I Got Those Old Dog, Old Cat, Middle-Aged Birthday Blu-u-u-u-e-s, Oh Yeah

Today is a whole bunch of things all wrapped around each other; and frankly, while none of them are much more than little rain showers on the parade of my life on their own, they seem to have come together in a Perfect Storm configuration that smacked me in the face as soon as I limped out of bed this morning.

Today's the day our landlords were supposed to be moved out of their house so we can move into it. So far, not a single item has crossed their threshold in an outward direction. I haven't even seen a box loaded into the back of a pickup truck. We've been doing amazingly well with the family bondage, but really ... we're all ready to stop sharing a bathroom and start getting our new living arrangements underway.

It's the second day of doctoring Cuppy's eye every hour, and it's hard to tell which of us is getting more tired of it. She's miserable, her eye is glued shut with eye crap, and I feel mean when I have to pry it open and put ice-cold drops in it.

It's the last day of my three day weekend, and that's always sort of a let-down.

Today I am officially fifty-one-more-year-than-last-year. I haven't been happy about the whole fifty-something process since it began. There's all this subtle stuff that happens to middle-aged bodies that isn't even listed up there on the top of the Hit Parade with gray hair, wrinkles, aches, pains and forgetfulness. Like this thing that happens to skin. It scars differently ... and worse. It's thin in places it used to be thick and thick in places it ought to be thin. It sprouts aberrant hairs from odd places and stops growing it at all on your legs. My nails are getting weird.

The dog is also getting older, and it's led her to spend an inordinate amount of time licking at things and chewing at things and snuffling at things, and that's led to her previously pretty red hair taking on an unfortunate smelly, sticky, spiky patchiness overlying balding, painful hot spots ... and her bidness is drooping. This is not a good look, and it's forcing me to confront the mortality of the animals I've shared my life with for the past decade or so.

So I'm up this morning washing the dried gunk out of the cat's eye, and thinking about the move that isn't moving, and wishing I had more weekend, and thinking that I'm not good at this part of owning pets when they start falling apart and leaving you one piece at a time, and that I'm distinctly not crazy about having any more birthdays, and pondering what indignities of age may lie ahead for me and the pets and whether they'll include losing more eyes ... or having my bidness get droopy ... and then I found the following on one of my favorite blogs, and it tickled me so much I had to stop and read it aloud to myself, and I thought, "Well, there! That's what I needed to hear today!"

If you haven't discovered Offsprung, you should. Do yourself a favor and go there soon.

I've shamelessly (but with great admiration, if that counts) borrowed this little snippet of wisdom to share with you as an enticement, and to internalize for myself, because now I know what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be a Calvinist Scotswoman with a brogue. I can do it ... I'm very good with dialects!

Fort Awesome: Did I tell you my mom’s review of Joan Didion’s book?

Terrible Mother: The Year of Magical Thinking?

Fort Awesome: Yeah.

Terrible Mother: I loved that book.

Fort Awesome: This was my mom’s review: “Oh, my husband died … name drop…name drop… name drop…name drop….self indulgent musing……” But in a Scottish accent.

Terrible Mother: Christ-o-matic.

Fort Awesome: This is the climate I grew up in. “Oh your husband died. Why don’t you cry like a wee baby. People die all the time. Be thankful you still have the health and wherewithal to survive the unflagging misery that is life.”

Kwach