The journey again! And more!

See part 1, 2 and 3 of this story

 We had made it to St. Louis when a craving for Olive Garden hit me like a ton of bricks. I needed the salad, and I needed it badly! We stopped for gas and D went inside to inquire about any nearby branches while I had the Tripletking (TK) look it up on the internet. He found one not more than 20 minutes away and right off the highway, perfect. We chowed on salad and breadsticks and hit the road again, D was driving since she likes night driving. I decided to take a nap on my favorite carnival ride again, the back of the RV. The cats didn’t know what to do when mom went to bed at the back of the bus. If they wanted to stay near me, which they did, they would have to tolerate being bucked and thrown like a bull rider while laying on the bed. But, if they wanted a solid, smooth ride, they had to stay up front with that other lady, D and lose sight of dear old mom. Mostly they stayed with me. Roxanne, of course was still hiding in her carrier under the covers.

When I woke up we were in Kansas. I drove for a little while longer and then we hit a rest area and slept a good 6 hours. This is when Roxanne decided to relocate. A bouncing bed with a carrier on it apparently was no longer her choice. She first took another opportunity to relieve herself and refuel, then poked around the whole car. First she checked out D, sleeping in the bunk that hangs over the front of the car. Not satisfactory. She nosed around the chairs up front, noticed that there is no ‘under’ anything in an RV. Due to the need for total efficiency in packing a stove, bathroom, three beds, closets, chairs and a shower into a 25 square foot area, there was no way to have any room under the chairs or stove or anywhere. Nowhere for a cat to hide down there. So, she headed up higher. I had left a cabinet open up over my own bed. She jumped up there, found a blanket in the corner, curled up and stayed for the rest of the trip except for bathroom breaks.

We woke up still in Kansas, (imagine that, no tornadoes!) and after a breakfast of hostess cupcakes and coffee, we were off again. Day 3 we planned out that we would make it to a campsite that evening, plug in the RV and sleep in luxury, relative that is: heat, electricity, showers maybe. The plan on the map looked good but we were reconsidering our plan to get to Utah and visit the animal sanctuary. The truth was, once you've driven for 3 days, spending an afternoon visiting something instead of driving like a bat outta hell so you can get somewhere seemed like bad planning. Midway through Kansas we started making new plans. We could cut back up to I80 from Denver, but that was a 100 mile plus straight north drive and weren't we driving West? There was no other smooth way to get back to I80 but we found a small highway that cut through the Utah Great Basin and slowly angled itself back up north to I80. The danger was that this would be slow or we'd get stuck behind people all the time without being able to pass them. Little did we know we'd picked "the loneliest highway in America." But back to that night. So we needed to get all the way through Colorado and halfway through Utah to sleep that night. No big deal, just a couple of states. We didn't count on the mountains or the armadillos, actually I'm kidding about the armadillos. But when we hit Denver, we understood its tourist skiing attraction. BEEEEEG mountains.

Well it’s mighty sad to only see Vail in the dark. The one chance we had with an excuse to drive through Vail and act like crazy rich people in a beat up RV was a bit off schedule. By the time we hit Denver, the sun was setting. All we saw of Vail was lights. Must be nice. I suppose I’ll never know now unless I trade up for a movie star. Just after Vail, we stopped for Mexican, the craving of the evening. We had the best food at this little hole in the wall there. That meal was perfect after, of course, I switched chairs because the one I sat in smelled like death. How do you tell a waiter politely that your chair stinks? Well it seems I failed. He didn't remove it from the scene at all and even sat in it himself when he stopped to talk. I pity the poor next client who sits in that one, they'll probably think it's the restaurant that stinks. Ah well, the guacamole could not be beat. 


As usual I went to sleep after dinner while D did the driving. I woke up in Utah. As I took over driving I drove past a campsite we had considered spending the night at, but rejected because it had no electricity hookup, so what was the point? We only had about 45 miles to the next campsite, how hard could that be? I drove up and up and up these mountains in Utah, who knows where they came from, and the poor RV slowed down to 40, foot on the floor! I would put the RV on cruise control on the flat parts of the road only to have it unceremoniously kick off when we started going uphill. We became convinced that the RV was breaking down because it couldn't handle these hills whereas it had taken Denver by storm. No better idea to two women traveling alone than to have your RV break down when the next gas was almost 50 miles away and all you could see around you were shrubs and wasteland. This was turning into a horror flick.

