Top 16 Signs Your Cat has a Personality Disorder

16. Couldn’t muster up sufficient disdain if all nine lives depended on it!

15. You’ve repeatedly found him in the closed garage, hunched over the wheel of your running Buick.

14. Sits for hours in fascination while listening to Bob Dole.

13. Teeth and claw marks all over your now-empty bottles of Prozac.

12. No longer licks paws clean, but washes them at the sink again and again and again…

11. Continually scratches on the door to get in… the OVEN door.

10. Doesn’t get Garfield, but laughs like hell at Marmaduke.

9. Rides in your car with its head out the window.

8. She’s a dues-paid, card-carrying member of the Reform Party.

7. You realize one day that the urine stains on the carpet actually form the letters N-E-E-D T-H-E-R-A-P-Y.

6. Has built a shrine to Andrew Lloyd Webber entirely out of empty 9 Lives cans.

5. Spends all day in litterbox separating the green chlorophyll granules from the plain white ones.

4. After years of NPR, Tabby is suddenly a Ditto-Puss.

3. Sullen and overweight, your sunglass-wearing cat shoots the TV with a .45 Magnum when it sees cartoon depictions of stupid or lazy felines.

2. Your stereo is missing, and in the corner you find a pawn ticket and 2 kilos of catnip.

and the Number 1 Sign Your Cat has a Personality Disorder…

1. Makes an attempt on First Cat Sock’s life in a pathetic attempt to impress Jodie Foster

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Madrigals and Tires

On Friday I took off early from work to make the trek over to Washington to accompany my sister, Candace, for her audition for the high school madrigals. (It still simply blows my mind that my baby sister is going to be in high school this fall.)

I arrived in Washington without mishap, despite my check engine light playing with me over the last few weeks. Ran through the song a few times to get my bearings – she was singing My Blanket and Me from You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown, and she even had her baby blanket with her!

She did great though! I had to coach her a bit out of her shell, but damn it there is some Meggan in her! She even caught herself off guard at the last bit of the song – I had been pushing, yelling at her to let it out, and then.. she did, and … it was incredible.

So we finished up around 5:15p.m. and I headed back over the 25ish miles to Chillicothe. Unfortunately, about 7 miles from Chilli I heard a loud POP and then thunkthunkthunk. Yes, my front passanger-side tire blew. Literally…blew. Like 2 inch in diameter hole in the tread. There’s only 30k miles on that tire too!! Of course, the lovely T-Mobile doesn’t get service in that particular area of Route 29, so after a bit of walking I managed to contact my dad and secure his rescue services then settled in for an hourish long wait for him to get out to me and put my spare on.

So the moral of this story is – Thank the Lord for dad’s!

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It Feels Surreal – A Story of a Newspaper Mishap

No doubt, those of you who read my blog know that I play classical piano – that I take piano lessons from Dr. Kaizer at Bradley University and that I teach piano. With spring comes my quarterly advertisement in the local paper to secure a few more students to offset the attrition that is certain to occur with young students. Up until this point, my dealings with our local paper, The Chillicothe Independent, have been agreeable, affordable and have brought at least a few students in.

Then the spring rolled around.

My ad that I place reads like this:

Limited openings for piano students of all ages in Chillicothe. Call Lydia at (***) ***-****.

Simple enough, right? Apparently not.

Last Christmas they had issues with the period. So this year I made sure to indicate where I wanted the period to go. I guess my mistake (although it was successful in the past) was that I placed the ad via telephone instead of delivering it, handwritten, to the office.

Last week my ad looked like this:

Limited openings 4 piano students of all ages in Chillicothe. Call Lydia at (***) ***-****.

Anyone else see the issue in this? Hi2u I r a netspek kid what tchs pino in Chilli. Seriously, I was furious. I called the paper as soon as I saw the ad and told the woman that the number 4 should not be there and F – O – R should take it’s place. I spelled it out to her, people.

So yesterday, I opened up the paper hoping that this time they finally got it right. This is what I saw:

Limited openings, four piano students of all ages in Chillicothe. Call Lydia at (***) ***-****.

………..

I’m speechless, people. It’s bad enough that these horrible ads look far from professional, but I’m not getting any phone calls – not even a bite. Granted this could be because people are not interested in signing up for lessons, or maybe, just maybe, the sheer stupidity of these ads is making people shake their heads and wonder what the hell is going on.

So today I am walking the written ad down to the paper, suggesting a cooling off period of 2 weeks before it is run again, and I am not paying for the last two weeks of insane stupidity.

Although I’m half-tempted to make a phone call again just to see if next week we can use the word “fore”.

Update:

So I went to the newspaper office. Once again – no apology for the mistake, instead she tried to blame it on me. Apparently me saying that the “number 4 is incorrect and should be spelled F-O-R” translated to “spell out the number 4″. I am seething with anger at the moment and trying to calm myself down.

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