The Terrible Bad Week, Part I

I feel just like Charlie Brown when he says, "Augggghhhh!"  As if I didn't have enough stress and aggravation last week, the laptop and the internet refused to talk to each other all day Saturday and Sunday.  Good grief!  It's finally a brand-new week, and hopefully the karma is better now than it was then.

But before I put last week completely out of my mind, I have to give y'all a little recap of it.  (Parts of it, anyway, the worst of it doesn't bear repeating.)

Last Saturday a kid I consider my daughter called me with a semi-emergency:  "Mommy, the people who said they'd move me to college backed out.  Can you help me?"  Sure, honey.  I got home from work at 8 a.m. on Sunday morning, took a 3-hour nap, and then drove to St. Louis to move Ash to college, where almost every possible thing that could go wrong did.  I claim exhaustion as the reason it didn't occur to me until somewhere around Columbia on the way home that NV lives in the St. Louis area and that I'd missed a chance to turn a bloggy friend into a real-life friend.  (Aside to NV:  I'll apparently be in Florissant on a somewhat regular basis until May and girl, we have got to get together!)

When I got home Monday Louis Cat had a little bump on his chin the size of a pea.  By Wednesday it was the size of a grape.  Thursday I woke up and found blood spattered all over my bedspread and trailing from the bedroom floor through the kitchen and onto the back porch.  The bump had burst.  After a hasty trip to the vet, we learned that the bump was a spider bite that abcessed.  Poor little Louis.  I felt so sorry for him that I made him a pallet in the Hoosier.  Just temporarily.  He shouldn't get used to it.  And by the way, this crazy cat actually likes bubble-gum-flavored Amoxicillin. 

And speaking of cats....

This poor, alien-eyed, skinny little thing had been hanging around the firehouse for a week, crawling in and out of bunker gear and standing at the back door meowing pitifully to be let in.  I couldn't take it anymore and brought the little bag of skin and bones home with me Saturday morning.  We carefully taped her up inside a cardboard box and stuck her in the cargo space of my Soul, where we thought she'd safely ride for the 35-minute trip home.  We were mistaken.  Three miles down the interstate, she clawed her way out of the box and stood yowling on a back seat headrest.  Uh-oh.  This did not bode well.  I was about to pull over onto an exit ramp when she leaped from the backseat onto my shoulder and settled in, purring, for the rest of the trip.  My friend John said, "The yowling was her calling co-pilot—you just don't speak Cat."  For now, she's known as Itty Bitty Kitty and lives in my bathroom.  I'm not keeping her.  Really.  I'm not.

Last week wasn't all bad, but since this post is getting rather long I'll stop here and put the better news in a Part II post right away.