Author: Robyn

Happy Valentine’s Day. You are hereby ordered to be my valentine, whether you like it or not.

 

Comment-answering extravaganza tomorrow! Get ’em in!

 

Readers, Suzy is dying – DYING! – to shave her head again this year. Who are we to deny her? She’s shaving her head in memory of an 8 year-old named John, who lost his life to leukemia.

Donate and help her meet her goal!

 

I had nothing pressing to do yesterday aside from getting a couple of Netflix DVDs to the mailbox (god! I’m exhausted!) so after slacking for most of the morning, I finally sucked it up and did what I’d been putting off for months and months – got my freakin’ recipe box organized. I’ve had piles of printed-out recipes sitting in a pile next to my desk waiting to be put on recipe cards (I don’t write them on recipe cards – I use Word and print them out on sheets of post cards) since at least October. I have the bad habit of printing out a recipe, using it, and then the next time I need it, I print it out again since I haven’t got it on a recipe card in the kitchen. I also tend to not bother to look through the recipe box and print the recipe out instead, so those got added to the pile of recipes too, so it actually ended up taking me all freakin’ day to sort through the recipes, type them in Word and print them out.

My recipes are organized, though, so I can rest easy that THAT happy little task is done.

 

Bad, bad Joe Bob Brown (he’s the baddest cat in the whole darn town!) didn’t get a chance to escape the back yard yesterday. It was cold, never got out of the 20s (yeah, I know your heart is BREAKING for me), so I didn’t let the cats out into the back yard. Maybe later today – it’s supposed to get up into the low 50s, so having the back door open won’t be so painful.

Fred reinforced the two spots we think Joe Bob is getting over, so hopefully that’ll stop the escapes. We shall see.

Planning his escape.

The chickens escaped yesterday, actually. I didn’t latch the gate after I checked for eggs, and round about early afternoon my attention was caught by McLovin getting some Buff Orpington lovin’ (that link leads to a picture of a Buff Orpington, not chicken lovin’. In case you were worried.) and I realized that the chickens were out of their yard and exploring. All I had to do was get a cup of cracked corn, carry it into the chicken yard, and call them. They were so excited that there was food to be had that they flocked around me, so I didn’t have to chase any of them around to get them back in their yard.

I imagine that when we have 40 chickens, it will be a wee bit more difficult to coax them back into their yard after they’ve escaped.

 

We watched Gone Baby Gone last night. It was an okay movie, but about five minutes in, I paused the movie and turned to Fred and said “Do you understand one fucking word they’ve said so far?”

It’s funny that the Yankee had to ask the Southerner to translate the Boston accent. Though Fred didn’t know it was a Boston accent he was translating, either – he thought it was New Jersey or New York ’til I told him I was pretty sure it was Boston, since I think Dennis Lehane’s novels all take place in Boston.

The funny thing is that this morning I checked my reading list to see which Dennis Lehane book I’d read (I knew I’d read one at some point), and it was… Gone Baby Gone, back in January 2005. The one and only thing I remembered about the book was the name Angie Gennaro, nothing else at all.

Casey Affleck kind of disturbs me. There’s something about him that reminds me of someone I know who’s… uh… what’s the politically correct phrase? Oh, right…. batshit loony, and so it bugs me to watch him. He seems… flat to me. Emotionless. Anyone else?

 

He don’t need no stinkin’ valentine.

 

Previously
2007: I should have asked him to be my valentine, no?
2006: “Stop following me,” Sugarbutt said. “Or I shall call the gendarmes and they shall kick your ass all the way back to Paree.”
2005: “I wasn’t worried,” Fred said to me. “Because any party where the invitation suggests bringing Dance Dance Revolution pads is not one that’s going to get out of hand.”
2004: No entry.
2003: No entry.
2002: Be our valentine, bitch!
2001: Could this get any more exciting, talking about the weather?
2000: Is it wrong that hearing about that incident gives me a whole new respect for Maria?

Like lemon in your water or tea when you go out to eat? You might want to rethink that. GROSS.

(Thanks to reader Debbie for the forward!)

 

Monday evening, we were watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Fred suddenly realized that when he’d stopped at his mother’s house on the way home from work to help them with their new computer, they’d given him a bag of sausage and he’d left the bag in the car.

(They like to repay him for computer help with food. This is how we end up with venison sitting in the freezer for months and months every year.)

He went off to find it and put it in the freezer, and then I couldn’t tell what the hell he was doing, but I suspected he’d walked by his computer and felt the sudden, urgent need to check the forum he hangs out on.

“COME ON!” I bellowed. “I WANT TO WATCH THE SHOW!” I’m usually okay with him wandering off for five or ten minutes when we’re watching a show, because I usually have a magazine to read while I’m waiting, but due to my recent cancellation of People and US, I had nothing to read.

There was silence from the other end of the house.

“HEY!” I yelled at the top of my lungs with the sharp tone that he can hear from as far away as the very back of the back forty.

