blackout.

And would you please check THIS out?
Yep. She actually said "Maverick" that many times during the debates. Ugh. I am completely nauseated by her "folksy" act--the turns of phrase, the ending of words that should end with a "g" with an "n" instead (ex: bringin', winnin', talkin', etc.), the "aw shucks that's how we do it way up in Alaska" crap. You know who else was considered "folksy"? Our current numbnuts disaster of a president. Nobody cares if you're down home, Sarah. Do you have what it takes to be the Vice President and, God forbid, president if that need ever arose? So far, from what I've seen and heard from you, the answer is a resounding "Gosh golly no!"