Anxious Cat and Cat Dad – Thoughts from February 15 and 16, 2022

February 15, 2022

I didn’t write yesterday because I was spending time with Patti on Valentine’s Day. We went out to breakfast even though it was after 2:00 in the afternoon. Patti and I are not early risers unless we have to be. I cheated on the vegan thing with butter and eggs, but not much else. I don’t really know if I’ve mentioned I’m a vegan most of the time now. Later, I had two cookies that were probably made with butter and eggs. I weighed myself this morning and was up by 4 pounds from the day before. I take about 4-5 days to lose that much weight, but I can put it back on in one day.

Quest (the cat) has been troubled recently. She doesn’t like going to the litter box because she has to leave the safety of the cat tree. I have seen and smelled poo and pee on and around the cat tree. If I see her looking down like she would like to come down, I pick her up from the tree (which is difficult when she digs her claws in) and take her to the litter box. I encourage her to go while I’m there. Sometimes the other monsters try to come in, but I stop them. She usually goes when I take her, but yesterday Patti was telling me she cleaned the tree that morning. I looked at Quest and she had the look of someone urinating. Sure enough, I saw it dripping down the side of the tree. I don’t know what we can do to get her to keep from freaking out about the invaders to her house. I don’t think I can take her to the litter box every time she needs to go.

People at my work seem to be much more miserable than I am these days. I can only be so bubbly and perky to cheer them up. I’ve taken my advice from my Reality Acceptance book and removed most of the things that used to make me miserable. Speaking of my book, I found out recently I was spending way more on my ads for the book than I was aware of. From October to January, I added up my charges and they were about $2000 when I made less than $100 from my book sales. I scaled the ads way back and all the sales went away. I’m still working on reworking the book, so this is fine for now. Even this loss of money did not make me miserable.

February 16, 2022

Ever since I’ve been writing my Thoughts again, I am a thinking machine. Actually, I’ve always been a thinking machine, but I’m back to writing those thoughts down (or typing them down). I am also happy again. That was in question not that long ago. I had an incident with a co-worker that definitely was not happy. This will be my subject in the next paragraph, but I wanted to point out how cathartic it is to write these thoughts. Not writing them means they won’t fester inside of me.

I was sitting in a work truck, and a coworker was helping me with a shuttle. I was telling him about a problem I had getting one of my medications. This is all we old people can talk about. He was telling me about a problem he was having getting a medication, but he said it was Obamacare that was the problem. I interrupted him and told him Obamacare is not what the health care act is called. He wanted to stop his whole story and argue about that. The more he insisted, the more my back tightened. It is something by back does when I am confronted with someone who wants to argue with me. I told him we need to stop taking about politics and he argued I was just getting caught up on words. My back just kept tightening, and I told him he needs to stop. He didn’t. I jumped out of the truck we were in and walked away behind a building. I was right under an iconic location. It was a surreal place to have a breakdown. I was literally breathing like someone had punched me in the stomach.

When I calmed down, I went back, and he apologized for pushing me too far. He also had looked up Obamacare and found it is actually called the Affordable Healthcare Act. Later on, he apologized again and gave me a hug. I’m sure it looked weird for two employees in the time of covid to be hugging, but I’m all about the weird. I jokingly told him I accepted his apology, but I was right that it is not called Obamacare. We had a good laugh at that.

But wait, there’s more! I was coming into a gate in a truck, and I could see a guy walking in the middle of the road. As I got closer, I could see he was walking in bare feet and shorts at about 10:30 pm on a fairly cold night. I could also see what could have been blood on his cheek. I told the security guard about him, but he had already seen him and was calling it in. Soon after, they called the gate closed to traffic and even later they called an ambulance to the gate. I’m pretty sure I witnessed the aftermath of an accident.

I think this is all a sign that the end is near. Yes, the end of my workday is almost here. As of now, I have about 45 minutes left. I don’t have anything left to do, so I’m typing these thoughts right now. I listened to a Martin Short autobiography recently that he read. It was very entertaining and interesting to hear about his journey from Canadian actor to the star of stage, movies, and television. He was raised in an Irish Catholic household, but he didn’t believe most of it.

The next book I’m listening to is The Happy Atheist. It is pretty funny but some of it quotes angry Catholics because of a cracker smashing campaign among atheists and ex-Catholics. In case you don’t know, the crackers represented the body of Christ to the Catholics. I had to skip some of their letters. They were the same things many Christians say when they justify their own horrible behavior while screaming about atheists not respecting their beliefs. We shouldn’t respect anyone’s beliefs, especially our own. I can only entertain myself so long with Christians’ illogical behavior before I think about how much I don’t like horror films.

That’s about it for tonight. I need to save some thoughts for my hour-long ride home. Keep it red, Blood!