the aforementioned kitty drinking fountain was purchased and assembled this evening, to zeke’s great consternation – a water dish that also clicks and gurgles and makes strange sounds. he can’t decide whether to drink or dip his paws in. it makes me think of a loud, grade-school-classroom aquarium, with the pump humming and growling away beneath the faint sound of trickling water. i won’t be able to sleep at night without unplugging the thing.

tuesdays have become our new favorite day: after 3 years of neck-injury-hiatus, i’ve started taking aikido classes again. by happy accident, my apartment is 3 blocks down the street from one of the only aikido schools in chicago. tuesdays i actually leave work at a normal hour, go to aikido, pick up some sort of yummy take-out on the way home and the second half of the evening is devoted to watching 24. god, i’m addicted to that show. i didn’t watch the first two seasons, but these days i specially engineer my schedule around having tuesday nights free from 8-9. i do the unthinkable (for me) and ignore phone calls, i shush the cat, make dinner wait until commecial breaks. it’s probably for the best that andy is away at rehearsal on tuesdays.

man, kidchamp comes back from the dead, and meatmeat promptly kicks the bucket. i’d like to blame my long silence on server problems, but it’s really just that my life’s kinda sucked lately and whining about it here didn’t feel like it would be terribly productive. and those 75-hour work weeks are murder on one’s internet hobbies. so to summarize chief gripes:

1) work is hard, sometimes good, sometimes not so good, just opened a hellish show that nearly gave me a nervous breakdown, but happily, is garnering us good reviews and in 3 more weeks, will be a bad memory, a bump in the career path.

2) the damn cat’s been sick again, and the vet bills are staggeringly expensive, as is the new perscription cat food he must eat and the special kitty-drinking fountain which will, in theory, encourage him to drink more water.

3) the financial result of my having cobbled together a sorry living wage via 6 differnet part time jobs during 2003 is that none of my employers took out enough taxes, so uncle sam also wants a piece of me. our strategy is to file andy’s taxes now, wait till april 15 to file mine, and use andy’s return to pay my tax bill. robbing peter to pay paul?

i simply need more time. i’m not afraid of hard work. i’m afraid of what happens when hard work isn’t enough.

it’s about my armpits.

pet peeves about chicago:

1) the lack of one giant corporate bank that monopolizes the city’s money and can therefore have an ATM on every corner. instead we’re plagued with like 100 different home-grown banks (one of which i grudgingly patronize), each of which can only afford two ATMs.

2) when the weather sucks and the trains get all funked up, the CTA doesn’t do anything about it – as in, make announcements to the 300 rioting people in a subway station wondering why a train hasn’t show up for 30 minutes during rush hour. or run alternate bus service. duh.

so, when these pet peeves conspired to inconvenience me on the same day, i found myself unable to get a train home from work and without enough cash to catch a cab. so i went into walgreens (if only we had ATMs like we have walgreens…) in search of something to buy with my ATM card in order to get cash back so i could get a cab. makes sense – i pay the same $2.00 convenience fee, only i pay it to walgreens for a magazine or a drink instead of to the ATM.

so it’s 6pm, i’ve been trying to get home for forty five minutes and it’s snowing outside and the streets are covered with two inches of slush thanks to the diligent salting trucks, and i’ve been slipping and sliding all over the place because of my stupid useless frail girly clothes (wool slacks, 2″ heeled boots) that i have to wear to my stupid mindless day job. so i’m trying to invest my ATM fee in my usual brand of unscented deodorant, and pet peeve #3 rears it’s ugly head: why every beauty product on the market has to stink to high heaven like some nasty perfume. seriously, why would i want my armpits to smell like, and i’m not making this up, Icy Rush, Sudden Blast, Cold Fusion? what is that, Cold Fusion, a gatorade flavor? and isn’t Sudden Blast just what we’re trying to prevent our armpits from emitting?

and how does one face the the coldest day chicago has seen in seven years?