(Deep scary announcer voice) “Two lonely ladies set out on the journey of a lifetime only to find themselves stranded in the wastelands of Utah. Would they get out alive? Who would rescue them? How would they get their kitties out of the dying RV in time? Would they ever make it to California?”

Well, that’s kind of how it felt. Cruise control kept conking out and we couldn't get up these hills. And it was getting to be 12am and who knows what would happen if we showed up at the campsite so late, would they even let us in or would we still be wandering? Discouraged, and not seeing a truck stop or rest area for miles, we finally pulled over onto an on ramp like the truckers do, and settled in to sleep. We were just dozing off when I heard a truck approaching. Faster, faster, closer, closer it came until BOOM! Rattle Rattle Squeak Squeak!!! it passed us and practically made the RV flip over with its windy wake. D was so terrified she couldn't stop her heart from pounding. We hadn't seen anyone else on the road for hours so I was relatively sure it was a one time thing. Well apparently they had all been behind us, because twice more they whipped past us, shaking the RV all over the place and terrifying D, who had a classic case of post-traumatic shock from the first impact. It was clear we couldn't stay here for the night.

We packed up again and took off, and wouldn't you know it, less than 2 miles up the road was a rest stop. After nearly running over a man aimlessly walking around his semi in the parking lot, we pulled into a parking place and settled down to sleep again. Mind you, it was 32 degrees that night in the Utah mountains, and all we had were just some sleeping bags and a few cats to keep us warm. Thankfully we were dead tired and despite our frostbitten noses, slept for about 6 hours. God it was cold. Knowing that campground was less than 30 more miles killed me. We started off the next day with our teeth chattering, but better rested than the last few nights. Even the cats were shivering in the morning. Poor Darlene didn't even get one to warm her up, heck we should have slept together to keep warm.

And again...to be continued...

The journey, continued...

(The first part of this story can be found here)

At 10am the driver of the moving company finally called to tell me he'd be there in an hour! How nice of him to give me a little advance warning. Now the original plan had been to get the cats into the RV before the movers came, but now that Roxanne was in the ceiling, I had to consider that I might have a better chance getting her out while the other cats were still in the house. Plus, with the ESP cats have and my level of stress likely to decline once all the crap had been taken off on its journey, she was more likely to not be terrified by my freakish energy after they came and went.

So now that I could load up the RV and not fear I was going to miss the all important phone call from the movers I proceeded to do the last bits of my part. By the time they arrived at 11:30am, I was so prepared I literally had nothing to do while they slowly went about their business. First they had to catalogue everything, then, as there was only one mover and one driver, the single mover had to move everything into the truck while the driver organized it. Naturally this process took far longer than the hour I'd predicted, I mean I was so ready they could have just loaded it in 30 minutes had I merited more than one moving guy. Even they admitted I was the most ready client they'd run across. Meanwhile, I'd locked Milo (the big fat white male cat) and Piglet (the hysterical, needy, clingy, black and white long hair female cat) in the basement with Roxanne (they don't hide in the ceiling so it was safe. In fact, Milo couldn't possibly launch his fat cat butt up half the distance from the floor to the washer and Piglet, well, lets just say Piglet doesn't have the brainpower to not come when I call.) Well Piglet, being attached to me via emotional umbilical cord, couldn't stand that she was on the other side of a door from me. No matter that big burly men were stomping around the house, her worst fear usually being any man doing little else besides breathing and her usual behavior being to launch herself out of my arms causing lethal puncture wounds in the attempt to escape people of the male persuasion. No, she didn't care about the noise and the chance to get stomped on or have boxes dropped on your head, SHE HAD TO BE WITH ME! Meeeooow! Meeoow! MEAOW! I almost had one less cat to transport after that little scene. Heck it coulda just been me and Milo hitting the road with Roxanne in the ceiling and Piglet suffering from some fatal accident I hadn’t dreamed up yet.