“What?”

“I WANT TO WATCH THE SHOW, COME ON!” (I like to yell “Come on!” because it reminds me simultaneously of GOB, Brother Love, and the Dancing Machine guy)

He walked into the living room looking down at something he held in his hand. “I’m trying to figure out what this is,” he said. “It was laying on the kitchen floor.”

“What does it look like?” I asked.

“I think it’s a dead maggot,” he said, and held it out to me. “It has these weird little nubbins on it, like the beginning of legs or something. Where do you think it came from?”

“Maybe there’s a portal to Hell in the kitchen and it opened long enough to drop a dead maggot onto the kitchen floor,” I offered, then looked at what was in his hand.

“This concerns me,” he said, looking concerned. “I don’t want maggots to start showing up in our kitchen, that’s just gross.”

“Indeed,” I said. “We wouldn’t want to detract from the beauty of the muddy cat footprints on the counters. But you don’t need to worry. That’s not a maggot.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s an eye from a potato. It fell off this afternoon when I was peeling potatoes and fell onto the floor. Skittles started playing with it, and I forgot to pick it up when she was done.”

“Oh.”

 

I really like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, not least because any show where the women kick that much ass (and teeny little Summer Glau gets to toss around grown men twice her size) on a regular basis is aces with me.

When Brian Austin Green showed up last night, I was halfway through a hypothesis where he was the man who fathered John Connor when I realized that since John Connor was 16, that wasn’t a very feasible hypothesis. Duh.

Is it just me, or does Sonya Walger show up in every show ever made? I thought she was gorgeous the first time I saw her in The Mind of the Married Man, but now I find her kind of funny looking.

And while I’m talking about TV (since there is NOTHING ELSE going on in my life at the moment), I like Breaking Bad. It’s such a weird, dark show, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how they’re going to keep it going past one season, given that the main character has incurable lung cancer, but it’s interesting enough to keep me watching.

 

Joe Bob is a Very Bad Bastard who escaped the yard twice yesterday, and after the second time (when I stomped out to see if he was maybe hanging out in the old chicken coop, and turned around to see him staring at me all casual-like from the top of the well house outside the fence like “Hey lady, what up?”), I made him come inside and left the door shut all afternoon until Tommy politely pointed out that HE was not a bad boy, and HE always stayed in the yard when he was supposed to (well, mostly), so why couldn’t HE go out into the back yard, so I flung the back door open and figured if Joe Bob ran away THERE ARE ALWAYS OTHER CATS. And then Joe Bob wasn’t even interested in going outside.

Bastard.

 

Bad Boy.

One very, very Good Boy, flanked by two very, very Bad Boys.

 

Previously
2007: I need a nap.
2006: Mystery solved. Just call me Nancy Drew.
2005: No entry.
2004: Molasses runs in her veins, I swear to god.
2003: No entry.
2002: My life? Complete again.
2001: Do I want to go sit through an eternal PTA meeting, listen to endless amounts of people babble endlessly? Um, no.
2000: No entry.

Y’all, reader Paula has a question, and it’s time-sensitive, so I didn’t want to make her wait ’til Friday:

I was wondering if any of your readers have tried the beef tenderloin & scallops in Manhattan sauce recipe in the last issue of R@chael R@y’s magazine. It looks good and I’m thinking about making it for Valentine’s day but I’ve never had a sauce like that. Obviously I don’t want to ruin my V-Day dinner by making a crappy meal.

So how’s about it, folks? Any of you give it a whirl yet?

 

In case you don’t read Fred’s journal, or you do and were put immediately into a 40-year slumber by his riveting second-by-second description about How He Figured Out How To Get The Truck Running Again, we’ve moved the chickens to their new coop/ yard. They seem to be adapting very well, though the first evening, we were a wee bit worried that they were just flat-out too stupid to remember how to get back in the coop, since they were clustered on the steps when it was getting dark, but slowly they all made their way inside through the side opening with ramp, and not a single one of them needed to be herded inside.

It’s a little strange – but nice – to walk across the back yard and not have chicken trotting along beside me, hoping I’m about to give them food. I miss Frick a little, though. Frick is like a little puppy dog. Most of the chickens I can take or leave, but it’s well known that unless a nuclear bomb drops and we’re forced to hole up in the house and eat all our animals one by one (Mister Boogers first, because it’s a proven fact that large amounts of het make a very tender Booger roast), Frick will be dying of old age.

The cats don’t know what to make of the fact that they have the back yard to themselves. They go out, sniff around, and with little cartoon question marks hanging above their heads, they stare over to where the chickens are.

McLovin took about two hours to figure out how to get out of the new chicken yard, but despite my expectations, he hasn’t come into the back yard at all. Probably just a matter of time, though.

 

On Friday, I lost Joe Bob.

