Remember back in December when I started this cockamamie Ask June idea, and I told you all to direct your questions back at the original post from December? Do you have any idea how many &$##&@ questions were back at that site? And I had to SLOG through them, and keep track of which ones I answered and such, and man, was it getting annoying.
So tonight I went into Typepad and gee, do they ever make it convenient to go back into December to delete comments.
[Obligatory Henry photo.]
They start at today's date and only show you 50 comments a page, and you have to SCROLL to the bottom of each page, hit "older," wait 470 years, get 50 MORE comments, hit "older" again, as you GROW older, and finally after you've grown a Rip Van Winkle beard that has wedged itself into a log like in Snow White and Rose Red you finally get to the December 18 comments and I am telling you what.
So to make an agonizing story longer, I am saying that I went back and deleted all queries that were already querieied, and yes that is so a word, and I will answer all the leftover questions that are still on there, but from here on out please address all your Ask Junes right here. Under this cute picture of Henry.
Let's have another one before we begin, shall we?
Seriously. Who is ludicrously cute? His eyes are turning green, I think. No more baby blue kitten eyes pretty soon. Crap.
Conveniently, Sarah B. asks, "How many cats is too many? My husband thinks 2 is enough and 3 is a crowd. I tend to disagree."
As many of you know, Marvin has often told me that if I bring a fourth cat home, I might as well name it Divorced White Female. And the part where we have three is kind of a fluke, too. Let's face it, three tips you over the edge into crazy cat people.
See, when I met Marvin, I was 31 with two cats. And that appeals to any man. But somehow I reeled Marvin in with my Mr. Horkheimer and my Ruby, who was just a kitten.
Marvin had never lived with cats before, so the first year we were together I'd hear a lot of "OW!" from the other room. He did not catch the cats' subtle body language telling him to KNOCK IT OFF with the petting their fur backwards or rubbing the base of their tail or whatever annoying thing he was doing, and he got a lot of the scratches that first year. But still, he would say, "Cats are fascinating!"
Marvin used to like me a lot. So had my thing been collecting my own urine in tear collector bottles he'd have said, "Your urine is fascinating!"
Anyway, we'd been together a year when we found two-week-old Francis hanging off a vine in our backyard, having been abandoned by his cat mom because he was NUTS and she was trying to let NATURE TAKE ITS COURSE but ohhhhh no. Not with old cat woman around! So the plan was to nurse Fran to health by bottle feeding him and teaching him how to pee and stuff and if you think you can give a kitten up after you have done all that for him. And it was MARVIN who didn't want to give that lunatic creature up and here he still is in our house in a special padded room.
And you notice that both Mr. Horkheimer and Ruby are dead, but we keep replacing the cats to keep our quota of three. So Sarah, technically your husband is probably right, but once you get started on three, it seems normal. Which is probably how people with 19 kids feel, too.
Bell chimes in with, "What was Marvin's job before he became a teacher? And has he ever been on the cover of Rolling Stone?"
Right before he was a teacher, Marvin had some boring-ass computer job that paid a lot of money but totally wasn't him but was hard to give up because it paid a lot, kind of like prostitution. Cause man, do I ever know what that's like.
But before he did that (and he did that for six or seven years), he was a sound mixer for the movies, which means he recorded the dialog. It doesn't mean he created the sound effects, which for some reason is what people always think.
Don't ask me why he gave up that perfectly cool job to go work at a computer/prostitute job. At the time he said the sound mixing jobs were getting harder and harder to get, and he wanted something more reliable. Or something grownup like that.
Yes, he met a lot of celebrities. And no, he was never on the cover of the Rolling Stone. Gonna get my picture on the cover. Gonna buy five copies for my mother.
Bambi asks, "How do you hang your toilet paper--rolling toward the front or toward the back against the wall?"
Do you have any idea how bad I want to make the obvious joke about why a deer even needs toilet paper? Can you imagine how sick Bambi must get of deer and/or Walt Disney jokes? So I will abstain. Bambi, I prefer it so it rolls toward the front, but I am generally in a state of duress when I am putting it on, so I kind of also don't care.
Once Oprah timed how long it took to replace the toilet paper roll and it takes seven seconds. Time it once, you'll see. Seven seconds. And yet you know everyone in your house tries not to be the one to replace it.
Poor Winston never gets any pictures of himself in this blog anymore, now that the KITTEN gets all the attention. He is shipping himself out of here. That is IT.
Mary asks, "What hair care products do you use daily???"
Apparently this is very important to Mary, as it required three question marks. Do you think Mary wants hair as pretty as mine? Let's take an impromptu shot of my calm hair. It rained today, so this could be good.
Mmm-hmmm. Yes, Mary. Perhaps you are wondering so you know what NOT to use.
I will tell you what I use. I use everything on earth to weigh it down. Recently I was getting my color done and two women asked my hairdresser, "What can I use that won't weigh my hair down?" and I was aghast. I would hang free weights off this mess if I could.
So I use serious conditioner every day, then a leave-in conditioner (yes, really), then some sort of cream or gel, then sometimes a serum. And LOOK at it!
Carrie writes, with just a hint of despair, "June, I am writing to you in desperation! A week and a half ago, I adopted a dog from my local animal shelter and we have had quite the week and a half! She had an upper respiratory infection and has had to be on antibiotics, she ran away (which I'm sure is how she got to be a stray in the first place), and yesterday when I got home from work, she was out of her crate, but no one was home to have let her out! I figured the dog walker had not latched it all the way or something. Then, this morning, she escaped twice within 15 minutes from her crate. I put treats in there. I put toys in there. I tell her she's a good girl for being in there. Before you took Talullah to Doggie Day Care, did you crate train her? How did you keep her in there!?"
You know, maybe I should have an emergency Ask June, as well, since poor Carrie asked me this in March. When I went to link to her blog, I see that she still HAS the dog, so that's good.
I have heard of this from other dog owners, Carrie. I have a friend whose dog will stay in its crate all morning but when my friend comes home at lunch, if she takes too long to get to the crate, the dog lets itself out. So it was ABLE to get out all that time.
As for me, Tallulah was just a teeny puppy and it never occurred to her to try to escape the crate. Well, that first night, the one and only time I have ever actually heard her howl, it must have OCCURRED to her, but she never figured it out.
I would assume by now your dog likes the crate. They always tell you the dogs grow to love them, and mine did. Of course, now she sleeps on my face.
That is all for Ask June on this fine Friday which is almost Saturday, seeing as it took me 29 hours to delete all the old Qs. From now on, ask your Ask June questions here.