start by staying in bed with the cat an extra half hour, listening to NPR’s every five minutes extreme cold weather (-29 windchill) warning. they say the key to avoiding frostbite is layers: we begin with long underwear, tops and bottoms, and over that the fleese-lined pants canvas pants, a long-sleeved shirt and cotton sweater. then the regular socks topped by the polar fleese socks. hiking boots, polar fleese jacket and mittens. scarf wrapped meticulously so that it overlaps the collar and the double-thick polar fleese hat, covering the nose and mouth loosely, so that the only exposed skin is the eyes and bridge of the nose. knee-length down parka goes over the top of everything, and the hood drawn tight to prevent any cold-air gaps between scarf and collar. i look like a thumb with legs walking down the street.

i swear this will be the last entry about the weather. well, no, actually, i can’t promise that.

if it’s going to be cold, i prefer snow. as lauren has pointed out, it only takes 10 minutes for new york snow to get dirty and ugly. chicago snow seems to retain the fluffy white picturesqueness a bit longer thanks to the extreme cold – nothing that falls out of the sky is going to melt until at least april, possibly may, and the snow does great things for chicago architecture – highlighting all of the little decorative railings, ledges, gargoyles – the stuff that no one bothers to put on buildings these days. i’m not such a fan, however, of the part where the sidewalk snow turns into an inch-thick dark brown sludge that is, in my father’s words, “slicker than snot.” it’s like walking on a oil spill. like rollerblading, i fully expect to acquire specially developed glute muscles from the effort required to remain vertical on this stuff.

in the poker game of misfortune, we acknowledge lmo‘s apartment fire with our own living room ceiling, which drips, peels and bulges with un-diagnoseable pipe leakage, causing our manager to threaten Brazil-like reconstruction and the seizure of our living room, and we raise her one late-night trip to the emergency veterinary hospital.

at 2 am on a sunday night, the hospital waiting room was filled with pet owners whose pets had eaten mouse poison, paperclips, polarfleese. there were no kitty flues or kennel coughs, just grotesque emergencies of the intestinal track. one doctor poked his head out of the operatory to explain to the parents of a constipated cat that, “we’re doing the plumbing now,” indicating the angry snarls from within. a nervous poodle paced the waiting room while her seven puppies had traces of rat poison pumped from their stomachs. much to my relief, zeke hadn’t tied his intestines into knots around a twist tie, but instead had spontaneously developed a urinary tract infection. $226 + cab fare (bless you, cab driver who didn’t refuse to pick us up with our cat in tow) later, all was set right with a dose of antibiotics. if you’ve never seen a cat growl and hiss at his own genitals, well, it’s one of the stranger sights i’ve seen.

ah, so this is what they mean by chicago winter. it was a lovely -8 degrees out this afternoon. the extreme cold engenders this feeling of camaraderie among chicago residents, a sort of we’re-all-in-it-together look of sympathy that strangers give one another on train platforms. they wear those big, furry russian hats with the ear flaps without the slightest trace of irony, ski mitts and fur-trimmed hoods. in our drafty 19th century apartment building, the cold creeps in under the windows, rolls off the wide windowsills and creeps along the wooden floors like an invisible fog. the radiators puff, clank and hiss, a comforting sound, and the steam on the inside of the windows has frozen to a thick, sparkly frost. the static electricity in the air has reached new levels; zeke sits on my lap and wags his tail against my polar-fleece pants and it makes all the fur stick straight out. i pet him and the electric shock runs out the bottom of his paws and zaps me through my clothes. even neighborhood errands like going to the bank and getting groceries become herculean tasks. to make matters worse, weather.com is taunting me with photos of arizona. i’ll bet if i were in florida i’d get pictures of vail, colorado…to put things in perspective, tho, i hated the 108 degree humid summer days chicago offered up last august even more than this. i didn’t come to chicago expecting to like the weather – and i don’t. but i like almost everything else, so it’s not too bad a trade.

over at the last embassy, enjelani is closing up shop. metameat is on hiatus and ihateyoutoonces has been silent for weeks. is the blog dead? have we outgrown it? worked out our early-twenty-something growing pains in public, and are now busy with the details of the lives we’ve created?

ever since i was a kid, i’ve had this narrator stuck in my head, this extra voice that put a quick spin on everything i was thinking, seeing, doing – the blog was just the first way i found of working that narrator out of my head and into a format where i don’t just look like i’m mumbling to myself. so slithy tove isn’t folding yet, anyway – i’ve just had a lot on my mind and it’s been hard to focus my thoughts into anything coherent for a while.