Thursday, I found him sitting on the steps outside the back door. I was surprised, even though I HAD opened the back door, because Ellie-Belly and Skittles are very much interested in what’s going on outside when the back door is open, though they’re apparently not interested enough to try to go through the cat door at the bottom of the screen door. Stinkerbelle is also very interested in what’s going on out there – she will often sit on the dryer and wait patiently for Tommy to come back inside – but she has never actually gone through the cat door. So being a dummy, I expected that it would at least take Joe Bob a month or so, if ever, before he ventured forth through the cat door.

Thursday morning I realized I hadn’t seen him for a little while, so I looked for him and found him on the top of the back steps. I coaxed him inside and he ran off like he thought he was in trouble, so I thought perhaps he’d stay away from the back door. A few hours later I realized I hadn’t seen him in a little while, and found him on the bottom of the back steps. I coaxed him back inside, and he ran off like he thought he was in trouble. When I followed him to reassure him that he wasn’t in trouble, he ran and hid from me.

So Friday morning when I walked into the laundry room and opened the back door (after collaring up Tommy, Sugarbutt, and the Boog), I wasn’t surprised when Joe Bob ran off.

An hour later, I wondered where he was. I looked out into the back yard and didn’t see him. In fact, none of the cats were out there, so I shut the door, which I usually do when they’ve decided it’s too cold to be outside. I walked through the house looking for Joe in his usual spots, and he was nowhere to be found.

“What?” I said. I looked again in his favorite spots, and his not-favorite spots, looked under beds, looked in the back yard again. No Joe.

“I’ve lost Joe, and Fred is going to kill me,” I informed Mister Boogers, who glared at me and went back to sleep.

I was walking through the house again when I noticed Tommy in the front room, staring out at the porch like there was something of interest out there.

I opened the front door, and Joe Bob went flying off the porch.

I ran to the side of the porch and called after him, then saw him heading for the back yard, and climbing over the fence. I ran through the house and when I got to the back door, Joe Bob was sitting there, looking all wild-eyed.

Now, the only reason I hadn’t put a collar on him even though we had an extra collar, is because we were out of batteries for the collars, and luckily, the batteries came in the mail Friday afternoon.

Saturday morning, when I collared up the rest of the Bad Kitty Posse, Fred took the extra collar and put it on Joe Bob, who responded by slinking around the house like something was ON HIM, and then he rolled around a little, and then he forgot he was wearing the collar.

And then he didn’t try to set one single solitary paw outside all day long.

Sunday, we collared him up again and at some point he went outside and then came flying back in through the cat door, and I figured he’d ventured too close to the fence and gotten zapped.

Yesterday morning, the little brat wouldn’t let me put the collar on him. I chased him around the house and then gave up in disgust and yelled “THEN RUN AWAY!”, only he mostly stayed away from the back door until around noon, when I looked into the back yard and saw him sitting on the well house just outside the fence, looking over the fence at me. I coaxed him inside and then shut the door.

Mid-afternoon, Joe Bob gave up the fight, flopped down on the kitchen rug, and let me put his collar on. A few minutes later he went outside, and spent most of the afternoon racing around the back yard with Tommy and Sugarbutt.

Hopefully there’ll be no more sneaking out of the back yard from the little bastard. I’m not counting on that, though.

 

Yesterday morning, I was getting ready to leave for my Monday morning volunteer stint at the pet store when I heard a far-off plaintive meow. I walked around the house a little and finally pinpointed the meow as coming from the front room. I walked in and saw Miss Stinky looking at the couch, ears perking up every time a sad little meow came from somewhere inside it.

I put the foot of the couch up (it’s a couch with a recliner on each end) and slid underneath and found that Skittles was somehow stuck in the back of the couch. She could stick her head through a small hole, but the rest of her body wouldn’t come. After much looking around and a phone call to Fred, I ended up cutting through the fabric at the back of the couch to get her out.

I love our cats – foster and otherwise – but sometimes I could happily toss all of them in the back yard, bid them adieu, and shut the door FOREVER.

I put this carrier on the table before Spot’s vet appointment a month ago, and when Fred got home with Spot, he left the carrier on the table. It has become the number one favorite place to sleep for Skittles, Elle, Newt, and sometimes Maxi. There’s always a cat in there. Good thing we never use the table, I suppose.

 

Previously
2007: I do NOT know why the fuck I’m such an idiot.
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.
2004: Sounds like corporate logic, to me – cable guys having to service DVRs when they don’t know anything at all about them.
2003: Uninspired.
2002: Dude, what the fuck? They don’t have mirrors on Boston Public?
2001: My husband, Narcissus.
2000: No entry.

Remember how, months ago, I decided that I’d clean the entire house every Saturday, and then I’d have a clean house at least ONE day a week, and then I did that for two – maybe three – weeks, and then I was all “Fuck this. Cleaning house is for the birds!”, and then my house became a mess and I’d run the vacuum every once in a while and dust when there were three inches of dust on all horizontal surfaces, and let the Roomba do most of the vacuuming, and called it good enough?

Well, I got so sick of what a mess the house was that on Saturday I spent hours cleaning the entire house and doing laundry, and for one shiny, sparkling day I had a clean house.