Finally at 2pm, the movers were done, I could get about the business of getting on the road! I pulled the RV into the driveway, filled it full of water (the water tank that is), organized the stuff inside minimally and then went inside to deal with the Roxanne situation. Having given the cats a little time to cool off, I thought maybe they'd realize the movers were gone and come out, or rather Roxanne would. Milo and Piglet fairly sprinted out of the basement. Once Milo ascertained that there was no furniture left, he had enough evidence to convince him that something was going very, very wrong with his day and he retreated to the basement behind the wood stove until further notice. I opened a can of smelly, stinky can food and realized I had packed all the spoons, so I dug into the can with my fingers and plopped some can food out onto the plates. Only Piglet was falling for this one so that wasn't going to work. Typical that she trusted me so much, atypical that Milo’s stomach didn’t win out over his 6^th sense, horribly typical that Roxanne didn’t trust me if I so much as looked at her funny. So, I scooped up Piglet, threw her in the RV, chased down Milo (not a hard task chasing and catching an overweight declawed cat) and threw him in the RV, cleared out the rest of the house, threw out the last of the garbage, checked everything once more and tried to figure out what to do about Roxanne.

How the hell do you get a cat out of a ceiling? And if you don’t and have now removed all furniture from the house (because the movers soon came and left with it all) put the house on the market to show and sell and are supposed to leave for California in minutes, never to return again, what is to become of said cat? And how bad would it stink if she stayed up in the ceiling until the house was bought by someone else and became their problem to exterminate? Just kidding.

 I quickly formulated a plan with my friends. D would visit the house regularly, leaving Roxanne food and water, and hopefully earning her trust (not likely) and then once she captured her (hah!) J would fly out to California to visit me with my cat, but probably 6 months later. Meanwhile Roxanne would get to live in J’s house with her two cats. Delightful. If Roxanne really wanted to live in J’s house, which already housed two strange cats and a new human squalling, smelly, crawly baby, she could make that choice, although I could fairly predict that she’d probably spend all her time there hiding in the basement on a hunger strike. If she didn’t trust me, how was she going to trust an unpredictable, drooly tiny version of me who walked around on all fours. Well, maybe she would understand that one better. But, in any case, I had to figure something else out. I went back to the basement, jumped up and hit a few of the drop ceiling tiles with my fingers. They popped up and back relatively easily, although my actions caused a half a pound of tile dust, two years worth of cat hair and probably nasty dead bugs that accumulate on the top of those ceiling tiles to rain down on my head which was not going to be under a shower for a few days now as I drove across the country. But perhaps I could make it feel not so safe in the ceiling for a little kitty cat?

I had one piece of wood left in my wood pile that, when held in my hand, made me tall enough to hit a ceiling tile without having to jump like a basketball player doing a layup. Since there was only one way in or out for her, I decided I could maybe herd her out of that damned ceiling by gently (or not so gently) encouraging her to head that direction.  I started poking ceiling tiles in a half circle pattern, ever tightening the noose around the exit, while ceiling tile refuse rained down on my head like a shower of filth. Suddenly I heard a scramble of claws, two landing thumps, and a scamper of feet up the basement stairs. I dropped the log, sprinted faster than my legs have ever moved before to the stairs, took them three at a time and slammed the door behind me.

Meanwhile poor Roxanne, anticipating a bed or a couch to hide behind once she got away from this monster making the ceiling tiles rattle, was racing around in circles throughout the now empty house terrified. That poor cat could not understand how there was actually not one thing she could hide behind or under in the entire house she’d spent her whole life in with furniture. She had no other memory as she had arrived as a 4 week old kitten and only been out to visit the vet. No couches, chairs, tables, newspapers, beds, sheets, blankets, NOTHING to hide behind, under or between! She finally thought of the refrigerator top, which had an overhanging cabinet that offered a modicum of camouflage, or at least didn’t feel like it was out in the open, and raced through the kitchen, up on the counter and finally came to rest cowering in the corner of the refrigerator I now realized I had neglected to clean of the dust and grease that had accumulated over the two years I’d lived there.  I tiptoed into the kitchen, climbed up on the counter, slowly reached my hand towards her, cooing softly and nabbed that little bitch by the scruff of her neck, threw her into the carrier unceremoniously and headed for the RV. Cursing under my breath I stuck her in the carrier under the blankets on the back bed of the RV. Poor Roxanne stayed in that container, under the covers for approximately 24 hours before she ventured out to pee or eat. What a traumatic day for both of us.

