That sign says ‘Gibraltar Point, Centre for the Arts.’

It’s a retreat centre on the Toronto Islands, meant to give writers and artists space and time to work. My goal was to use the week I had there to finish up an illustrated middle grade novel I’ve been working on. It’s a serious literary work about a girl named Clara who likes to draw cartoons of Unicorn Cats.

Meet UniCat! She’s half cat, half unicorn, all awesome.

I had a long way to go to finish the project, which I received a Canada Council Grant for, so I was expecting my time at Gibraltar Point to be productive (and it was).

About 70 of the 80 or so drawings I finished, in addition to writing 6 chapters.

I figured it would be beautiful to watch the sun set from the island (and it was)…

I knew I’d love waking up to the sounds of birds chirping and ducks going “WAK WAK” (and I did)…

What I hadn’t bargained on, though, was the fact that, for the first time in my life, something about Gibraltar Point would make me feel like a REAL writer.

That sounds stupid. I know. For God’s sake. I have two books out and a third on the way next year. Doesn’t that make me a real writer? I guess, technically, but I’ve never truly felt legit. And, as far as I can figure out, this is why: Instead of being central to my life (although I love it dearly) writing has always fit into the cracks between everything else.

Sure I make time to write, but I do it while my son is napping on a Sunday afternoon if my daughter is busy watching My Little Ponies and the laundry is already done.

I sneak in half a chapter in the afternoon while the kids are at school if I don’t have paying freelance work and then finish it off after they’re in bed that night. When I have an actual deadline for an actual publisher, I make it a priority, of course, but it’s still always far from being the only thing on my plate. Even my writing space is a corner of the bedroom—-the one nook in our overflowing house that isn’t already being used for something else.

So to have a WHOLE week, just for writing fiction… and a WHOLE studio, just for myself…

My very own studio at Artscape!

Well… it was more than amazing. It verged on life changing. It made me realize that it’s not the publishing contracts (although those are nice, don’t get me wrong)… or the occasional letters from readers (which I love… hint hint… you should totally write me a letter) or even the number of good or bad reviews I get on GoodReads… The only thing that can make me feel like a real writer is giving myself space and time to write.

And while, for me, (like for most writers I know) it will likely always be a fine balance between writing and other paying work and my kids and my husband and all the other people and things I love, I know now that I need to carve out a little more time that is untouchable and belongs only to fiction. In short, I need to take myself seriously as a writer, even when the thing I’m currently taking seriously is something kind of like this…

UniCat uses her cunning ways (and a squeaky hamburger toy) to defeat her arch enemy, Poodle Noodle, the balloon animal poodle.

So, thanks Artscape, Gibraltar Point. Thanks VERY much! Come hell or high water or piles and piles of laundry or whatever other stuff I need to do, I’ll be seeing you and the ducks next year.

What you probably don’t know, though, is that I OWE MY VERY LIFE to the perfect pen.

When I was writing Rhymes with Cupid, I actually stole that detail about Patrick and his pen from my parents. They met in their early 20s. My mom was working at the bookstore at Carleton University in Ottawa, and my dad, who was an engineering student at Ottawa U, wandered in one winter’s day to warm up his hands.

He saw my mom at the cash register and, to get her attention, he started to line up all the ballpoint pens in the pen section to see which one had the most ink in it. Smooth move, right? I guess so because a few years later my sister was born, and 18 months later I came along.

So even though my parents have long since divorced, I guess, for me, pens and romance will always be related.

Which brings me to my point!

In honor of Valentine’s Day–which is fast approaching–I’m proposing we let all the dopey, pastel pink, badly rhymed Valentine’s cards sit snugly in their little card cubbies, and instead, we spend our money way more wisely by giving each other the gift of the perfect pen.

“Valentine-schmalentine! I want a pen!”

HERE’S HOW IT WILL WORK:

If you want to take part send me your mailing address privately at info@annahumphrey.com with the subject line ‘PENpals’ by FEBRUARY 10th at the latest.

Then, I’ll send you somebody else’s mailing address (which you will, of course, promise to use only for PENpal-related purposes).

After that, you’ll go out and spend less than $5 buying what you think is the PERFECT PEN—The kind that that makes a crisp, razor-thin line… Or the really juicy kind where the ink flows across the page like warm caramel sauce. You know. Whatever does it for you pen-wise… and then you’ll mail that pen to the person whose address you got.