It was nice while it lasted.

I scrubbed out litter boxes (though they didn’t really need it), and I cleaned out the Cat-It, and I vacuumed the entire house with the Dyson, and moved everything in the kitchen and cleaned behind and under everything, and scrubbed the bathrooms. In fact, I think I have about 50 cleaning rags in the house, and I used every damn one of them. Which, I mean, don’t be too impressed, I am liberal with the usage of cleaning rags. But still, by the end of the day I had a clean house and a washer full of dirty cleaning rags, and all the laundry was done.

It was nice, is what I’m saying.

What was even nicer is that it was warmish and sunny out on Saturday, so I did laundry and hung everything out to dry, and got to fold and put away laundry that smelled like sunshine, and then I did more laundry on Sunday (sheets and the laundry left over from Saturday) and it dried nicely in the sun and the 50-degree weather with a medium wind.

I love weekends like that.

I even got out the upholstery attachment and went around and vacuumed all the cat hair off the couches and the recliners, and then I pulled the couches out and vacuumed behind and under them, and then I switched them around because we’ve been using the same couch for almost a year (the other couch only gets used by humans when we have guests; otherwise, it belongs to the cats).

The only thing I didn’t do that I wish I had was go around and clean the inside of the windows. I JUST cleaned the friggin’ things, what? November? But every window is covered with cat paw prints and cat nose prints, and some of them have cat spit on them, because sometimes they need to be licked. I don’t know what that’s about, and I don’t want to ask the cats.

Maybe I’ll get that next weekend. Maybe not. We’ll see!

 

We watched Across the Universe on Friday night, and eh. The songs were good, and I learned that there are a LOT of Beatles songs I’ve never heard before, but the movie itself was not anything I desire to ever see again. I’ve liked Evan Rachel Wood since she was Jessie Sammler on Once and Again, but these days I mostly think she looks like she needs a good hard smack.

I did download some of the soundtrack from iTunes, though. That version of Let It Be gives me chills.

Maybe we would have enjoyed the movie more if we hadn’t stopped it halfway through to run to the pharmacy to pick up TamiFlu for Fred, and then went to 0ffice D3pot to look at computers, then came home to watch the rest of the movie so we could send it back to Netflix.

Probably not, though.

Saturday we made it up to ourselves by watching some good quality entertainment, a movie I’ve seen three times now, and which Fred has seen four. We just need to give it up and buy the damn movie already, so we don’t have to record it when it’s on or keep renting it.

I speak, obviously, of She’s the Man. That Amanda Bynes, she just cracks me up. One of my favorite parts is the scene when she’s eating and shooting dirty looks at Olivia, and the lady running the meeting (for the debutante ball) leans over and says “Remember, eat like you have a secret”, and she does this FACE that cracks me the hell up every time. I had to go back and watch it like five times, I love it so much.

Not this face, but one she makes just a few seconds later:

(pic)

That Amanda Bynes, what a cutie.

 

I was sitting at my computer Sunday afternoon when something caught my eye, and I glanced over to see our next door neighbor’s (grown) son tromping through the garden. I picked up the cell phone and called Fred, who was working in the chicken yard.

“What the fuck?” I said.

“What?”

“What’s fucko doing tromping through our garden?” I asked.

“I don’t rightly know,” Fred said. We watched as fucko stopped, picked something up, and went back to his own property.

Keep in mind, there’s nothing growing in our garden, so it wasn’t like he was doing any damage, but STILL.

Over the course of the afternoon, he tromped through the garden at least five more times, and I finally realized he was hitting a tennis ball around, and it kept going into our garden (and in the shrubbery separating their property from the neighbor on the other side sometimes, too).

“Is he high?” I asked Fred.

“That or very bored,” he said.

The day before, we’d noticed a tractor clearing brush from between our property and the property touching ours on the back forty section of our land. And then it started clearing brush ON our land.

“Um,” I said to Fred. “Should we say something to him?” “We” meaning “Fred”, of course.

“I guess I better,” Fred said, and headed in that direction.

Turns out the guy’d been hired by the granddaughter of the woman who owns that land to clear the brush because they were going to put up a new fence (they have horses), and when she explained it to the guy, he misunderstood and thought that our back forty belonged to them as well.

OH HELLZ NAW.

Good thing Fred caught him when he did – he was planning to go all along the property line and clear all the brush. The brush that we LIKE having, because it gives us some semblance of privacy.

I’m starting to think that 4 1/2 acres is not nearly enough. I’m wishing we had, like, 200 acres, and the house was directly in the middle of it. Is that too much to wish for?

 

Apparently atop the air conditioning unit is quite the hopping social scene.

 

Previously
2007: No entry.
2006: No entry.
2005: Why she felt the need to ostentatiously walk up and down the property line so many times instead of just coming over and talking to Fred, I have no idea.
2004: Interesting how that works, no?
2002: Woulda made a good picture.
2001: No entry.
2000: Have you ever noticed that if you read or say the same word over and over, it ceases to make any kind of sense?

