pameladean

It's been an interesting few days. The weekend involved both my family birthday celebration and a date with Eric, one sort of in the interstices of the other. Both party and date were very pleasant indeed. During one of the date parts, I got email from David saying that water was coming up from the floor drain in the basement. I wrote back saying I'd call Roto-Rooter if it were me dealing with it, but he'd maybe liked Ron the Sewer Rat better when we had drain problems. He got a time window from Roto-Rooter of 5 to 9 pm on Sunday evening. It turned out that the water coming up from the drain was quite extensive and it wasn't safe to shower, run dishwashers, flush toilets more than very occasionally, or even wash one's hands vigorously. These restrictions have a very depressing effect on one's ability to do much of anything

The hours crept by and it was 9:30 and there were no plumbers. David called them and they admitted to running late and offered us a Monday window of 10 am to 2 pm. This would fall to me, since David had to work Monday. I thought of calling another emergency plumber that had once come through for us when Roto-Rooter got overwhelmed. However, I got an automated message from them saying that they were experiencing an unusually high volume of calls. While I was considering whether I would stay on hold, I brought up the MNDOT site and looked at the traffic map. It had been snowing pretty hard all afternoon and evening -- Eric and I had agreed that we would not try to go to the St. Paul Trader Joe's or our usual former Rainbow/now Cub in Uptown, and he brought me home early. On the MNDOT map the highways around the Twin Cities were solid orange and spattered liberally with purple squares enclosing exclamation points, When you hovered the mouse over them they said variously, "Crash," "Vehicle spun out" and "Critical Disruption on Highway 52." Okay, no. We had to resign ourselves to a night without drains.

I will not dwell on the situation further. It only lasted about 24 hours, but when nobody can shower, flush anything without consultation about when anybody else has last done so, run the dishwasher as a prelude to cooking, or do any laundry, things devolve rapidly into chaos. I set my alarm for 9:15, which is extremely early for me. Saffron woke me around 8:15 wanting to be fed, so I shut her out of the room, but about half an hour later I got up and used the bathroom and optimistically flushed the upstairs toilet, which is cranky and horrible but only has a tank capacity of 1.6 gallons, and fed the cats. Then I cleaned up with baby wipes and got dressed and put my shoe on my left foot and the Robot Boot of Doom on the right foot. I discovered about twelve hours later that I'd put the front panel on upside down, which meant I spent the whole day adjusting and readjusting the boot because it felt wrong and nothing would stay in place and my heel kept sliding around.

The phone rang twice once the window for plumbers began. The first call hung up on me, so I put it into a search engine and got a lot of very indignant comments about spam callers and being called 20 times a day by a number that never left a message. Okay, probably not the plumber. The second call also hung up on me, but when searched for turned out to be the Minneapolis Snow Emergency Phone Alert number. When I did hear from Roto-Rooter, they called my cellphone. The plumber arrived and sympathized about the walking boot, and we minced down into the basement to find a pool of water covering the floor drain and trying to take over the foot of the stairs. The plumber walked around muttering. "Shit," he said. He poked around, cleared junk from around the plumbing stack in what we'd like to be a basement bathroom one day, and said he could probably get at the problem through that stack. "Only," he said, "I have to bring a really big machine into the house and I'm not sure how to do it." He mimed its size and height. We discussed bringing it around the side of the house, but the snow there hasn't been shovelled. Raphael and I do most of the shovelling unless there's enough snow to break out the snow blower, when David does it; but Raphael is getting over a virus. Lydy has exercise-induced asthma. David had shovelled the last lot of snow in front but has long work hours. And I have a broken ankle.