MEANWHILE, I’ll arrange for some random other person on the list to send you their idea of the perfect pen.

Basically we’ll all get an AMAZING new pen and the whole thing will be amazing. You in? It’s easy. Remember, send me your address privately (not in the comments) at info@annahumphrey.com ,subject line ‘PENpals’ then watch your mailbox.

Sorry. That was a lot of bold text, underlining and exclamation marks. I can’t help it. Yesterday my husband and I took our kids to the Toronto Monster Jam and, apparently, trucks with improbably large wheels get me all excited.

Trust me, I’m maybe more surprised about this than anyone.

In a general day-to-day way, I’m a super quiet person. I can hardly even stand it when someone in the house has music on upstairs and someone else is watching TV downstairs. I hate macho shoot em’ up movies and gore and destruction of all kinds… so why would I want to pay to be nearly deafened by 12-foot tall, 1500 horsepower, 5-ton trucks that cause MASSIVE DESTRUCTION.

Ummmm…. because they’re AWESOME!

Ever since I can remember I’ve been equal parts fascinated and appalled by them from a distance. They’re so weird and macho… not to mention over-the-top wasteful.

Then last year I watched my first monster jam on TV, mostly by accident. We were flipping channels and my then-18-month-old son caught sight of the trucks. Like most little boys, he loves things that go, and “big truckses” are his favourite.

I started watching for him that day, but before I knew it I was perched on the edge of the couch with my heart in my throat. You guys, if you haven’t seen it…. I can’t even really do it justice with words. Needless to say, when they started showing the ads on TV this year, I knew we were going.

And the monster trucks did not disappoint.

All of them were INSANE…. with flames that shot out their hoods and wheels the size of beds. And the whole thing was ridiculously wasteful. Forget the cars they rolled over! By the end of the freestyle round, half of the monster trucks were so badly mangled that they had to be pushed off the course by bulldozers.

But before that happened…. it was nonstop thrills. There was this one called the Grave Digger. It rolled over this stack of crushed cars like they were pebbles, then it sailed, like, a million feet up and floated there FOREVER with its wheels spinning in midair before it landed with a bounce on one wheel and reared up like some kind of unstoppable beast.

It was nothing less than monster truck poetry. (And yes, I actually just wrote that.)

All day yesterday, I was trying to figure out what was up with my extreme enjoyment of all this engine revving and car crushing. Then my son cleared it up for me.

Long after I thought he was asleep I heard him in his crib, flipping the pages of his 2013 Monster Truck Souvenir Yearbook, which is filled with pictures of tripped out trucks catching ‘huge air.’

“Lookit dat one go!” he would exclaim, and then turn the page and gasp.

“Lookit DAT one go!” he would say again, with even more awe.

And, really, that’s about as close as anyone could ever get to explaining the appeal. The only thing I can add is “Heck yeah!”

Proof: She really did have the snubbiest nose. Don’t you want to eat it right off her face?

The fact that she was 10 months old meant that my mat leave was almost up, and it was nearly time to go back to work. Hence the hopelessness.

It wasn’t even that there was anything THAT bad about work, really. I was a communications coordinator for a nice not-for-profit organization. I had kind co-workers and sometimes there were free cookies in the lunch room.

It was just that my baby’s cheeks would no longer be within kissing distance… and, what’s more, I was going to miss the free time her general nappiness gave me to write. (Because besides having a snubby nose, she was also the nappiest of babies.) I’d been working on a book while she slept (which later became Mission (Un)Popular) and even though it sounded like a CRAZY idea and everyone knows you can’t make money that way, I thought I might try to get it published.

I also thought I might start a business, doing consulting on the side. But, of course, that was also CRAZY, because everyone knows that saying “I’m a consultant” is just a fancy way of saying “I’m unemployed.” And anyway, I didn’t even have all the stuff I’d need to get set up…. like business cards and a website. My writing desk—one of those cheap things from Ikea that you screw into the wall—had actually crashed to the floor several weeks before when I tried to put the sewing machine on it, so I didn’t even have a desk…

And it was right in the middle of an internal dialogue of all that doubt and excuse-making that I saw it.

Sigh. So pretty!

It was sitting at the end of the lawn in front of someone’s house, calling to me.

