A Week of "Getting to Know Me"

In class today I spent my entire afternoon painting a watercolor mandala.  All I could think about was all of the things I could be getting done at home.  I am a creature of logic and reason.  I appreciate art - in my spare time.  I don't consider class time to be "spare time."

I should have just painted a woman in a house with about a thousand things to do, but she can't - because someone has chained her to a mandala. 

Two Things.

Item 1:
"It's a scheduled disbursement day!" says the woman on the other end of the line when I call to inquire why my financial aid has not been deposited.  Well shit.  I guess you probably realize that people count on the schedule that you provided then don't you?

You know what  lady?  You have no right to sound irritated at me for very simply, very nicely inquiring about why I don't have my money when you said I would have it.  I have jumped through all your hoops, crossed my T's and dotted my I's.  Today was your turn, okay?  And by the way, it IS MY money.  You're not doing me a favor or giving me some kind of gift so hand it over already.

Item 2:
A summer cold in my last week off?  Really?  How cruel.

Not *that* Maru Kitteh!

I scoured the merchants of this dot on the plains, vainly hoping to find a LitterMaid litterbox that would accommodate my crew of kittehs.  I have four (they all made me take them home, I swear) and two of them are... um... jolly-sized?  Nobody in town has the jumbo model of mechanized cat crap removal I desire, so it's off to Amazon.

This is my Maru.  He was a big guy when this was taken, and now there's even more of him to love.  My daughter named him before we stumbled onto the famous Maru of YouTube fame.  Except for the ears and a couple of extra pounds, they look alot alike!

I found my Maru as a very tiny kitten, crouched behind the rear wheels of a vehicle that was getting ready to back out of a driveway on a very dark, -5F night.  I dove out of my car and scooped him up.  The poor little guy was completely blind in both eyes from a rather severe bilateral infection of the conjunctivae and he had a deep gash on his left side.  He was freezing, and starving.  He was instantly mine.  Maru gets whatever he wants.

The other substantial cat citizen of the house is Buddy.  Should have called him Buddha I guess, but his previous benefactor called him Buddy, and it seemed to fit.  We rescued Buddy from a houseful of five small kids who seemed to have mistaken him for a large kinetic/windup monkey.  He was safe no hour of the day from becoming an action hero, or a tiny pack animal, or whatever the game of the hour might be.

Buddy was SO grateful when he came to live with us. 

In the featherweight category we have Jack (the stripped one)  and Chessie.  Jack was a shelter cat.  He's the only cat we have ever purposefully sought out.   Although he was pretty young when we got him, he had already been neutered and he was very familiar with what a can of cat food was for, so we figure wherever he was - he was loved.  He had been hit by a car though, and he had a broken rib, and a broken tooth, and his mandible had been snapped in two.  That is why you need to keep your pets inside.

Chessie wandered into our lives as a lost kitten.  Dehydrated and subsisting only on bugs, she became my personal body guard the day I found her and gave her some cool water and a dish of 5-star cat cuisine.  That was 12 years ago, and she's been no more than a breath away from me when I'm at home every since.  I think she would love it if I just carried her in a papoose all day.

Four is a generous number of cats, by any measure.  With school coming up rapidly on the horizon, I'd like for my house not to smell like cat ass.  We'll see how the LitterMaid does when it gets here. 

Too much empty space.

There are still things I'd like to get done before the semester starts.  I would like to finish painting the bathroom and do a thorough clean of the upstairs.  I would like to get our badly neglected patio back into shape.  A half a dozen smaller projects like ordering some artwork for the office, cleaning the kitchen cupboards and other such undone tasks clutter my to do list as well.

I won't have time to get all of these done, more than likely, and still it feels like too much space between here and the beginning of classes.

It's not that I don't have things to do - I'm just bored of them.  I'm a terrible domestic, and I'm perfectly content with that.

$9,278.00 in scholarships and grants. YAY!

Of course I have access to none of it yet.  All I can do is sit here and sniff it through my computer monitor.

 ← Did I mention my books are expected to run about 8¹/₂ of these?

Other things I will need:

Shoes
Another set of scrubs.  (Those run $110 a set)
A nursing bag.  I'm pretty sure my POS $15 bookbag is not going to cut it anymore.
About 75 lbs. of coffee.

A wife would be nice.

Someone to do the shopping, pay the bills and make dinner.  Sounds lovely.  Too bad I already went and married a man.