Bad Parenting

If your cat is making weird coughing noises and trolling around the kitchen sink acting like she's scrounging for any scrap of food she can find, it might be because when you put her water dish in the dishwasher three days earlier while cleaning the house, you forgot to replace it. Poor thing. And I don't even keep my toilet lid open. She at some point would have just keeled over.

Then there's the epic power outage/freak early snow storm from a couple of weeks ago. I'm not proud of how I handled it, in that after only 2 days without power or heat, I was on the verge of a total collapse. But let me set the scene for you. Having just gotten home from work (after getting a ride to and from the office because I couldn't get my car out of the garage) to find the house still dark and freezing cold, I spent no less than half an hour trying to battle the three upstairs smoke alarms and figure out which one was beeping. It would have been comical to have seen it, although I can't remember a time in recent history when I've been so frustrated. Even after eventually replacing all three batteries, the beeping continued. This was physically impossible. Near tears, I texted a friend who came to get me, fed me dinner, and let me sleep on her couch in a nest of blankets belonging to her 4-year-old daughter.

But back to Clementine, whose only access to warmth during these days was the down coat I left behind for her, stuffed with hand warmers in the pockets and sleeves. "She's a cat," everyone would say. "She's fine." But that doesn't mean she was warm. Bottom line: I'd probably be reported to CPS were I an actual parent.

Oh, and the beeping? Turned out to be the carbon monoxide detector that was out of batteries. It's floor level, and without any light in the house, I guess I forgot it even existed. There's 30 minutes I'll never get back.
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