“Do you think someone is throwing this out?” I said, passing my hand once over its smooth surface, noticing the way the worn wood dipped down at the corners.

“Maybe,” my husband answered. I glanced nervously at the house. The lights were off and nobody seemed to be home, but could they really have meant to throw out such a lovely thing?

I guess I’ll never know for sure…. but I do know that my husband took one end, and I took the other, and then we ran. I also know that finding that desk on that night changed my mind… and that changing my mind changed my life.

To the owner of that house, the little white desk with the silver star handles was (probably) a random piece of furniture that they didn’t need anymore… but to me, it was a sign.

I had a desk!

I didn’t know if that book would sell or if my business would take off… but it gave me the guts to take a giant leap and find out. First of all, for myself, but also for my snubby-nosed baby. And I’m SO glad I did because, if I teach my daughter nothing else valuable in life, I will at least have shown her how important it is to follow your dreams and to take chances on yourself (even when taking those chances involves possible furniture theft.)

Have you ever been faced with a tough choice and felt like the universe gave you a nudge (in furniture-form or otherwise)? If so, I’d love to hear about it!

________________________________________________

Today marks the (23nd) anniversary of the Montreal Massacre–a very sad day in Canadian history. In 1989, an armed man walked into Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal and shot 14 women, for no other reason than because they were studying engineering, which, in his mind, made them feminists. I was 10 at the time. What I remember most about that night was coming downstairs to find my mother sobbing while she watched the news. I didn’t get it. I asked if she knew them. She told me she didn’t, and then I really didn’t get it.

They were always showing terrible things on the news. Bombs went off. Kids got abducted. Murders happened all over the place and my mom never cried. So why was this news story any different?

As the years passed, my mother took me to candlelight vigils every Dec. 6 and I listened to the 14 names being read out. And every year the reality and the horror sunk in a little more. I was 17 the when I wrote these 14 poems as part of a creative writing assignment. I went to the library one weekend and read microfilms of the Ottawa Citizen from the days following the massacre. And when I read the details with my own eyes, from my now (mostly) mature point-of-view, I felt sick. I realized how terribly young these 14 women were, and how they were killed for no reason other than that they were women.

I still didn’t know much about them personally, but I decided to write each of them a poem that would not only help to record the terrible events of Dec. 6, but also reflect the fact that they were each unique women whose lives were cut much too short. Most years, on this day, these poems seem to turn up somewhere on the Internet, but I’ve never actually posted them myself until now.

14, As More Than Just a Number

For Genevieve Bergeron, 21
Because you bled one week of every month.
Because you wanted to build bridges and towers.
Because you weren’t at home dusting the den.
Because, for no reason.
Because “The gunman suffered a brutal upbringing”
Because the world has gone mad, gone sad.
Because you were there.

For Helene Colgan, 23
At 5:30, the paper says,
on Dec. 6
he began to roam the halls
hunting humans
with two ammunition belts
criss crossed on his chest;
a semi-automatic,
and a knife
and his eyes – cold
and his hand – steady
And in the paper they quote,
“It was just like Rambo.”
But what would you say, Helene,
if you could say?
Probably just
that it wasn’t fair;
that Rambo
only shot
the bad guys;
that your gunman
was shorter,
much scrawnier,
and no kind of hero.

For Nathalie Croteau, 23
When he spat:
“feminists,”
like a dirty taste
from his mouth
you were the only one who said ‘no’
You said, “We aren’t.
Not the kind who protest
in the streets.”
Probably your last words
Probably not quite true
Not the kind who protest in the streets
But in the classroom.
The kind who would challenge,
the kind who would speak up;
try to save thirteen women
and herself
when everyone else
had lost their words.
Brave Nathalie
in coffin #8.

For Barbara Daigneault, 22
Later, they talked about the men
and the guilt
He was smaller than me,
I could have jumped him.
Could have
Should have
Would have
Could have been the hero
Should have hit, kicked,
slugged him hard,
sprayed a fire extinguisher
in his eyes.
Would have, if only
I’d thought of it in time.
Could have bashed his teeth out
Should have thrown him through
the wall.

For Anne-Marie Edward, 21
21 is very young
only 17 + 4.
21 should be camping in the Gatineau
Backpacking, hitchhiking,
meeting the man of her dreams
21 drinks cold coffee and works
late into the morning, on drafts
of a paper
she really should have started
last month.