The plumber finally decided to bring his machine in through the front door and see how it went. I moved a bunch of lightweight objects out of the path he'd have to take, and this sufficed. He bumped his battered Victorian-looking wheeled object down the basement steps. I retired to the living room to put my foot up. There was a protracted banging session. That stack is really old. I wondered if the access cap was stuck. Eventually there was a ringing thump as of a heavy metal object hitting a concrete floor, and then the machine started up. Then it stopped. The plumber came upstairs. "Ma'am? Where's your electrical panel?" I got up and came to show him. "I blew a fuse," he said. I managed to describe the location of the room with the panel in it, and stood at the the top of the stairs while he went in and dealt with the fuse and then walked around turning lights off and talking to himself. I decided he had things in hand and went to put my foot up again. A series of roars, rumbles, thumps, and sounds as if someone were delivering a series of oversized packages of rocks at the front door went on for some time. I'd been nursing the fear that something really dramatic was wrong that wouldn't yield to the usual remedies, and thinking that I knew plenty of people who would let me take a shower, or let all of us take showers, but that clumping around in the snow with the boot was not at all a good idea. When Eric and I had come into the house on Sunday he'd suggested that I brush the snow off my boot. I ended up taking the whole thing off and to some degree apart. It dried fast, but it's really not for wet conditions at all. Anyway, the longer the noises went on the more reassured I felt.

After about an hour, the plumber, looking somewhat the worse for wear, came back upstairs with his machine. It was, he said, tree roots. Lots of tree roots. But he had gotten through and the drain worked now. He also said he needed to get a new access cap out of the truck because he'd had to break the old one. As he maneuvered the wheeled monster that had fixed the drain into the front hall he said, "Oh, the snow's still there." I apologized for its not being shovelled and he said, "No, I didn't mean that. I meant all the snow. It's not spring yet." I said it did seem to be time for spring at this point. When everything was squared away and I'd parted with a large amount of money and we'd arranged for a person with a drain camera to come and check the line and make sure it was as clear as it should be, I locked up and with enormous satisfaction flushed the downstairs toilet, washed my hands extravagantly, and took my book and pillbox back upstairs. Whatever else I may have messed up, I did take my medication at the right time even though I got up three hours early/

Being able to put water down the drain was giddy-making. When I got over that, I realized I was hungry, so I got out some of the leftovers from the birthday dinner -- baby carrots, celery sticks, and vegan sour cream and onion dip. I would have some, put it away, and then realize that I was still hungry, and fetch it back out of the fridge to have some more. Finally I just left the remaining carrots and the container of dip, with the lid firmly in place, on a high part of my desk that cats have never gotten anything down from. Then I took a shower, which was luxurious, and got dressed again, and put my boot back on -- still with the front panel upside down -- and headed back to my office. Cassie was meatloafed in the middle of the sitting room floor. There was no sign of Saffron, but she often spends the afternoon either bothering Raphael or sleeping peacefully in Raphael's extra chair. However, as I sat down and put my foot up, wriggling my errant heel back into place, I heard very odd noises from the space between my desk and the wall. I thought Saffron might be stuck. I craned sideways and looked. She was not stuck. She was standing in the licked-clean dip container, assiduously licking the dip from the underside of the lid.

The carrots were right where I'd left them, untouched.

I took the lid and container away from her and put them with the other dirty dishes. I told Raphael what had happened, mostly thinking there might be digestive issues, but when I saw Raphael's face I thought, Oh, right, onions. Bad for cats. After a bit of discussion, Raphael looked up the effects of onions on cats. There were probably at most three tablespoons of dip left, and it was possible that Cass had gotten some of it, but when we did the numbers as best we could, given that the dip was not composed only of onions, it still sounded less than ideal.

This still left us at a loss, so we decided I should call the emergency vet and see what they thought. The person I talked to said that freeze-dried onions were usually not as bad as fresh, but that they didn't really have the information on hand, and she would give me the number for the ASPCA Veterinary Toxicology line. I called this number and eventually got a very nice woman who asked a bunch of questions about the cats and their ages and whether any OTHER cats might have been involved -- Ninja would have if he could, but he was downstairs -- and then put me on hold while she consulted a veterinarian. We were worried about getting the car out and getting to the emergency vet on the snowy streets, and I was worried about clumping around in lumpy uncertain snow in my boot. You can put a plastic bag on the boot, but that doesn't address any balance issues and in addition removes traction on slippery surfaces.