Shall I continue? Perhaps I will...

The Journey to CA begins

When your own cat doesn’t want to move with you to California, to live with a guy you’ve only been dating for 6 months, you start to think maybe you’ve made a big mistake. Roxanne wasn’t the type to make a stand, but stand she did on the day we were to hop in the RV and start driving. First I had to be stupid, but then she took over. Yes, the little, tiny 6 lb 2 year old grey kitty almost took the day.

The day being Monday, November 15, 2004, 4am, MOVING DAY. I still hadn't heard from the moving company, so they could be arriving at 8am or 3pm, what did I know? Why am I awake at 4am when I'm so prepared? You tell me why my brain is obsessed with the nails I still have to pull out of the walls, or the 5 minutes it will take me to tape the last two boxes shut, or the 10 minute shower, or the loading of my suitcases into the RV. At this point I have freaking 4 hours at the very least! Do you think I can make it? Yeah me too, but you try sleeping on the day you're moving your entire life and 3 cats across the whole United States to live, forever, just because you're in love with some guy (well not just some guy, but you catch my drift.) Well I digress, so sleep is for the weak, and I'm up getting the last parts of my life organized. Maybe I can take a nap once I know when the movers are coming and have everything done (hah!)

So I’m all ready, standing in my kitchen, boxes piled in the garage in preparation for the movers and damned if I’m not ahead of schedule. You know this is exactly when things have to go wrong. I’d been preparing for months, I’d even joined an organizational cult to get myself ready. Because packing up your whole life, leaving behind your job, church, parents, therapist, friends and the first home you’ve ever owned is hard enough without the complexities of putting it all into a box to move it 3,000 miles. Organizational cults abound on the internet but this one I’d found had been mentioned twice in the Washington Post and that meant something to me, so I took a chance.

Flylady is a cult for those women you see with houses packed to the brim with crap, old newspapers, flea market finds, cast off furniture from street corners, but it works for those of us with a mild disability in the ‘keeping your house from going to hell’ skill. It teaches you that 15 minutes a day will keep you from going crazy and, naturally, get you to understand that it’s just not so hard as you think to keep it together. 15 minutes a day translated into one box a day in the world of packing up a 3 bedroom house to move into a tiny 2 bedroom apartment across the country. I kept a couple of other boxes running: the giveaway box that went first to my friend D who could make use of almost anything, and then to goodwill, and the throwaway box that got set on the curb for every trash day. I had never been this organized but it was amazing how much stuff was just not worth paying someone to transport practically across the whole universe.

So needless to say, because of this fabulous cult of the homemaker, the weekend before my move I only had about 4 boxes left to pack! But, I also had picked the wrong moving company, among many bad choices of vendors in this process. I had a bad real estate agent, a bad landscaper, and many other characters I ran across in my journey, but we’ll get to those. So back to the mover, as I mentioned before, I had actually no idea when they might be coming, although I was pretty sure it’d be today. My friend D had taken the week off to drive to California with me in my RV but I had no idea when I’d be picking her up. A true friend sits around on her ass all day waiting for you to pick her up so she can sit in an RV for a week. 8:30 am came around Monday morning and, since I had been up for 4 hours, I was just sitting around in my house with nothing to do because I hadn't dared leave the house long enough to walk across the lawn and load up the RV with food or clothes because that would be the very minute the movers called. Everything seemed under control, so naturally it all went to hell.

