Bob and I have two cats and I sometimes feel like all I do is tell them no. Cisco wants out doors. No. Chloe wants to scratch the furniture. No. Cisco wants to eat the food off of my plate. No. Chloe wants to scavenge the kitchen counter for leftover. All they hear from me is no.

What worries me is that it makes absolutely no sense to them. For example, why can’t Cisco drag the chicken bones across the kitchen counter and then drop it on the floor so he can eat it. I was obviously done with the bones, why can’t he just pick the bones for whatever he can find. Why is he getting all hysterical about it?

Or why is it all right for Chloe to scratch the cat scratchers that Bob has so artfully arrayed around the house but not the couch and the chairs that are just a juicy targets. Why is one scratchable and the other not? And how, a poor cat, supposed to the difference.

They just run and hide when we raise our voices but I am sure they are thinking WTF. This is what animals do why are these two humans such pains in the asses.

I am surprised that they are both still civil with us. But they are.

A senior moment that keeps recurring in my life is misplacing things. I lose my glasses the most. My eye sight is actually pretty good which enables me to ramble around the house without them. So, unless I have a pressing need for them, like watching television, I go without them.

I try to put them in the same place every night before I go to bed. The problem comes when I take them off earlier in the day for some seemingly benign act like rubbing my itchy eyes and forgetting to put them back on. At this point, they are lost. I go looking for them but without my glasses. This sometimes proves an impediment to finding them because instead of seeing the room clearly, there is a bit of blur obscuring everything.

In the past, I would just get my spare pair of glasses and wear them until I found them.

This worked pretty well until recently. I bought a new pair of glasses. The day I bought my glasses I was overwhelmed with the number of choices I had — there were hundreds of potential frames. This paralyses me. The more choices I have, the more difficult it is for me to come to a decision. So, I thought, well Tom you liked your present frames, just get a pair of frames that looks like the old ones you have. Genius, right? I got the exact same frame.

As we all know, the road to Hell is paid with good intentions, it has actually made it worse for my search for glasses.

Since I misplace my glasses on almost a daily basis, I constantly am putting on my spare pair. When the old pair and the new pair looked different, I could easily determine which pair of glasses I should be wearing when I stumbled across them. I would put on the new pair and return the old pair to my cram packed junk drawer until I need them again.

Now, so I just put on my old glasses which work until I stumble across my new ones. This would work if I also kept better track of my old glasses but I don’t. So, much to my chagrin, I will misplace my glasses and when I go to the junk drawer, the spare pare is missing. Which means instead of wearing my new pair, I was already wearing my spare pair and now, instead of looking for one pair of glasses, I am looking for two pairs of glasses.

Worse still, I don’t know which is my old pair and my new pair when I do find a pair of glasses because I didn’t think to check if there was anything that would differentiate the two pairs, I don’t know which pair I am holding — the old pair or the new pair.

As I am reading this back, I am thinking why am I writing about such a trivial matter. Then I think, wait a minute, this is important. As a Senior Citizen, this is how I spend a large portion of my day — looking for shit I can’t find.