No Foolin’

It doesn’t seem much like spring from here, snow yesterday and very gloomy again today, but try telling that to the robins, who are swarming the back yard, swallowing every crabapple dropped last fall and knocking more out of the trees. There’s even a bunny in their midst, crawling its way across the apple-festooned yard that is slowly, ever-so-slowly, emerging from under its snow blanket.

It’s making for riveting Cat TV this morning, although we wonder how well Na Ki’o can see. His vet thinks everything probably looks fuzzy and cracked, like your iPhone screen. But he must see well enough to remain on this channel.

He only started watching because Marrakesh was already tuned in. Their dynamic is funny, and hard to figure out. Sometimes one wants to be doing what the other is; sometimes they are at opposite ends of the house. I have watched Marrakesh insert himself between (harmless) neighbor dog Brandy and Na Ki’o, much like a larger, protective older brother. But then I see Na Ki’o pounce on Marrakesh, as if to remind him who’s in charge.

I lied to you all, awhile back, even if it wasn’t intentional. I said Marrakesh had been with us for nearly four years, when it fact it’s been less than two. Although now, while they’re stacked side-by-side in front of their “TV,” heads turning in unison, they seem like they’ve been buddies forever.

It won’t last, though — they have different interests. For Na Ki’o, there are really only two times of the day: Food, and Not Food. If I get up, that might mean we’re shifting to Food, and he will leave Marrakesh’s side. In an instant. No qualms.

For Marrakesh, food is a far lesser thing, and he turned down a snack, as he often does, in favor of his window. Any window. But he sat on me twice yesterday, once even actually on me and not on the chair arm. In fact, he was so settled that I blinked first, because I was supposed to be cleaning my closet, not sitting with cats. I kept thinking he’d move, because he always does, but when he didn’t, I had to reject his offer of kinship.

To my surprise, Ki’o ended up taking my place, and there they both were, preventing me from sitting back down. Damn cats.

So it was off to my closet, and look what I found at the bottom of it:

This does not include the navy hightops and black low cuts I’m currently wearing (I was going to say “rocking,” but I’m not that hip), nor the red hightops lying in wait that I found on the closet shelf. Nor the bag of all the boring white laces that came with the shoes, nor the sets of colored laces I bought with the last two pairs of hightops, because laces are harder to find than you’d think.

(I ordered the laces and the shoes from the Shoe Box in Black Earth, Wis. I figured if I couldn’t shop locally here, I’d get them from the local dealer in Lynn’s hometown. But Converse has turned into one of those companies: if you don’t sell x amount, then you can’t sell at all, ensuring that only big-box stores will get to play. So I probably won’t be able to shop locally anywhere the next time I need Chucks.)

All right, I left this four hours ago to walk to work, figuring I could resume my train of thought once there. There wasn’t going to be an April Fool’s joke in this post — all those shoes really came out of my closet — but the joke was waiting for me at work, of the cruelest kind.

Our time-card program, which is very old, appears to have crashed. It tells me today is 4/1/19, but when I want to look at a previous pay period, it tells me that period is 4/1-4/15, and the current period is 4/16. So after starting the computer twice, and calling our on-line back-up company, I got not much of anywhere.

The Carbonite person inadvertently found the underlying Microsoft Access file, which has all the data, just in raw form, no nice mask with names and days all conveniently collated. The only happy part of this is that I had printed all but three of the timesheets, so I will only have to spend the afternoon putting together three time cards.

So it may have been a joke, but it’s not a funny one, and it is going to usurp anything else I might have had to tell you about my closet. Or Cat TV or anything else.