Halloween Planning and the Return of a Beloved Gym Mystery (with pics)

Right off the top, I want to apologize for the sudden scarceness of posts on the site. No, I didn’t get too “Hollywood” for this blog, despite what the buzz on the Internet may say. The actual story is that it’s late September which means I’ve been in full-blown preparing for Halloween mode for the last … I don’t know. July? Since July. All of this planning and such has finally begun to eclipse my devotion to my other favorite pastime: writing nonsense on the Internet.  

                Some years I handle my spooky season business a little bit better than others. This year not so much. I’ve got three trips to the hardware store invested into my Halloween costume (making a T-800 arm, dressing as Arnie from Terminator: Genisys). I’ve also got some designs worked up in my brain for new homemade outdoor decorations. It’s just, it’s a lot. I don’t want to say planning a wedding was easy compared to planning Halloween … so I’m just going to leave it at that. Hahaha kidding … or am I?

                Anyway, so even though blogs are light right now I still love you all to bits and pieces. And that is precisely why I felt it was imperative to interrupt my Halloweenings to share this news with you.

                So, remember my classic blog post from August 29 entitled “Gym Mysteries: The latest and most adorable new chapter?” Here’s the link in case you don’t. The long and the short of it was I walked out of the gym one morning and saw a cat napping in the rear window of a car. This sent me off on fits of wild and rampant speculation about the true nature of the car’s owner, life in general and cat’s place in it, etc. Then I didn’t see the cat anymore, Halloween took over my life and that was that. 

The high-risk, high-reward world of horrible parenting

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We should probably get this out of the way right off the top. Parents of the world: I have no interesting in kidnapping and/or murdering your children! None!

But if I did (and I don’t), I can assure you, you made it very easy for me.

I volunteer at a cat adoption center. Basically, I clean cages, let cats run around in this little room and just have fun with the kitties for a few hours every weekend.

The adoption center where I volunteer is located off to the side of a large, chain pet store, but I’m not affiliated with said pet store in any way. I wear no uniform or name tag while I’m there.

One side of the room is all large cat cages, the other side is almost all floor-length windows, so shoppers can look in, see the kitties and hopefully find one to adopt.   

How does me being nothing short of an animal-loving hero tie-in to me not kidnapping and/or murdering children?

In my two plus years volunteering there, I’ve noticed one thing: Parents all secretly hate their children and want nothing more than to get away from them, even if it’s just for a few minutes – even if it means sticking them with a complete stranger in a mildly isolated tiny room.

Ladies and gentlemen, that’s where I come in. Meet the complete stranger.

I can’t calculate the number of times parents have dumped their kids in the adoption center with me and then just plain disappeared for huge chunks of time. Hell, why pay for a babysitter when a weird, uniform-less, name tag-less, greasy-haired guy in a pet store can totally do the same thing for free?

I mean, that’s just good business. Miserable parenting, but awesome business.

I’ve had parents knock on the glass to be let in, send in their kids and then watched the adult vanish like a teen-aged runaway, leaving me to entertain the kids.

Incidentally, this phenomenon is significantly more common around Christmas time, which I guess makes sense because if your kids are dead in a ditch somewhere, you don’t have to buy them Christmas presents.

So again, business.

My Cat Week from Hell or How I spent $500 on a Halloween Costume

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Being paranoid is expensive.

                You might not think it, what with the usual isolation and aversion to leaving the house, but it’s totally true. Just go ask any one of those “Armageddon prepper” people who keep getting TV shows on deep cable for some reason.

                Retrofitting SUVs to run on human feces and training your dog how to run a CB radio both cost a lot of money. A LOT.

                Now I’m no prepper. I have no discernible skills that would be in any way useful should society go belly up. Unless writing business-to-business newsletters and complaining about things on the internet plays a bigger role in post-apocalyptic American than I’m forseeing.

                So why prep? I’m the guy at the beginning of the zombie movie who gets hit by a car while crossing a street as he’s running away from a zombie. You don’t need to prep for that. You just need to enjoy the ride until that Prius slams into you at a cool 60 mph.