Dead things. Nasty things. Weird things. Scared things.

I keep getting better and better at posting the Music Monday results in a timely fashion, don't I?

When I last wrote this past Monday, I had spent the evening at the vet with my sweet little Bailey.  I still don't know what's wrong because guess what?  Just guess!  Her urinalysis came back fine.  All of her blood work came back fine.  The vet called me on Tuesday night and told me her white blood count was elevated but the vet says that's probably from whatever infection is causing all of her tummy issues but the only way to know what is causing the infection is for them to test the stool sample I was to bring in.  But when I got home from work Tuesday, Bailey had stopped eating.  She would not eat a bite.  She was moving slow, acting weak, etc. and I'm not going to lie....I was scared out of my mind.  So instead of writing to y'all, I sat on my sofa and watched every little move she made and checked on her every 2.5 seconds, and begged her to eat.  She refused.  She also left me no stool samples.

Wednesday night, I worked late because it was Halloween which is, without a doubt, the absolute worst rush hour of the year in Atlanta because everyone leaves early or on time to get home to take their kids trick or treating, or to hand out candy.  I worked until 6:30 and breezed home with very little traffic.  As I was driving home I got two texts to call people, and literally as I was unlocking and opening my door, my neighbor texted me asking me where I was and to come over.  I told her I was just getting home, had to make two phone calls and would be right over.  Bailey still wasn't eating and I felt awful for doing it, but I left her and went to my neighbors' house.  The wife had taken their daughter to go trick or treating so the husband, one of his friends, and another neighbor combined all of our candy and handed it out from their house.

They decorate, they dress up, they play scary music, and they have fun.  And I showed up with a bag of candy and nothing else.  So the husband put a super scary mask on me, a cape with a hood, and he had on a scary gorilla mask and a black gown thing with a hood and he and I just looked scary.  The neighbor lady had on regular clothes and a witch hat and the husband's friend had on regular clothes and a cowboy hat.

And then a huge group of people came walking up to the house and man neighbor and I apparently scared the ever loving crap out of some kids.  Because 4 of them started screaming bloody murder.  One of them was too terrified to even come up and get any candy.  So I ripped off my hood and my mask to show them that even though I am naturally scary looking, I'm not as scary as that ugly green faced mask with the hot pink hair sticking straight up looks that I was wearing.  But they just kept screaming and crying.

When I got back home around 10:00, Bailey still would not eat anything.  Y'all, I was in tears I was so scared.  And I wasn't even wearing a scary mask.

Finally, when I got home on Thursday she had eaten a tiny bit of food.  I knew this because my cat is weird and every now and then she will pull about 10 pieces of her food out of the bowl, walk over to a step and leave them there.  She had done that a couple of days earlier, and when I came home Thursday they were eaten and little crumbs were there.  And then she had gone upstairs and crapped and bled all over my bed.  Awesome.  I did not even care though because she was finally eating and I was able to get the grossest stool sample in the history of cat stool samples.  Y'all.  It was awful.  And I almost got sick gathering it.

So I stampeded to the vet's office Friday morning and dropped it off for testing and I should hear something by tomorrow if there is anything wrong and otherwise, I will get a letter in the mail.  I find it hard to believe with the stuff coming out of my cat that there is nothing wrong.  But she has seemed totally fine last night and today (other than loose stools).

In the meantime, we worked our butts off and I finally managed to get my office and my bosses' offices all packed up before we left last night.  Before they left, the partners in my group took magic markers and wrote crap all over the walls.  Things like, "HONEY BADGERS RULE!"  Everything will be moved this weekend and I will have a new temporary space on another floor to work in when I go in Monday morning.  And then in 3 or 4 months, we get to move again.  Back to the original (but remodeled) floor we will go.  However, the worst of this whole thing is done because all of my files have been sent offsite so I will have only my desk stuff and whatever files have accumulated in 3 months to move next time as opposed to 15 years worth of files.

Things sound okay, right?  Bailey is eating again, my office is packed up on time, and I scared the crap out of some little kids.

But then I tried to leave work last night and my car battery was dead.

I was standing there in the parking deck staring at my car like it was possessed, when a guy came walking out to get in his car.

"Um, excuse me," I said.  "What does it mean when I try to crank my car and the alarm starts going off and every light in the car starts blinking on and off?"

