New month, new banner! (You might need to clear your cache if you don’t see it up there at the top.)
This was created by Aly, who has created so many of my banners in the past. Thanks again, Aly – you rock!!!
Site housekeeping stuff:
Over there in the right column at the bottom is my “currently reading” widget from Good Reads. I don’t know why I felt compelled to add that to the sidebar, it’s just that the right and left sidebars are way unbalanced and it was bugging me. I might just move everything not cat-related from the left sidebar to the right to make it work out right. We’ll see. I’m not currently feeling the urge to houseclean the page, but I can feel it coming.
Over in the left sidebar, in case you hadn’t noticed, Kara’s been moved to the “permanent residents” list and the new fosters have been added to the “fosters” list.
Hmm…. I thought there was more, but it appears that that’s about it.
I woke up Saturday with an aching hip. Ever since I painted the shed last week, my hip had been aching, and it got worse Friday and Saturday instead of better. So I limped around, swearing to myself that I’d make an appointment with my doctor as soon as possible.
(And then of course Sunday morning I woke up with it much improved, so now I’m going to put it off ’til after my visit to the gynecologist next week!)
Fred came upstairs after I got out of the shower to ask where I keep the cleaning rags (I’d make fun of him for that, except I just moved them. This is like the fourth time I’ve moved where I keep them since we’ve lived in this house. I don’t know, I just can’t find the perfect place, sue me!) because Joe Bob had gotten into the litter box I’d put in the guest bedroom for Miz Poo, and instead of peeing IN the litter box, he peed straight back and hit my cedar chest and left a big nasty puddle of cat pee on the floor.
Thus would begin my own personal HELL DAY wherein I must have cleaned up ten zillion Joe Bob sprays. I don’t know what the holy fuck is going on with him, but he walked over to a bookcase and sprayed it while we were RIGHT there, he peed on the table, he peed on the floor, he peed on the rug by the back door. (Poet! Knowit!) I got so over-the-top pissed (PUN INTENDED) off at him that I yelled at him to get out of my house, and when he obeyed by running out the cat door into the back yard (don’t be too impressed – he was headed for the cat door before I yelled, so it’s not like he UNDERSTOOD what I was saying, but my yelling certainly sped him on his way) I shut the door and left it shut for an hour.
(Don’t GIVE ME that look. It was warm outside and there’s a bowl of water out there. If he’d stayed inside, I might have ended up throttling him.)
Fred’s going to be taking him to the vet this afternoon so they can find out if there’s something physically wrong with him. If there’s nothing physically wrong with him, we’re going to see about getting him some medication to calm him the fuck down and STOP THE GODDAMN PEEING.
This makes me despair. We’d gone a good long time without anyone peeing anywhere, and then Fred had to say “It’s been a while since we had any peeing incidents, huh?”, and the NEXT DAY? Cat pee.
Grrrr.
So I thought that perhaps His Highness (Joe Bob, that is. Not Fred.) was objecting to the cleanliness of the litter boxes. It’s been a long time since I emptied, scrubbed, and refilled them, even though I make sure I add fresh litter regularly, and the litter boxes get scooped twice a day (we are not MONSTERS, you know!). I emptied them one-by-one, scrubbed them out, let them air-dry and refilled them with clean litter. (I don’t know why I feel compelled to tell you that I filled them with clean litter. It’s not like I would have put the old nasty litter back in the clean boxes. I WOULDN’T.)
Then I decided to move stuff around in the laundry room. For one, the cat fountain is in a location where there’s no nearby plug, so I’d run an extension cord behind the litter boxes (and in front of the door where the water heater is), and it just bugged me, having it set up like that. So I moved it so it’s near a plug, moved the storage containers holding the extra cat food over by the food bowls, dusted and straightened the storage unit in the laundry room, vacuumed the entire room and scrubbed the spot (in the middle of the laundry room) where Stinkerbelle and Mister Boogers share their Snackin’! Time!, because they tend to knock some food on the floor and then tromp through it.
In and amongst all this cleaning of the laundry room, I did laundry, made lunch, and hung out with the kittens.
At one point, I went out to take popcorn to the chickens, and Fred asked me to give him a hand. Some piece that holds implements onto the tractor was stuck, and he needed to hold one end and have me pull the other end to get it out.
(THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID!)
“Be careful,” he said. “You’ll have to put all your weight into it, but it’ll probably let go suddenly.”
It did, and seeing as I’m the ungraceful sort, I landed on my ass on the driveway.
(Later that night, he stepped onto a cat toy on the rug in the kitchen and bitched about how much it hurt. I gave him the bug-eyes and said “I FELL DOWN on the driveway, and got a mild “Are you okay?” You probably shouldn’t expect too much SYMPATHY right now, big baby.”)
