Leander is seven years older than Verbal. And they fight like crazy.

I adopted Verbal when he was three months old from a household full of animals. So he has made a lot of friends in his short life. He's easy to get a long with (when he's not annoying as hell), and he's hilarious. Leander spent her early life as a stray, went through some very stressful times when she was initially adopted by yours truly, and has led a relatively solitary life since then. But she adapts well to adventure (I've moved her 6 times in the five years I've owned her), and she doesn't let the uncertainty of her small life change her: an intrinsically sweet-natured girl. Nevertheless, when Verbal came along, I don't think she knew what to make of him.

Here was this fellow cat -- so similar to her -- yet quite different. He's always up to something. He wants to play with her, even when she wants nothing to do with him (sometimes especially b/c of that). And he will, at times, randomly race around the room. And she certainly loves him. Cats clean themselves for hours a day. But they can't always get behind their ears, and the tops of their heads. In quiet moments Leander will be laying on the couch and he'll flop down beside her and she'll patiently clean his face, while he lays, blissed out, his eyes closed.

Other times they don't seem to get along especially well. For no apparent reason she'll just swipe at him. They'll wrestle and fight, and get to really growling at one another, and I of course, can't help but wonder if they are hurting one another. And other times, he doesn't want anything to do with her.

I've considered giving Verbal back to the adoption agency -- mostly because of his tendency to get into shit he shouldn't. My hope is that he'll grow out of it, but even if he doesn't, it's gradually become a moot point. I don't think Leander would stand for it.

A couple of weeks ago, Verbal stayed the weekend with his foster mom (from whom I adopted him). By the time I got him home, Leander was quite restless and spent his first day back very vocally letting me and him know that this should not happen again. When they are apart, she misses him. They are bonded.

So he'll stay and they'll continue to adapt, grow closer, and send even more fur flying when they fight. But the wrestling is here to stay -- they just wouldn't be themselves if they didn't have one another to spar with, cuddle with and clean those hard to reach places.

"911, What's your emergency?" "Uh, yes, I've been locked inside a medical clinic, and I would like to go home."

OK, well, I was already mildly horrified while reading an article at CNN.com today about a woman who was getting a CT scan, and was then left inside the machine. Yeah. The technician forgot about her and went home. That's bad. That's bad enough. But then I read the following quote from one of the doctors who works there:

"People have been left in the office after hours, when something like that happens -- it's the same sort of thing," said Dr. Steven Ketchel. "My guess is she was lying on the table, waiting and waiting and nobody told her she could go home."

Oh, is that your guess, Dr. Ketchel? Your incredibly flippant guess? She wasn't just laying on a table waiting for someone to tell her she could go home. She was inside of the machine, screaming for someone to come help her. When she finally wiggled out from under all of the things attached to her and blanketing her, she found herself in a shut down, LOCKED clinic. Everyone had gone home, and she couldn't get out. She had to call 911. From a health clinic.

It really is Peachy Keen.

So there's a blog on Blogger called sweetcakes.blogspot.com.

And guess what? It's written by someone names Jess. Isn't that weird? I just discovered that. It's so weird. Go look at it and then come back.

Now, did you know that Gainesville and/or Indianapolis were hotspots for discovering musical talent, because I totally did not. I did, however, know that her baby cousin is super cute, or at least that he was in November of 2002. Honestly, he's not that cute anymore.

Flip the bird? Whatayou, retahdid?

Flipping the bird, flipping out over dead birds, throwing people in jail for using unconventional ads in admittedly poorly choiced locations. Ah, the world of post-911 when dealing with the out of the ordinary.

OK, make Turner pay for all of the man hours, etc, that were wasted by the overreaction in Boston to a blinking neon cartoon flipping the bird, but are we seriously saying that we're going to jail the ad guys who were doing their jobs? I won't even get into the fact that these guys are also artists and we're stepping all over their freedom of expression. What hangs me up about this? Is this: "Turner said the devices have been in place for two to three weeks in 10 cities: Boston; New York; Los Angeles; Chicago; Atlanta; Seattle; Portland, Ore.; Austin, Texas; San Francisco; and Philadelphia. As soon as the company realized the Boston problem, it said, law enforcement officials were told of their locations in all 10 cities." - AP reports

TWO to THREE WEEKS. In New York?! LA?! No reaction. The article even quotes an official in Seattle who was like, Yeah we took them down, but no one in our City Hall is claiming criminal negligence against a cartoon. Or he might have just said no one called 911 over them. Because they're cartoons.

In Austin we wigged when a bunch of birds died, but you didn't see us calling in the freaking Coast Guard over a CARTOON. Ok, we're not on a coast, and I need to chill about the fact that it's, you know, animated, but I think my point is still a valid one. This is ridiculous and Boston is just embarrassed that they went through all of this over an ad, and now they want someone to prosecute over it. It's wicked bs, and they need to pull the punch.