I've never had that happen before with a dead battery.  But Justice (that was his name - and he's a legal recruiter and he started asking me if I wanted to change law firms while he was helping me) said that's not unheard of with dead batteries and then he jumped my car off for me.  I'm quite sure that's what he wanted to be doing on a Friday night.  Also, Justice was just as cute as he could be and super nice, and I think he was gay.  Now I want him to be my gay best friend and help me pick out better clothes because I'm a complete fashion disaster.

I drove to Pep Boys because that's about the only place open at 6:30 on a Friday night between my office and my house and they tested the battery and confirmed its deadness. 

"It's dead," the guy told me.

The battery is only a year old so he told me to take it somewhere that sells that brand of battery because it's still under warranty and he would jump the car back off so I could get home.  And that's where the night went awry.

He could not find their jump box.  He walked around.  He yelled at people.  He screamed at people.  He was pissed.  He couldn't find it.  Then someone finally found it.

What I didn't know was that then he was looking for jumper cables because I would have told him I have some in my car.  But he walked around for another 10 minutes and then went in the store and came back out with brand new ones.

He hooked the jump box up to my battery.

It wouldn't work.  My car would not start.

We tried.  And tried.  And tried.

Nothing.

He said the jump box probably didn't work so he would move his car around and jump me.  Well, jump my car, not jump me.

We tried.  And tried.  And tried.

Nothing.

At this point, we had spent almost 30 minutes looking for the jump box, looking for cables, trying to jump my car with the box, trying to jump my car with his car.  And then he shut my car door and it started right up.  Oh, let me tell you how happy he was that he had wasted 30 minutes when all we had to do was shut the front door.

This morning I called around until I found somewhere that would replace the battery for me and then texted my neighbors asking if one of them could come jump my car (and I made a note to myself to shut the front door).  It was a little after 10 and they were all gone from home already doing various things.  I waited a bit and then I heard my new next door neighbor outside smoking and I ran over and he was in his pj's but I introduced myself and asked him to come jump my car.  And he did.  And now I have a new battery.  And I found out I am right on the verge of needing new tires which I kind of suspected, but I don't have $600 extra right now because I just spent $300 at the vet this week, I have a trip coming up soon, and oh yeah, my house has been breaking for the past year.

But I did need groceries so I stopped for those on the way home from the car place.  And a girl in the grocery store almost drove me to the wine section to start drinking.  I went to the deli to get some ham for sandwiches because I cannot afford to eat steak every night (see above) and this girl was sampling some sort of deli meat.  Then she asked for a sample of a second type of meat.  And she stood there and picked itty bitty pieces off of it and tried them.  And chewed slowly.  And stared up at the ceiling like she was deep in thought.  Then she repeated.  About 9 times.  But then?  She liked it.  Yay!  Then she ordered 5 slices.  And the deli guy said, "Huh?  You only want 5 slices?"  She did only want 5 slices.  He explained (and it took a while for her to catch on) that they would be very small slices because it was the beginning of the big hunk of meat so it was the tiny end pieces.

So then she decided she needed to sample a third thing.

And that's when the guy who had walked up behind me shook his head, looked at me and said, "it's going to take this girl all day to pick her meat" and then he walked off in frustration.  I stuck around to see how things ended.  She finally happily left with her 5 slices of meat.

So I have a new car battery, a cat that's eating again, a most nasty cat stool sample at the vet, my office packed up, I managed to scare some kids, and an odd girl is happy with her 5 slices of meat and that's my week in a nutshell.  And in the middle of all of this nonsense, Hot Brazilian tried to call me 5 times this week from the Amazon and I missed every single call because I was dealing with the crap of my life.  And the crap coming out of my cat.  I haven't talked to him in over a month.  I am sad.

Also, it is now super duper official that I live in the 'hood.  I came home last night to find a grocery cart sitting on the sidewalk in front of my house.  The grocery store is a long walk so I'm not taking it back.

Let's move on to the Music Monday results.

Only two of you participated so here we go:

First place goes to Sadie for Ray Stevens and the Mississippi Squirrel Revival:

My dad loved Ray Stevens and we listened to his stuff a lot when I was growing up.

Second place is a tie.

Lisa Pie (this song is a little dirty so don't watch this if you're easily offended).  From SNL, "D^&k in a Box":

And me.  Greg Brown's "I Don't Want to Have a Nice Day":

Third place is also going to me this week:

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!