The biggest part of the weekend, though, was spent dealing with the GODDAMN LADYBUGS. Apparently it’s time for them to hibernate, so they’re coming into my house in DROVES, all “No, that’s okay, we can find out own hibernating spot, let me buzz by your ear on the way across the room to scare the shit out of you, ‘k?” I vacuumed up several hundred of them Friday and Saturday. By Sunday morning I’d had it, and went to L0we’s to buy something that would kill them. I don’t particularly want to kill them, I just want them to stay away, but I found nothing that claimed to be a ladybug repellent, so I opted for an indoor/ outdoor spray that would kill them on contact. It seemed to work okay, but I still had to vacuum up a ton of dead ladybugs. At least they were dying near the windows instead of spreading out throughout the house.
The worst infestation of ladybugs was upstairs in the garage, where the windows were open a little bit to allow air circulation in the garage. The window facing the street was just COVERED in ladybugs and wasps, and I took great pleasure in spraying the hell out of them Sunday afternoon.
Seriously, though. I really would prefer to repel them rather than kill them. Anyone out there have a good ladybug repelling trick, something that has worked for you personally? Do share!
After all my making fun of Fred in my Friday entry, I ended up deciding that we should just pick up Chinese food and eat dinner at home. I didn’t want to have to change my clothes, y’see, and I was dressed like a slob. So we got Chinese food and I ended up eating too fast and getting sick and spent some time hanging over the toilet.
(Good to see that the tool is still working as it should, almost three years later!)
We watched The Devil’s Advocate, which neither of us had seen, and despite the fact that we’d stopped to buy candy at the dollar store just in case, not a single kid knocked on the door.
While we were watching the movie, I fired up the laptop (which I keep in the living room – or I guess I should say I did until Sunday, when I decided I was spending too much time online in the evenings, so I packed it away in its case.) and surfed to Flickr, and then I thought “Hmm. It’s been a while since I went through my Flickr inbox, hasn’t it? I should clear that out.”
For the uninformed, every time someone adds you as a “contact” on Flickr, you get an email in your Flickr inbox (well, I do, I can’t speak for you. I’m just assuming. I’m using a lot of parentheses in this entry, aren’t I?) and when someone adds me as a contact, I go and check out their pictures, and if I think I might be interested in seeing their pictures on a regular basis, I add them as one of my contacts. But like I said, it had been a while, so I started with the most recent emails and worked my way back.
Yeah. It’d been a while since I clean out my Flickr inbox. TWO YEARS since I’d done it.
I know, I suck. I’ll try to keep on top of it from here on out. Don’t hold your breath.
I made a mistake Friday night with the foster kittens. I thought it would be a good idea to just open the door to their room and leave it open. I sat in there for a while and petted Delmar, but Lem, Marion and Claudette sat atop the cat tree and nervously eyed the open door. After a while, I decided to just leave them alone, hope they’d decide to explore on their own, and get comfortable being out of the room.
Then I got distracted cleaning the kitchen, going out to give the pigs their nightly snack, and locking the chicken coops. By the time I got back inside and Snackin’! Time! for our cats was over, it had been about 45 minutes since I left the kitten door open. Lem and Claudette were still on the cat tree, but Delmar and Marion were nowhere to be found. We searched the upstairs, but they weren’t up there. We searched the downstairs and didn’t find them. We searched the downstairs again, and Fred found Marion behind the bathroom door, and thus ensued a chase where we pursued Marion through the house. She ended up behind the washer, but we flushed her out with a blast of canned air to scare her out, and Fred finally caught her and carried her upstairs.
We looked all over the place and couldn’t find Delmar anywhere. After three or four circuits of the downstairs, looking in every nook and cranny, I finally discovered him hiding behind the water heater in the hall closet. I lured him out with a toy, and he let me carry him back upstairs to familiar territory.
I tried to lure them out of the room several times on Saturday, but none of them were going for it, so I spent as much time in the kitten room as I could, petting them and telling them how sweet they are. Most of them forgave me, but Marion seems to be holding a grudge.
They got their first vaccination shots Saturday evening, and were kind of knocked out from that Saturday evening and most of Sunday. I decided to pull back on trying to throw them into new and scary situations, so instead of just leaving their door open on Sunday, I left the door open but put a couple of baby gates in the doorway in hopes that being able to see the hall and see the traffic (ie, the big cats and us) would eventually make them curious.
So far it’s not working, but y’know. It takes time!
Tommy, Sugarbutt, and Joe Bob, laying in the yard. I’m not sure what they were watching – probably chickens, since that’s what’s usually on the other side of that fence.
Previously
2007: Newt was a total teeny baby this time last year – he was clearly NOT fully grown at that point, as this picture can attest.
2006: Maddy’s new Mommy and Daddy came a-visitin’ yesterday.
2005: Huh. I was wondering why Tom Cullen was snooping around in the stamp drawer
2004: The spud and I stood patiently by while the man chattered at the school employees for several minutes and then my head exploded, scattering brain matter everywhere.
2003: “Jessica Lynch!” I said. “Isn’t she the only POW we’ve ever had in all of history?”
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: No entry.
1999: She went in and treated the whole office to a very loud gagging sound (she gets that from her mother), and came out a few minutes later a little less green.