Not Lassie

This is the true story of how my cat DID NOT save my life.

Exhibit A:  Not Lassie

Picture this: Saturday morning, before 10 a.m.  I am contentedly slumbering when 15 pounds of cat lands on top of me.  Errol, my mustachioed minion, peers worriedly in my face.  I shove him off and try to go back to sleep but white paws keep batting at my face and sheets.  Then the meowling starts.  (That's right meowling - part meow, part yowl.)

If I ignore it, he will stop.  If I ignore it, he will stop.

He does not.

Finally I sit up and he runs out of the bedroom.  I stumble down the hallway, blearily bumping into the walls and make my way into the kitchen where he is nervously pacing.

"WHAT, CAT?"  I bellow.

As he continues to dart back and forth meowing, I notice the smell of burning.  WTF?  I open the oven and find two pieces of bread have been transformed into smoking charcoal briquets.  I pull them out and dump them in the sink.

Holy shit, the furry little butterball just alerted me to danger!  Way to go, Rolls.

I try to pick him up to give him a celebratory snuggle, but he's still agitated.  And that's when I see it.  The autofeeder, his favorite thing in the world, has been knocked over and he can't pilfer kibble from it in its current position.

I right it and he happily begins abusing it.  The sound of dropping kibble follows me down the hallway as I go back to bed.

Jerk.

Eire and Ire

I always knew I would go to Ireland at some point in my life.  My last name starts with Mc for christ's sake, it's practically required that I go.  If I were Muslim, I would make a pilgrimage to Mecca, but I'm Irish (with grandparents directly from the island - accents, American wakes and all), so a trip to the emerald isle was all but inevitable.

Baked

Culinary School.

It seems obvious.  You want to cook, you have to learn how to do it.  Schools teach you things, so for cooking you go to culinary school, right?

Maybe.

My Love Smells Like Burning

Every year I buy a real live Christmas tree.  I'm not religious, but I love having the tree in my house.  It smells good!  The lights are pretty!  My cats like to chew on it!

This year I went with a zombie theme (something that will probably be repeated ad nauseam this year, just wait).

Ohhhhh... Ahhhhh...  Braaaaains...

But, as of last weekend, the tree wasn't so much zombied as mummified.  Yeah it was DEAD.  It needed to go.  Fortunately my neighborhood has a quick and dirty way of disposing of the the trees.

We burn them.

NOMaste

So my little chickadees, how did I spend the new year?

Sweating.

I decided to forgo the typical drunken debauchery and do something healthy.  So I did 108 sun salutations.  (I apologize to anyone who was hoping for a good 'you-did-what-???' story.  This is in no way indicative of a lack of debauchery for the rest of the year, promise.)