Mother Nature I Curse You!

It’s that time of year.  Animals are fornicating and plants are procreating and nature’s debauchery that is called spring is fucking with my allergies.  Each year for a full six weeks I walk around wishing that gasmasks were in fashion and that I could wear one everywhere I go.  But this would not be socially acceptable and would most probably freak people out, so I have to settle for antihistamines, a nose spray and eye drops.  I now know how drug addicts must feel, instead of getting withdrawals if I don’t take my drugs I get blood shot eyes, sinus and persistent sneezing which I am convinced kills brain cells.  Mother Nature can be such a bitch and this is why I hate spring.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that spring hails a farewell to winter, the fact that my garden seem to come alive with new flowers and that the dullness of winter is replaced with vibrant new greenery.  I also love the sweet perfume of jasmine and purple rain that permeates the air in my garden and watching bees gorge themselves on pollen and nectar.  But what I love about spring is also the things that literally make me feel like I want to die.  You see I have severe allergies.  The kind of allergies that could justify me being encased in a bubble filled with purified air and that is medically sterile.  I am allergic to just about everything except cats.  Ok, so I lie.  I am a little allergic to cats too and we have five.

Spring is the one time of year that my medical aid must think that I am a total hypochondriac, with on average about 3-5 doctor visit during this time every year.  You see when my allergies flare up it does so epically.  I look and feel like death warmed up with eyes so red it looks like I partied hard the previous night and that I smoked a whole case load of marijuana.  My voice goes and my nose start running like it’s preparing for a marathon.  It also usually doesn’t stop there.  Every year I get an eye infection which is referred to as chronic allergy related pinkeye and when I am really lucky I will also get an ear infection.  This year I had both twice and spring is not even really in full swing yet.

In an effort to at least try and make our house on the inside tolerable for me I bought an air purifier.  It’s a machine that sucks in air then takes out all the impurities such as dust and pollen and also kills any germs and bacteria that floats around and then blows out the clean air.  You can also add special concentrated extracts into the water that smells nice and helps you to relax.  I guess it is doing its job because neither hubby nor I have been sick since I bought it, but I suspect I need an industrial sized one to completely get rid of my allergies and make our house on the inside 100% pollen free.  Things have gotten so bad that if you stand outside in the garden you can physically see the pollen floating around in the air and it is making my bronchi and corneas shit themselves.

When we were house hunting we had very specific requirements, one of them being that the property should have no grass.  You see I am allergic to grass and we didn’t want to spend our weekends having to mow the lawn.  Life is too short the waste it behind a lawnmower where as you could rather spend it with a cocktail in the pool.  We also had a list of trees and plants, which we at that time, knew I was allergic too.  So when we found our house it “semi” fit the bill and we then proceeded to address the “semi” part and did some renovations.  The one thing we however neglected to research was some of the plants that were already in our garden and some of the trees and hedges of our neighbors.  So came spring, that first year we lived in the house, and I was unpleasantly caught off guard and found myself to be a whimpering snot filled ruby red eyed hot mess.  I was at ground zero of a pollen explosion of mammoth proportions.  It was like the Hiroshima and Nagasaki of allergy and pollen hell, and I was trapped in the middle!

It’s embarrassing having to go to work looking like you washed your eyes out with acid, having sneezing attacks that last longer than 45 seconds and having been blessed by more people in one day than a visitor to Vatican City.  It’s embarrassing having to stand nervously in line at the pharmacy looking like a meth addict waiting to get your allergy alleviating drugs.  But I have no choice.  I love our house and we still owe a shit load of money on the bond so we need to stay.  It’s also not like I can tell my neighbors to cut down their trees and remove certain hedges just because I am seriously allergic to them.  So, I do the only thing I can.  For six weeks every year I curse Mother Nature and call her things that’s not becoming of a lady.  But the bitch doesn’t listen and clearly she doesn’t care.  If only rapid weight loss was also a side effect of severe allergies, maybe all this suffering would be worth something.  But instead I have to diet AND suffer from allergies.  Gawd I hate spring!

Till next time.

I Love Pussies and I Just Cannot Lie

My husband lives in a constant paranoid state of fear that he will get home one day to find that our property has magically transformed into a one giant petting zoo.  You see I love animals, the furrier and smaller the better.  And as some of you know (the 7 of you who read my blog regularly and those of you who are friends with me of Facebook), hubby and I currently have 5 cats and our most recent addition to our gay family is a tortoise called Irina.  Sure some people say pets are substitutes for the queers’ lack of being able to have children and maybe that’s true.  But, animals bring so much joy to your life, they are cheaper than children, don’t go through puberty and tells you that they hate you and don’t come home at 4am in the morning drunk and possibly knocked up or disappoints you by not living up to your expectations.  Pets enrich your life in so many ways and this is why I love them.

