For My Girls

Dear Kim and Mary Lu,

Here you go.  An updated blog.  This will give you the significant household happenings through January 2012.  It’s too much to expect me to catch up in a single post, but here’s January:

We went grocery shopping on January 3.  That doesn’t sound very eventful, does it?  Certainly not blog-worthy.  But . . . guess what happens when you’re in Costco and you see a new couch at an unbelievable price?  That’s right!  You get A NEW COUCH.  After an entire year of no furniture in the living room, we now have a couch.  No more making the home teachers sit at the kitchen table (which usually has dinner on it because invariably the home teachers make the appointment with Dad and I only find out about it when the doorbell rings just as I’m pulling dinner from the oven).

It was a bit of a hassle getting the couch home.  I hired the moving service they suggested, but the Costco managers had changed how they wanted to handle the pickup of large items.  One manager told me that they would load it on one of those big long orange carts and wheel it out to the front, and the delivery truck would be in front.  But then when I went to do that, another manager said you have to put the couch on the cart yourself, wheel it through the checkout line to pay for it, and then take it out the front.  The third manager told me the pick up was in the back, and I needed to drive around to the loading dock and have the delivery truck meet me back there.  I did a lot of running back and forth trying to figure out it, but I finally managed to get the couch and delivery truck in the same location at the same time.  And just so you know, you just tell the cashier the item number – you don’t really have to wheel an entire couch through the checkout line.

The delivery guys had a little trouble getting it through the front door, and in the process of forcing it, they broke the door.  One of the boxes got caught on the bottom left corner of the door, and it partially peeled the metal sheeting off.  I was really glad Dad wasn’t here for that one.  Fortunately, one of the delivery guys used to work for a door company.  He got some tools out of his truck and had it fixed 15 minutes later.  Unless I pointed it out to you, you wouldn’t know anything had ever happened.  And Dad’s none the wiser, so we’ll just let him stay that way.

The new-couch smell permeated the house for a week, so I’m sure we were breathing in all sorts of toxic fumes.  It was worth it.  Love, love, love!  (Jeff was stunned:  Whoa!  Is this BRAND new?  Like, from a store?”    Yes, sir.  Brand new.  From a store! )

You might think that ends the couch saga.  But no, the couch does indeed have a SAGA.  Here’s the next step in the story.

So, we’d had the couch all of three days.  It is now Sunday morning, and Dad’s up early, leaving for bishopric meeting at 6:30.  I followed him down the stairs to lock the door behind him.  Then I opened the blinds next to the door, because I just happened to be standing there anyway, and then I decided to open the living room blinds, too, since that would be quite efficient, you know.  When I walked over to the living room windows, I noticed a puddle of liquid on top of the couch.  I wondered if the window was leaking and starting feeling all around the window sill for any moisture.  Nothing.  The ceiling didn’t look compromised either, so I examined the puddle again.

It wasn’t water.  You’re going to think I’m kidding, but I assure you I am not.  It was cat pee.  Cat pee!!!!  I could not believe it.  (Mary Lu, it was cat pee that destroyed my original couch.)  I was LIVID.  I don’t ever remember being so mad in my entire life.
 
I grabbed Lady and tossed her out the back door.  She turned right around and ran back in the house before I could get the door closed.  I chased her up to Brett’s room, grabbed her again, and this time, I tossed her a good five feet so I could shut the door in time.  She was definitely gato non-grata!  Lady has been an outdoor cat ever since.  And this was in January.

After I got the pee cleaned up and after I realized it had not soaked into the fabric and after I stormed over to the bishop’s office to inform Dad of what his cat had done AGAIN, . . . I calmed down . . . a little.  Just enough to feel a little bit guilty.  Not guilty enough to risk another couch demise but guilty enough to feel a twinge every time Jeff says, “Mom, she’s meowing REALLY LOUD.  She wants to come in, Mom.”  I'm getting over that guilt, though.  I'm coming to terms with the idea that cats all over the world live outdoors, so Lady will be fine.  She'll continue to be an outdoor cat.  She will also be our last cat.

So, there you have it.  The blog has now been updated with the most significant happenings of January 2012.

Love, Mom