"I have a relatively good track record, sometimes I miss."

I always cringe whenever I see Pat Robertson's name in a headline, not just because he gives Christians a bad name, but because he's also quite the narcissist separate from any confessed beliefs.

But this "God told me this is going to happen" nonsense has got to stop. He's not freaking psychic. All he's doing is taking the current trend and predicting obvious outcomes.

Even if God were speaking to him, he wouldn't be telling him that we're about to get nuked; he would be asking him to zip it.

God [booming voice]: "Patrick. Patrick! Whoa, take it easy. You're going to give yourself a heart attack. Yes, Patrick, I know I've never spoken to you directly before, and you know that. But that's not the story everyone else is getting, is it? Pat, seriously, I'm going to need you to stop telling anyone who will listen that I speak to you. These folks are having a hard enough time these days without you trying to scare them, and in my name, no less. Oh, and tell Falwell to shut it too."

Yeah, I think God says "folks." You don't?

Anyway, this is my point. It's bad enough that we've had Pat and Jerry out there for the last twenty years muddying up the waters about what a Christian looks and sounds like, but if Pat's really going to try to say that we're psychic, now, I'm going to need him to share. If I have to put up with him being such a vocally public ass, then in return I should get to be psychic too.

God: "Jessica, I already told you where your phone was -- don't get selfish."

Ring, Ring. "Hello?" "Yeah, hi, this is God. You're a moron."

Wow. It's November. I don't know how that happened.

So I lost my phone this past week. I looked EVERYWHERE. Tore my apartment UP. It was not in my apartment. Searched and searched through my car. Emailed friends and begged them to look. And all the while, I'm trying really hard not to flip out. I'm just praying that God will somehow resolve this, even though I'm quickly getting to the point where I don't see how that's possible.

The last time I remembered having it was Sunday night. So I look for it Monday. Tuesday I really start to worry, because I realize that I don't have insurance on it and that gets expensive, kiddos. Looking. Looking. Looking some more. Frustration level's getting a little higher. Still actively NOT freaking out. Wednesday morning, I got out to my car to go to work (*I have a job, woo-hoo!*) and I climb in, thinking about that stupid cell, and, even though I know it's not in the car, I think to myself: "God, please just let it be in the car." I have no more than completed that thought -- the little cartoon bubble with the sentence, "God, please just let it be in the car" is still hanging in the air -- and I hear my phone start ringing. Somewhere in the car. Of course, then I still couldn't find it for another day, but that's more about me needing to clean out my car than it is about the fact that God has such an awesome sense of humor.

Wanna buy a kidney?

First off, my apologies to anyone out there who still might be checking in with me. I know I haven't had much to say for the last month. Looking for work is rough, and I'm not very pleasant company right now, so really I was doing you a favor.

I've been in Austin about four weeks now. I'm in an apartment, so Leander and I are not homeless, and I'm looking for work. Yes, that's right, I've been looking for four straight weeks. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "That's really not that long."

And you would be wrong about that.

It is, really, that long. When you think that you'll come in, sign up with a couple of temp agencies and be a phone-answerer-for-hire whilst you look for something permanent, and between the FIVE agencies you sign up with, you get two one-day assignments in four weeks, you realize that four weeks is, in fact, a very long time.

So basically, I'm being humbled, but I'm not yet humble. Translation: my moods are constantly fluctuating from ecstatic to be living in this wonderful town again to so despondent about never again working that I start surfing the net to see how much my kidneys are worth. Both kidneys.

In the hours that I'm not pounding the pavement for a cushy HR job, I've been rereading Anne Lammott's stuff. In one of her books (I think it might have been Operating Instructions) she talks about how during WWII, children in orphanages in Europe who had been abandoned or misplaced during all of the chaos would often have trouble sleeping. They'd been starving and lost, and now that they were some place warm, with food, they still couldn't sleep. So someone figured out a way to comfort them. They gave the children pieces of bread to hold onto while they slept. Not to eat, because they had plenty of food, but just tangible evidence that they were being cared for, fed and kept safe.

First of all, obviously, things could be so much worse. I can't find a job, but there are almost no Nazis in my neighborhood, and it's plenty warm in Texas in August. But I can identify with having trouble sleeping, anxiety and insecurity.

After reading this, the one permanent job that I have been able to find is working five hours a week on Saturday mornings baking bread at a local bakery. I knead dough, carry pans, man the counter. I love to bake, so this was a lovely opportunity in and of itself, but the divine appointment of this was not missed by yours truly. Anyway, it's fun, challenging, and most importantly, it's my tangible evidence that I'm being cared for, fed and kept safe.