If It Quacks Like a Duck, Walks Like a Duck, It Must Be Alan

As a kid, I once whined, cried, and begged my mom to buy me a pair of cowboy boots. She must have been having a hard time that day, because she actually gave in and bought them for me. I loved those things and wore them everywhere. Yes, I wore them everywhere, for about two days. The problem was and still is, that I have feet more appropriate for a duck than a human. My heels are narrow and The area around the ball of my feet are wide. After two days of being Cowboy Al, my feet were rubbed raw and painful blisters had formed on top of huge painful blisters.

I further degraded my feet as an adult, when I decided that spending the least amount of money for a pair of shoes was more important than buying shoes that fit correctly. For years I clomped around Chicago in ill fitting shoes, made in Poland of questionable materials. After years of bad shoes, my feet became more and more painful, and I found myself walking less and less. Even with the foot surgery I had last year, my feet still wouldn't be considered fit for use on most humans. I have actually considered having them cut off and then be fitted with those high tech springy, fake feet. I hear you can run fast on them.

Sunday, Mark and I went to the mall, and while Mark scoured Home Goods, and Marshalls, for more crap to bring home, I went looking for shoes. I don't like to shop for shoes with Mark, because he always tries to talk me into buying something fashionable, and I like to get what feels good. Unfortunately what feels good usually looks like something my grandmother would wear, and this time was no different. I found a pair of shoes that look awful, but on my walk around the block with Chandler this evening, I was glad I bought them. They felt good, and I'm pretty sure they don't make me look like Donald Duck.

The Warmth of the Sun

Last week it got down to thirty three degrees here at 'Casa de Alan', and I along with the rest of South Florida acted like the pussy's we are and bitched and moaned about the bitter cold. How, you wonder, did a guy who grew up in Chicago and faced temperatures in the -20 degree range become such a whiner about how cold it is in Florida? Like they say, my blood has thinned over the twenty years I have lived here. It is so thin that I wonder why it isn't just seeping out through my skin. Also, I was pretty much a pansy about the cold when I lived up north. That is after all why I moved here, to be warm despite all the crabby old people, loud New Yorkers, and rude French Canadians, who I have had to put up with these many years.

One reason the cold feels so bad here, is that I own an old house that was not built to keep out the cold nor to keep in the air-conditioning. The windows are leaky little slats of glass, that pass the air like an old man eating chili. Then there is the so called "furnace", which is actually no more than a glorified space heater with a high powered fan, that sucks up kilowatts of electricity at a fantastic rate.

The fact that we don't dress correctly for the cold, is another cause of our discomfort. Most of the year we walk around looking like bums in our shorts, tank tops, and flip flops, then suddenly one day the weather changes and we've forgotten how to dress for it. On the night I crossed over into Florida, twenty years ago, I took off my winter coat and threw it into a trash can. After all, I wouldn't ever need that thing again. I found out later that December, when the temperature dropped to twenty seven degrees on Christmas Eve, that I probably should have kept the coat. At least I have the fact that cold spells never last long here to keep my spirits up. This week the temperatures will shoot back up into the eighties, and I can put my heavy winter coat back in the closet for another few years. Hopefully the dog hasn't dragged my flip flops off too far.

Photo Friday

One degree from ice skating on my pool
(Thursday Morning, February 5th)

Video Thursday

At Sidelines in Wilton Manors Florida

Hazardous Waste Removal

(Photo courtesy of 'The Hostess', and her dog Simon)

It must be rough having a dog in a cold snowy place. No matter the weather, you have to take the dog out to go poopies. At best you have a dog run right outside the door, but still you have to convince Fido that he must go out into that frozen wasteland, and that you won't forget him. That's why some people only have a cat, a pet that poops inside like civilized people do. The only problem is they don't flush.