21 drives with her music
turned up loud
and worries where
she’s going
with this life of hers
and whether or not
she can pay off
the phone bill
21 thinks often of a house
in a quiet neighbourhood
and a wedding dress
with a nice head piece
or veil
not too fancy,
and not too soon,
but not so very far off either.

For Maud Haviernick, 31
(Quotes taken from the Ottawa Citizen)
“The man who killed 14 women on Wednesday had trouble relating to women and
couldn’t
keep a steady relationship.”
“No way,”
you might say.
“Well, then… it’s okay.
Was he beaten as a child?
In high school, was he wild?
Was he reckless? Was he tough?
Did he just need more love?
Or was he bullied? Did they taunt him?
Did they pants him?
Did they punch him?
Did his mother make him bad?
Was she absent? Was his dad?
And how is it no one saw it?
no one caught it?
no one thought it?”
“He had difficulties in expressing his need to love and be loved. He was a very
troubled
individual, who suffered a brutal upbringing.”
“No way,”
you might say,
“well then…
it’s okay.”

For Maryse Leclair, 23
It didn’t seem any different
when his alarm went off
at 6:30
like every morning
just like it does
every morning
And when your father
read the newspaper,
put on his uniform-
when he secured his gun
in the leather holster,
how was he to know
he would walk
through his daughter’s blood
towards her killer
lying shot through the head
in a third floor classroom?
All in a days work.
All in a days work.
All in a days work.
Not today.

For Anne-Marie Lemay, 27
You were just an Everywoman.
Nothing personal, Anne-Marie.
You were Everywoman
who turned her back,
Everywoman who wouldn’t let him
buy her a drink,
take her home,
take her in his arms.
Everywoman on the street
wearing a business suit
and heels
Each one he thought
was laughing at him.
If he’d known you were one woman
One woman who liked
to ride her bicycle in the spring,
who sometimes woke up
late at night
with cravings for sea food,
who wore red
Converse running shoes,
who liked to bake
and sometimes
liked to hike…
But it was nothing personal,
Anne-Marie

For Sonia Pelletier, 28
Your body was found underneath a cafeteria table,
trying to hide
just like you used to duck behind the sofa,
conceal yourself in the closet
with your feet in a pair of boots
and a jacket wrapped tight around you
Ready or not
here I come
like you used to hide your tooth brush
so when eight thirty came
and you wanted to stay up
you could waste time
searching,
then ask for a glass of water,
another kiss goodnight,
one last hug.
Exactly like they told you to do
in event of an earthquake.
“Sit in a doorway,”
they said,
“or under a table.
While the floor shakes
and the drywall cracks
around you
you should be safe there.”

For Michelle Richard, 21
Sort of like grade school picks
for baseball,
or a dance
with the boys on one side
and the girls
on the other.
And for awhile you thought
it was a joke,
some trickster;
some friend of someone’s
making an ass of himself
because it was the last
day before Christmas exams
and time
for some fun.

For Annie St-Arneault, 23
On Thursday night
they brought in
the maintenance crew
to paint over the bullet
holes;
repair the walls and
ceilings;
scrub away the
blood and bits.
And Friday morning,
were you to walk through,
you’d never guess.
You’d never even guess.

For Annie Turcotte, 21
Probably not how you imagined
your funeral
On an icy day with
3000 plus in attendance
And 14 hearses
gliding past
with white numbers on their sides
and all in a row
1 and 2, 3, 4
And a sunken-cheeked woman on the street corner
holding her daughter’s hand
and
5, 6,
7, 8
and the daughter not understanding
9, 10, 11,
and
12
13
14
saying to her mother,
‘Why are you crying,
if you didn’t even know them?’

For Barbara Marie Klueznick, 35
A three page letter,
dated, ‘Wednesday’
signed, ‘Marc’
meant to explain
meant to make it
make sense
and we could call him crazy,
and try to forgive
and we could call him ‘full of hate,’
and hate him right back
and we could fall to the ground
and cry ourselves to dehydration
and we could start a candlelight vigil
and we could be afraid
and we could learn self defence
and practice kicking a man in a marshmallow suit
and yelling the word ‘no’
We could, and we will
but it will never
bring you back

For Maryse Laganiere, 35
and the flags flew
at half mast
and the city was in shock,
and the country
and the men
were afraid
for their lovers
wives
daughters
and the streets
were a little quieter
while your family
and your sisters
looked everywhere
for why’s.

