Last week we cleared a mountain of crap off this garage shelf:

Today I cleared a mountain of wine off the garage floor:

And I cleaned out the garage refrigerator. And poured out an entire forgotten 12-pack of carbonationless Sprite that expired in 2016. And scrubbed the weird yellowish liquid that perpetually weeps down the garage walls and no the drywall isn’t peeing and we aren’t aliens or witches so don’t even think any of that or I’ll put a hex on you.

Also: It’s a delicate balance to scrub the grime off the garage-door opener without repeatedly opening and closing the garage door. It’s like Jenga. Or Jengarage. Or Garenga.

Yes. It's THAT cold here in Iowa.

Tomorrow looms ...

3 days until #Hallowmeme!

(I just realized my countdown is somehow off by a day. THANKS, OBAMA. But that just means I guess I’ll have to post a BONUS MEME on the 31st.)

So how does this work?

Do I pick one from each column or do I get to mix and match any three like on the Denny's value menu? Or is this one of those brain teasers where I have to re-organize the list so the first letter of every line spells a common phrase or a popular song title? Or maybe I have to clear the board--which automatically disqualifies me because I refuse to be yoga pants as a matter of principle. They should really pass out leaflets with the rules spelled out clearly or nobody's going to play ... which means nobody will ever win Eternal Damnation.

#NotVeryIntelligentlyDesigned

There is a wicked-ugly fight brewing that just might tear our friendships asunder about the name for the structure behind us: campanile, carillon or bell tower

We would have had a kickfight deathmatch over it this morning, but we couldn’t move our legs because we’d just run 11 miles.

Oh, yeah: Did I mention that WE RAN 11 MILES!

(Minus about 3/4 miles for walk breaks, but still.)

Some thoughts about this morning’s run:

• The 5.5-mile turnaround on our route is out in the middle of a cornfield and along a lonely highway.
• It seems REALLY FAR.
• Plus NO SHADE.
• Our route also runs under two highways that we think are 30 and 380, but it would be cool for them to be labeled along the route just to quell our curiosities.
• I like the word quell.
• Quell.
• It would also be cool if the lonely country road were labeled to quell the curiosities of people on the trail.
• There’s that word again.
• I’m on a roll!
• Anyway, I have NO idea what highway it might be.
• We saw four hot guys running on the trail with their shirts off.
• I didn’t get any of their numbers.
• But the one in the yellow shorts ...
• Wow.
• (Call me.)
• I have some kind of knee soreness that feels like it might become a bit of a problem over time.
• Stay tuned for updates—I’m sure I’ll bitch about it here ad nauseam if it gets worse.
• I also love the term ad nauseam.
• Though people often misspell it with an -um ending.
• Don’t do that.
• On one of our first long runs on the Cedar River Trail, I swear I noticed an old-timey wooden staircase overgrown with weeds and climbing up a hill from the trail to a dense thicket of woods.
• Which, of course, is evidence of witches.
• I like the word thicket.
• Thicket.
• Rob and Scott didn’t see the staircase, and I was so exhausted and hurting along the run that I truly considered the possibility that I’d hallucinated it.
• Or I’d missed my opportunity to visit Brigadoon.
• We’ve been looking for it on our long runs ever since, with no luck.
• So my money was on Brigadoon instead of witches.
• Anyway, I FOUND IT AGAIN TODAY.
• So maybe I’m a witch.
• It isn’t as old-timey as I remember it, but it definitely climbs from the trail through a bunch of overgrown weeds to the nowhereness of a thicket of woods.
• So it’s definitely witches.
• Thicket.
• Anyway, if you want to see it or you’re looking for a local coven to join, it’s at mile 4.4 on your right as you head south on the trail from its intersection with the Lion Bridge.
• WE RAN 11 MILES, PEOPLE!
• Quell.
• Ad nauseam.
• Thicket.
• Campanile.

