Day 1 of my mad dash towards The Organizational Promised Land…

When Brad and I first got together, he was on tour about 8 months out of the year.  I never gave this a second thought because we were in a constant “honeymoon” period, and I’m forever busy as hell and am pretty into my personal space.  Don’t get me wrong, I love sharing personal space with him- but my personal space is kept on a very short leash, and all items that exist within it have very specific designated places.  I get annoyed when this is altered.

Over the years, Brad has been touring less and less because he wants to stay home more.  I love having him home- but the more he’s home, the more my tightly-run-ship of a household turns to anarchy.  And it makes my head spin.  I’m going to spill a dirty-Brad-secret and divulge that he is MESSY!!!! MESSY MESSY MESSY MESSY MESSY!!!  Crumbs and socks and dirty dishes and piles of clothes and trails of spilled coffee and random objects scattered as far as the eye can see.  Sorry Brad, my darling- but it’s true.  Sully is a pigpen too- but he’s 11, so his brain is still in the making and I can mold it into what I want it to be (or at least as far as this subject is concerned).  But my dear husband is a lost cause with the teaching of “new tricks”, and he sincerely doesn’t see the mess around him- so I have given up trying to rectify these negative behaviors and now I just work with it.

How do I work with it?… I do the best I can to clean up what he doesn’t see as a mess when he’s in town.  But the moment he leaves for tour, the “White Tornado of Immaculate Fury” (ie: me in a manic frenzy) hits our house and makes it all better.  Brad left this afternoon for a 2 week tour with Intro5pect as their stand-in guitarist, and the moment he was gone, the madness started.  It resembles “spring cleaning” while on speedballs… and it doesn’t stop until every inch of our house is scrubbed down to the point that it can endure another few months of  Messy Boys until Brad leaves again.  Room by room I go through EVERYTHING top to bottom, scrubbing and dust-busting and organizing and discarding until I make it better.  Purifying the house of Messy Boy Demons and turning it back into a Kristen Sanctuary.  The kitchen, garage, and bedroom were tackled today.  Tomorrow the living room, dining room, and bathrooms.  Monday is the guest room, closets and cabinets.  Clean and purge, clean and purge, clean and purge- and purify.  Then bask in it.  Amen.

One thing I’ve been concerned about with Brad going out of town was my sleep walking.  I don’t like the idea of wandering around the house in the middle of the night without another adult there to supervise that I’m not leaving the house or doing anything destructive.  So to prepare for this I started a little experiment last week, and have been tying one of my feet to our bed frame before I go to sleep.  Each morning I wake up with my foot still tethered to the bed, and Brad says that I didn’t get up.  Who knows if I tried to get up, but since I don’t think I could manage redoing the intricate restraint system that I set up with my leash while in sleepwalking mode, I’m pretty secure in the fact that I stayed put all night.  I’m pleased as punch that this has worked so far- but I’m just waiting for the night that I get up and fall flat on my face (because if a stupid accident is to happen, we can all be sure that it will happen to me because I’m apparently part cartoon character).

On a final note, I had a dream the other night that I was trying to stick a 2 headed puppy in an envelope- and failing miserably at my attempts at this.  Here’s hoping that I have a million more dreams just like that, because it was hilarious.

Off I go to bed, and I hope that tonight I have dreams of this little guy because he’s my new best friend:

*Poof!*

Destructive kitten forces vs. Psychic Premonitions, and some icky dream imagery to boot….

I have lots of sick and disturbing dreams.  Lots and lots of them.  Usually I’ll wake up from them and have to laugh, because I’m not sure how my brain comes up with this stuff when it’s trying to rest.  And other times I’ll wake up completely disturbed, and wondering if there is something truly wrong with me.

Last night I had a dream that our old and befuddled Oscar cat got out (all our cats are indoors cats).  I looked out into the backyard (which wasn’t the backyard we have now, but a huge lawn surrounded by woods), and I saw a bunch of kids torturing Oscar.  Pulling out his fur, poking his eyes… horrible stuff.  But here’s the part of the dream that made me sick to my stomach…. I grabbed a huge hammer off the kitchen counter, ran out into the backyard screaming like a warrior and killed the children, then grabbed Oscar cat and ran with him back into the house.  In my dream, I killed children with a hammer… and not in a cartoony way…  but in a really bad way.  I didn’t like this dream.  I woke up feeling like something in my brain had totally crossed a line, and it really needs to apologize.