Because I run a small (i.e., one person) business, I somehow got added to a mailing list for this amazing catalogue that is really meant for people who manage offices with many employees. I’m talking about the kinds of companies who ship and receive things using heavy duty shrink bundling film and order staplers in bulk. It warms my office-supply-geek heart… and, for your gift-giving (and/or receiving) pleasure, although it was a hardship, I’ve gone through all 506 pages to choose the ten best office supply gifts of 2012. Are you ready?

“Flashy metallics on the outside, protective bubble on the inside.” Oh my God. You know you need these as much as I do.

This is maybe not technically a gift, but ANYTHING you wrap in this stuff will automatically be fierce.

If you love regular Sharpies (and who doesn’t?) imagine how much you’re going to love the MAGNUM Sharpie. If I used this to write on my roof, I’m pretty sure the words would be visible from the moon!

Do you have a problem with people always coming into your house and freezing your penguins. Well… have I got a solution for you! These handy international safe-handling labels come in rolls of 500.

I have no use for these, but part of me wants to order them just to see the look on the letter carrier’s face when she brings them to the door.

It’s not a very long commute from my bed to my desk, but if I owned one of these, I’d get to work even faster.

It’s air! In a can! Why? I don’t know… but it made me laugh.

I don’t know exactly what I’d tape yet, but if someone got me this for Christmas I’d be SO happy.

You guys, this is no ordinary label maker. This is a TWIN TURBO label maker–meaning you can print two labels at once. Yeah. I knew that would blow your minds.

Just stop for a moment and imagine the possibilities.

And, with that, I wish you a great holiday season. Here’s hoping your stocking overflows with Post-it notes and gel ink rollerball pens.

Seemingly pointless drawings of random objects connected by many arrows.

“Why?” you may be asking. It’s a good question, and the answer makes me so happy.

Back in the spring I was asked my Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers to write a book for 7-12 year olds. It’s about a 9-year-old girl who loves to build Rube Goldberg machines. “What are Rube Goldberg machines?” you are wondering. You’re JUST FULL of great questions today!

A Rube Goldberg machine is a machine that uses a borderline-stupid number of steps to perform a simple task—-just because it’s fun to do it that way.

So say, for example, you wanted to stick a letter on a stamp. You could lick the stamp using your tongue and apply it to the envelope… OR…

1- You could start a marble rolling down a ramp.

2- When it reached the bottom, it could land on a springboard.

3- The marble could bounce off the springboard and hit a lever that would release a sponge on a stick.

4- The sponge on a stick could go swooping through a dish of water.

5- After it swooped through the water, it could swish across the back of the stamp, moistening it ever-so-slightly.

6- The sponge on a stick could then hit a release switch that would drop a brick.

7- BAM! The weight of the brick falling could stick the stamp to the letter like no stamp has ever been stuck before!

And THAT is a simple Rube Goldberg machine.

I call it the Lick-o-Matic. There is no patent pending.

It’s also why my summer work days have been such a blast. Can you believe somebody is paying me to have this much fun? Me neither!

In any case, the book (which will also be illustrated by a REAL illustrator) is due out in the spring of 2014. It sounds ages away, but it’ll sneak up on me, I know. And, for now, the draft of the manuscript is complete and is off being reviewed by the editor, so it’s back to real life for me.

Coincidentally, I’m off to run some errands and mail some letters now. And, to save time, I’ll be sticking the stamps on the old-fashioned way. Boring, right? Oh well. Life can’t be ALL springboards and sponges on sticks, now can it?

Have a great day, everyone!

Anna’s tree in Anna’s yard.

And then I picked the berries and made them into tarts.

Yardtarts.

I even had this idea that it would be really excellent to eat the yardtarts in the yard, underneath the tree where the berries grew, but my husband pointed out that that might be a little cruel… kind of like eating bacon in front of a pig. So we ate them on the porch. And they were delicious.

THRILLING, right? Okay, maybe not so much… but you’ve got to admit: there’s something undeniably cool about growing something you can eat and then eating it, isn’t there? My next project is an apricot tree. I’ve already planted five pits.

Apricots in progress.

And even though, right now, they’re doing an excellent impersonation of an empty pot of dirt, if we all just BELIEVE HARD ENOUGH, I know they’re going to grow. I’ll keep you posted!

