BBKristopher.com

So, it's been almost two months since I last updated this. I think I'm overdue, so here goes.

In the last two months, I've:

Started my second year of college. I'm taking Stellar Astronomy, Stellar Astronomy Lab, Survey of World Religions, Survey of American History - Civil War to Present and American Government. The Religion class is disappointing, but the other classes are a lot of fun. I suppose you can't win them all.

Finished my Planetary Astronomy class. It was a lot of fun. It also changed my whole opinion on the Pluto as a Planet controversy. The arguments against Pluto being a planet are pretty freaking convincing. Of course, the real problem is, we don't have a concrete definition of what is and isn't a planet. I mean, are the extra-solar bodies we've discovered actually planets? They're not big enough to be brown dwarves, but they don't really fit any of the current models we have of planetary formation, so are they supermassive planets, or a new class of object? Time, and the James Web space telescope will tell.

Increased my hours at work. I'm doing half again as many hours as before. Still pulling a full course load. It's rough.

Moved. We were going to buy the house we were living in. We were three days from closing. Then we discovered a tiny problem. The house was in forclosure. Long story short, it's good to have an aunt who's a realestate agent. We found another house. We bought it. We moved. We've been here since September the first. Yeah, verily, it is the coolest house ever. Much better than the pit we were going to buy.

Got Pan and Pandora, our youngest cats, fixed. Spay and Neuter is never a pleasant thing for anyone involved, but Pandamonium and Pandorable are litter mates. If we'd waited another couple of weeks, we would have had little inbred kittens on the way. Pandora was starting to hit on inanimate objects.

Had the weekend from hell. We got the kittens fixed on Tuesday of last week (this is important later). Thursday I finally managed to get a U Haul reserved for Saturday and pick up my new glasses from ForEyes (also important later).

The weekend from hell begins Friday when I come out of work to discover that the side of the front passenger side tire has peeled away from the steel belt. I don't know how long it's been like that because my glasses were so out of date, but the first time I saw the tire with the new glasses I immediately noticed the problem. Katherine was afraid we wouldn't make it to the tire place, so we called our Auto Club to come change the tire (I can change a tire in a pinch, but only if I don't plan on standing up straight for a couple of weeks). They send the guy to the wrong part of town, then hang up on Katherine when she calls to find out where he is. Takes two hours to show up. We don't get home until around 8, despite getting off work at 5.

The weekend from hell continues the next morning. We arrive at U Haul place at around ten. They've rented the truck I reserved out. They have another one of the same size, but it's got a broken fuel gage and the last person who had it ran out of gas, so they have to put gas in it before we can take it. I should realize this is a bad omen, but I've got to meet the locksmith at 11, the movers are due at 12, and its the end of the month, finding another truck will be nigh on impossible. I leave Katherine at the U Haul place and go to the storage place to meet the locksmith.

Locksmith guy is, of course, 20 minutes early, and because of the U Haul fiasco, I'm five minutes late. I scheduled it at 11 figuring he'd show around 12. Just my luck I got the one punctual locksmith on the planet. He's nice enough about it and saws the locks off the storage building. I give him an extra five bucks cause that's all I can spare, and he didn't make a stink about the wait.

Katherine shows up with the truck at 11:45. They had to siphon gas out of another truck. See earlier comment about omens and this being the end of the month. Note foreshadowing of impending U Haul desaster.

The movers call to tell me they'll be two hours late. We decide to get food. We park the truck at the loading ramp after getting permission from the storage place to leave it. We go eat. We still have 90 minutes until the movers revised ETA. We go home.

2:30 rolls around. I'm starting to get nervous that the tire places will be full up if I don't get there soon (I'm still driving on a donut) so Katherine waits for the movers at the storage place while I go to get a tire put on. I get to the Goodyear place at 3. Tire guy says 45 minutes. Can we say "bullshit" boys and girls? I knew we could. It takes one hour and twenty minutes, and tire guy points out that one of the other tires has dry rot and the rim of the tire being replaced is bent and needs to be replaced as well.

4:30, I pull into the parking lot of the storage place just as the movers show up. I hired three guys. Two show up. I'm pissed, but it's the end of the month, the storage place closes at 7, and I've already rented (ominous music) THE TRUCK.

They go to work. By the time it's over, Katherine is upstairs shuttling carts between the storage room and the frieght elevator and I'm down stairs shuttling stuff from the elevator to the truck while one mover is upstairs loading carts and the other is down stairs loading the truck. We manage, barely, to meet our 7 o'clock deadline for emptying the storage rooms.

