It is rapidly approaching 3AM on Saturday night/Sunday morning, and I'm still awake.
Why?
Well, aside from the fact that I always sleep weird hours on the weekends anyway, I just spent my last 3-4 hours grading my first class's set of papers. Normally it wouldn't take that long, but as it is their first paper for me, I must go through every one of them and mark every single error. Not only did it take a lot of time, but I used the remainder of my red ink pen and burned through half of a second. Yeah. Not kidding.
This is typical, though, for a first paper from any class I've taught. Because of that, I'm not really concerned.
Sadie, my little Russian Blue cat -- the smallest of my three cats, and by far the dumbest and most skittish -- has been in a tiff with Pete for the past two days; she growls and hisses at him whenever he comes near her, and occasionally they'll get in a knock-down, drag-out rolling furball fight.
This sort of tiff isn't incredibly unusual; it's happened two or three times over the five years I've had the cats and they've all lived together, but usually it's both girls (Sadie and Maggie) ganging up on Pete. After a few days they all snap out of it and get back to normal. I've read up on it and it's a sort of territorial and/or dominance thing, more than likely. This is, however, the first time Sadie has done it by herself, which made me wonder briefly if she was sick or something. She's not; she's generally perfectly fine around her sister Maggie, and she's just fine around me. She's also eating normally and wanting normal attention/love from me. It's just something about Pete that's been pissing her off. However, when she's growling/hissing and pissed off, she'll even growl at me or Maggie sometimes until she calms down again. To a certain extent it's really funny, but to a much larger extent it's fucking annoying, and I wish she'd just get over it already. Pete's not going anywhere, and all three of the cats will still be continuing to share a home for the rest of their lives, so my opinion is that Sadie just needs to suck it up and shut up.
For the record, even if it is a dominance thing, Petey will always be the dominant alpha of the three cats whether the other two like it or not. That's not going to change. I've read all sorts of literature like "anxiety-prone cats, even if they live together for a long time, may stop getting along and permanent separation may be necessary." When I read that, I laughed. No, cats, you're not getting your own special little rooms; you are not unique snowflakes, I thought. You're going to suck it up and continue living together just like you have your entire lives.
I need to go out to Walmart sometime tomorrow, which is a bad thing. It's a bad thing because of three different circumstances:
1.) It's Sunday.
2.) It's two days before Valentine's Day (or, as I'll refer to it this year, Black Tuesday.)
3.) There's a snowstorm primed to hit us tomorrow night.
I could have also added "and I don't get paid again for another week" to that list as well, but for the moment I'm okay with money. I'm not great, but I'm okay. I do have a $316 credit card bill to pay most, if not all of the balance of within the next two weeks, after all.
All the money on said credit card went towards gas for the Monte Carlo, by the way, with the exception of the renewal of my Amazon Prime membership ($39).
The snowstorm is problematic on a few levels. For one, it means everybody and his brother will be at Walmart emptying the shelves of everything possible, which will make the store a madhouse. I only need about five or six different things, but still, I'm not looking forward to fighting everyone off. As is customary in most Walmart stores, the one here in Newton is populated by the dregs of society, all of whom seem to be self-centered, rude white trash. However, if I want to be able to feed the cats and clean their litter box, I have to brave the dregs.
It's also problematic on the level that it's hitting at all. As you know at this point, my car needs new tires. While I can drive in some levels of ice and snow, the +/-3 inches Newton is expected to receive by Monday night isn't necessarily horrific, but it's at right about the level where driving would be iffy if the roads aren't properly treated by Tuesday morning when I have to return to school. Amusingly enough, even though this is the first real substantial snow of the winter that may occur and stick on the ground/roads for a while, the local news channels aren't going nuts about it because Wichita is only supposed to get a half-inch or so, if that. I live far enough north (22 miles north of the city) to where I'll always get more snow than Wichita will just because of the way storm systems tend to travel over the state. At least I can take solace in the fact that it's not hitting during the work week, and that tomorrow I can stick my car in the garage and leave it there again until Tuesday morning.
I sure miss those 70-ish degree days we were having about two weeks ago, though.
I've been having really weird dreams lately, none of which have been good. They're not so much nightmares as they are just strange, and they leave me a little shaken for an hour or so after I wake up. Most of the time they're dreams of things being drastically different in my life than they are now, which is why I think they're so jarring. For example, last night I had a dream that I had married a good friend of mine from back home (whose name I will not state, as I'm sure she's read this blog on occasion even if we don't talk much anymore) and we were happy, and for some reason lived in a cabin in Vermont. Now, how I could come up with a scenario like that is beyond me, but let me tell you -- when I awoke in the same house, in the same bed, with the same cats and same loneliness, that was jarring compared to the life I'd been dreaming. Like I said, when I awaken from something like that and re-enter my real life, I get this deep sense of disappointment and misery for an hour or so because I realize how boring and monotonous my real life actually is on a daily basis. It's a feeling that passes, of course, but still.
I also think it's proof that I need to get out of this state for a few days over spring break more than ever, and that my trip back home to visit my parents and Andrea during that time will be really therapeutic for me, even though it won't last long and I'll return to Kansas shortly thereafter.
The information on next year's department fellowships was sent out to all of us on Friday; the "application" for it (because it's really not much more than a writing contest) is due in about three weeks. I'll have to select my best poetry to apply for it, because this year the competition is much tougher than last year due to a much higher number of quality writers within the department. I'll write more about that as the deadline for it comes closer, of course. Hopefully I'll have a decent shot at winning it, but somehow I doubt it. Still, there's no harm in trying. Fortune favors the bold and all that.
The rest of my weekend, as I'm really only about halfway through it, will be spent grading the rest of my student papers and writing a short essay (one page) for my editing class. Monday, especially if it's really nasty/snowy, will be spent finalizing my taxes so I can call them totally done. Getting those taken care of is really important to my mental state, as it's but one more thing I have to do ASAP. Once I finish them I can renew my FAFSA as well, which should only take a few minutes. And, of course, there's the aforementioned Walmart trip and the paying of the credit card bill. I have to put new gas in the Monte Carlo, as well. Since it's been nut-numbingly cold, I'll be dressing in multiple layers when I have to leave the house. On Thursday, I even wore my leather jacket -- which should tell you how cold it's been as of late. Regardless, I'll still have to get out and do all of that stuff before the snow moves in. Which means, as it's almost 4AM, that I should get to bed soon.
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