That does it. I'm through using Netscape for email and newsgroups. The damn thing is so buggy that it crashes every third time I use it, the newsgroup reader won't even work now, and when it does crash it takes the whole system with it. I'm through!

pant pant rant froth at the mouth

On the bright side, my scabs are starting to peel. It worries me when scabs stick around for a long time, because you know that it's still healing. ("Why is it taking so long? Do I have anemia or whatever that disease is that causes cuts not to heal?") But my skin has now miraculously repaired itself. Let the picking begin.

See, I got into a tussle with Jaws a few days ago.

I am not a cat person. I like dogs. Cats are just too... aloof for my tastes. But I live in HUD-subsidized housing. HUD rules state that there are to be NO PETS. None. But the management here has given us a little leeway, so long as we don't make trouble. If you have a pet and they are looking for a reason to get rid of you, they'll use the pet against you. Otherwise, you're fine. But they stand strictly by one rule: No Dogs. At all. Period. Unless you've got a damn good reason, and wanting a kyoote widdow puppy-doggie isn't a good enough reason.

So when I originally moved in here, my ex-roommate and I decided to adopt a cat that one of our co-workers had. She got the cat because she felt sorry for it, and then discovered that she's allergic to cats. Oops. So we ended up with the numero uno cool cat around: a depressed, sedate little black and white kitten who we dubbed Bucky.

(Why Bucky? After the Bucky Ball, of course. A Bucky ball is a ball of carbon atoms, that when modeled in a 3-D environment looks sorta like a soccer ball. We watched a PBS episode on Bucky balls right before we got the kitten. They used a little wind-up soccer ball with feet in the show. We thought it was brilliant. We thought the kitten's markings looked like a soccer ball's. Hence, Bucky.)

A few months later we discovered why he was so depressed (which made him cool, you know.) He was sick. He started getting fat, fatter, fattest until he looked like his little wind-up soccer ball namesake. Off to the vet.

Diagnosis: Feline infectious peritonitis. Prognosis: terminal.

Friday was the vet visit. Saturday he was fine. Sunday he couldn't move, paralyzed from the neck down.

We had him put down on Monday.

We'd only had him for a few months, but there was a wake. Friends came. My mom came. It was sad. I'd really liked Bucky, despite myself. I mean, he was a cat. A very cool cat, but still a cat.

Anyway, we had all this cat food left over. Since the house rules say that you can have anything but a dog, of course there is a plague of cats around. Lots of strays, some feral. We left some food out when we remembered to, and the cats started flocking to our place. (Do cats flock?) We started nicknaming them. The Siamese. Stubs. Cranky. Da-Pimp. And Jaws.

Jaws' full nickname was Jaws the Great White Cat, named after that oh-so-scary shark. She's pretty big, white, longhaired, and damn fluffy. Some of the neighborhood kids called her Snowball, which made me gag every time I thought about it. This was no Snowball. I once watched her square off against a tom cat twice her size. She kicked his ass from one side of the parking lot to the other. Snowball, indeed!

She was hanging around our apartment all the time, and I started to feel a little of my mothering instinct kick in when she was around. She was infested in fleas, so I sprayed her down and gave her a flea collar. No one removed it. I hung a sign in the complex office. No one took the bait.

At about 3:00am one snowy morning, I came down and found Jaws curled up against our front window, her little paws and tail neatly covering up her face. Her ears poked up out of a pile of snow, and more snow was drifting over her. I felt cold just looking at her. So I opened the door, swooped her inside, and locked her in a closet with some food, her water and a litter box.

After I was satisfied that she knew what a litter box was for (most of the time, anyway), I got her fixed. And that's how I ended up with an accidental cat.

Anyway, a few days ago I noticed that Jaws' claws are getting out of control. I wanted to give them a little snip, just to take the points off them for a week or so.

I didn't get the clippers anywhere near a claw. In ten minutes, she managed to tag me at least 6 times with her claws, and bit me hard three times. Why? She hates it when people touch her feet. If someone came into my apartment at that moment, they would either have called the ASPCA or 911. Between her yowling and my bleeding, some people just wouldn't know what to do.

Of course, that's nothing compared to the time we tried to shave her butt, but that's another story, kids.

She's snuggled up on my lap now, purring like a marital aid device, so I guess I'm forgiven.