One final note: I took all my non-car keys off my car key ring before the run so they wouldn’t bounce and jingle in my pocket for 2.5 hours, and I randomly left them on my bed before I headed off to run. When I came back exhausted and slightly loopy and for some reason holding my glasses in my hand instead of wearing them on my face, I saw the copper-brown lump sitting there and my first thought was that the cat had pooped in my bed.

It’s not that very good a story but I’m still exhausted and loopy from our 11-MILE RUN! and that’s all I got.

Campanile!

Oh nose!

Bitch Kitty is sick! She left barf bombs all over the house last night and today she's sneezing all over things we're now reluctant to touch. But kitty sneezes are adorably cute, even if they're coming from a kitty who's hemorrhaging profusely out of every orifice and in the spastic throes of death. A whimsical little sneeze is like a final gift of adorableness to the people standing helplessly around her watching her die.

But back to Bitch Kitty. According to the accredited scholarly journal Everyone Has Syphilis, Bitch Kitty's barfing and adorable sneezing and open hostility toward adult gay men who have so much love to give but no one to give it to are classic symptoms of Profoundly Embarrassing Feline Syphilis That Brings Mortal Shame Upon The Entire Family.

But! There is a cure: Value Size Ultra Mega Hairball Formula Premium Formula Gel. I swear I'm not making that up. It comes in a toothpaste tube and you squirt it on your cat's paw and she fastidiously licks it off and through the wonders of magic and witchcraft -- because all cats are witches who are openly hostile toward adult gay men who have so much love to give but no one to give it to -- she stops leaving barf bombs all over the house. And it comes in malt flavor, because everyone knows cats prefer malts and drive-in movies over tuna and chicken.

As for the adorable sneezing, we read on the internet -- and I swear I'm not making this up either -- that you should fill an eye dropper with a gently warmed saline solution and squirt a few drops up the cat's nose while the cat sits calmly and cooperatively as she's basically being waterboarded. Look at this picture:

That's a rare and extremely collectible photo of Bitch Kitty hissing and running away but still for one brief nanosecond keeping her hiss aimed in the general direction of my camera, which she does at bag-of-pudding speed (because she's too zaftig to move at lightning speed) every time I enter her field of vision. So guess who in my family would be a lacerated failure at squirting salty water anywhere in the vicinity of Bitch Kitty, much less up her adorably sneezy nose. Just guess. Bitch Kitty LOOOOOOVES my dad, but waterboarding is still waterboarding and my dad is 500 years old and starting to get feeble and Bitch Kitty would open every vein in his body if he tried to waterboard her -- even coming from a place of love -- and I bet he wouldn't even give us an adorable final sneeze as we stood around helplessly watching him die.

But! The guy at the pet store said there is an alternate solution: Buy a humidifier. Which we did. Let me type that again slowly to make sure you understand it: WE JUST BOUGHT A HUMIDIFIER TO GENTLY MOISTEN THE AIR IN OUR HOME FOR OUR SNEEZY BARFY BITCHY CAT.

In other news, we found proof at the pet store that our country is officially out of plausible, relevant product names. Because we found a product called Stop That!, which I assume is designed to stop kitties from doing whatever "that" is: collapsing the soufflé, ordering too many shoes online, staring at Melania's classy titty pictures ... who knows?

Then! (And I promise I'll end this endless post after this paragraph.) We found the BEST worst name for a product in the whole entire universe: ThunderShirt! Which could be used for superheroes or bodybuilder clothes or storm chasers. But no. It's just for cat anxiety. CAT ANXIETY. The ThunderShirt for Cat Anxiety. Say it 16 times and it's STILL the dumbest use of the coolest name ever to fix an imaginary first-world problem. Like bipolar disorder. Or plain Oreos. Or That.

Rats. I mean Hats.

My one obligation on my calendar tonight got canceled at the last minute and I was suddenly freed to accomplish a million things all over the house. So of course I promptly fell asleep on the couch at 6:30 and just woke up having accomplished nothing. But I did take the time to find a seasonally timely cartoon and post it on here before transferring my unproductive sleeping to my bed. So there’s that.