musings not about my hair.

Monday, as I was driving home from work, I realized that I had somehow moved from bright sunny daytime, to moody foggy dark daytime, all in the course of about 3 blocks.

Looking back in the mirror, I could see the sunshine beaming down upon the earth behind me, bright pools of light.

I looked east to the lake, and realized that I could only see a narrow band of beach, breakers, and a bank of white nothingness.

Above and west of me, tall buildings were engulfed by fog, looking half-consumed, and reminding me of a Stuart Davis song, "...chow down, chow down the buildings..."

Once, someone told me that she lived high enough in a building facing the lake that often times her view was of empty quiet nothingness.

Eerie blank whiteness wielding the primitive powers that makes stories like the original version of "The Fog" stick in your memory.

I was half tempted to write down some sort of epic poem to the strange weather in this city, but the ennui won out, and I instead watched television.

..........

Watching Aninal Planet lately has served to implant the idea that kittens need rescued from bad situations, and places like the pound. They need homes filled with love.

It has also made me more aware of Cricket's behaviors. She's always been strange, but she's gotten so clingy and meow-y lately, I wonder if she's in need of companionship -- someone to burn off her excess energy, wear her out, and keep her from being lonely when I'm not here.

I am stricken with kitten fever.

Not the tiny mewling baby kitten kind, but the gangly litterbox-trained adolescent version.

I want to get Cricket a kitty of her own.

Cricket could lord it over her kitten until it got bigger than she is, and then she could get the well-deserved smackdown that she has earned many times over by then.

But I have concerns as well.

I am afraid that Cricket might hurt the kitty when I am not here.

Or they could create so much collateral damage from fighting that I'd need to pack away anything breakable forever.

Or worse, that she would just hide and skulk around to avoid the kitty, and probably start acting out more, making the sink peeing, the bathtub whizzing, and the front door marking the least of my worries.

Cricket is a strange one -- she has the capacity to get used to things and warm up to them, eventually accepting them. Case in point, she now attacks and sleeps upon the Flokati rug I got at IKEA, where before she avoided it like the plague, scrambling over furniture and making stunningly gymnastic leaps from here to there. And it's a damned big rug.

However, she is also completely capable of carrying a burning hatred that will never be extinguished, deep in her weird little heart. For the first 8 or so months of her life, she was in the same house with Chase the dog, and never once did she accept him. She mostly just ignored him, or gave him the stink eye and a very wide berth. To this day, 3 years later, she still swats and hisses at him.

She still won't accept anyone's touch except those of my family members, and she's truly only affectionate to me and Dad. (I think she pays him attention because he's not really hot on cats, and it's either that she senses a kindred spirit and the sharing of a common bond, or simply the expression of a perverse need to antagonize someone that doesn't like cats, because she is both evil and a cat. And she has to suck up to me or else I might stop feeding her, or possibly introduce her to the hard life of the common alley cat.)

I still want another kitty.

And if N. hadn't had to get back to Chicago so quickly from another pointless management meeting in Wheaton, we just might have stopped off at a PetSmart and picked up a cute black 6-month old kitty that looks just like Cricket except without the random white hairs.

Instead, after dropping N. off at the nail salon, I bought the weasel-bunny a new litter pan.

............

I also want a Yaris.

I don't need one, and other than knowing that they are fairly inexpensive, small, cute, have decent gas mileage, and are made by Toyota, they're completely foreign to me. Ironically, I could get a brand-new, tricked out Yaris now for less than I paid for my gently-used Camry 5 years ago.