In my 30 something years on this rock I have had 4 dogs, 2 hamster, 5 chickens, a duck, a parrot, 3 love birds, 10 white doves, 2 turtles, 3 bunnies, 16 gold fish and 10 cats.  And I love(d) them all.  Last week our family got a little bigger with a tortoise that we decided to name Irina.  Irina means peace in Russian and I believe that the name suits her perfectly due to her temperament.

Now, tortoises are not the most affectionate pets.  They are shy, a little aloof and it takes quite a while to win their trust.  Hubby and I understand this but our 5 pussies do not.  The first day I brought Irina home all our cats were completely bemused.  They visibly could not wrap their head around this thing that I brought home in a box filled with hay.

The cats hovered around Irina for days as if she was a spaceship that just landed waiting for the alien to show itself.  They were not quite sure whether Irina was friendly and mostly they could not understand why something that looks like a rock had a head, feet and a tail and could walk.  It took them a full week to get use to the idea that there was a mobile rock in the garden and that she wanted nothing to do with them.  As for Irina she also was just as intrigued by her new surroundings and one thing I have learned is that tortoises are very smart animals and curious as all hell.

Most tortoises tend to hibernate during winter and Irina’s species is one of them.  So when I brought her home I expected her to do just that but clearly she had other plans.  You see, Irina took it upon herself to explore our whole garden.  Not a single inch of it have not been inspected by her.  Anyone who says tortoises are slow clearly has never seen one move and Irina is a sprinter of note.  Another talent she has is that of camouflage and hiding.  Every afternoon I have to go into the foliage of our garden, Indiana Jones style, to look for her to make sure she’s still there and that she is ok.  On two occasions I failed to find her and being the fatalist that I am I was convinced a bird of prey snatched her from our garden and that she ended up being either breakfast, lunch or dinner in a tree somewhere.  Luckily I was wrong.

Boris (meaning warrior in Russian) is the youngest of our five pussies and noticeably the only male in the house apart from hubby and I that is.  He has been with us for six months and he is a handful.  From the first day we brought him home he took over the house, as little as he was, and claimed the house as his kingdom.  He has attitude, a will of his own and a strong and possibly unhealthy relationship with food.  That cat will eat anything!  He is also completely orally fixated and have a tendency to bite and nimble on everything ranging from hands and toes to television remotes to electrical cords.

He also lacks the grace of his feline sisters and has the ability to walk and then just drop on the floor most times in not so flattering or gracious positions or postures.  Many a morning you can literally see how he is walking around the house looking for something naughty to do.  Most mornings he is destructively successful.  Another thing about Boris is his inability to do anything quietly and you can hear him approaching from a mile away through things crashing to the floor, his stomping and meowing.  Recently he discovered that there is a cat game app on iPad that’s fun and that it doesn’t take too much physical effort, seeing as he is the laziest cat I have ever had.

Yes, you read correctly.  There are apps for cats on iPad.  I also didn’t believe it when I first heard about it, but they do exist and cats love playing with them.  The one game our 5 pussies enjoy the most is a mouse that runs around on the screen which they can catch by stepping on it.  When stepped on, the mouse makes a squeaking sound and every “catch” is recorded in the individual cat’s score.  Currently Boris is 35 points ahead of Katija (meaning Pure in Russian aka Killer Pussy and FYI, she has a Facebook Fan Page), who clearly prefers catching live prey but finds the artificial mouse good mental practice.  She approaches the game like an Olympian who’s trying the get psyched up for a race.  She’s totally focused, determined and scarily accurate, whereas Boris will rather lie next to the iPad and randomly catch the mouse every time it passes by him which makes his score all the more amazing.

When Boris first arrived home the other four pussies wanted nothing to do with him.  It took some time and a lot of cat psychology to successfully assimilate him into the family.  You’d be amazed by how just changing the way you feed them (creating a fluid hierarchy) and the way in which you greet them changes their attitudes towards each other.  It took 3 months to get the other pussies to accept him and now he and Killer Pussy are best mates and occasionally, when Boris feels up to it, killing partners.  I have also noticed how Killer Pussy encourages Boris to be naughty to her great amusement especially when he gets into trouble.  Not that much unlike how human siblings behave.

Yes, I love animals and I especially love my pussies.  I cannot lie.  There is not a day that goes by without them blessing us with a cuddle or a giggle or two.  Sure our pussies can be destructive and have been the cause of a great many pot plant fatalities and many mornings waking up with a house full of feathers and a few bird corpses.  But I would not want it any other way.  Irina is still new to the family but if my experience and memory of my previous tortoise serves me right, she will be just as amusing and a joy in our garden.  I am slowly but surely building up my petting zoo and as such hubby’s fear is completely justified (but don’t tell him).  Now, apart from our 5 pussies and 1 tortoise we only need a giant bunny, a donkey and a pony.

Till next time.