While I was out in Palm Springs, California for five days, I called home every day to make sure Mark was feeding the dog and that he was giving Carlotta the cat, her pills. My biggest fear was that I would come home to a house full of dead or starving animals, because pet maintenance is not one of Mark's strong points. What was most disturbing, was when I called, and Mark told me, "I haven't had to scoop the cat box all weekend. Chandler has been eating the turds and is keeping it clean.". This is the one thing I've been having a hard time communicating to Mark, Chandler is not a garbage disposal! I knew that Mark would not actually scoop out the kitty litter. That's why I kept my visit out west down to five days. Any longer and I would have come home to a mountain of kitty poop, and that odor that you can only get in a crazy cat lady's house.

I try to clean the cat's poop box out at least once a day. If you leave it any longer it becomes a major excavation project, and requires more than the little pooper scooper that I normally use. It's not too much of a job, but as I am removing the little cat nuggets and urine clumps, I have to ask myself, is letting an animal take a crap inside my house really all that civilized?

Things That Smell

I don't like perfumed things. I use unscented soap, unscented deodorant, and I insist on unscented detergent to wash my clothes. After years of breaking out in rashes, I finally figured out that it was the perfume in those things that made me look like a giant strawberry, and itch like I had fleas. I am so sensitive to perfumes, that if I walk down the detergent aisle in the super market, I usually have a sneezing fit so violent that other shoppers are running away, and mothers are throwing themselves over their children to protect them.

If I had to do without the unscented products. I would probably end up like the older lady I ran across while shopping the other day. She was a stinker, she smelled horrible. The smell was so bad that I gagged out loud, and much to Mark's embarrassment, I blurted out "What smells like goat crap?". I know it wasn't just me, because two young women walked by and visibly winced and held their noses. I felt like yelling after them, "It's not me, It's that goat woman over there!!", but I kept my mouth shut for fear of inhaling more of the stench. The worst part is that she was with friends, who obviously weren't very good friends or they wouldn't have let her out of the house smelling like that.

Lately, Mark has been using a new body wash. I have asked him to stop, because he now smells like my grandmother. Not that my grandmother smelled bad. In fact she had an odor of perfume, combined with the smell of chicken soup and Lysol, none of which are really bad. It's having that smell on Mark that's so disturbing. It brings back memories of being two years old, and my grandmother holding me on her lap, pressing my face against her large bosoms. I'll never forget looking into that cleavage and seeing her lace hanky stuffed down there. For years I believed that women's breasts were meant to be used for storage. It might explain a lot of things about me.

Grandma and Alan, sometime in 1950

Yummy, It Tastes Like Razor Blades

It was just about six months ago that I first saw a cute little puppy named Chandler at the shelter. When I finally got him home two weeks later, he was a wild, twenty five pound, biting, chewing, pooping, machine. Now, five and a half months later, he is a wild, seventy pound, chewing, biting, machine, thanks to Mark using him as a garbage disposal. At least the pooping in the house part has been eliminated. I still remember the folks at the shelter assuring me that "He won't be more than fifty pounds, max.". I have tried restricting him to just two cups of dog food per day, but the way he hangs around the dinner table catching all the food that flies while Mark eats, I'm sure he gets the equivalent of another two cups.

The biggest problem with Chandler, is that he will eat anything. While my last dog, Molly, could lick a plate clean of all evidence of meat, leaving peas and potatoes untouched, Chandler sucks it all down. Unfortunately his eating doesn't stop there. A few days ago he came trotting by, happy as could be, chewing away on something. I looked down and realized Chandler was eating one of Mark's discarded razors. I wrestled the razor out of his mouth, and checked for blood, all the while imagining the worst. Luckily his mouth must be tough from all the crap he has chewed up, and he was fine.

Later in the day I noticed him walking around, chewing away like a teenage girl with a wad of Bubblicious in her mouth. This time he was gnawing on one of my Breathe Right® nasal strips that I had left on the night stand. Yes it was used, which probably made it even more delicious and irresistible to him. But the worst was Sunday evening when I decided to pour myself a cocktail and watch a movie on television. At one point I put the movie on pause and made a quick trip to the bathroom. Upon my return, I sat down and reached for the cocktail. Gone. Nothing but ice and a few drops of liquid on the bottom of the glass. I wasn't worried about the effects of the alcohol on Chandler, he seemed fine. What really bugged me was that he drank the last of my vodka, and he didn't even have a hangover the next morning.