RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING 2: THE BLOGGANING

 1) Up until last year, Steve had never carved a pumpkin for Halloween. 

Pause:

Steve's childhood baffles me, because although he had loving, attentive parents and had a seemingly otherwise normal childhood, he didn't do a lot of things your average, non-Jehovah's Witness, kid would have done as a matter of course. Until we got married, he had never colored Easter eggs, never made a Jack-O-Lantern, and had never had a birthday party. None of this is relevant to what I'm going to talk about, but a tangent is a trip I always seem to take regardless of the direction I NEED to be going in. 

Unpause:

Last year he carved his first pumpkin and he seemed to enjoy it, so this year he went to a place and brought home two pumpkins so we could carve them to decorate the stoop.  Unfortunately, lack of time and waning interest in doing the carving left us two pumpkins sitting around the house. We moved them to the floor of the kitchen for a day or two to get them out of the way. Well, one of them started to mold. I didn't notice right away, because it started at the bottom, and it leaked pumpkin water (?) all over the floor and caused one two of our floorboards to warp a little. Gross and inconsiderate! So I took it outside and threw it against some rocks in our back garden to bust it open so that the critters could eat the seeds while they were stocking up for winter. No critter would touch it. I would watch squirrels and birds circle it, and none of them would go near it. 

For some reason this ticked me off. I threw a moldy, but still useful, pumpkin out there for them and they were not eating it! We have all kinds of small animals back there, and even some bigger ones that come around, and that stupid pumpkin was never touched.  Maybe they didn't want it because it was moldy or something, but still...

So I took the other, perfectly normal, non-moldy pumpkin that we had placed on our stoop to the back yard and cracked it open. No mold, full of seeds, and should have been delicious to any animal getting ready for winter, and yet, none of them will eat it! I literally watch animals walk over and look at it and then walk away!  Why do they not touch my autumn offerings? WHY?!

My only consolation is this: If I were to have woken up one morning to find a random bacon cheeseburger in my kitchen, would I eat it? Probably not. I would wonder where it came from, and maybe wonder if someone was trying to poison me with delicious foods. Maybe I'm not giving my back yard vermin enough credit. Maybe they are suspicious of the feast that suddenly appeared in their living space. Maybe they don't trust me. This makes me weirdly sad.

These are the kind of things that occupy me these days. Oy.

2) Y'all, I made a stupid, stupid, stupid impulse purchase the other day. 

In my defense, online shopping has made it WAY too easy to buy things when I'm tired, and when I'm tired, I don't make very good choices. Shopping while sleepy is how I ended up with two pairs of Pajama Jeans.

I already know that you are going to judge me and think I'm very dumb with money, and yes, obviously sometimes I can be, so judge away. I deserve it. I'm telling you this as a way to shame myself.

I bought a $49 dollar pineapple. It's not a fake pineapple that will last forever, but a real pineapple that we can eat.  Please don't disown me.

In my defense, it isn't a normal pineapple! It's a newly created and rare kind of pineapple that Del Monte has just put out for sale. I have this...thing...I guess you'd call it, about being able to taste interesting, new, different things! Usually, I never get a chance to do it, because whatever it is isn't sold where I can get my hands on whatever it is. There are fruits that I'll never get to try unless I backpack through South America, and dishes I'll never eat unless I decided to live in rural China. There are a million variety of apples I'll never taste because they can't be shipped! That isn't fair!!!!  So when I was reading about this pineapple, and saw there was a link to a fruit company that was selling them, I kind of lost my head.

It's called a Pinkglow Pineapple, which, now that I think about it, sounds like a kinky sex toy. 

OK, so pineapples usually contain lycopene, which is the same thing that makes tomatoes red, but a naturally occurring enzyme in the fruit usually converts the lycopene to beta carotene, which is yellow. This pineapple has been changed to contain less of the enzyme, so the fruit stays pink. It's supposed to taste a little different, be sweeter, and be pink. Probably for Instagram. I have no idea. This fruit takes years to grow and and is only just now available to be shipped. 

