You know it’s bad. . .
. . .when not only do I vacuum the entire house to avoid working on my WIP, but I’m reduced to using the little crevice dealie to suck up ten years’ worth of cat hair from all the nooks and crannies (which means some of that hair is from cats who have long since passed into the Great Beyond. There’s an eerie thought). Heck, I even moved the dining table to get at the places the vacuum wouldn’t fit under (it’s kind of a trestle table with these wonker, low to the ground feet, which make lovely dust-fur-and-dessicated-rice-bits traps). Amazing what the procrastinating mind will find to occupy itself when pressed.
And on a completely different subject. . .is anybody else drowning in catalogs these days? I have piles by “my” chair in the living room, here by the computer, on the floor beside my bed, on the dining table, on the penisula in the kitchen, by my desk in the husband’s studio, on my desk in the husband’s studio. I really do try to toss the ones I know I’ll never order from (uh, no, we don’t really need $400 sweaters, $80 gift packages of nuts and pears, or anything from American Girl), as well as the duplicates. But still, they multiply like Viagra-ized bunnies.
Actually, though, I like catalogs, even when I know I’m not going to buy anything. There’s a lot to be said for armchair window shopping. Anything to avoid the Mall. Which is funny, because like most red-blooded American women, I used to adore shopping — or, more accurately, The Hunt. When I lived and worked in NYC (pre-marriage, pre-kids, pre-having-to-spend-money-on-anyone-but-myself), my fave thing to do at lunch was prowl Macy’s or B. Altman’s or even Saks (when I worked there), keeping an eagle eye out for the markdowns (hey, I was clearing something like eighty-seven bucks a week, if it hadn’t've been for sales racks, I’d've been nekkid). But that was back when shopping was still a hobby, instead of a chore. Now, I walk into a department store — have sales floors always looked like something out of a hallucinigenic nightmare, or was I just more resilient then? — and immediately get palpitations. Not to mention shelf blur. After ten minutes, I’m like, nope, can’t deal with this, get me outta here.
So I love catalogs. Five minutes of flipping through the pretty pictures, and it’s over. No muss, no fuss, no shelf blur. If I see something to actually buy, it’s a thirty second trek to the nearest computer and boom, it’s done. Which of course lands me on five times more catalog lists, and hence drowning in piles of the bloody things.
But at least all the fur from Cats Past (and Present) is gone. . .
