I'm Sorry I Mentioned It

That there was a parakeet on the telephone pole near my house.

I spotted it yesterday and grabbed my binoculars to confirm. Yep, it was a parakeet all right and maybe 24 hours later, it still is.

Ever the animal lover and good citizen, I immediately posted this to a lost & found site. No good deed goes unpunished, so within an hour I had a semi-hysterical form letter from an organization that deals with lost & found birds.

It told me that some poor person was yearning for his / her "feather kid", AKA "FID" (Tonstant Writah Frowed Up) and it was my duty to capture this creature and bring it into my house for safekeeping and feed it this, that, and the other. And all I could think was, ain't no way, no how am I going to try to catch this bird.

I've done my duty. Boundaries have been drawn. Just last week on a cool morning when I had the windows open, a big stray gray and white tom cat checked out Ma Maisonette. He was told there is no room at the inn. And I know that if I had attempted to capture him, I would likely have succeeded. And then he would have been taken to the Shelter of A Thousand Horrible Deaths or to St. Hubert's Giralda, which is beautifully clean and empty because every cat they get older than a year gets a week and then it's The Needle.

Truly, a boundary has been drawn. If I can walk away from Gracie's twin, who knows what other heartlessness I'm capable of.

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That I hadn't done much of anything on Gigantically Important Project

Honestly, Casper, who is the supposed project manager on this thing is completely ignorant of anything but his own valuable but arcane world. Fred was insistent that I go dig around and find out what was going on and do QA on it. So I found out that the QA guy and his offshore team had already completed drawing up the test cases. I didn't think there was much of anything for me to do.

For one thing, for the company's second most important project, the specs are only six pages long and any attempt to get info from Casper is worse than pulling teeth.

Now I find that I have to rig up the testing between Casper's world and Zapata's world. (Zapata is a new product manager who is essentially a non-Jewish, very Latino version of Boy Wonder. Oy. Ay yi yi.)

Fred greeted my puzzlement with something like apoplexy. I took a Xanax. I feel better now, but I'm not so sure about Fred.

Actually, this has touched off a bout of Job Paranoia. I don't need this. I truly don't need this. And on the other hand, when will I freakin' learn?

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That my feet still hurt

Wasn't there a story about some fairy tale princess who gets her feet taken away from her but when she gets them back, it's like walking on knives?

I can so relate.

I ended up back and Hoity Toity Medical Group today where I was given yet another round of cortisone injections. I had my feet taped up and was handed one gigantic boot-like thing that I'm supposed to wear at night to keep my foot stretched. Mind you, both feet hurt and both feet have plantar fasciitis and I was given one boot. WTF?

More talk about surgery for not just one but both ankles and at least an MRI.

Before the doctor walked out, with Job Paranoia in full swing, I wanted to say, honey, if you want to do whatever you want to do to me, do it now while I've still got the health insurance.

I was told to stay off my feet, to put them up, to ice down my feet every night, to do any number of things I will probably half-heartedly do.

What are they going to do to my ankles? Maybe I'm sorry I mentioned it.