Shitfire! How come none o’ yous told me Survivor was coming on?! If Fred hadn’t read about it somewhere, we might have missed it completely! Luckily, we did not.

I note that contrary to the most recent seasons of Survivor, they’ve moved away from casting really, really good looking people. Far, far, FAR away from it, in fact. Heh.

GodDAMN I loathe Jonny Fairplay. And yay! Yau-Man! James! Ozzy! Cirie!

 

When is the grand opening of Crooked Acres Cat Sanctuary?

As soon as I convince Fred to build me a building in the back forty where we can foster a meellllllion cats!

 

Where the hell did all the gnats in my house come from and can I borrow McLovin’ or one of the girls for a week or so to take care of them for me?

I cannot spare McLovin or the girlz – McLovin because he keeps the girlz hoppin’, and the girlz because they (supposedly) will start laying eggs more regularly now that the days are getting longer.

HOWEVER, Miss Stank is quite good at hunting down little bugs (and eating them), so I’ll happily offer up her services for a nominal fee. You have to come get her, though. Good luck getting her into the carrier!

 

Do any of the KATG ‘characters’ get on your nerves?

I don’t know what it is about Matt Bray but the second I hear his voice, I can’t listen to the episode. I don’t know if it’s the sound of his voice or if it’s that he’s a little bit condescending and smart-alecky but he just ruins the whole show for me when he’s on.

I don’t love Matt Bray, but he also doesn’t annoy me too much – I know what you mean about him being condescending, though. I really REALLY hated Keith’s old roommate (Adam, I think?), because every time he says something funny he does this little nasally laugh, and he sounds just exactly like Butthead to me. He’s kind of grown on me, but the nasally laugh still annoys the fuck out of me. I don’t like Liam McEneaney at all, though I want to. His voice just annoys me, and his insistence on telling his story THE LONG WAY annoys me, too. I really want to like Dina (the Friday advice girl), but I really don’t – although her trainwreck of a life is kind of fascinating to me. I would LOVE IT if they replaced Dina with Eats Paste. I just caught the show he called in on, and I really like him. Death threats aside, I think he’d give some excellent advice – or maybe bad advice, but entertainingly done.

What I want to know is, where the HELL is Patrice? She’s my favorite, far and away and she hasn’t been on in forever. I don’t even care about the “entertainment news”, I just find her entertaining, “news” or not.

I like Jesse Joyce a lot, too. Speaking of him, I came across this picture of Myrtle from last year:

(flickr)

and I thought “Hey! She’s doing her impression of Jesse Joyce!”

 

#1 How did the name Crooked Acres come about

I could have sworn I wrote about this, but apparently not, since I can’t find it in my archives anywhere. Fred and I were trying to come up with names we could call home in our journals, and I was lobbying for “Horseshit Alley” (that’s the name I’ve always sworn I would use for my home when I won the lottery and built my zillion-dollar mansion on the ocean), which Fred wasn’t crazy about. Then one day I said something about how everything in the house is just a little bit crooked – not horribly so, just a wee bit out of square – and I said “Even our land isn’t straight! We have crooked acres!”, and there you go.

#2 Did you not at one time refer to one of the Kitties as Stanley or have I lost what little is left of my mind?

Mister Boogers’ “legal” name is Stanley, though why I don’t just tell the vet his name is Mister Boogers, I don’t know. We also called him “The Bean” for a few months before his REAL name evolved.

 

1. How often do you go into “town” for groceries, appts, and what not? How long does it take to drive there? Does this ever seem inconvenient or do the benefits of Crooked Acres make it all worthwhile?

Since I have duty at the pet store on Monday mornings, I usually stop on the way home to pick up groceries, and if there’s anything I need at Target, I get it at the same time. Fridays I usually run to the post office in Madison (I’m seriously considering opening a PO Box in Nearville, because the drive to Madison is getting to be a pain in the ass), and if there are any groceries we need, I can stop on the way home. It takes about 30 minutes to get to the pet store in Huntsville on Mondays, and a trips to Madison take about 20 minutes. If there’s some grocery-related item I need right away, it takes me about 5 minutes to get to the nearest Piggly Wiggly. We’re in the country, but not that far in the country, so it’s not bad. It’s a matter of a 5-minute drive to the grocery store versus a 2-minute drive. It’s not my beloved Publix grocery store, but it usually has what I need. Also in a 7 – 10 minute drive is a Lowe’s, a second Piggly Wiggly, Super Wal-Mart, CVS, Walgreen, Mexican and Chinese restaurants, Applebee’s, Ruby Tuesday, and more movie stores than you can shake a stick at. The only thing Nearville really lacks is a pet store and a book store. And I’d like to have Target closer, but I’m right by one every Monday, so it’s not a big deal. We’re in the country – but we’re not in the boonies.