The conclusion of the veterinary toxicologist, when delivered, was a relief. They didn't expect any difficulties with such young and healthy cats. We should watch for lethargy, weakness, and pale gums over the next five days. The main bad effect of onions on cats is anemia, which can be treated. I also got a long list of protocols to follow in case the vegan sour cream caused digestive problems, and a list of under what circumstances I should call them back, and a case number. The service costs $65.00, but this includes all the callbacks.

Cassie acted just as usual for the rest of the evening. Saffron had a very very deep nap, which led us to think that she had probably gotten most of the dip and needed to sleep it off. She woke up for her supper and they both ate with their usual appetite.

After I fed the cats I sat down to adjust my boot again, and finally realized that I'd been putting the front panel in upside down. I am 99% sure that I only did that yesterday and today. It still immobilized most of my foot quite well, so I trust  it will be all right. There's nothing to be done about it, anyway; but this confirms my suspicion that my executive function is all being used up in navigating with the boot, and that resources generally available to make my brain work right are being diverted to the ankle.

I would say that no more exciting things are allowed to happen, but there isn't much point in that.

Pamela

"Random Jottings" has a particular literary source, but it's been so long that I cannot recall what that source is.

I think I've finally sorted out the cross-posting to LJ, but I guess we'll see. I assume that it will work perfectly now that LJ has finally gone off the rails for good and I should probably consider not posting there any more. I'll do a separate post asking people to tell me if they plan to stay on LJ and post there, because I don't like losing track of people even though I make it easy to lose track of myself.

I've been trying to be more active on DreamWidth/LiveJournal, but what this has resulted in has been my commenting lavishly and then having a very hard time responding to the responses even though I'm delighted to get them. I doubt anybody is feeling neglected or snubbed, but if you are I apologize; and even if you aren't I will try to do better.

The rest of this post is an International Bad Cat Day post involving tulips, followed by a section about the Guthrie Theater's recent production of King Lear.


Last week I got on a bus and took a large thick envelope of receipts and statements and forms to the accountants' office. I'm not sure when we last got the current year's taxes done by April 15, though we have managed to file an extension and get things done by August 15 a time or two in the last never-mind how-many years. I'm suddenly feeling much more chipper; I hadn't realized what a horrible burden having the undone taxes looming over me was, and yet doing them is such a nightmare. Tax law has no understanding at all of how self-employment works, and doesn't care either. Tax law secretly feels that if you get your money in large lumps rather than in increments week by week or month by month, you are somehow duplicitous, lazy, or both; or else just generally trying to get away with something. It hates me and mine and I hate it back passionately.

When I left, Raphael asked if I knew when I'd be home. I had no idea and was a bit short with R because I was about to miss my bus. (I did, in fact, miss it, but the next one was early, and it wasn't very cold out.) I sent a text once I knew when I was likely to be back, wondering a little, since I wasn't making dinner and we didn't have any firm plans for anything. R texted back that zie had gone for a short walk and might or might not beat me home. I got home first. When Raphael got home I eventually wandered through the kitchen to find her putting white and purple tulips in a Portmeirion vase. "It's a Saffron vase," said Raphael, and indeed the image on the vase was of meadow saffron (a kind of autumn crocus). We have the dinner plate but I hadn't realized that there was a vase as well. The vase was an early anniversary present and the tulips were for getting the taxes done. The overflow went into a Portmeirion mug (with sweet peas on the side) with a broken handle, and the vase spent the afternoon in my office on a high bookshelf, faintly scenting the room with tulip.

