“Danger’s my middle name” or “Things you no longer fear when you have a homicidal cat”

In the past two weeks, I have chased a tornado, gone into a house where a fire was being put out, cleaned my living room thoroughly and scheduled a doctor’s appointment.

In sequence:

The Tuesday before last, I showed off some ridiculous foibles to my coworkers.

1) Having been around medicine so long, I’ve absorbed a lot of useless facts. Regurgitation of said facts earned me the nickname Dr. Shafa. I always think of Dr. Dad when people say that, but whatever. Moving on. Maybe it’ll get me more pay.

B) In 1996, a 12-year-old me watched the movie Twister and was never the same. Ever since, I’ve become fairly obsessed with the weather. It helps me deal with the fact that I am downright terrified when it comes to severe storms. So when a patch of bad weather came rolling through the Pennyrile region of Kentucky on said Tuesday before last, I was the one who had six tabs on his computer open to the Web sites of the NOAA Storm Prediction Center, the Weather Underground Warnings map, the Paducah, Ky. NEXRAD radar feed, the Evansville, Ind. NEXRAD radar feed, the Fort Campbell, Ky. NEXRAD radar feed and the NEXRAD Mixed Composite Radar feed for the region. That’s why I was the one who said the tornado warning was coming before they even issued it.

Company regs at our paper say that if you’re in the building when a tornado warning is issued, you have to go into the basement.

“Let’s go,” said one of the photographers, a particularly gifted and insane man.

And so we went, heading out into the storm, cameras in hand and piling into his SUV to go head out to the southern end of the county to do and end-around on the storm and follow it back into the city, watching for any damage and potentially photo-worthy whathaveyou.

We made it out of the building and onto the road before the sirens kicked off and made it to a small side road on the south end of town, parking in a turnout and waiting for word over the police scanner we had in the car. I elected to stand out in the wind and rain just because i was too jumpy to do anything else. We never did see the tornado, since it was night and the rain was pretty thick, but a funnel cloud was sighted about two miles from us. The funnel cloud and storm ended up tracking right into town but never got low enough to do any damage, which is just as well.

Then, last week, I ended up going to the scene of a fire, where a photographer at our paper whose self-estimate of cleverness is WAY over-inflated captured this picture.

PICTURE FORTHCOMING ONCE I GET BACK TO WORK IS BELOW… Click for full size…

Just when I thought things couldn’t be any crazier, well… they got crazier. The source of this dose of insanity is, of course, none other than Cyrus the Cat (who must have figured out I was typing about him and decided to jump up on my lap right at this very moment).

Cyrus tends to like 9 Lives cat food, so I’ve been cycling him through the flavors. We were on beef and almost through the bag when he decided that his tummy wasn’t having it. He decided to make this known by means of epic flatulence (I’m talking 80-year-old bean-eating man-severity), diarrhea which stank up the entire house and anal leakage, which has forced me to launder my sheets and a blanket.

Following this horrific turn of events, Cyrus was placed in bathroom exile. There, he turned the bathroom into a veritable gas chamber, flung poo on the floor and on the tub and left nasty footprints EVERYWHERE, and out of spite (I’m fairly certain that’s why he did this) tossed litter all over the floor so it would stick to the bottom of my feet whenever I had to come in to use the john.

At about 3 a.m., I went in to check on him again, making it probably the 10th time in the day where I’d gone and looked at his butt to see if he was still producing this horror of an excretion. To my great surprise and joy, he wasn’t, and was thus released from exile while I cleaned the bathroom until about 3:30 (Thank you, Formula 409) and fell asleep at about 4. Then it was back up at 6:30 to take Cyrus across the street to the vet, where he clawed me and shed all over my sweater and generally was a grouch. This, I don’t hold against him so much since the last time he was at a vet, just before I adopted him, they took away two things I’m sure he would much rather have kept. But he walked away from this one without much more than a thermometer in the rear (he scratched me for it) and some pills which I’m going to give him should the Montezuma’s Revenge take up its nasty, downstream motion.