7:30 PM. (Ominous Music) THE TRUCK is packed. We are headed for the house. Less than a mile from the house, (Ominous Music) THE TRUCK explodes. It's not a firy ball o death, but there isn't any other way to describe it. The transmission and read end gear box tear themselves apart with enough force to send debris about twenty feet from the truck while the drive shaft simply falls out on the grounds.

A cop shows up and calls a tow truck. The tow truck says they'll be there in 20 minutes. This is tow truck speak for three hours, minimum. I'm paying the movers by the hour. Bugger.

8:30 PM now on our second cop, the tow truck arrives. I'm amazed. It's only an hour since we called. Tow truck guy tells me how much he charges. I start to wonder if I can push a fully loaded 26 foot U Haul a mile up hill. I decide that Katherine would probably stuff and mount portions of my anatomy I'm fond of if I try, and tell tow truck guy to hook up.

9:00 PM Tow Truck guy finishes shoveling up the remains of the transmission and gear box. He uses a shovel because the pieces are that damn small. The drive shaft gets tossed in a convenient ditch. I feel suitably guilty for littering. It lasts for about five seconds. Then I get the fuck over it, because I'm to tired and stressed to care.

9:10 PM We arrive at the house with (Ominous Music) THE TRUCK in tow

9:45 PM U Haul finally answers their phone and tells us that they can't pay for the tow truck but they will reimburse us if we do. Fine. We pay for the tow. Then I talk the movers into taking a flat rate for the job instead of their hourly rate. It's simple really. I tell them they can either have $300 for the time they've put in, or $450 if they finish the job. They take the $450. I still figure I got ripped off, cause the hourly rate they quoted me was for 3 guys, and Katherine and I ended up doing some of the work. I was just to tired to risk pissing them off enough that they'd say fuck it and leave.

12:30 AM The movers are finished. Casualties as yet unknown.

9:45 AM U Haul calls and asks if they can come get their truck. I tell them the sooner the better. They say they'll be their within the hour. I think they're full of it.

11:30 AM. I hear a truck outside. I go look. The U Haul is gone. I knew they wouldn't make it in an hour.

We go to the U Haul place and explain that we won't be returning their truck because it went to truck heaven. Neither Katherine nor I can stop laughing long enough to get out at complete sentence. We go by the store and buy laundry detergent and some other things we need now that we have furniture and major appliances again. We come home.

7:00 PM I sit down to do some homework. Pan makes "pet me" noises. Being a total sucker for a cute cat, I scoop him up and flip him over to rub his tummy. He lets out a shriek and wiggles right out of my arms. A couple of minutes later, he comes back and demands to be petted. I scoop him out and immediately notice a bald area on his tale. Since they shave the area before they remove his reproductive organs, I think maybe he got razor rash and licked all the fur off the spot trying to get the itching on his neuter site to stop. I lift his tail to check. It turns out not to be a bold spot. It turns out that the fur is soaked with blood and puss and plastered down on the skin. When I flipped him over earlier it was apparently enough pressure on his tail to rupture an abscess. We rush him to the vet. This is particularly bad since we have to rush him to the only vet that's open, which happens to be the same vet where we took Adonis the night we had to have him put down.

I love all our cats. I adore them. I make jokes all the time about having sucker written on my forehead in cat. I can't help it. I like cats better than I like people. Cats never lie to you about how they feel about you. And it doesn't hurt that we've got six incredibly sweet little furballs. Pan, though, is kind of special. It's hard not to get attached to someone or something that so obviously adores you, and Pan, like all cats, makes no bones about how he feels about me. I can set him on the floor a hundred times in a row, and a hundred and one times in a row he'll climb up on me and start giving me a bath. He beats out Persephone for the title of "single most stubborn creature on the planet." I adore all of our cats, but Pan's special, and there I was sitting in the same room where we'd had to decide to have Adonis put down, while Pan had this very large, very infected wound leaking all over the place. I wasn't in a good mental place.

In the end, Pan ended up with a shaved butt, to keep hair from growing into the open wound, a prescription for antibiotics and twice daily baths until the wound is completely closed. His feline distemper vaccination is also postponed indefinitely.

Also in the Last four months, I have written pretty much nothing. Which largely explains why the blog hasn't been updated. I'd say I had writers block, but the truth is I have severe burnout. I'm hoping that things will calm down now that our entire living situation is stable and I'll finally finish the first draft of Homefront. It's a bit difficult to concentrate on writing with all the crap that was going on.