But at some point Saffron herself evidenced a strong desire to get up on the bookcase with the tulips. You could see her cat-brain doing the math. Can I jump up from this vantage point? No, not enough room to land. What about from the lower bookcase under the air conditioner? No, can't see properly. What about from the top of the air conditioner? That's better but some monkey has put a paper bag up there on my occasional landing spot. Pause. BUT TULIPS! What about this part of the pile of boxes of author copies and very old files apparently put here just for the convenience of cats? No, not actually convenient to cats. Scaling the lower shelves? No, too many useless bits of decoration and books stuck in sideways for lack of room. She had been allowed to sniff and examine the flowers before they were put in the vase, but she still seemed very determined, so I removed the tulips to my bedroom for the moment.

I was reading peacefully in my bedroom much later when she started the same set of calculations in there, ultimately making it through quite a number of random objects without knocking any of them down, until she was a foot or so from the vase. I removed it and put it on the front stairs. This was useful insofar as it's cold on those stairs, which preserved the tulips nicely. I let Saffron sniff them again before I took them away, but whatever she wanted with them, it wasn't that. When I brought the tulips back up at the end of a busy weekend, and on every day that I had them in my office, she did her mathematics at some point, but by then I was persuaded that she probably couldn't actually get up on that bookcase and was too smart to try and fail.

In late March, Eric and I went to see the Guthrie's performance of King Lear. I meant to write it up immediately so that local people would still have a chance to see it. The Guthrie had not done Lear in twenty years. Raphael and I went to that 1996 production, which was excellent; my main memory of it at this remove is Isabel Monk's tremendous, hilarious, moving performance as the Fool. I mentioned it to Raphael when I was talking about the recent production, and Raphael reminded me that Isabel Monk was so much more robust than Lear in that production that it transformed the entire nature of their relationship.

In this production, the Fool was played by Armin Shimerman. I gazed and gazed at that name and at the photo of the actor, which was not familiar. I was only clued in by the conversation of the people next to us. All of you are no doubt jumping up and down to tell me that Mr. Shimerman played Quark on "Deep Space Nine" and later, Principal Schneider on "Buffy." Lear was played by Stephen Yoakum, who long ago was Henry Bolingbroke in Garland Wright's production of the History Plays, which I saw at least four times, most of them on day-tickets. It was in that line that I overheard a bunch of late-adolescent girls fangirling Henry V. Not Kenneth Branagh, whose movie had come out recently; and not the actor who played Henry -- Henry himself. It was awesome, as was that whole run of plays. They did Richard II; a very long and deeply distressing adaptation of both parts of Henry IV; and Henry V.

I didn't recognize Mr. Yoakum, but I recognized his voice at once in the first scene.

It almost always takes a few minutes to settle into Shakespeare's language, and while that was happening I looked over all the characters who were on stage at the beginning and suddenly recalled the scene from the third season of "Slings and Arrows" in which Charles Kingman, meeting the rest of the cast in a production for which he had been invited to play Lear, asks the woman playing Cordelia how much she weighs and reacts very rudely to her answer of 107 pounds. This Lear would not have needed to do that even if he had been twice as rude a person: Yoakum's Lear is physically robust even as his mind breaks and breaks again into smaller bits.

Cordelia and Goneril both also had very robust physical presences. Goneril was tall and Cordelia was just very much present. Regan was more withdrawn and quiet, which made the later scene with Gloucester particularly horrible and creepy. I had forgotten how funny Goneril is; horribly funny, but funny. Another thing that struck me was that, when she has her first tantrum, she behaved and sounded really exactly like Lear just had when he flew into a rage at Cordelia and exiled her.

Edgar's first appearance was made with his hair falling into his eyes and a wineglass in his hand; he was clearly pie-eyed and may not have been completely sober until sometime after his transformation into a Bedlam boy. This made his complete cozening by Edmund more plausible than is sometimes the case. And of course it lighted up what's already present, his gaining clarity while feigning madness. Edmund was very well done; I had remembered that he is funny, but actors vary in how well they manage this, and this one did a very good job.