Most weeks, unless I have an appointment somewhere, I’m home Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday and don’t need to go anywhere. I rarely go anywhere on the weekends, either, unless Fred and I need to run somewhere, usually a trip to Lowe’s.

It’s absolutely worth the extra drive (like I said, it’s not a bad drive, either) to have a lot more land and a lot fewer neighbors.

2. Can you explain to me and other non-pet people why you prefer cats to dogs? It seems to me the appeal of a dog would be that they are more affectionate than cats. It seems like cats are more independent and hide a lot, so they aren’t as interactive–is this true?

It really depends on the cat, but I get more affection than I can handle from our pack o’ cats. Not all the cats are particularly affectionate, and some of them (Sugarbutt, especially) run hot and cold (he’s a middle of the night lover, but during the day if you pick him up he’ll put up with it, but he’s just marking time ’til you put him the hell DOWN), but I certainly don’t lack for kitty lovin’. Some of our cats hide – Miss Stank, for one, would rather be hanging out on top of the bookcase in the kitchen than in the middle of the kitchen floor – but as long as it’s just us here, they can be seen out and about in the house.

The thing about dogs is that they’re so NEEDY. They need to be let out, they need to be walked, you can’t go away overnight and leave them alone for they will expire from the heartbreak. With cats, you make sure they have a clean litter box and plenty of food and water, and you can leave them alone for a day or so. Also, with the occasional exception, cats smell good. Dogs smell like dogs. NO OFFENSE, DOG OWNERS.

3. What pets did you have growing up and before you married Fred?

I had a cat when I was little and we lived in Guam. She had a litter of kittens and went to live on a farm (or so I was told, AHEM) and we kept one of her kittens, a little orange boy I named Charlie who kicked off my lifelong love of orange cats. Charlie eventually ran away (or was eaten by some wild thing that lived on the woods, who the hell knows?), and that was it until I was… 9 or 10, I think. We got our dog Taffy when we lived at Loring Air Force Base in very northern Maine. She was a puppy, and I was carrying her outside one day and dropped her on her head, poor thing. She was a good dog, but I’m not sure being dropped on her head did her any favors. I don’t remember how old she was when she was put to sleep, but I was grown and the spud was a baby.

(pic)

Also, when I was 11ish, my sister and I lobbied very hard for a kitten for Christmas. We ended up getting hamsters, one for her (she named hers Shirley) and one for me (Laverne). Those two hamsters lived the longest of any hamsters we had. Laverne was the first to die – I was in 6th grade – and I was HEARTBROKEN. We had subsequent hamsters, but none of them lived very long.

It was at some when I was in middle school (I don’t remember exactly when) that we got Tabitha, who was a kitten who’d been living in a cage with a rabbit, and seemed to be under the impression that she WAS a rabbit for her entire life. She lived a good, long life too, and I’m pretty sure I was living in Alabama when she had to be put to sleep.

There were other dogs before Taffy, but I don’t remember them all that well. Taffy and Tabitha were our main pets growing up (along with the varying hamsters). When the spud and I moved to Alabama, we brought her cat – who had many different names, but was “Katie” toward the end of her life – with us.

4. You mentioned that you originally wanted to get the lap band surgery but you had to do the roux en y instead (not sure how to spell this). What are the differences, advantages/disadvantages between the two??

The major difference is that lap band surgery is far less invasive than RNY. There’s no rerouting of intestines, no cutting off one part of the stomach from the other, and thus less potentially harmful side effects in the long run. Lap band can completely be reversed; RNY can technically be reversed (that, I believe, is why they leave the nonfunctioning half of your stomach in there, instead of removing it), but there are few doctors in the country who perform RNY reversals. At the time I was researching both surgeries, though Lap Band patients lost a lot slower than RNY patients, the weight loss at 5 years out is about the same, and lap band patients tend to go on to lose a bit more.

 

Oh, I have questions-all cat related-and purely for fun, so if you’d rather not answer-not a big deal.

1. Which of your cats, if they were human, would you actually want to hang around the most?

I think Mister Boogers. He’d be the one who would hang out and make bitchy comments about other people and make you laugh ’til you choke.

2. If this were possible, which cat would it be easiest for to sit on your lap on a plane trip to Maine?

Miz Poo, ’cause she’s the lap sitter of the bunch.

3. Which of your cats would find it easiest to be adopted?

Probably Miz Poo, because she’s the friendliest and would walk up to any potential adopters and howl until they gave in and took her home. Second place would be Tommy, because he’s almost as friendly, and he’d flop over and present his big ol’ belly and charm the hell out of anyone who looked at him. The other cats would need a little time to get friendly.

4. Which cat would your mother like the best? And why?

My mother LOVED Maddie, and told me many times that if she didn’t already have someone coming to get her (that would be Nance), my mother would take her home. Of our permanent residents, though, probably Miz Poo would be her favorite, because Miz Poo is a great big demanding baby who climbs into your lap as soon as you sit down.