Look, I know none of this makes spending $49 dollars on a damn pineapple any better, but what is done is done. I have grounded myself from buying anything other than necessities for a while because this was indeed a stupid, frivolous purchase.

But...but... let's be real here, I'm probably still going to enjoy it, because right now, I'm going to take any chance for a new experience! If it takes a pink pineapple and some buyers remorse to do it, so be it. 

NOTE: We tried it last night. It was good! It was not $49 good, though. :)

RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

 1) So, here is how the situation with the cat has ended.

Steve decided that he didn't want her remains to be disposed of without anyone to claim them, so he had Simba cremated and now we have her cremains on the same shelf as Butler and Bear. We aren't sure they would have gotten along very well in life, but we figure that in that Rainbow Bridge place, they are probably all friends.

The really weird thing is that we know that Simba was someone else's cat. She had to be. She was fat, way too friendly for a feral animal, and she had no instinct to protect herself when the dogs got after her. We are fairly sure she had been a house cat for some time before she came to us, which means that there is a family, or a person, who has no idea what happened to her. Although she lived with us for more than a year, and was for all intents and purposes our cat, we both feel kind of bad that somewhere out there are people who might miss her, and they don't know she died, and that we have her ashes in an urn in our dining room. 

Animal control came over and talked to Steve the next day. We could have pressed charges against the people who owned the dog, but we chose not too. As much as the whole situation sucked, we didn't want to make it a THING. You know what I mean? We hate that Simba died the way she did, but we didn't want to be responsible for anyone losing their dog, when really, the dog was just being a dog. The Animal Control guy said that they wouldn't have lost the dog, but they would have had to pay more fines. Apparently when the neighbors called the police after it all happened, they are already getting hit with a vicious animal charge, which is a hefty fine already. We still declined, and the officer thought we were being really too nice about the whole thing. We were just done wanting to think of it. The officer did go to the house where the owners lived and told them how kind we were being, and how they need to be more careful with their dogs and all of that.

Ya know, I don't expect any of them to offer to pay the vet bills or bring us cookies, but you'd think one of them would at least holler over the fence and say that they were sorry their dog ate our cat. Don't you?

2) I think the social distancing is starting to get to me. Granted, Steve is at home and we see people at church and when we run errands (and the craziness that is associated with not really having control over who you see in places like that) but I've realized that I've developed a borderline Imaginary Friend. I say borderline, because it is a real person I pretend to talk to, but that person isn't really there, so really, I'm projecting my own ideas and thoughts onto the idea of a person and having conversations with them. 

Not out loud, though. Sigh. This seems weird. It is weird, isn't it?

I guess the only real problem with what I'm doing is if I see this person in real life and expect them to remember what we talked about in my head.

Is this what it feels like to go mad? 

3) We have been re-watching The Office again lately. When it was first on the air, I was a HUGE fan of the show. I made sure that I was at home to see it when it aired if possible, and it is, to date, only one of two shows I ever paid Apple to watch if I wasn't at home to watch it live. (The other was Lost. Don't judge me.) I watched every episode, and I got emotionally involved with characters, and I think it made me cry a couple of times. It was one of those shows I connected with for whatever reason, and I loved it so much.

I'm not sure it's held up, though. As we've watched it again, I find myself wanting to punch Michael Scott so much, and Jim...well...he isn't as nice as I remember. I also don't remember it making me cringe quite so much as it does now. In fact, I worry more about the fact that they work in a paper company during a time when paper was being used less and less, than I care about anything else they're doing! I get stressed because I know their company will become obsolete in a few years time. How stupid is that? Haha!

I guess that's the difference between being 27 and 42 years old and watching the same show. Now I'm old and jaded, I guess! Sometimes you can't go home again!

4) Sorry for the filler, but things are so boring. Nothing fun is happening right now, so there isn't much to talk about. Probably the most exciting thing I've gotten to do lately is see the Super Retriever Series dogs compete in the parking lot of the local Marshall's. You can social distance and watch dogs jump into big tanks of water and, well, retrieve stuff and swim back. We can't pet the dogs, though, so it's almost not worth it!

Ugh, I miss my friends and my cat, but otherwise, things are fine. We are fine. Our jobs are fine. Our families are fine. Everything here is fine! I hope you're also fine and enjoying life as much as possible!

