Cat Soup

Stinky hanging out in the guesthouse during last October's flooding of the house during the massive storm. I love that coffee table. Mango wood shaped just like a surfboard.



Stinky fell off the roof a little while ago, right into the bubbling boiling hot tub. I'd been in the hot tub for my back when he started meowing. Spotted him on the roof, started talking to him and he rolled right off the roof. Never have I seen a critter move so fast getting out of the hot water.

I needed the laugh. I've been filled with crazy irrational anger all day long. You'd think by now I would recognize it as a coming severe asthma bout, but I rarely do when its happening. Just much later.

But it did hit, after I sat in the hot tub. The hot tub chemicals get me every single time now. So I'm stuck with the bad back now. My padded computer chair got all wobbly and I've been having to use my leather Costa Rican rocker. I'm only 5'2", Jim's well over six feet. My desk is tiny, my chair is low. If I have to use a substitute chair where my feet cannot touch the ground I end up with back pain.

One interesting thing, once I blew up someone finally got off his rump and whipped out his allen wrenches to fix my nice padded small chair. I was afraid I'd have to go out and get a small stool to sit low enough to help the back. Being short sucks sometimes. But at least I've never fallen off the stupid roof.

Men say they do not want to be nagged, but I often wonder if that was really the case why does it sometimes take an explosion after a month of asking them nicely to do something? I oh so rarely fight with my husband, but I do once in a great while get stupid sick to death waiting for him to do something I've discussed ten trillion times. Usually it coincides with the asthma.

Constantly having to remind someone to do something isn't any more fun for the woman than it is for the man being reminded. We hate it. We wish you would just take care of these things in a timely fashion. Nagging sucks for everyone. But now my chair is fixed, the poles for the tomatoes bought and cut, the ink changed in the printer, legal documents printed out, those shoes glued and sundry other things.

For us some of this is just fall out from those twenty years living in fundamentalist. I did EVERYTHING in those days, from plumbing repairs through painting, through yard work, through the zillion niggling things that much be done to a house. It's taken a great deal of effort to change that mindset for me and actually ask for help. It's hard. He's not used to lifting a finger around the house either. Learning process here...

The other problem is in the past ten years I've had to stop doing many things I used to routinely do because of the mast cell, like painting, or like anything that involves chemicals or stinky stuff. Using the saw because of the dust and sawdust making my lungs go nuts. The glue is instant asthma too.

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