My desk = chaos.
My office = chaos.
My house = chaos.
My life = chaos.
My checking account = nearly empty.
My head = hurty.
My throat = hurty as well.

Today I need to:
- call and cancel newspaper subscription
- call Telecheck and ask them why they are assholes
- put my rent check in the mail
- write a change-of-address letter and check for car loan
- get gas
- clean out my fridge.

Next two weeks looks like:
Tonight = laundry, pack, clean bathrooms, vacuum, drive home.

Friday = drive two hours to the mountains to do a flag workshop from 9 to 5; drive back two hours same day.

Saturday/Sunday= family’s house, maybe Target, finish writing this year’s guard show. Oh, and an oil change. I need that.

Monday – Thursday = back to the mountains for band camp (probably the last one I’ll ever do; more on that another time.).

Friday = drive 10 hours to upstate New York.

Saturday = friend’s wedding.

Sunday = drive back 10 hours from upstate New York.

Monday = back to work and work and work and work.

Oh, and then, moving Ginny to Harrisonburg one weekend and Sammi to Lynchburg the following weekend. And working. And more working. I think there’s also a Crosby, Stills, & Nash concert in there somewhere but I’ll be damned if I can remember what day that is. I think I have to work like five weekends in a row, but I still don’t know which ones those are. Jamie might have softball tournaments in there somewhere too. Oh, and work.

My head hurts – did I mention that?

I’m kind of halfway watching the 5:30 news while researching rental cars online, and I think in the current spot they’re teaching us how to make crack pipes out of convenience store items. That’s kind of messed up, isn’t it?

I’m sad right now, because I’ve had a long and difficult week at work, and I’m tired, and I’m sitting on my couch watching the news and waiting for Sasha to come out from under the couch. When she does, I’m going to put her in her carrier and take her back home to live with my family.

She’s unhappy. Last week she seemed like she was doing fine, but ever since the ductwork adventure, she’s stayed under the couch all day long, and then at about ten at night, she’ll come out and walk around meowing and looking in all the rooms for, literally, hours at a time. I think she smelled home on me when I got back on Sunday and she’s looking for her littermates. She doesn’t really want to play with her mice and she isn’t eating much and she doesn’t want to come sit next to me on the couch like she did last week. She hasn’t been misbehaving at all, because she’s a good cat like that. But she’s not happy, and so she needs to go back to her family, and that makes me really sad because I love her and I don’t want her to go.

And I know some of you reading are like “whatever, it’s just a cat,” and I guess that’s okay. But she’s my cat, and I love her and I want her to be happy and content. She needs to be at home where she can wrestle with her sisters all day and look out the windows to the woods and sneak out of the house every now and then without getting run over by a car, where she can find safe places to hide that aren’t heating ducts, and where she can beg for table scraps and curl up on my dad’s chest at night when he’s watching TV.

It’s not fair to make her stay in this big, beige, scary place all day by herself.

Sometimes, doing the right thing seems so much sadder and more difficult than the alternative. But it still has to be done.

I want to begin this post with a disclaimer of sorts, because I’m not in the best mood today and I realize even as I flesh this post out in my head that some of it’s going to read as antagonistic, and that it will almost certainly be disorganized. I just want all of you reading to know in advance that, while this post was indeed sparked by some comments on another post I wrote this week, nothing I’m about to write is intended as a personal attack on anyone.

There. Let’s go.

Read more »