 

IT'S ALL RELATIVE

Humor me for a moment, will you? 

Are you familiar with the "Many Worlds Theory?" I'm not going to pretend that I can explain it the right way, but as I understand it, it means that all possible outcomes occupy a place in and on an infinite amount of different worlds. That's probably not exactly right, but it's close enough. I have always interpreted it as every possibility of a choice creates it's own reality. That makes a lot of realities, since we make hundreds of choices every day, but the idea makes an odd amount of, ahem, sense to me. I will think of it as the Quantum "Sliding Doors" Theory. (Pratt, 2020) So every time a decision is made, another reality is created where the opposite decision was made. So, say, I decided not to marry Steve back in 2000, and now there is a very complex parallel reality where I become a plus size stripper or anchor person on MSNBC. Maybe both. 

One thing that Steve and I talk about sometimes, only partially seriously, is that people must have the ability to inadvertently slip between realities. I already know that sounds crazy, but my theory is that if a new reality is created to accommodate a new outcome it has to go someplace, and if the outcome of a choice is fairly minor, then the reality isn't that far removed physically from the one we are currently living in, maybe even overlapping it. So, say, if in one reality Kool-Aid never created a blue raspberry flavor, then that blue-raspberry-less reality is positioned much closer to the original reality because it would be a small change. So one day you might wake up with a craving for that Kool-Aid, but go to the store only to find out it never existed. You might remember having that flavor many times, or seeing commercials for it, but no one else remembers it. That would mean you somehow crossed over into the different reality through one of the overlapping places. Stephen King calls them a "thinny" or a thin place in reality. Of course, in his case, the alternate realities are full of Lovecraftian monsters, while my own ideas are more about which Kool-aid you can buy. 

Potato - Potahto

Anyways, this has been coming up a lot for me lately and it's getting weird. Not long ago I had a conversation about something I thought I heard a friend say years ago, but he said he didn't say. I could remember it so clearly that you could have held me at gunpoint at any time and asked about it, and I would have sworn on the bible that he did. However, he didn't. Obviously, I just misunderstood what he did say, but in my head it was so freaking clear that hearing otherwise makes it seem unreal.

Another example is something my mom told me, or so I thought. It was a story about my aunt going somewhere and getting sick. I remember hearing the story and being indignant about it, because it seemed like a silly risk for her to take. I remember details about the story, down to being able to imagine the situation. I even told that story to my coworker, because I was irritated that it happened. I brought it up to my mom yesterday and she had no idea what I was talking about. She said that never happened, and proceeded to tell me a completely different story of how she got sick. In fact, over the past couple of years, that same thing has happened to me with my mom. I remember her telling me stories about family members, and those stories became part of the way I thought of my extended family in general, but when I've asked her about it, she said none of it was the way it actually happened.

It's not just me, though,. It's happened to Steve as well! We were standing in his office and heard a big truck outside, so we looked out of the window and saw a utility truck a crew working on a fire hydrant. He said "When did we get a fire hydrant there?" I didn't remember ever seeing any big utility work being done on that side of the street, so it couldn't have been put there in the past 20 years, so it had to be there much longer. Also, it's an old hydrant, so if it were newer, it wouldn't look the way it does. That might not be so weird under most circumstances, but he's lived in that house literally all his life. How could he live somewhere for 45 years and not notice a yellow fire hydrant right across the street? He's also had other things happen to him several times that he's noticed recently don't exactly jive with his memories.

Now, I'm not saying any of this is real or that it's true, or even that I honestly believe in it. For all I know, we are just considering a pseudo-scientific explanation for both of us having really bad memories! But it has been happening enough lately that it's starting to become almost too much of a coincidence. 

Has it ever happened to you? Have you ever believed or remembered something clearly, only to have it be proven later on that it was different than you thought? Think about it, or at least start paying closer attention to some of your memories in case some things you've thought for years are suddenly very different. 

I'll just stop here before you really think I've gone off the deep end. I hope you wake up in the right reality! Especially the one that has blue raspberry Kool-Aid!