Armin Schimerman was an excellent Fool, much smaller than Lear but much more mentally present. The production also did something I don't remember seeing before. The Fool simply vanishes from the proceedings during the thunderstorm. At the end of the play Lear says, "And my poor fool is hanged," and there is, or was, much speculation about whether he means the actual Fool or is using a fond term for his daughter Cordelia. The parts were probably doubled originally, which explains the Fool's disappearance so that Cordelia can reappear from her exile, but it's still very weird how the Fool just falls silent. When Isabel Monk played the part, she deliberately withdrew and turned her back on the entire situation, wracked with many feelings. In this production, as Lear's mind breaks down, he stabs and kills the Fool without knowing it, to the horror of Kent and Edgar.

I was sad that they cut so much of Edgar's speech when he's persuading his father that they are standing at the edge of the cliffs of Dover when really he's been leading Gloucester in circles, but the scene was very affecting anyway. And they did leave in the bit during the torture of Gloucester where the one servant objects to what is being done and is killed for his pity. C.S. Lewis has said somewhere that while that is a very small part, it's the part he would want to play in actual life.

Pamela

When we adopted Saffron, the people who had been fostering her brought her over to our house so she'd know that they thought we were okay. They were telling us about some of her quirks, and I asked if they had any tricks for getting her into the cat carrier. After a blank pause, one of the fosters said, "She usually just goes in." I assumed that this meant that if you picked the cat up and headed her into the carrier, she would feel that her dignity required going in meekly rather than struggling.

The first time we took her to the vet, I got out the carrier and put a fresh discarded T-shirt into it, and Raphael dusted it a bit. Cassie hid as soon as she heard the door squeak; Saffron came sauntering along to see what was up, and walked right into the carrier and lay down. It was much too early to go to the vet, and she eventually got out again, but when it was time to corral her, she was back in the carrier and all I had to do was to shut the door. Every time we've taken her to the vet, she's just gotten into the carrier on her own. She doesn't like the vet and is an uncooperative patient, but the carrier is awesome.

Today Cassie was due for shots, so Raphael got out her carrier and dusted it and put a nice thick sweater in the bottom. Cass tends to hide at first, but eventually get over herself -- after all, the carrier might be for Saffron. I had just gotten home from looking after Toliman when Raphael arrived in a rush from a trip to the post office, checked the time, and in a few minutes scooped up Cassie and took her to the carrier. Saffron appeared from nowhere and walked into the carrier just ahead of Raphael's attempt to put Cassie in. I ran out of my office and tried to dump her out, but she wouldn't go, instead retreating to the back of the carrier. I tried to pull her out on the sweater, but she removed herself from it. Cassie does not like to be picked up or held, does not like the carrier, and does not like the vet, so she was struggling a lot. I finally got Saffron to come out, probably because she didn't like the fuss in her place of rest; and she ran off with a kind of flounce of her shoulders, only to return ten seconds later, talking furiously and demanding treats, which we had decided to postpone til Cass was back from the vet.

She forgave us for being weird, but she certainly had no idea that she was doing anything untoward.

Once we had Cassie where she belonged, we started to laugh, and I suggested that Raphael could either have taken both cats to the vet, or taken Saffron "because this is the one I could catch."

Pamela

First! The ebook version of Points of Departure, Pat Wrede's and my collection of all our original Liavek stories plus a new story by Pat and a new collaboration by both of us, telling the often-crossing stories of Granny Carry and the Benedicti family, is on sale for $2.99 from the following vendors:

Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/zppqh9d

ibooks: http://tinyurl.com/jpca42t

Kobo: http://tinyurl.com/jr7adpw

Paperback copies vary wildly in price, but I always encourage people to support their local independent bookstore if they are lucky enough to have one.

Second!