Somehow, in that period of time, I found the need to go downstairs and do something. Now I had known for a long time that downstairs there was a secret hiding place where Roxanne loved to hang out, and so I’d kept that door to the basement closed for the last few weeks. Last thing I needed was for her to be out of reach when the time came to scruff and stuff her for the trip. Oh, but things just don’t work out the way you want them to because somehow I left that basement door open just a crack. My extra large cat Milo also loved it in the basement because there was cool tile flooring down there for his fat butt to lay on and chill. Thanks to his remarkable ability to cause problems, he was able to open the door all the way, and, unbeknownst to me, allow Roxanne and Piglet to go downstairs too. I caught the situation about 30 seconds too late. Roxanne saw me at the top of the stairs glowering down at her and immediately bolted to her hiding place. Being on the phone with the future Triplet King (TK) at this time, I naturally went hysterical. Like a fly entering a deadly Venus Flytrap thinking it was just another flower, he innocently said "How did she get down there, didn't you have the door closed?” Then a blaze of dragon furied fire such as he had never experienced erupted from my lips: “Of course I had the door closed, what do you think, I'm stupid? I made a mistake! Bwaaah (hysterical shriek to those unfamiliar.)" How in the hell was I going to get that little cat out of there when she knew perfectly well that coming out was the last thing she wanted to do (typical cat prescience as on vet appointment days.) Like hell she was going on some RV across country, what did I think she was, crazy?

Let me describe her hiding place to you in better detail to help you understand my hysteria: try to picture the basements in most houses. If they were built in the 70s or 80s they all involved drop ceilings. Panels and panels of probably asbestos laden tiles hanging in a metal framework, leaving a gap between the panel and the floor of the rooms above. Pipes wind through there and spiders I imagine, but it’s just big enough for a cat to crawl through, lie down and hang out. Well, there was a way in there through the laundry room, which did not have the drop ceiling.  Whomever created this ceiling hadn’t carried it through to the utility room and so at the top of the walls in that room was a hole that two of my skittish cats had made use of for months. All they had to do was run down the stairs, hang a right, jump on the washer, then the water heater and 2 more feet to the tunnel in the ceiling. This is not a place you or I could go of course, as it was 10 feet up, 1.5 feet wide and 1 foot tall and would require us to jump on top of a water heater, bend at an unnatural angle and wiggle in. Even if you were strangely wormlike and able to get in there, the ceiling extended across approximately 700 square feet of basement rec room with the aforementioned pipes, floor struts and spiders. You’re going to catch up to the cat? I don’t think so.

So, this is where the highly evasive and intelligent Roxanne went when she saw me at the top of the stairs with my mouth hanging open pre-hysteria on the day I was to pack her and her buddies in an RV and move across country. Roxanne now had the upper hand while I impotently stood below on the cold tile floor having a total nervous breakdown about what the hell I was going to do now.

 To be continued...

Slacker Sunday photo

Friends?

Er, maybe not.

Kids and cats, the same?

How my kids are like my cats. Or vice versa naturally.

1. They chase each other around the house.

2. They fight with each other regularly, over me or random crap.

3. They all want to pile on me at once and none of them wants anyone else on me at the same time.

4. They prefer to play with garbage or wrapping more than the toys we spend so much money on.

5. I have to clean up their poop, pee and vomit on a regular basis.

6. They hate the doctor and practically claw me to death trying to get away from him.

7. They turn their nose up at half the food I serve them.

8. They destroy my furniture.

9. They want attention in the middle of the night.

10. They cry constantly while I'm fixing their meals, apparently not fast enough.

11. They writhe in agony while I'm trimming their nails even though I am NOT hurting them.

12. The Dr has to constantly explain their odd behaviors to me.

13. According to them I never spend enough time with them.

14. They tend to drool all over me.

15. They all have different personalities.

16. Oh heck, I love every messy, annoying, demanding one of them.

Wordful Wednesday

I would never have guessed how much kids are like cats until I observed it in my household. My triplets are always doing cat things. For example, the minute a new cardboard box arrives in the house, they check it out and climb in. They spend hours playing in it. More than with any toy I buy them. Which is also like a cat. The best toys are garbage or wrappings or packaging. Also like a cat, they bump heads sometimes as a greeting. Again, like a cat, they cry noisily when hungry. They tend to hurt you when they get over excited, with nails and teeth. Their poop stinks, they sometimes pee where they are not supposed to and they hate having their nails cut and going to the doctor.

Had I known that three kids would be essentially like three cats but with more work I might have reconsidered my choice to have both.