on your journey, i will bless you...

Excuse Rebecca while she gets some grumpiness off her chest. This is a list of things I'm sick of lately:

1. TV spots for Savages. They show them pretty constantly on USA (where I watch old NCIS episodes) and A&E (where I watch Storage Wars).
2. We're scheduled for inventory, which is always a headache, at work tomorrow. My managers have all been talking and stressing about it non-stop. I hate the word inventory now. But not as much as I'll soon hate back-to-school. Ugh.
3. The smoke smell in one of my purses. I got it from my cousin. Most of the time, it's not noticeable unless you shove your face inside it. But I keep making the mistake of putting a change of clothes in it, and then my clothes end up smelling like smoke! Ugh! I'm going to flush that smell out soon.
4. Our new stocker at work. He seems to find any excuse he can to talk to me. Within a few seconds of meeting me, he asked me if I wanted to go to the movies with him. (Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter? No? How about the new Spider-Man movie?) Ugh. If this keeps up, I'm going to talk to the manager about it.

And now onto happier news... As of tomorrow, we'll have had Tovah for one month! One of the reasons Sara and I picked her from all the cats at the animal shelter was that she's so skinny. (The last time I was at JC & Co's, I held their cats and the difference was amazing. I couldn't feel all their bones!) We've been trying to fatten her up and have offered her bits of just about every human food we eat -- pizza, cheese, ravioli, oatmeal, fish, beef, etc. But she never really ate any of it, she just sniffed. Remember how in the Ramona books, her cat was named Picky-Picky? Yeah, that's Tovah.

Then we made the mistake of giving her a slice of turkey. I've never seen Tovah gobble up anything so fast. Now she comes running every time she hears the refrigerator open (even if she's asleep in the next room!) and meows pathetically, like she's never been fed a day in her life. It's annoying, but we've started putting bits of turkey on top of her cat food, and she finally seems to be eating more and gaining a little weight. Hallelujah!

And for no reason, here's the trailer for a recent (2010) French biopic of Serge Gainsbourg. If I could find a version with English subtitles, I'd love to see this.

What a Monday it's been. I woke up at six this morning with a terrible asthma attack. My albuterol inhaler recently got lost ran out, and I had ordered a refill, but by the time I got to the pharmacy yesterday, it was closed. So, I had nothing. Worst of all, I had one of the God-awful Christmas songs they play at work stuck in my head! So I put on my Sound of Music CD and read Davita's Harp until I dozed off again two painfully wheezy hours later. (I'm still amazed I was actually able to go back to sleep at all, considering how bad my breathing was.)

Then I had to get back up at nine to get ready for work. At least I wasn't wheezing anymore when I woke up. One of my co-workers was sick -- although she actually came in and tried to work before she almost puked, which I admire -- so we were short-handed, and the insanity hasn't slowed down since Black Friday. We were so busy that it took me forever just to get to my locker and root around for 86 cents to buy a Snickers bar (I had forgotten to pack a snack to eat). Since I had no inhaler, I took a full dose of asthma medication last night, which gave me a headache for most of the afternoon.

When that was finally over, I went to the pharmacy and picked my inhaler, which fortunately was only $30. One of my medications is $30 and one is $80, but I can never remember which is which. Then I went by the Dollar Store and spent my last bit of cash on Draino, Cheeto's, and one can of French-fried onions to eat raw make more green bean casserole with. (It was my last bit of cash because I forgot my paycheck to take to the bank!) For some reason, it didn't turn out as well as the ones I made for Thanksgiving, and even though I meant to make it go for two meals, I just finished eating the whole thing. Oh, well.

And did I mention that we didn't see the sun once all day today? Nothing but depressingly gray, overcast skies. Bleh!

But, two little pick-me-ups that made a bad day so much better. Weird how messages like this sometimes come just when we need them.

• E-mail from Mr. G: "In Boston right now and it's so cold! Hope I get to c u Friday, been too long."
• Text message from Athena: "I miss u! Hope we can get together next time I'm in town, I'll b home soon.