This is what actually impelled me to post. You may recall a cat-related saga earlier in the year when I lost most of our 2014 tax information and then rediscovered it. I'm afraid that I did not, in gratitude, immediately finish preparing the taxes. Sadly, I finished preparing the taxes the week before Thanksgiving, impelled by the realization that one is not eligible to apply for health insurance subsidies on the individual market if one has not filed one's taxes, but upheld by the knowledge that our accountants just last year went to all-electronic filing, so that once things were done the filing part would be instantaneous.

Well, it would have been, but, not really amazingly, there's a deadline for e-filing, and it's in October. So yesterday, after a horrified look at the calendar and a quick call to the accountant's office, I waylaid David as he was heading innocently out the door to take a thumb drive containing a concert video to friends. We went to the accountants' office and had a nice chat with the accountant while the taxes were being photocopied. Then we went to the nearest post office, helpfully pointed out by the accountant's getting me to stand behind a plant in a far corner of his office and peer out the window. We signed the taxes in the car and then, having stood in line for a while, I paid various amounts of money to get the tax forms to St. Paul and Fresno as quickly as possible.

I want to pause to extol the extreme kindness, sympathy, knowledegability, and helpfulness of the Post Office employees, not only to me, but to the many equally infuriating people ahead of me in line who didn't know what they wanted, complained when it cost money, had not packed up their boxes adequately or had forgotten the slips for the packages they wanted to pick up. Every single one of those Post Office employees deserves to be paid twice as much as they get, whatever it is.

Then we took the thumb drive along to our friends and had a lovely chat with them as well.

I was figuring that I would not be able to sign up for health insurance in time to get coverage by January 1, and would need to get some kind of interim coverage for that month. However, I got an email this morning saying that MNSure had extended the deadline to December 28th, which provides a much better chance that things will work out.

Third.

Thanksgiving went off pretty well, given how many people we had and the curious attrition that had occurred in our supply of dishes and flatware. David and I had Lund's sushi for lunch; the rice had suffered in storage, but it was still tasty and prevented sudden blood-sugar drops later on. I did not manage to make my small casserole, which is just as well, because the new-to-me mock cheese I'd been planning to use is really not up to snuff and would not have worked properly. I did make the roasted vegetables, and they were delicious. My youngest brother was a delight, and did cook the salmon for non-eaters of turkey. He called up recipes on his phone, and when informed sadly that no, we did not actually have any parsley or almonds, he just kept looking until he lit upon a reduction of mustard and balsamic vinegar with garlic and olive oil, which was so tasty that my other brother ate the extra salmon filet I'd had plans for. This continued a theme: arkuat had brought vinho verde because he knows that I like it, but I was too busy running around during the appetizer phase, and everybody else drank it all. Next year I am going to manage better.

My mother brought mashed potatoes, including a non-dairy version just for me; she also brought braised celery and leeks, which is about a dozen times as delicious as you think it will be, even if you think highly of the idea. fgh's cranberry sauce with ginger was excellent with salmon. Both her daughters came along this year, which was extremely pleasant, and they brought a very nice spread of appetizers. And my mother and local brother and I were very glad to see our youngest, even though he'd arrived at 2 am on Wednesday and was expecting the band's bus to collect him again around midnight on Thanksgiving. My family accordingly left around nine, and lydy kindly gave Eric a ride home so he wouldn't have to cope with the holiday bus schedule; but Felicia, Rachel, and Judy stuck around to keep us company while David carved the rest of the turkey and reduced the carcass into a form suitable for soup. The house smelled of turkey soup for the next day or two. I can't eat it, but it still smells lovely to me.

Fourth.

