See, this is why we can't have nice things.

My mom and dad had to give one of their cats to the Humane Society this week. Cooper wasn't exactly a people cat to start out with, but he'd been picking on Simon (the oldest cat, who's a total sweetheart) to the point where Simon would shit on the carpet in the living room rather than go upstairs where Cooper usually hid. My dad got sick of seeing Cooper treat Simon like that, so it was off to the Humane Society with Cooper. This is my mom we're talking about, though -- she wasn't letting the cat out the door unless she called the Humane Society and made sure they had families lined up who'd take him.

I think Cooper is a lot like Otis was before he came down here. He's just not the kind of cat who deals well in a house with six other cats. Otis was a victim up there, and Cooper was kind of a bully, which I think is why my mom didn't send him down to my place. They both need to be in one-cat homes, you know?

The others up there are more laidback. Two of them, Spencer and Tucker, are total social butterflies. Seriously, if there's a party going on, they HAVE to be downstairs. Spencer just because he adores people and is insanely friendly (I've never seen him go upstairs when there's company ... he loves new people), but Tucker because he's positive that if there's a roomful of people around at least one of them there will want to play with him with his favorite toy, which is this string on a stick. He's friggin' hopeless. :)

My favorite's George, though. George was the last kitten we got before Riley and he grew and grew until he's now the size of a linebacker. It's great, like having another love seat. It also means he's ridiculously cuddly. He hates when I go up there because as soon as I see him I want to pick him up and squeeze him like crazy.

But ... yeah. Cooper's gone. I want to say he'll be missed, but since he rarely if ever came out of hiding it'd be hard to miss him. And seriously, he'll be better off somewhere where he's not overshadowed by the six other cats who actually like people.

*****

The other night at work during a smoke break, in a discussion with a co-worker who also writes:

Co-worker: What are you doing?
Me: Planning out one of my stories.
Co-worker: Dude, don't plan it out. If you don't know where the story is going, then the reader doesn't know where the story is going.

Uh, yeah, okay. I can't do that. Well, I can, and I have, and it turned out stupid and needs ludicrous amounts of rewrites.

The thing is, my idea of planning out a story isn't really all that planned out. I come up with the idea, I write up a handful of the first few scenes that spring to mind, and I string them together. And sooner or later I get a story.

*shrugs*

*****

My thread at the epilogue meme.

So about that stringing-together-scenes thing ...

I just did this in the name of plotting all of the books I've got planned.

1. Taped a long piece of brown shipping paper on the door to my living room.
2. Labeled a bunch of sandwich baggies with the names of each book.
3. Taped the baggies onto the paper in nice neat rows.

This way I can write scenes at random -- REALLY random -- and just drop them into the correct baggie as I come up with them. Man, I hope no one comes over to my apartment right now so I don't have to explain this to normal people. Heh. :)

And now I really want a cherry limeade Slushy. *sigh*

EDIT: You know, I was looking out the window just now and saw another person in Crocs, and I know they're comfy as hell but there's a part of me that's sworn never to wear them because they look so much like that and not a damn thing like this.

So I'm watching VH-1 ...

I'm not the only one who wants to reach through the screen and smack every single one of those guys every time there's a commercial for The Pickup Artist, right?

I mean, I know I'm not, but still.

I kind of want to use a two-by-four with a rusty nail through it.

I was watching the Top 40 Reality TV Moments before ...

... and I almost forgot how much this clip from Trading Spouses creeped me right the hell out.