There’s an old nautical saying (and why would I know anything about anything nautical when the nearest ocean is 500+ miles away, and I’ve never actually seen the ocean for myself, I will never know) that goes, “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight / Red sky in the morning, sailors, take warning.” 

Usually sunrises (which are seldom seen in Central Ohio during the winter, because the dismal grey clouds usually obscure them) in Ohio are not this blazingly red, but this morning’s was so out of the ordinary I had to stop and click a pic.  Whether it bodes good or ill, I don’t know, but I really don’t buy into funky superstitions.  Murphy’s Law does not need a reason for anything to go wrong.  If it can go wrong, it generally will, even if the sky is green with brown splotches.

Fanny- sort of the “fat kid” at school.

Cats have an interesting defense mechanism when they are bullied or threatened by a larger or more powerful entity.  They lash back at a perfectly innocent and non-involved party rather than to retaliate on the aggressor, hence the phrase, misdirected feline aggression.  Fanny displays the best example of this of all of my cats.  The irony is that she’s by far the largest of the cats, but the most pathetic at defending herself.  Jezebel (all of 5#) takes Fanny (15# the last time I tried to weigh her) down in headlocks frequently, at what point Fanny retaliates (?) by lashing back at one or more of the dogs, who simply give her a dismissive look and carry on whatever business they had been engaged in.  The dogs really don’t care how pissed Fanny is or whether or not she hisses at them and swats at them.  Fanny is declawed, and my smallest dog, and most frequent recipient of Fanny’s angst, (Lucy) is 40#.  Lucy could care less. Clara and Lilo usually just step over her and keep right on going.  Apparently the dogs are a good target for Fanny’s rage, because she knows they aren’t going to bother with her.

I never made fun of the fat kids in school, (there were only three of them, because when and where I grew up, nobody could afford to be fat) simply because my fighting skills were just as bad if not worse than theirs, and if worse came to worse, the fat kids could always sit on me.  I was tiny and scrawny, which usually motivated me to keep my mouth shut around anyone with any incentive to kick my ass. My oldest sister would kick my ass just for sucking up valuable oxygen, so I never needed an invitation to an ass-kicking.  Breathing was more than enough just cause for her to give me a good pounding.  She did not like me breathing.  Not one bit.

I wish I could score Jerry something stronger than Nyquil.

I don’t understand why, but for him the most minor of head colds or sniffles is a Major Ordeal.  The world is coming to an end if he has the snots for a day or two.  Perhaps I don’t have much sympathy because I am pretty much always either drowning in snot or very close to it, but the incessant and constant moaning inspired me to come home prepared Friday night: two bottles of the really nasty green Nyquil he likes, an extra bottle of snot pills, and some of those disposable ear plugs so that after I medicated him I could get some bloody sleep without hearing him moan and snot and bitch.

Just as a contrast I remember a time when I had an extremely wicked sinus infection as well as a rip-roaring case of bronchitis.  I was a green snot fountain that was reminiscent of the that slime game show that was popular on Nickelodeon in the late 80’s- Super Sloppy Double Dare, if I remember correctly.  Only I was emanating more green slime than even that show could- out the nose and, big thick green loogies out the mouth too.

I was working for a particularly psycho cokehead boss at that time, and didn’t dare miss work for something so trivial as showering fountains of snot both uncontrollably and copiously.  So I drove the 40 miles to work, only to let fly the world’s most horrendous goopy sneeze that completely coated the entire inside of my ’94 Toyota truck’s windshield.

I knew it was going to be a really shitty day when I was trying to scrape off the snot from the inside of my windshield with an ice scraper so most of it wouldn’t dry on there.  As I am trying to scrape and wipe the snot off before it dried, my boss (thankfully not high that morning for a change) saw what I was doing and was horrified.  He sent me home and told me not to come back without a script and a doctor’s note.

When I did go to my doctor that afternoon (lucky me) he gave me nine kinds of hell for not coming in sooner- and four or five different scripts for various sprays, pills and rinses.  It took a long time to go away, but I only missed one day of work, and that’s because I was sent home.

Women can endure bodily discomfort.  Jerry would beg for Vicodin for a butt zit.