International Bad Cat Day, pastry version. So I went to a monthly gathering of fellow writers at a bakery that sometimes has olive-oil pastries flavored with orange and fennel. I don't know if there is egg in them, but they don't do me any harm, so there can't be much. They had the pastries, so I got half a dozen and ate one while socializing and drinking tea with all the lovely people. Then I met Eric for a date and gave him one. Then I gave Raphael one. The following day, I ate the fourth, and reminded Raphael that there were two left. We had a late dinner that night. If it's just the two of us, we often eat dinner in Raphael's office, with the door shut. My office has no door. If you eat where the cats can see you there are various behaviors that make finishing your food difficult, let alone reading or watching TV or even conversing while consuming it. So we had our dinner and watched whatever we were watching at that point (Dr. Who or Parks and Rec, probably). When we came out, it was time for the cats' own supper. Ordinarily the two of them pour into the office with the appearance of about a dozen, tails upright, voices proclaiming starvation.

No cats. "WHERE ARE THEY?" I said. "WHAT HAVE THEY DONE?"

There was no depredation in the kitchen. In my office, however, the brown paper bag containing the last two pastries -- which I had carefully set on a tall filing cabinet that Cassie couldn't get onto in one jump, and that I believed Saffron could not, less because of the height than because she couldn't get a good run or a good view of the top first -- was on the office floor with the bottom torn out, and both cats were feasting on the pastries. Raphael took the bag away from them and then I cleaned up the crumbs, to much feline protest. They had had quite enough to be going on with. Next time I am just eating everything at once. Possibly with some nice vinho verde.

I wish I had five things, but I don't seem to.

I wish you light in this season of darkness.

Pamela

We got an extension on filing our taxes this year. I had very good intentions of dealing with them much sooner than now, but didn't get to actually sorting papers and finding vital information until last week. I ended up with seven or eight file folders with stuff in them, a brown paper bag of papers for recycling, and an as-yet-unsorted mass, mostly of medical information, but with a leavening of charitable contributions and so on. I put the file folders, with all the W2 and other income forms, and the sorted household expenses and rental income information, back into the brown paper bag that said 2014 TAXES in large friendly letters, and then just slid the folders with sorted stuff in them down one side of the bag. I left the recycling in my bedroom, where I had been using the bed for sorting because my desk is a horror show; and I brought the bag of actual tax information, sorted and not, back into my office, because I was still discovering random credit-card statements and receipts for prescription medication and technicians' invoices for fixing dishwashers, and so on. Then I spent about a week and a half avoiding more sorting, though the deadline is approaching pretty quickly. At some point in this interval, I took out several brown paper bags of papers for recycling, labeled RECYCLING in large friendly letters.

Do not lecture me about this system. I know it is stupid. However, it has got me through catching up on *mumble* years of late taxes. Let me tell you, a brown paper bag for the year in question is a huge improvement over my previous method, which I don't intend to discuss because nobody could refrain from lecturing me about that one.

This afternoon, the internet went down. Well, I thought, I guess I'll sort some more of that stuff for taxes, and maybe get all the utility bills entered properly, because that's very tedious and I won't do it if I can do something more interesting. I picked up the brown paper bag from the location where I had left the one that said 2014 TAXES in large friendly letters. It said 2015 TAXES in letters superficially just as large but noticeably less friendly.

There are really too many brown paper bags in my office. It is okay, in my opinion, and do not start on me because I will not listen to you, to have bags of both useful paper and recycling. However, having the lovely shimmery moon and stars mobile that Eileen gave us as a housewarming present, which we recently had to take off the library light fixture but hope to hang elsewhere, in a brown paper bag is confusing; and having extra copies of the reissued Secret Country trilogy in a brown paper bag is confusing, and having a bag of brown sugar, a lidless refrigerator dish and a recipe for scones in a brown paper bag is DEEPLY CONFUSING. It's also less than helpful to have bags saying 2009 NON-TAX. They raise hope only to squash it flat again.

I spent a short time whimpering and emptying out bags of recycling. Then I thought, okay, I really do not think that that is the mistake that I made. I always read the bag and go through it before I recycle it. Always. Because I know my system is stupid.

I looked through every brown paper bag in the upstairs. We also have cat toys in paper bags. And sometimes actual cats.