P.S. Oh, and one more pick-me-up for the day: NCIS's Cote de Pablo on the cover of Prevention:

 HOT DAMN! Isn't she gorgeous? I'm drooling.

A cat has moved into our stairwell. He is gray and very lean, and we're calling him Graycat until Sara comes up with a real name (which I'm sure is only a matter of time). He's very friendly, and he and Sable actually get along, which is a nice surprise because the vast majority of cats Sable encounters are either moody bitches who'd just as soon scratch his eyes out as look at him, or wimpy bitches who scratch his eyes out to hide how scared they are of him. Anyway, Graycat is nice to have around, although he's probably mad at me right now because I picked him up while wearing my iPod and he got tangled in the headphones.

A really bitchy customer came into our store today. He was a middle-aged man pushing himself around in the store rascal, looking for a printing calculator and being really rude to the stocker and tech guy who tried to help him. One of them actually warned me, "Watch out for that guy in the rascal, he's a douche." (Sidenote: Whenever I see lazy bums like him using the rascal, I'm always tempted to tell them, "Excuse me, but that's for old and disabled customers, and you're not old or disabled. You're just fat." Yeah, I'm a bitch, I know.)

The cool part of the story is that when the guy finally came to my register to check out, he called me baby. Which, most of you know, I hate. I was about to tell him my usual response -- "I don't see any crying infants around, so I don't know who you're addressing as baby" -- but I just gave him my best Bette Davis deathglare, and the man started stammering and apologizing. Fuck yes.

It made me feel like Gibbs when he caught Palmer sitting in his chair, and Palmer like to have shit his pants. Don't you love how Rebecca can relate everything back to NCIS? I spent the rest of the day humming this song.

Tomorrow I'll be borrowing Grandma's 50-year-old cake pans (no lie) and baking my birthday cake! I really hope it turns out well. I'm also making my favorite punch -- ginger ale with lime sherbert -- which Sara says is "something Mormons would drink because they can't have liquor." The hell?

Summer is on its way out now, though it's still plenty hot and will be for a good while. Our store hasn't quite reached the full-pitched insane fervor of Back-to-School, but we're getting there. I had a nasty encounter with this mom buying school supplies on Friday. The pinpad happened to have frozen that morning, in the middle of ringing up a $600 tech service. I had turned it away from the customers, but this woman reaches over, turns it around, and freaks out because she thinks we're charging her $600. I said something like, "Your total is blah-blah, that pinpad is broken, please don't touch it," and then she really hit the ceiling. She started complaining to everyone but me (her kids, my co-worker, the manager) about how I had "fussed at" her, and inbetween she glared at me, and I know she expected me to apologize. But I didn't say anything, so she said, "I hope you like your job," and left. What was that supposed to mean?

Yesterday evening I went to Grandma's house and pulled up most of her old brown tomato plants. Then we ate dinner and watched Elvis. I was supposed to go over today and pull up the rest of them, but I'm a lazy bitch. Instead I went to Mom's house and watched Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix with Adam. I hadn't seen that movie since it was released. I think it's the best movie of the series so far. The us-versus-them mentality between the students and the ministry was well-done, and it made for a lot of action and excitement. HPB, by contrast, was more exposition, explaining about Voldemort's past and everything, which got a little boring. (But it's not the movie's fault; it usually falls to the second-to-last installment of a series to set things up for the big finale.) In OotP, you knew exactly who the bad guys were: Umbridge, the Ministry, Voldemort. But in HBP, things got murky, and the bad guys came down to the ever-ambiguous Snape, who may or may not be evil, and the Horcruxes, which are no more than inanimate objects.

On a closing note, Eva's birthday is at the end of the month. I'm planning to make her another YouTube video, but I'm not sure what song to use. I had been thinking about "Just a Little Girl," but now I wonder if it's not too bad-ass for a 12-year-old. Suggestions, please?