Saturday Morning First World Problems

Nothing to improve a Saturday morning like stepping in a steaming pile of cat puke.

This after virtually a whole night spent feeling like Donald Duck in one of those old Merry Melody cartoons.  You know, the one where Donald is trying in vain to sleep but one thing after another seems to confound his efforts?

My first mistake was eating a snack too late.  I’ve discovered, much to my dismay, that if I eat much later than 8:30 or nine at night, I will invariably wake in the middle of the night even hungrier.  It must kick-start my metabolism, kind of like a second wind for my appetite.  And in case you’re not a regular reader, I have a very low tolerance for being hungry.  It makes me cranky and miserable, especially when I’m trying to sleep.  So then I eat a little “mid-night” snack, which is really nothing more than me grabbing something as I make a small circuit from the bedroom, to the kitchen, to the bathroom to pee, and then back to the bedroom.  And since I usually wake up multiple times a night, catalyzing this routine usually results in several repetitions of this routine, as the more I eat in the middle of the night, the hungrier I am each time I wake up.  I’m usually okay if I can fall right back to sleep; I can take a sip or two of juice and be fine. I try to drink juice or milk or even water in place of eating, but sometimes that just aggravates my bladder and then I can’t sleep because I keep having to pee…  And then when I get up for good in the morning, I already have five hundred calories under my belt (pardon the pun) to try to work off for the day.

And then the damn cats– Methos, specifically.  He’s always doing irritating shit, like butting into the black out curtains and letting in light from the lamp outside my window.  He’s learned that he doesn’t have to run away unless I actually get out of the bed, so after like the fifth time he opened my blinds, I finally got up to lock him in the laundry room.  Chloe hears the door shut, knew she was next (cuz that’s where the litter boxes are), so she led me a merry chase around the coffee table trying to evade capture.

It sounds ridiculous even as I type it.

So, last night was spent in a semi-comatose swirl of eating, drinking, peeing, tossing, and turning.  All of J*’s stirrings made me anxious, as I dreaded her waking early and me having to get up and stay up.

Hubby had a headache this morning, but I managed to beg him into getting up with J* so I could at least get a couple hours of uninterrupted sleep.

So I get up around ten AM and, as I make my coffee in the kitchen…squish…

Why can’t a writer WRITE???

A (writer) friend of mine recently posted an entry in his blog asserting that “writers are lying bags of cat puke” when they claim writing is hard.  I had to respectfully beg to differ. I have been trying to write largely without success for about 3/4 of my life.  Oh, I can write reasonable well as far as quality is concerned.  That is, if you measured my ability to write based on the opinions of those who read and enjoy my work, I am a ‘good’ writer.  The problem is that aside from a handful of short stories (and a ‘novelette’ I wrote when I was 15 or 16 and saved on a 5 inch floppy-which was subsequently accidentally thrown out by my dad on a cleaning binge), I have never finished anything. Continue reading