Brain Freeze

My, doesn’t time fly when you’re filling it with endless trips to the North Pole to break ice on frozen water buckets and take food to cold, hungry animals that have no way of getting their own, because some bugger has covered the land in a white blanket of freeze.

Yes, this is today’s pathetic excuse for having not written another post sooner. I’m full of them. Excuses I mean. Not posts. I’m actually woefully short of inspiration for posts these days, For some reason, my tried and tested method of lazing in bed and waking up slowly so that I can access that weird and wonderful creative world of the underbrain is failing me. Sadly, I just keep bloody falling asleep again. What a dastardly waste of precious extra time in bed!

So, I thought I’d try another tack. I thought I’d try the “just write and see what comes out” approach. Hmmmm. Not looking too promising so far.

Apart from the cold, cold and then, just for a change, a bit more cold, there has been remarkably little of note happening lately. Let me see…. There must be something I can write about.

Well, Yoda has most definitively NOT given birth to a bevy of squealing piglets, so I’m sorta guessing that means she ain’t up the duff after all. Unless pigs are like llamas, and can delay delivery until the weather improves (much like La Poste, actually).

And Mother Cat has undergone a personality change in the last couple of days and we are thinking of renaming her Psycho-Cat. She spends much of her time hiding behind a door, ripping the scanner box to noisy shreds, or rampaging around the furniture like a hyperactive kitten high on happy dust, with bristling fur and pupils the size of full moons. She has recently decided to put an emphatic, biff-enforced stop to the suckling of her five four-month-old kittens, at least two of which are now as big as her.

Yes, twelve weeks after being spayed, she is still producing milk, thus knocking a big in-yer-face nail into the coffin of that myth about not getting nursing mother cats spayed before their kittens are weaned, because the operation will dry up the milk. Ha! And then Ha! again. If we had known this way back in the distant memory of that time called June, shortly after she’d given birth to her first hapless litter, we could have saved ourselves and our soft furnishings all the trauma of yet another kitten-load of trouble.

So, the word to the wise…..Don’t believe everything you read on t’internet or in books purporting to contain the gospel according to the Best Cat Breeder in the World. I believe I may have indulged in this rant before on here somewhere, but, hell, it’s nearly Christmas, so I thought I’d treat myself to a second helping.

Ah…. ‘Nearly Christmas’. Words capable of inspiring terror in many a tradition-burdened heart – particularly those procrastinating, disorganised souls who always leave everything to the last minute, and find themselves traipsing round the rapidly emptying shops on Christmas Eve, desperately searching through the broken-boxed vestiges of the Season’s stock, hoping to find a little inspiration and a (highly unlikely) perfect gift for their Loved One.

I do of course speak from experience. In early December days gone by, I was always unseasonally irritated by colleagues who would initiate conversations about whether I had yet done all my Christmas Shopping, just so that they could smugly proclaim that they had completed theirs “weeks ago”. Who, in any normal existence, has the time to even think about Christmas presents that far in advance of the Dreaded Deadline?
Actually, to be fair, I would think about them, but always conclude that there was loads of time left before I actually needed to do anything about getting them. Until, suddenly, there wasn’t.

And far from being a joyful experience, filled with goodwill and the anticipation of the pleasure of giving, the Shopping of Christmas Past was for me, almost invariably, an ordeal of indecision and will-they-really-like-it worry, endured within an unchristmassy fog of wishing that I could run away to an uninhabited island and not come back till it was all over.

Well, having pretty much achieved that wish (okay, so this is not actually an island, but it sure as hell feels like it sometimes) I find myself somewhat surprisingly in the uncertain position of not knowing what I think – nay feel about Christmas. And before I launch into an on-line voyage of discovery to the nether regions of my psyche, in search of the elusive key to that Big Door in the House of Memory labelled “Christmas” , I will exercise a modicum of self-control, and save my further Seasonal Ramblings for a long overdue addition to Talk of Many Things.

And since Christmas is still more than a day away, I obviously have loads of time left before I actually need to do anything more than just think about it.