That’s all for now. My apologies for taking so long to update. I’m working on being more regular with the blog. Heh, regular. Bad kitty.

“Feeding the addiction” or “Paging Dr. Freud”

I held out as long as I could, but even this journalist’s iron resolve could not hold out against the temptation that lurked around every corner. I’m so very ashamed that I was only able to hold out for four months, but I was weak and I gave in.

I drank coffee.

The last cup of coffee I had before I moved to Owensboro was at the paper I was at this summer, and I was holding out pretty well, but when you sit next to the coffeemaker at work and drive past a Starbucks every day, how long can you hold out?

Like a true junkie, I am using every justification possible. I have a psychotic cat who keeps me up at night. I have insomnia on top of that keeping me up until 3-5 a.m. I’ve been drinking tea a lot, and coffee isn’t that much worse than tea, and caffeine isn’t THAT bad for you…

So I went to Starbucks this morning, hair with that just-slightly-mussed-I’m-not-hungover-I-just-want-coffee look and a crazed glimmer alight in my eyes. The lady at the counter was nice. Too nice. She had that “oh no, not another” look as she took my order (a grande – couldn’t go venti, too obvious). I smiled nervously as I asked for an extra shot of espresso on top of the two that were already in there (as I asked for that third espresso depth charge into my cappuccino I guiltily thought of the day I went on a four-Red-Bull caffeine binge right before my 9 a.m. class and was a twitching, raving mess until I crash-landed on the college paper’s couch at noon). She knew and I knew that she knew that I was a caffeine addict on the relapse.

My hands took on an almost DT-ish trembling as I took a sip from the caffeine-loaded cup and walked over to the counter and shook six Splendas into it. Then I replaced the top of it, walked out the door and took the first, sweet sip. I giggled a little to myself. The rush was on its way.

And so there I sat, waiting for sources to call me back this morning so I coud do a story on how breast-feeding mothers (YAY lactation!) really don’t have to avoid common-allergy foods, with my hands trembling and a tell-tale twitch running up the side of my face. My coworkers can all easily tell I’m loaded on caffeine, even if I did keep my thumb on the part of the cup with the tattle-tale “3″ under number of espresso shots on the side throughout the entire morning budget meeting. For now, it’s all good, I’m free as the wind and wide awake.

But I know that now the monster is out of the cage… And soon, I must fill my need for caffeine again… The hunger… THE HUNGER!

***

The caffeine overload should, nay, MUST explain what happened a short time later…

I was reading over the wires (still waiting for call-backs) and noticing story after story about the dangers of sexual enhancement drugs. I looked over at my boss, whose cube is a mere 10 feet away, then checked our archives. No stories on this topic. Ever.

I got up and strolled over to my boss and put on my professional pants voice.

“I was looking through the archives and we’ve never done a health story on the dangers of these sexual enhancement drugs,” I said, and then it happened, and the worst part was I saw my brain heading in the direction of this cliché. “I think we should because they keep popping up on the wires… Oh God…”

I could feel myself turning bright red and my boss, who has a good sense of humor looked at me blankly and said nothing, letting me soak in my embarrassment.

Then one of my coworkers piped up: “I think you just killed your story.”

She’s probably right. And maybe that’s a good thing… Heaven only knows what terrible Freudian slip I’d let fly in said story. Better to let sleeping dogs lie… Or something like that.

“I got no (Circadian) rhythm” or “Insomnia Central”

It is 2:30 a.m.

I am still wide awake.

I have absolutely no reason to explain why in the world this is going on.

I haven’t slept right in over a week.

My sleep habits have never been terrific. As a child, I was a habitual sleepwalker. In college, I went days without sleeping, the most notable being a 72-hour stretch after which I began hallucinating, dreaming up my first dog, my sisters’ dad and my stepmothers uncle (both of whom I called uncle), all of whom were dead.

I need sleep. Badly. Here’s hoping I can get some… Five hours and counting…