My beautiful funny friend Shannon King, in whose honor Monstro and I Relayed-for-Life the other week, died on Saturday.

I am heartbroken.

Shannon and her husband Phil advised the junior-high youth group at our Chico church the same year I advised the high-school group. We coordinated a junior/senior high VBS class and put on a great skit at the end of it, about the worshiping of a golden idol. One of our seventh graders dolled herself up in a shimmering toga. I fell at her feet. Shannon pulled me away.

“Now, we don't worship golden idols,” Shannon admonished me.

“But it's so shiiiiny!” I whined.

“Come on, now. You know the better way,” she said.

We also took the high-school group to see the movie “Saved.” She and I howled all the way through it.

“When that character said she'd rather have cancer than be pregnant, I just wanted to give her a hug and take her home,” Shannon said as we left the theater.

Her service will probably be on Thursday, but I can't go because I'm pregnant and stuck in stupid Massachusetts.

Stupid Massachusetts. Stupid cancer. Stupid God.

We have two black cats. The little sleek one with the gimpy leg is mine: Jasmine (aka the Jazzy-cat). Tang is our big fuzzy; she answers only to Monstro. We got them both as adult cats from the local no-kill shelter and they are a joy and delight.

The last time I got pregnant, Jazzy wouldn't get off of me. Any time I sat down, she'd be on my ever-reducing lap. This time, though, it's Tang who has been most aware.

They've both been through what I'm going through, so I think they're somewhat empathetic. Tang and Jazz both had a litter of kittens in the lives they had before coming to our homes. Tang's adoption paperwork included a report from her foster family that she was a very good momma. It doesn't surprise me — she's the cat who would run to get me when baby Lex started crying.

(We got no such report about Jazzy-cat, leading us to believe that 1) she wasn't in a foster home when she gave birth and 2) her kittens probably met no good end.)

In a not-unrelated aside, Monstro and I keep a plastic shopping bag of unmatched socks under our bed. Every six months or so we go through the bag to find matches — don't laugh, last week we found five pairs!

We thought to match up the socks because a lot of them have found their way into our kitchen as of late. At first, I figured it was Lex playing around…

…Until tonight, when Monstro and Lex and Mom and I were eating dinner and I saw Tang, carrying a black sock in her mouth. Then she dropped it on the kitchen floor and began crying over it.

As I type this (from my office, which is also in the kitchen), the floor behind me is littered with socks.

Poor Tang.

Please go to www.Hopeline.com and learn more about their mission, and why it's so important to help wrest them away from the clutches of the federal government. This 2.5 minute video will tell you more.

My housemate Alex killed himself years ago and not a week goes by that I don't miss him.

I've been tossing and turning since midnight, hotter than asphalt on a southern July, and finally at 2:30 Lex came to our room.

“Close your eyes,” I told Monstro, who has to teach this morning at 7:30.

I located our boy and took him back to bed, picking him up. He was roasting.

“Too hot!” he said. No kidding. I took his temperature and it was 101.7. Then I took mine, and I'm a full degree-and-a-half hotter than I usually run.

So I put the boy in his crib, and put the fan on him, and left his door open, and turned on all the ACs in the house (with the big one set to 70 degrees on Energy Saver), and then picked up my pillows and blanket (wishful thinking that that'll be necessary). But before bedding down on the Futon of Torture, I just had to tell you guys about it.

Remember when we used to be up at 2:30 on Friday night/Saturday morning for FUN reasons?

Yeah… me neither.

UPDATE: No sooner had my head hit my pillow than I heard a cough from Lex's room, followed by a more pronounced “hoark.” Ruh-roh. Went in to see his crib sheet covered in, uh, liquid. Stripped his bed and remade it, put him in the bathtub, washed him well, got him blotted dry, gave him some applesauce and children's ibuprofen and a new clean sippee cup of cold water, put him into clean diaper and jammies and took his temperature again. 103.2 for my troubles. Ugh. Gonna be a looong night.

Wait, it's 3:22. It already *has* been a long night. 🙂

… because we're going to be paying a LOT of babysitters so Monstro and I can go to the movies this summer:

The Dark Knight

Hellboy II

X-Files (!!!!!)

Lest you think I fritter away cash on silly entertainments, I think the last movie I saw in the theater was the last “Harry Potter.”