Tag: personal

Crawdads

THIS IS THE 4,000TH EPISODE OF THIS PODCAST

I love crawdads.
Back in college, Ellen taught me how to eat crawdads, and I’ve been eating buckets of them ever since.
Nardo the cat loved the crawdad smell on my fingers, so I’d set aside a few tails to bring home to him.
He’d meow and beg and snap at the bits of crawdad I offered him.
“No more,” I’d say, and he’d lick my fingers for awhile.
This is my first crawdad season without him. And our two black cats don’t like crawdads.
I ate the entire bucket myself.
Except one, left atop the pile of empty shells.

Never Go Back

For years, I went to a place called Cabo.
I loved the fish tacos and frozen margaritas there.
They opened up a few other locations, and the original location closed, so I’d get my fix Downtown.
Last year, they closed.
No more fish tacos and margaritas.
Then, while I was walking home from a cat show, I saw that the place had reopened as Pepper Jack’s.
I went inside and ordered their fish tacos.
They didn’t have those.
Instead, I had a special burrito.
It was good, but not good enough.
I won’t go back.
You can never go back.

Oh By The Way

My least favorite words are: “Oh, by the way.”
Whenever someone says that, it means they forgot to tell me something important, and they’re about to make it my fault for not knowing about it.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” is not the proper response to an “Oh, by the way.”
Instead, you should say “I’d like you to put your oversight in writing so that I can hold you legally responsible for any consequences that result from your failure to keep me informed.”
They never do.
This is why I record everything…
Oh, by the way, I’m recording this.

Cold Cat

Usually, the cats like to go outside and hunt. They come back in to get food, water, and use the litterbox.
But Bruwyn really doesn’t like it when the Winter chill comes.
Instead of going outside with Myst to hunt lizards, he stays inside and sleeps on the bed or curls up on the top of the chair.
Okay, so he sometimes goes outside in the cold, but he comes back inside quickly, and he growls angrily as he runs around the hall.
I grumble as I walk home from work in the cold, and know exactly how he feels.

Rainstorm Roulette

I pull out my phone, check the weather map, and hit the Play button.
A band of green, orange, and yellow sneaks in from a corner of the screen, moving rapidly towards the center.
Checking the time, I do make a rough guess as to when the rainstorm will pass through.
Twenty or thirty minutes.
It will take me thirty minutes to get home from here.
Perfect.
I pay for my coffee, grab my backpack, and head for the sidewalk.
Will I make it home before the rain hits?
I don’t know.
But then, that’s what makes Rainstorm Roulette fun.

Companion

Myst has lost a lot in her little life.
She lost her cat family when we took her away from them.
She lost Nardo when he died.
And Bruwyn when he never came home again.
Our hope was to get her a kitten that she’d bond with and make a companion.
That way, she’d have a cat to clean her ears, chase around to play with, and not be alone while my wife and I are at work.
Tinnie the kitten is supposed to be that companion.
Oh, she loves us. But she and Myst hiss at each other.
Shit.

Size Matters

Every so often, I hold out my arms, turn them over, and compare them.
It’s been over six weeks since the surgery, but I haven’t yet regrown all the hair back on my left arm. There’s patches of stubble all over it, unlike the pelt on the right one.
Also, the left one has atrophied significantly, allowing the pins and plate to poke against the tight skin.
I bang my left elbow against a countertop.
Nothing. No more funnybone, anymore.
A canned laugh track, perhaps?
Then, I bang the right elbow and CRAP! THAT HURTS!
But it feels so natural.

Time Away

I prefer not to think of physical therapy as taking time away from being able to meet my deadlines at work.
Instead, I consider appointments at the rehabilitation center to be an opportunity not to worry about deadlines.
The problem with thinking this way is that it’s the pain of the stretching and pulling by the therapist which distracts me from the work deadlines.
In a perfect world, I’d be healthy and have all my time available to get my work done.
I close my eyes, forget about the project due Friday, and let the therapist twist my shoulder again.

Tolerance

After I broke my arm and underwent surgery to rebuild it, I was given Vicodin for the pain, and it worked. It kept the pain at bay when I took it regularly.
Forty minutes after taking a pill, I felt the rush and it felt good.
But over time, as I healed, the pain subsided. I built up a tolerance to Vicodin, and the rush stopped coming.
Take more? No. That leads to addiction.
Instead, ease off the drugs, and switch to Tylenol.
And then, when I’m better, and my tolerance subsides…
I hope I didn’t sell off my stash.

Tea Time

It doesn’t take long to make a fresh pitcher of iced tea.
I strip 8 teabags from their packages, drop them into a pitcher, and then put a kettle of water on the stove.
Turning the dial to High, I walk into the living room and sit for a while.
I guess this is the superstitious part of me, not watching a pot because a watched pot never boils.
I wait 5 minutes… 10 minutes… 15 minutes…
No whistle yet?
I go back into the kitchen.
Great. I turned on the wrong burner.
I guess those pots don’t boil either.