Good God I’m Farty.

TGIF, yo. I’m looking forward to my weekend. I have a double-birthday party tonight, and a cat to meet in Sunday. By the end of the weekend, I plan to be partied out and catted up. Yeah yeah.

I’ve started knitting a sweater for my brother. I bought the yarn about a year ago, at a sweet yarn store in Muscatine. I’ve been sitting on this yarn (nine skeins adds a lot of bulk to one’s stash) for long enough! I finally found a pattern I liked, and then I realized that my brother’s particular frame is nothing like the pattern. I spent a night with a book of graph paper and a calculator, and came up with my own version.

So I’m freestyling, I guess you could say. Yo, my stitches are fat and this aint no weave …

I just realized that South By Southwest music festival is coming up and again this year I have no imminent plans to go. Last year Jason and I were torn between driving down to Texas for SXSW, or driving up through Canada to New York to visit his mom. Mom won out, although the weather would have been much better. Alas, maybe some sort of body-part fairy or godmother will bestow upon me some sweet tickets and a week off.

So this cat thing is actually Martha Stewart’s fault. I was watching TV last Saturday morning, and I ran across a pet show. The show was not particularly fascinating, but there was this cat, and it made me realize that I wanted a cat.

Now, I’ve had a cat. You might have met my cat, Maceo. Around the house in Iowa City, he was mostly referred to as (and this is at the top of one’s lungs): NO! NO! NOOOO! or FUCK OFF. Maceo was and always will be an outside cat. He had a lot of fun qualities, but he was also kind of terrible. Kind of like a child, I imagine.

So anyway, I’ve been kind of gun shy about a cat. On Abbott’s intranet, there’s a wanted/for sale page. A woman in Kenosha is getting rid of her half-Siamese 13-year-old cat because she accrued a husband, three kids, and a dog since she and the cat first joined up. The cat is miserable, hides under the bed all day, and needs a quieter home. Not that she’s wheezy, just that she gets sat upon and played with roughly.

She’s already declawed, and is a lap cat. These qualities alone make her exactly Maceo’s opposite. I mean, if she just wants to chill out and read the pape, I’ve got no problem with that. It’s if she attacks my head in the middle of the night, or climbs up on screen doors that we’ll have a problem. I’m willing to drive to Kenosha to see.

Jason pointed out that cat-allergic folks like Kate and Aden won’t want to come over. I pointed out that 1. I live in Waukegan, and 2. I vacuum.