5. If the sky fell in and you and Fred had to have just one cat, which one would it be?

My one cat and Fred’s one cat would, I assure you, NOT be the same cat. For me, it’d be Miz Poo because she’s my baby. If I had to guess for Fred, it would be either Mister Boogers or Joe Bob, probably depending on who was closer.

 

Joe Bob and our JoJo must be related, no?

Kissing cousins! 🙂

 

Are you planning on letting any of the eggs hatch this coming year? You know, now that you have the big Cock and all (snort!!) I remember chicks hatching as a kid on the farm, so cute.

That is an excellent question… and I have no idea what the plan is. I know that Fred was talking about letting some eggs hatch once they were moved into the new coop, but I have no idea what his plans are. I’m not sure he has any plans right now, to be honest. Maybe once the chicks we’ve ordered from the hatchery have grown to a decent size, we’ll start talking about letting the girlz add to the flock.

 

I have to tell ya, that picture of Tommy and Sugs, with Tommy’s leg slung over him… that’s very Brokeback Mountain-ish. Maybe it’s all the press coverage of Heath, but that’s the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw it.

It’s not Brokeback Mountain love – it’s Guy Love!

 

What did the doc say when you looked at him with the bloody eyeball?

Would you believe he didn’t say one single thing about the Crazy Zombie Eye? Not one word! I meant to say something to him about it, but I completely forgot to, and if he’d asked I would have told him what happened, but nada. Not a damn thing. Only one person has ever asked me what the hell was going on with my eye – the bagger at the grocery store. Weird.

Crazy Zombie Eye update!

(pic)

MUCH improved. This is what it looked like over the weekend, and this is what it looked like originally. Better, no?

 

How do you tell the difference between the love eyes and the het eyes? They look the same to me!

I knew they were Love Eyes because I don’t think Joe Bob even HAS het eyes. Joe Bob is all about the love. Except when he’s all about the running in terror from his Momma – which is happening less often as the days go by, thankfully.

 

I wonder if you and Fred have insurance for pets and if not, does Alabama offer it? Also, does your home/property insurance cover your animals in case of “damage” or theft or death? Does Alabama state income tax allow for deductions in the event of loss of “stock?”

We don’t have health insurance on the cats – it’s available, but we opted not to get it.

I don’t have any idea if Alabama state income tax allows for deductions for loss of stock – we don’t prepare our own taxes (we have an accountant do it) and the only stock we have at this point are the chickens, none of whom we’ve lost (yet!).

 

I’ve got a touch of the early senility going on, so bear with me, but was Mister Boogers ever the Bean at some point? I could swear you had a gray cat called the Bean–I think because he raced around like he was full o’ beans? I’m probably making all this up. It’s Mary Kate Olsen’s fault!

I think most everything can be blamed on those damn Olsen twins. Yeah, Mister Boogers was the Bean for a few months ’til his true Boogery nature appeared and we switched over to Mister (Meester, Mr.) Boogers.

 

My heart shall always stay true to Tommy Cullen. Once you go black and furry, you won’t go back in a hurry. (I totally just made that up! Am poetic genius!)

I always love it when you guys express a preference for one cat over all the others, I don’t know why. It just warms my heart.

 

We have an eight-year-old (orange!) kitty, Stella. Not the friendliest cat. Then two months ago we brought in a foster (ha ha), Cowbell, who is so lovely. She’s snuggly and cuddly and doesn’t mind if we pet her. Hallelujah! Only problem is…yep…Stella hates her. So much so that she hadn’t left our bedroom since Cowbell moved in, and if they so much as LOOK at one another there is shrieking and growling and the fur flies. So it’s Stella in our room, and Cowbell everywhere else.

Here’s the thing. We really really want to keep Cowbell, because she’s awesome. But will they ever get accustomed to one another? What can we do? My husband is convinced that tough love, i.e. forcing Stella out of our room, is the thing to do, but I think that’s mean. Help!

They may never really become friends – Miz Poo LOATHES Mister Boogers after all these years, a situation he exploits from time to time when she’s laying in the bed he wants to lay in – but I would imagine (though I can’t guarantee it) that over time Stella will learn to tolerate Cowbell. If I were you, I’d make a point of bringing Stella out of the room on a regular basis – every evening, or whatever’s convenient for you – and if there’s something you can bribe her with to stay out, a treat or a toy, try bribing her with that. If she wants to go back into the room, let her, but be persistent in bringing her out and encouraging her to stay out.

Readers, if you have any tips, feel free to jump in!

 

Hey, have you guys seen this hilarious/cute cat/kitten video on Youtube.com?

I think YouTube is the coolest damn invention on the internet, just for the cat videos alone!

 

With all your cats, how in the world do you know who is doing what, like peeing in inappropriate places or barfing or having the diarrhea, god forbid? We found cat pee on the bed and the couch yesterday and for the life of us, cannot figure out who did it. Short of watching their every move (which is impossible), any suggestions? I suspect a vet visit is in order, but crap, we just can’t tell who is having the problem! One is a 15-yr-old male and the other is a 13-yr-old female. He’s never had a problem before but she did several years ago. They are both in overall good health but the male seems to be skinnier these days altho he eats like a pig. (Sorry, I know you aren’t a vet, but figured you might have some experience with older cats, too.)

