Don't wanna be a cat dude.

Everyone has heard the jokes about a Cat Lady.  You know, the lady who lives alone and has a whole mess of cats?  When I picture a cat lady, I imagine a crazy and disheveled looking older lady who wears knit sweaters, has messy hair, no make-up, and probably smells awful as well.

After a quick shoulder and legs workout at the gym tonight with Ikaika, I came home and crashed.  I was walking like Frankenstein, and could barely lift my arms (because I did so many).

In case any of you are wondering, the resemblance is pretty uncanny.

After a quick shower, I headed upstairs to make a delicious taco dinner for one, which was delicious by the way.  As I finished eating, I realized that How I Met Your Mother airs on Monday night, so I hurried and pulled up the latest episode on my laptop.  My apartment was just a little chilly, so I put on a sweater, grabbed my fuzzy blanket, and stretched out on my awesome couch so I could watch my show.  Right about then, Sassy, who is Preslie's new cat in case you were wondering, jumped up on my lap as well.  I was fairly relaxed and content, and reached over to get a nice swig of apple juice.

That was when it happened.  That was when it hit me.

I have become a cat dude.

I'm 31, and I live alone, or at least when Preslie isn't here, that is.  I am wearing a sweater, I have a beard, and I am sipping  on juice minus the gin, and I have a cat.

WTF???

I immediately became self-conscious about this, and tried to rationalize that it wasn't so bad, because I only have 1 cat.  And I'm certainly not throwing cats at my neighbors or anything like that.  I'm still cool, right?  This isn't the start of the end for me, is it?  I'm not going to be alone forever, am I?

Who am I kidding?  I didn't think that much about it or even care for that matter.  I just watched another episode of How I Met Your Mother.

Witch Hazel

First of all, let's get one thing clear.  Pay attention to your body.  When you are working out at the gym and something starts to really hurt, and your body says, "Perhaps now is a good time to stop..", then perhaps you should listen.  I have a bit of a problem with knowing when to quit.  Especially when I am working out, and am in the middle of a set.  If I set out to do 12 reps, then be damned I am going to do all 12 reps.   This is when you need to pay attention to your body and know your limits.  Take tonight for example.  I was doing a seated curl at a Hammer-Strength preacher station, and my left bicep started to hurt.  And it wasn't hurting in a good way.  I was on my third set, and on about 7 out of 12 reps when suddenly I felt something tear deep inside the bottom portion of my bicep.  Immediately I started to drop the curl bar, but then ended up squeezing just at the bottom and over-extended my bicep.  Basically, my arm bent too much at the elbow and sort of bent in the wrong direction for a brief moment.

Now hear is where my stubbornness plays in.  At this point, I had this deep tearing sensation that went down my entire bicep and into the majority of my forearm.  It hurt pretty bad, and felt even worse if I just let my arm hang at my side.  I should have stopped, and been done with it at that point.  Stubbornness prevailed, and I continued on, as I still had 2 more tricep and 1 more bicep exercise to complete.  I tried to justify continuing on by rationalizing that perhaps I just needed to stretch it out and keep it moving to keep it loose.  This was not the case.  Now it seems to hurt even worse.  Imagine that.

So what does witch hazel have to do with any of this you may ask?  I will get to that.

After leaving the gym, I was thinking that a nice hot shower with the hot water running on my arm would feel fantastic.  That's when I remembered that I needed to swing by the store to get some more soap, and perhaps some new face wash.  Adult acne decided to pay me a visit, and I have had a couple random pimples pop up this last week.  As much as I enjoy looking like I'm High School kid with a beard at 31 years old, I decided that I should get a new face wash.

I popped in to the store, and started to collect what I needed.  When I came to the skin care section, I had no idea what I should get.  I stood there like an idiot and checked out some of the different options. Finally I settled on getting an astringent of some sorts.  I had just a few options.  For who knows what reason, I ended up grabbing Witch Hazel, as it was a more or less natural astringent that claimed to not cause dryness, as well as being safe to use with all skin types.  That seemed good enough for me, so I walked back to the front of the store to check out.  Lucky enough for me, the shortest line also was occupied by a cute checkout girl.  I made the obvious choice, and strolled up to make my purchase.

Dove Men's Care Bar Soap.  Q-tips.  Witch Hazel.

Cute Checkout Girl started to ring up my stuff after giving me a brief smile, but then stopped with the Witch Hazel.  She held it for a few seconds, then started to read the bottle.  "Witch Hazel, huh?  What is this for?"  Then looked up at my face inquisitively.

"Apparently it's an astringent......for washing your face."  I replied.

Then she looked up at my face, and her eyes searched around my beard for some signs of acne.  I could feel my face turning red.

"Have you used it before?" She asked me without cracking a smile.

"Nope." I blurted out, feeling a little bit embarrassed.

"Do you think it will work?" She asked again with a concerned look now.

"I guess we'll find out.  Perhaps I'll come back next week and you can tell me if you see any improvement."  I kind of laughed after saying this, as I was being sarcastic.  I hurried and swiped my debit card, and then she smiled awkwardly and put the stupid bottle of witch hazel in the bag with the soap and Q-tips.  I gave what had to have been the most awkward smirk of a smile, and then rolled my eyes.  She laughed and then handed me my receipt and bag, and stammered out, "Well I guess I'll see you next week then.."