I searched around and discovered that the IRS, grudgingly, has a way to get you a replacement copy of your W2 or other tax form, but it takes a long time. They prefer you to remember everything you need to about your employment, or have actual pay stubs, which seem to be going out of fashion quite fast, and reconstruct an estimate of your income and file that instead. I really didn't want to do that. One can also apply to the employers in question; how long that takes will of course vary with employer. I made about $26 in royalties last year, and the other income was made by David, with at least three different employers.

I decided to sleep on it, since I did not actually believe I had taken all the tax information and recycled it. Then I would have to email the accountants and hope that they would not also recommend the reconstruction of the income stream, not to mention the household expenses. At least the rental income is consistent, and one can get copies of bank and credit-card statements from the respective providers, though they tend to cut off abruptly at the date you want and demand compensation for sending you anything. Still, it could be done, one way or another.

The internet came back up. I started making vegan jambalaya. (NO, really, stop it. Nobody is making you eat it.) I went into my office, and Saffron was sprawled on the desk cushion. I reached out to rub her belly, and my brain said to me, "File drawer." I looked in the empty file drawer. Yes, yes, yes, it's empty because everything is in brown paper bags. It was not empty. In it was my bag with the folders and the unsorted receipts and statements, with 2014 TAXES in large friendly letters.

I now recalled quite clearly that Saffron had kept pawing at the bag of tax papers until it fell onto the floor, whereupon Cassie licked some of the bank statements. I have no idea; they were not visibly stained, nor did anything in the bag smell of anything but paper and dust. After three iterations of this behavior, I put the bag in the file drawer. Then, while procrastinating, I forgot all about it.

But now there is vegan jambalaya simmering on the stove, and it seems possible that sorting the damn papers won't be so tedious. At least they are there to be sorted.

Pamela

Saffron has been feeling her oats lately. She has escaped down the front stairs to the cat-free zone several times, though she is very good at letting me pick her up and take her back upstairs, only turning her head upside down to look at me quizzically. She is a large and somewhat unwieldy cat, so she could make a lot more trouble if she liked.

Well, she does like, but struggling to make me put her down isn't one of her methods.

On the Eve of International Bad Cat Day, this iteration, I heard a clatter from the kitchen that did not belong there in the absence of humans. I went in to find Casssie and Saffron both sniffing at the sink drainer, which was on the floor. Very obsessive readers may recall that when I was making pies for Thanksgiving, Raphael and I found the sink drainer stranded in the middle of the kitchen floor. Cassie seldom jumps that high, so I assume that Saffron fished the drainer out and dropped it on the floor for reasons of her own.

This evening, as we often do on a Friday, Raphael and I ordered Chinese food. The restaurant had packed the dishes in the reverse of the usual order; the appetizers were on the bottom. We usually get shrimp in garlic sauce, the sauce of which is very viscous, clingy, and insinuating. It had already, from its position at the top of the stack of takeout dishes, leaked all over the inside of the bag and onto the other dishes and the packets of extra soy sauce and the fortune cookies in their wrappers. I ended up tearing the bag down one side to get at things without making quite such a mess. Then I rinsed some lids and Raphael wiped up some leaks, and we served ourselves. I then put the actual leftover food and rice into the refrigerator, but failed to realize that a torn bag with a lot of garlic sauce in it would be attractive to cats. When we came out of Raphael's office (where we retreat when we don't want cats marauding our food) with our empty plates, Raphael found the empty, torn wrapper of a fortune cookie on the floor of my bedroom, with the fortune lying nearby.

Having ascertained that none of the plastic seemed to have been eaten, Raphael picked up the fortune and burst out laughing. I took it and read, "Tomorrow you will find the item you have been searching for."

This struck us both as irresistibly funny. When we had stopped laughing, Raphael said, "I wonder which of them ate it."

"I would bet on Cassie," I said, "but I wouldn't bet much."

There was no question of who had taken the cookie out of the bag. That would be Saffron.

Pamela