Windows Week, Day 4

Oy. I debated even sitting down to write this post because it's just going to be one long drawn-out whine, but I've sort of committed myself to updating the saga every day. I have nothing new to report--it's a little after 11 am. They were to start at 10, but you know how that goes. No biggie there. I'm still cool about that. It's everything ELSE that's making me crazy this morning.

First off, last night. We go into the bedroom to start getting ready for bed about midnight. Now, our house is layered. If you have cats, you know why. Our cats are all perfectly litter-box-trained. No issues there. But (I'm sorry--if you're squeamish, you can skip this part. Skip the whole post, in fact. Come back later; I'll write something not cat-related then) cats throw up. You know? Sometimes it's hairballs, and sometimes it's for no apparent reason. Most of the cats are pretty good about hopping down onto the floor when they're going to puke.

Not Moe. Moe throws up wherever he is. It's extremely irritating, but I also feel sorry for him: the reason Moe is fat is because when he came in the house to live with us, he was just a kitten, and he immediately got a respiratory infection--probably incubating it from before he came indoors. He coughed all the time, and when he ate, he'd start coughing, and then he'd puke. He was such a skinny little guy, with this big head and big paws, and it was scary because he couldn't gain any weight. After a couple rounds of different antibiotics, we finally got him well, and I set about fattening him up.

Little did I know how successful this would be, alas.

Anyway, so he has a history with puking, and when he does it now (not often, but every couple weeks), he doesn't even bother to move from wherever he is.

Hence the layering. Layers of rugs on the floors, layers of dyed cotton rugs on the furniture, layers of washable bedding on the bed. We have our crispy white sheets, and then there's a dyed over sheet, and then there's the comforter, and then there's an over sheet for it (over sheets = can be whisked off and laundered quickly). Then there's another cotton comforter, twin-sized, that goes on the very top and just covers the top of the bed--it's pink and orange, and it's nice to lie under but is small enough to fit in the washing machine, unlike the king-sized one, which has to be disassembled for laundering. And, at the foot of the bed where the cats sometimes nap during the day, a piece of fuchsia fleece.

Normally we don't leave our clothes lying around, for obvious reasons and because we like our clothes and keep them put up, mostly. Except me and the ones I'm altering--I hang those up or put them somewhere theoretically away from the cats. But with the huge disarray this week, there were clothes on the bed along with the heated throw under which we've been camping out in the afternoons when the house gets really cold. And someone--I'm pretty sure it was Moe--threw up all over everything--The EGE's leather jacket, the heated throw, the fleece. A huge mess, after midnight, so there was a load of laundry to be done. And not just regular laundry, but the special laundry you have to do for those electric throws. You know: set the washer on "diva," add 2.75 tablespoons of detergent, let it agitate for 90 seconds and then let it rest and then agitate for another 90 seconds, then rinse by hand while reciting calming mantras and then let it spin with the delicacy of angels' wings. And I had to wait until it was finished so I could take it out and drape it over something to dry because heaven forbid you put it in the dryer unless you're prepared to stand right there with one hand on the dryer door and a stopwatch in the other.

OK. So we get all that done and finally go to sleep and are sleeping soundly when, at 3:25 this morning, we were both jolted awake by the biggest, hugest, scariest noise I've ever heard in my whole entire life. GRWRWRWRWRWRWRW!!!!!! We both leapt straight up out of bed and were kind of running in circles like not-awake cartoon people, trying to figure out who was using a chainsaw to hack through the house and take off the metal roof. I fully expected to see the roof being lifted off, seriously. It sounded like The End of the World.

And it's not even December yet (you know: December 2012)

 We kind of tripped over each other racing into the sewing studio and flipped on the light--we couldn't hear each other, just the GRWRWRWRWRWRWRWRWRWRW!!!!
and realized he air compressor had somehow mysteriously turned itself on. At 3:25 am. All by itself. The cats were locked in the front part of the house, so they weren't responsible.

Fortunately one of us knew how to turn it off. That would not be me. I was just trying to breathe and keep my heart from leaping out of my chest.

OK. So we finally get back to sleep, and all goes well this morning, and I get up and get ready to start taping off all the doors because today is the Big Mess Day of sanding the drywall. I check email, and I find an email about my YouTube channel, one of those telling you that your videos are fabulous and the sender has no idea why you don't get more hits and so you should try XYZ website because it will drive viewers to your channel and blah, blah, blah, and I click the "report as spam" link and then just happen to notice that the email is to me but also *from* me, and I'm like, "Oh, man. &^%$# hackers." So I go in and reset my google password to something even *I* can't remember--it's one of those you have to write down in a bunch of places because it has no bearing on anything in your life--it's not your cat's name or your driver's license number or the title of your first book or anything logical that you'd ever be able to remember but, instead, one of those with upper and lower case letters plus some random, not-traceable-to-you numbers. One of those. And I get that done and then think that while I'm at it, I should change my online credit card password, too. Just in case. My banking one is already so convoluted it's impossible to remember, but this one could stand tweaking. So I go in to tweak it, and there are a couple security questions, and I fail them. Both of them. And they're ones you can't forget, like, "What is your name? And how old are you?" I mean, those aren't the actual questions, but they're like that, things you aren't going to forget.

Or so one would think. But I fail them. Over and over. And so get locked out of my account and am given a phone number to call. Which I do. And the woman (in Florida! I love how they tell you where they are when you call) takes the info and says she'll set it up to give me new security questions tomorrow when it lets me back in. And I hang up and then think, "Wait a minute. What if my credit card company was hacked and that wasn't really an XYZ employee in sunny Florida but was instead some Evil Hacker just pretending to be a native speaker, and now she has my access info and can get into my account?" So I called the other, standard number for XYZ and explained the whole thing to some young whippersnapper in Idaho or Indiana or one of those other vowel states, and he was very helpful and assured me that my account looks just fine (and I was all like, "Well, yeah. Duh. For *now* it does, but what about an hour from now?") and then, of course, he tries to sell me a Security Protection Paranoid Old Woman Insurance Policy.

Sigh.

And then, because I changed my gmail password, it also changed it for access to this blog and my google calendar and everything else on the planet, and because it's a password that I cannot REMEMBER, not unless I were one of those people who can memorize and then recite the Constitution without missing a single word, well. Let's just say it took a while to get access to everything once again.

And then I started taping plastic over the doors and thumbtacking wet cloths over that, and I came out here to do this door and then heard Moe in the living room, trying to dig through the plastic and cloth to get in here where I am. And so I had to go through the plastic over this door, go into the kitchen, go out the kitchen door and through the carport and onto the front porch and through the living room to yell at him and then reinforce that door, the one between the kitchen and the front part of the house, by propping the ironing board--one thing they're afraid of, although not Moe so much--and other stuff so they can't reach the plastic itself. And then back out through the living room, across the porch, through the carport and into the kitchen and through the sewing studio and back out here. All made more fun by the fact that we don't wear shoes in the house. So there have to be shoes by each door so I can put them on to walk outside.

There was much grumbling in the land this morning, is what I'm saying.

I taped the plastic using the Special Expensive Blue Tape, the stuff that's supposed to be made for taping on painted walls but is PULLING THE PAINT OFF these walls out here. And they've been painted for over two years, so it's not like the paint's fresh and not cured. So now, after all this is over, I'm going to have to touch up that paint, and you know how that goes: it never matches, and it always looks shoddy. Plus it looks like more of the paint wants to peel off. The whole wall might peel!

In short, it has been A Morning. Only 10 minutes until noon--maybe this afternoon will be better. And maybe they'll show up and start sanding any time now~~