So this afternoon, I went into the kitchen to make Sully lunch.  We have big windows and a sliding glass door that lead into our backyard. I glance into the backyard- and there are all the cats…. minus Oscar.  I look at the sliding screen door, and it was off it’s sliding track and lodged open.  I run into the backyard and start swooping up cats.  One after another until they’re all safely back inside… but still no Oscar.  Sully starts searching the house while I search the backyard for him. Nowhere to be found.  Oscar is really old, totally senile (he gets disorientated and confused easily), and has really bad joints so he can’t jump or run anymore.  He’s the one that CANNOT get out because he wouldn’t be able to defend himself.

And then I remember my dream.  And I hear the sounds of the neighborhood kids playing in the culdesac, and I get a little freaked out.  Sully and I are running up and down the street calling for him, I’m repeating over and over in my head “no matter what, don’t get a hammer”.  We eventually find him down the street in a neighbors yard unharmed.  But I found the lost-cat-dream and the lost-cat-a-few-hours-later interesting, and I was glad that horrid neighborhood children being smashed into jelly wasn’t a part of the dream that was played out.

After we got all the guys back inside, we found out how the back door was opened.  It was Daisy.  Our 4 pound tiny cat was repeatedly taking a running start and jumping as hard as she could onto the back screendoor until it got knocked off it’s track.  She’s crazy smart.  I’ll come home to find all my drawers opened and emptied onto the floor, she can open doors and scale anything.  We already had to replace one screen door because she figured out how to pull the screen part of it out and climb through the opening it made.  She’s a crafty little asshole.  And today she organized a prison break.

But senile old Oscar is back at home, safe and sound…. and no children were killed in the process.

And Daisy is under strict supervision.

Old man Oscar and his best friend Sluggo during daily cuddle time

Daisy, the destroyer of everything

Sleepwalking, part 2 (picking apart last night’s adventure)

When Brad got home tonight, he was telling me all about the state the house was in when he found me curled up in the livingroom in the middle of the night after last night’s sleepwalking adventures… and I think I figured out what I was trying to do- or at least during last night’s journey (who knows what was going on in the previous ones).

I had a dream last night that our black Lila cat had an evil twin.  This is me & Lila:

The Lila-twin was thinner and a little smaller, and for some reason I was terrified of it…. terrified in that way you feel when you’re a little kid and you’re sure there is something horrible in your closet. That pit-of-your-stomach panic, where you feel nauseous and afraid to move.  The other cats would hiss and run whenever this Lila-twin peeked it’s head around the corner, and I was convinced that it was set on killing Sully while he slept.  I knew the Lila-twin was hiding around the house, and caught glimpses of her slithering out of cabinets and running under furniture, getting closer and closer to Sully’s room… and I HAD to stop her.  That’s really all of the dream I remember.  It seems really benign when I type it out… but I get that sickly feeling in my stomach when I picture that cat in my head somehow sliding out of the tiniest cracks of slightly open doorways and cabinets like she was made of ink.

Brad told me that before he found me in the middle of the night last night, he wandered through the house looking for me.  All the kitchen cabinets were open, and the furniture was moved around.  The huge couch that he found me sleeping on was pushed across the room up against these big cabinets blocking them.

So my sleepwalking last night had a purpose.  I was trying to find and destroy the evil child-killing cat.

I’m not sure which is more unsettling to me… blank-stared purposeless wanderings around the house in a sleep-state; or acting out imaginary scenarios rolling through my subconscious in a fugue-like state.  Probably the later.  Brad says he’s terrified every time he wakes up in the middle of the night and I’m not in bed, and he has to go hunt me down.  He’s not terrified of me having left the house, to roam the neighborhood in my pajamas…. he’s terrified that I’ll come lunging from around the corner with a knife- blank-eyed, hair hanging in my face like the little girl from “The Ring”.    I have lots of violent  and gruesome nightmares- so if I’m now starting to act them out, he’s afraid he’s going to get sliced-and-diced.

He better start being really nice to me… or he might just wake up one night with me standing over him with gardening shears.  Mwhahahahahahahahah!