But wait! That’s not all!! Exciting fruit-related news aside, I also have EXCITING book-related news… except I can’t share it just yet. Sorry. That was awfully anti-climactic, wasn’t it? God! WHY do people do that?! Like, if you can’t say what the news is, WHY BOTHER TELLING PEOPLE YOU HAVE NEWS in the first place, right? Sigh. You hate me now, don’t you? I can hardly blame you.

Anyway, I swear… I will tell you everything just as soon as I’m able. And, until then, I’m off to watch my dirt.

Have a great day, everyone!

Did you know that sloths hang from trees?

She’s been doing a rainforest unit in her senior kindergarten class, and I guess they read some kind of sloth book.

“Oh, yeah, sloths,” I said with great authority. “They live in the water, right?”

She looked at me like I was on drugs.

“No, Mummy. They hang from trees!!”

“Really?” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

And, really, I didn’t. My complete knowledge of sloths up until that point had been a vague sort of suspicion that they were mammals, and that they were kind of slow, or lazy… or something like that. I think I had them a little bit confused with manatees, to tell you the truth. You know those big flubbery animals that hang out at the muddy bottoms of rivers and eat all day?

This manatee is NOT a sloth.

“How do they get into the trees?” I asked, really interested now.”Can they fly?” I was pretty sure they couldn’t—-but I wasn’t positive.

“No, Mummy! They climb! And they make a cradle out of their bodies to swing their babies in.”

“Seriously?!” I said. “I never knew that!”

“Yes you did,” she said accusingly. “You knew that!”

“No, I swear, I really didn’t,” I assured her. “You know WAY more about sloths than I do.”

And then she gave me this look, and I could see the realization hit her like some kind of life-changing tidal wave: MY MOTHER DOES NOT KNOW EVERYTHING! Really, it was kind of major. And when the news had washed over her, she was left looking extremely proud, but also a little bit afraid–which was EXACTLY how I was feeling.

“Do you know anything about bats?” she asked… and luckily I knew a little bit about bats, so I was somewhat redeemed in her eyes.. but not entirely.

Can you remember the exact moment you realized your parents weren’t all-knowing and all-powerful? Personally, I can’t (and I’m still inclined to think that, even if they don’t know EVERYTHING, they really do know most of what matters).

I have to admit, though, that being on the other side of that discovery was both really really humbling, and really really cool. It got me thinking about how much my little girl is going to see in her life, and how much she’s going to know that I never will.

Not to brag or anything, but she’s a really smart kid. She can already read—-at 5!! And she’s almost as good at math as I am (which doesn’t say much about my numerical abilities, but still…) I can forsee that she’s going to surpass me in every way possible…

And don’t get me wrong. I think that’s great. I hope that she learns and learns and learns, and grows and grows and grows. I just also hope that, even when she’s become a world class mathematician/sloth expert, she’ll still need me, at least a little bit. And that she’ll come home once in a while to fill me in… about advanced math theories… or sloth mating habits, or whatever… even if all I can do in response is nod my head and say “SERIOUSLY? I never knew that!”

It’s been a slightly sucktastic May over here, which is my excuse for the prolonged silence. Well, that and the fact that I’m not good at blogging regularly to begin with.

The month started with a nasty stomach bug that landed me for a short stay in the hospital, followed by a series of kids sick with the same thing (although, thankfully they didn’t get quite so pulverized by it).

But now I’m pretty sure that we’re all going to live after all, the birds are chirping, the sun is shining, and I’m sitting in my summer front-porch office eating Girl Guide cookies while the cat naps in my son’s stroller.

The front porch office. Sigh. So sunny.

All of which leads me to say… HELLO!

And, really, that was about all I wanted to say today. Well, that and, does anybody want some Girl Guide cookies? We have a whole case, and I haven’t had the time or energy to rope our relatives into buying them.

If not, no worries. I suppose I’ll just eat them myself. I lost about 15 pounds in all the stomach flu fun, which I really should gain back. When you think of it like that, they’re practically medicinal cookies.

And then, when I’m done eating, maybe I’ll go take the cat for a walk for some exercise… or something… because THAT won’t make me look especially crazy at all.

What the heck you lookin' at, lady? You never seen a cat in a stroller before?

And, with this mostly pointless post completed, I am off to write now. Have a happy day, everyone!