christmas was: recovering from the flu (the kind that makes you lie on the couch and moan softly for about five days and wonder why you didn’t get a flu shot like your mother told you to), then watching it snow and snow and snow in a cabin in the idaho mountains. snow shoeing, downhill skiing, cross-country skiing, bickering with my brothers in the usual fashion. below is a picture of Henri, our little christmas miracle, whom we rescued from the animal shelter on Christmas Eve. at 12 weeks old, he’s as fearless and plucky as can be, and weights about half a pound – all fur, claws and a purr. it’s hard to keep track of what day it is, tho, on vacation up there, and life didn’t seem to come back into focus until i got back to chicago earlier this week. new years was simple but pleasant – a couple of friends over for fondue for dinner, then a swank party full of Improv Olympic actors – the dress-up-and-drink-champagne sort of party that makes the new year seem glamorous, but i’m terrible at parties where i know no one. me and andy:

me: hey, look, there’s that guy we saw do that skit about D&D a few weeks ago

andy: oh yeah, he was really good

me: yeah, we thought he had a suspiciously accurate knowledge of D&D, remember?

andy: hehe. i’m going to go introduce myself.

me: uh, i dunno. he’s chatting up that pretty blonde. should we really butt in and accuse him of being a D&D geek?

andy: yeah, that is kinda a cock-block, isn’t it?

eventually we got around to the other side of the room and found a way to introduce ourselves. the actor in question did confess a childhood penchant for gaming, which in turn forced us to admit our own nerdly histories. the beautiful blonde turned out to be his wife, who tried valiantly to make polite small talk with me, which i am very bad at. i retreated to a corner and pet the dog wearing a ballerina outfit. she looked out of place, too.

new years resolutions:

stop working through my lunch hour. it doesn’t really save me money, it just makes me tired, cranky, and more likely to buy junk food.

stop biting my cheeks, tongue, lips. find a new nervous habit if necessary, but kick this one. working at a dentist’s office can really reform a girl.

extend my ban on animal-tested beauty products to the animals i eat, as well. this wishy-washy vegetarianism just makes me feel guilty and crave bacon. better to stick to meat that wasn’t tortured or stuffed full of hormones and antibiotics. plus, being vegetarian when i’m eating out means that i don’t have to be all paranoid about whether restaurants handle meat products safely.

eat more super cancer-fighting fruits and veggies. that whole five-a-day thing is a lot harder than it sounds. veggie go limp in my fridge so easily, and chicago in winter isn’t exactly chock full of farmer’s markets selling fresh produce.

all work and no play makes me a dull girl.

i always did hate the way that saying lacked both meter and rhyme. which reminds me of the harry & david brand advent calendar my mom gave us. behind each door is a piece of very fine chocolate, and a little poem about approaching christmas:

It’s the first week in December

A time to remember for boys + girls.

Twenty-four days to go

Will we have enough snow?

Singing songs of Christmas cheer

Hoping all of Santa’s friends will soon be here.

today is the 12th of december and so far, only ONE of the poems has actually had any sort of meter. apparently harry & david are better at food than they are at composing rhyming poetry.

we are busy trying to build a $4000 set for $1200, and keep a day job, and strike another show, and find a summer job, and prepping to stage manage a new show and seeing some free plays and entertaining andy’s parents and trying not to spend money we don’t have. also it is very brr outside. 10 degrees brr.

have come to the unpleasant realization that i need to start looking for a summer job. seasonal employment is a little manic depressive – just as soon as new-job-jitters are abating, the will-i-be-unemployed-jitters begin to loom. the thought of spending the whole summer just working full time at my day job alternately terrifies me and relieves me – it’d be SO EASY just to ignore that ugly task – compiling lists of companies i want to work for, sending out cover letters, networking, schmoozing, interviewing, then packing up, moving somewhere, learning the ropes at a whole different job just in time to start worrying about where the next one will come from. but on the other hand, at my day job i process insurance claim forms in a dental office that has no windows. i don’t love teeth, nor do i love insurance companies (altho a side effect of looking at diseased mouths on a daily basis is that i now spend considerably more time worrying about the oral health of my loved ones, and my own flossing habits have been thoroughly reformed). and i really don’t love getting up for work at 6am. there’s a reason i keep chasing the elusive dream. it doesn’t expect me to show up before 10.