And smiled.

And that my friends, is exactly how you do NOT get a girls number.

The End.

So this is how I'm going to go....

This last weekend was my scheduled weekend to have Preslie.  On Thursday night, her Mom sent me a text that the storm was pretty bad up in Farmington, and she wouldn't be able to meet me like normal.  We agreed to try to meet up on Friday instead, weather permitting of course.  On Friday, I had a lot of errands to run, but luckily enough for me, I have a pretty awesome boss who was cool with me popping in and out of the office that day.  Especially since he had apparently been snowed in up in Bountiful where he lives.  He claimed that they got over 3 feet of snow overnight.

I had made an appointment to get my windshield on my car replaced by a mobile tech on Friday, but due to the sub-zero temperatures, I ended up having to bring my car in to their shop.  After getting that done, I went over to my friends shop to get my Safety and Emissions testing done, and then off to my favorite place......the DMV.  I've been to hell, I spell it.......I spell it D.M.V.  Once that was behind me, I was able to get back to work.  A few hours later I headed over to my Optometrist to get my eyes checked again, and order another pair of frames.  I updated my prescription, lenses, and got another brand new pair of Ray Ban frames for $10.  Gotta love having good insurance!

After that was done at about 5:45pm, it was time to head up to pick up Preslie.  Her Mom had texted me again to say that the were snowed in, and once again, she could not meet me.  I was not, however, going to miss my time seeing my Squeak, so I decided to just drive all the way up there to get her.

When I first got on the freeway down here in Utah Valley, it was definitely snowing, but not too bad.  The freeway was clear, and I had decent visibility.  Before too long I was behind 3 really big snow plow trucks, which were blocking all the lanes as the they drove at about 45 MPH and were spraying some sort of sand and salt mixture on the ground.  I had my windshield wipers going, and had to frequently spray fluid to clear the gunk off that continued to cover my brand new windshield.  Finally, the trucks broke formation to allow a passing land in between the two on the left, and I took the opportunity to get past them.  As I accelerated to pass them and started to come up between the two trucks and pass them, my windshield  wiper fluid froze.  It happened so quickly that I didn't really have any time to think about it either.  I was approaching the point of the mountain, and within 3-4 seconds, my windshield was completely covered in a mixture of salt, sand, snow, and ice, and I could not see a thing.  I couldn't even make out lights through my windshield.  My heart started to race, and I could feel myself starting to panic as I continued to hit the button for more fluid to come out to no avail.  As fast as I could think to do it, I rolled down both of my front windows and stuck my head out the window to try and see.  It was single digit cold, snowing pretty hard, and I was doing about 60 MPH or so with no place to pull over.  The trucks had plowed the snow off into the shoulders on both sides, only leaving the lanes to drive on.  It was in that moment that I thought, "Well........I'm certainly up shit creek now."  I couldn't slow down, as these two large snow plow trucks were right behind me, but I couldn't see anything ahead of me either.  I kind of shrugged to myself in the car and said out loud, "So this is how I'm going to go..."  My mind was still racing and I started processing the reality that Preslie wasn't going to have her Daddy anymore, and she would be sad.  Then I started to worry about how much life insurance I was going to be leaving her to take care of her and that sort of thing.  All within the span of what had to have been just 10-15 seconds at most.  Just at that moment, a semi or other sort of large truck passed me on the right side and hit some sort of wet spot which splashed a little bit onto my windshield.  Just enough that I could run the wipers and clear about a third of my window and see a bit.      And it was over.  Just like that.

I continued driving the rest of the way to Farmington, as I was able to see and enough snow had fallen by then that I was able to clear my view.  I also didn't want to stop and end up getting stuck behind those trucks again.  Passing over into Salt Lake Valley was an immediate change.  The snow was sticking on the freeway, leaving only 2 thin trails for tires in each line through the white snow.  I passed several cars who spun out directly in front of me, and also a few accidents where cars had lost control and slid into the median or other cars.  All the while, no car was doing more than 40 MPH.  As I passed  downtown Salt Lake City, the snow got heavier, and the tire trails became more faint.  I was starting to  realize that making this trip probably wasn't the best of ideas.  Nevertheless, I continued driving until I made it to the Farmington exit at Lagoon to get to Preslie's Mom's house.  I came to where the exit should be starting, but only saw snow which I had to plow through.  There really wasn't an exit.  Only snow.  By now, I had shifted into the lowest gear on my Saturn Vue, and was still barely chugging along.  Their house is right up against the Mountain, as high up on the benches as it goes.  As I pulled onto the driveway that leads up to their house, I noticed a lard mound of snow that was easily about 20 feet high, apparently the end result of plowing the driveway earlier.  The driveway leading up the hill to the house had about a foot of standing snow on it, and I could not see over the snow through my windows on each side as I drove up the hill either.  There was easily a good 4 feet of fresh snow.  I was only annoyed by this, as it proved that Preslie's Mom was telling the truth......for once.  How annoying.

I picked Preslie up, and drove back home, but we didn't get back to Orem until around 9:30pm.  The drive back wasn't nearly as bad.  Preslie held my hand and was pretty excited about all the snow, but mostly about seeing Sassy, her cat, once we got home.  When we did finally get home, I was more than ready for bed.