by Kevin Burton
You take your edges where you can in life, and here’s one of mine:
Though I missed National Cat Day on Oct. 29, and thus missed my time hook, we are still in National Cat Week (I think). That’s the ticket baby, National Cat Week!
And ain’t that chicken soup for a blogger’s soul?
As you can see, I put my extra hour of sleep Sunday to good use.
We don’t need a declared Cat Day around my house anyway. Every day is Cat Day. The adventures of Ronnie and Lakin!
There’s the feeding and cleaning up after. There’s the entertaining and refereeing. There’s now grooming and medicating for Ronnie, the older one.
There is something every day all the time.
The new routine is that Ronnie comes over to my recliner when I am watching an NFL game. I pick her up, put her in my lap and brush her. She’s not grooming herself very well and I sometimes get a small fistful of hair off of her.
Also Ronnie knows that an NFL game is the only thing that will make me sit still in a chair for longer than five minutes…..
So, seven years in, seven-plus, we’re at a certain place with the Page 7 blog.
Also, 60 years in, 60-plus, we’re at a certain place with the Kev.
I can not, with 100 percent precision and exactitude, always, with complete reliability one could take to the bank, remember what I have written before in this here blog.
It’s weird and it’s scary. I don’t want to repeat myself, though it might be OK to return to a theme I addressed seven years ago.
You’ve heard of the Wonder Years? I seem to have reached the “I Could Have Sworn” years or the “I Just Had It” years.
I have an archive folder in my e-mail, where I put story ideas I haven’t gotten to yet. I have a NEXT folder on the desktop which serves essentially the same function.
What tends to go into, and stay in these places are ideas I like but don’t necessarily love. They tend to sit there un-fulfilled, like my honey-do list from my longsuffering wife Jeannette.
And so I sometimes can’t remember if I already ran something or just unloved it into one of these holding areas.
I have a pretty good “morgue,” as we call it in the news biz, or reservoir of past stories that ran, but I can’t be sure this is complete.
Sometimes I’ll be typing away on something and get this creepy, did-I-already-do-this feeling.
Therefore, so sorry in advance, if I publish a great idea for the second time……..
Don’t look now, but I have landed on injured reserve.
Broken right pinky toe.
This is a first. Never broken a bone before. Here’s how it happened:
On a recent Sunday morning I was rushing toward the living room to join Jeannette in our weekly prayer session. I came upstairs from the mancave but turned the corner too sharply, and in a big, big hurry, rammed by right foot into a stationary wooden railing, which for its part didn’t give an inch.
That put me on my butt at the edge of the kitchen. But then I did the Bible study, with a sore foot. I was much more annoyed than hurt. So what I was expecting was to see a big bruise.
I have extremely light skin and when I bruise it depending on the severity it looks a little like weather radar, with the different colors. But that didn’t happen this time.
So it hurt, but I could bear weight on it. But it just didn’t behave like a bruise. So eventually I called and made an appointment with my doctor. When they couldn’t get me in for a whole week I just said fine.
Doc wasn’t available so I saw the nurse practitioner who sent me to x-ray, then said, yep, you broke a toe. So now I’m taping the smallest three toes together. Nothing else to be done.
I have always associated breaking a bone with extreme pain that you couldn’t ignore. But this was next to nothing.
That’s not the way I played it with Jeannette though.
“I’m going to need more help,” I told her in a shaking, pitiful-as-I-could-make-it voice. “You know, washing dishes, standing on that toe, I don’t know how much I can do. And laundry, you know, up and down those stairs.”
Boy you’re really milking this,” Jeannette said.
“And changing cat litter, there’s a certain pain involved. Though I will always give my best effort…”
I had been getting the smirk face from Jeannette, the one all married men are familiar with. There was tolerance in that look, at first. But I must have gone too far.
“The cat litter is non-negotiable,” Jeannette said.
