In Case of Tornado, I'll Be Stuck With the Cat Boxes

I hid in the basement last Wednesday afternoon for a good half hour.
It was just me, the dog and the laptop.
And nothing happened.
Scratch that.
I got some work done; a whole post written on the five products you shouldn't bother to accept as hand-me-downs when you're pregnant. Thrilling, I know, but that aside, nothing more came of my half hour on the bottom step of a humid basement than the outright understanding of how desperately my cat's litter box needed to be cleaned.
Let's just say the dog - in her rare chance to enter said basement - helped with that one. In the wrong way.
So I felt like a true ninny admitting the tornado watches blowing through the county sent me scurrying for the cellar.
This isn't Kansas.
It's upstate New York, where the wind goes sweeping straight into the side of a mountain.
It's our dearth of devastating weather events that makes the few that happen (can anyone say flood?) so much more distressing.
Go ahead and call it an excuse, but the rest of the world isn't buying it.
To wit, a little bit of wind makes a Nebraska native pull up their collar and keep going.
It sends a whey faced New Yorker tumbling down the basement steps only to surface red-faced and slightly smelly a half hour later, wondering where the time went.
That's me.
Lily livered.
Yellow bellied.
Fraidy cat.
The sky turned green, and I hid like my dog trying to stuff a 70-pound body into the space between the front and back seats of my car when we pull into the animal clinic driveway. I'll give her the fur-matching brown upholstery.
It still doesn't get her out of the shots.
I didn't get out of work. Or get an out on cleaning the water logged rugs in my bedroom.
But the cat boxes got cleaned.

Image via PazLeonel/Flickr

Ferreting Out the Facebook Mole

Hello, my name is Jeanne Sager, and I was a Facebook addict.
I thought nothing could help with my obsession.
I turned on my computer at 7 a.m., jonesing for a comment fix.
Were my photos liked?
Was I poked?
Did someone's relationship status change?
I'd blame it on my job as a blogger - responsible for posting every article I wrote to every form of social media out there - but I'm wearing my big girl panties today. I just loved the simple pleasure of doing absolutely nothing special.
Facebook was a place to let your hair down and your freak flag fly. After all, it's all friends here.
And then came the mole.
They snuck their way onto my friends list and began a campaign to disseminate my private information like they were a hacker loose in the credit bureau.
Exactly why I've always been careful what I say online - anywhere online. Even on Facebook, the allusion of privacy is just that.
But here's the problem: they got it wrong. They said I said "X" when I'd really said "Y." They blamed me for comments by my other friends.
They gave me a whole lot of credit that I just didn't deserve.
They ruined Facebook by turning the completely random into the off-base specific.
And as my "friend," they were granted the ultimate authority because, hey, no one could check up on what they were saying on my otherwise private Facebook page.
They had carte blanche to claim I was painting the sky green and screaming fire in a crowded theater.
We lock up our Facebook pages because the privacy experts tell us that's the way to keep our homes from being broken into when we go on vacation and our mother's maiden name from landing in the hands of the scammers.
And then we let people in, little by little, who we barely know.
The guy you took an English class with in 10th grade.
The woman who bags your groceries at the supermarket.
The mom whose kid shared a swimming class with your toddler . . . two years ago.
You haven't had so many people ask to be your "friend" since kindergarten.
Suddenly, that private space to talk up your own life with friends and family has become a "private" space with all the comforts of public life.
The friends . . . and the troublemakers.
It turns out I was liked. And poked.
All at the same time.



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