ad nauseum

once again, the tummy is acting up. say it with me now, i know you all know the words: "i got violently ill today."

*sigh*.

came home to writhe in pain and get sick all afternoon. yay. the good thing is, tomorrow morning 1st thing i have a follow-up with my specialist to see if anything came of the colonoscopy and all the other tests. cross your fingers, i really hope he found something, so i can get on the road to recovery.

monkey

so, i've posted on here several times about how much i love my two cats. their little personalities are such a riot. angus, the younger one, is this big, beefy "gentle giant" with a teeny "eep" voice, and a wide-eyed expression that makes him look unbearably dumb. monkey, on the other hand, is very intense... almost too smart for her own good, you can see on her face that her kitty brain is analyzing everything around her. and she uses it to her advantage. there's a story from when she was a kitten, that's come out a couple times in the last week... so i thought i'd post it here.

i adopted monkey in 1994, when she was about 11 weeks old. i knew early on that she was rambunctious -- it's one of the reasons i adopted her, and one of the reasons for her name. (when i first saw her at the SPCA, she was doing backflips in her cage. i kid you not.) we were instantly attached to one another... i was madly in love with her little fuzzy face and her outgoing personality. however, sometimes that personality got her in trouble, because she was a total diva and wanted non-stop attention. now, my apartment had only 2 doors: the front door, and the one for the bathroom. and a cat book i had said that if your kitty is bad, you should give them a "time-out" in another room with the door closed, so the bathroom was my only choice. so when monkey was still a kitten, and she was bad, i'd put her in the bathroom with a toy for a while.

she HATED that. the fact that she wasn't out where the action was drove her absolutely nuts. she'd cry at the top of her lungs until i let her out: "YOW YOW YOW YOW..." and then come tearing out of the bathroom as soon as i'd open the door. i tried not to give in, because i didn't want her to think that the yowling would work. so after a time, when she got wise to it, she figured out a new trick. first she'd yell for a while... then she'd attack the roll of toilet paper, and unroll it all over the floor. i'd open the door to find a striped blur shooting past me, and 1000 sheets of shredded Charmin to clean up.

i still refused to give in. it was now becoming a power struggle between us, and i was the mommy, dammit. she'd be bad, i'd put her in the bathroom... she'd yowl, then shred the toilet paper, and i wouldn't let her out until she was calmer. but then she thought up a new tactic. one day i heard the yowls, then the roll unfurling, then suddenly, BAM! BAM! BAM! over and over again. she had climbed up on the sink, and had opened the medicine cabinet... and was smacking the cabinet's wooden door open, so that it hit the bathroom door and made the BAM! sound. ugh.

i still wouldn't give in, no matter how much it all annoyed me. this was playing out over several months, and since she wasn't learning to be good, i wasn't going to coddle her. the struggle continued. so after several more weeks, she added something new to her repertoire. she'd yowl, shred, BAM!... then with the medicine cabinet still open, she'd reach up and scoop everything off the cabinet shelves. Q-tips, toothpaste, heavy jars of cream, would all rain down into the sink with a loud crash. and when i opened the door, she'd shoot past me and leave me to clean up the mess.

so, one day monkey was being especially abrasive. she kept jumping up on the table while i ate, and after saying "no" a million times, i put her in the bathroom with one of her toys and closed the door. the mayhem started -- she yowled, she shredded, she slammed the door, she scooped all my toiletries into the sink.

and then... silence.

when you have a rambunctious cat, or a rambunctious kid, you know that silence means trouble. i opened the bathroom door and she tore past me yelling her standard "MEEEHHHHHH"... i looked around, and it looked like the standard carnage. i cleaned up the toilet paper, put away the Q-tips, and everything was back in order. a few hours later, i showered before i went out for the evening... and when i reached for my towel, it wasn't on the rack. huh. i figured i'd put it in the laundry without replacing it. i grabbed a fresh towel and started drying myself off... and then i noticed a flash of color out of the corner of my eye.

my towel was in the litterbox, waaaay in the back. somehow this little kitten had taken my towel off the rack, and stuffed it (it was 10 times bigger than her) through the opening of her covered litterbox, and back into the very recesses of it.

i had to laugh. it was gross as hell, but absolutely brilliant. i threw the towel in the trash, but the memory is burned into my brain... and i learned not to mess with her sharp little kitty mind.

customer service

so, i am a big one for good customer service. not that i expect to be fawned over when i walk into a store... but being in sales myself, i want done unto me what i would do unto others. i want someone who'll let me do my thing in their store, not smother me, know enough about their products to answer my questions, and just be nice. i don't think that's asking much.

i went into a specialty store at lunch today to get a gift for someone. i had seen it a while back in this shop, and thought it would be perfect... so since i was back in the area, i went to make my purchase. i was pretty green from my stomach problems, so i wanted to keep it simple... no browsing, just ask for the thing, get it, pay, and go. except, it was completely sold out. according to the sales guy, right from the moment the product name escaped my lips, he "tsk-tsk"ed me and was like, "oh honey, that sold out almost immediately. you should have bought it while you had the chance." i started to ask if they were getting any more in... he cut me off and told me that only a few stores had received them as a special shipment, so they were all gone, everywhere. i asked if maybe he could call one of the other stores, to check... he grinned the kind of grin that told me i was a pain in the ass, and called a store in god-knows-where, and left a voicemail asking for the item number so he could look into it for me. he took my name and number, and said he'd look into it and call me. i joked that if he could help me locate it, i'd give him a big kiss... the way he rolled his eyes and went "ooOOOooo..." told me that wasn't a very appealing prospect to him.

anyway, cut to 7:00 this evening. i was still thinking about this item... as anyone who read about my michelle k shoe mission knows, when a shopping task is put in front of me, i MUST succeed. and i figured it'd be a cold day in hell before the boston store rang me. so i went online and did a store search for the company, and it turns out the one i'd been in today was the only one in all of massachusetts. so i looked up ones in philly, and lo and behold, there was one in the king of prussia mall (best mall EVER... holla!). i called them and explained my situation, that i was in boston and was looking for this item but it was sold out and discontinued. the girl on the phone was a peach... she said their store had never received that item, but she'd heard about it, and would order it for me. i told her that the boston guy said it was completely gone. she got on her computer and went, "nope, my terminal says there are still 62 of them left in the company. i can place the order next week, and fedex it to you. how many would you like?"

i bought 7 of them from her.

they're not expensive at all, a few bucks apiece... i swear, if i had the money, i would have bought all 62 of them just so she'd get the commission. and in the meantime, i will never buy anything from the boston store, at least while that guy is working. grrrrr.