It takes time, but usually we find that whoever’s found looking guilty in the vicinity of the pee or barf or diarrhea is the likely culprit. Sometimes, unfortunately, it takes several incidences before we realize who’s doing it, and sometimes it entails just stumbling across them in the act, though I will sometimes get out the video camera, train it on a certain spot, and keep taping until I find out who’s doing it.

If your male is eating like a pig but still losing weight, I’d get him to the vet; that sounds like Spot about six months ago.

 

I actually had a dream about you and Fred last night. I wanted to come visit Crooked Acres, but of course it’s hours away. But one day I was driving in on my way to work, and suddenly there was a house that looked just like yours, and you were having a yard sale or something. Turns out, you were only 20 mins away in the dream. You had people walking through your house like it was a museum or something. It was really very strange.

And then we all had to leave because something in the air was making the cars explode.

Oh, how I love it when y’all dream about me!

 

Do you have any idea at what age an un-neutered male cat will start to spray? I fully intend to get Burl fixed but I can’t find any cheap clinics around here and my house taxes have to come first. He’s 7 months now and hasn’t done it yet but I don’t want him to start!

This page says that they start when they reach sexual maturity, which is between 5 and 12 months. Probably the sooner you can have him fixed, the better!

 

This seems to be the place to discuss Dy$ons. I am a big lover of vacuums. I can be found in the vacuum aisle of most any stores. Not that I need one. I am the proud owner of a Kirby, but I really want to know how those “D’s” work. So I bought the hand held for the steps, because the Kirby is one heavy mofo, and I have no patience to constantly be changing out the equipment.

Here’s what I love about the handheld:

It has awesome sucking power. The steps look great.

Here’s what I hate:

You only get 6 minutes before the battery goes dead. Totally dead. And there’s no plug in. So you have to really hurry. For 150 bucks, I think that awesome sucking power should last longer than 6 minutes. Or am I missing something? Any handheld owners have a secret to maintaining the sucking???

I’ve only seen one Dyson handheld and only used it for a minute or two, but I’ve been thinking we could use a handheld vacuum (Fred says I’m obsessed with vacuums. Heh.) so I’m disappointed to hear that it only lasts for six minutes!

Y’all out there with Dyson handhelds, any advice? And while I’m asking, if anyone out there has a handheld they LOVE, tell me about it. Every home needs a handheld!

 

So did you watch the Superbowl for the commericals? I did not since the Green Bay Packers lost in the playoffs. I tried to watch it for the commericals, but heck it was a snore so I switched channels. Today, I was happy to hear they have them on the web. I’m going to look for them as soon as I get home.

The Superbowl was a complete nonevent for me – I didn’t even remember that it was on ’til the spud texted and asked me if we were going to watch it (we didn’t). The last Superbowl I bothered to pay any attention to was back in… ’86? ’87? Whenever the Patriots played the Bears, because Liz was a big Bears (and Jim McMahon) fan. We recorded The Superbowl Shuffle and watched it over and over and over again.

MY SUPERBOWL SHUFFLE WILL SET YOU FREE! All these years later, that is one cheesealicious song.

I checked out the Superbowl commercials online (damned if I can remember where!), and I think either the Budweiser Rocky spoof or the E*Trade baby commercial was my favorite. The EDS cat herding commercial from 2005 is my all-time favorite Superbowl commercial, though:

 

Fred’s probably talking smack about you behind your back, Robyn!

and

Hey, I know Fred is a great guy. I’m wondering if Fred could maybe be telling JoeBob or insinuating that Fred is the more lovable one? Maybe extra treats?

Oh, Fred doesn’t talk smack about me behind my back – he does it right in front of me. “Don’t listen to her,” he says to Joe Bob “She’s just a big old mean lady. She doesn’t love you like I do. She took you to the pet store! No one loves you like your Daddy!”

Bastard.

 

I noticed that both of your neurotic cats are Daddy’s boy/girl. I do I sense a hint of jealousy here? Just kiddiing. I’m sure JoeBob will settle down and lurve his mommy soon enough. He probably remembers that you were the evil one that took him to the pet store each time he went. He already lurves his Daddy because he saved/picked him up this time.

That’s what Fred says, that Joe Bob remembers me taking him to the pet store and Fred rescuing him. I think that might be attributing a little more brain power to Joe Bob than he actually possesses, but who knows? And actually, that could explain why Miss Stank is less afraid of Fred than she is of me!

 

Pigs? “…where the pigs were going to go..” ????

and

For what it’s worth, pigs like mud holes, and I hate pigs. Because they are MEAN. Tell Fred they eat chickens. I had a few pigs once and one of my guineas got trapped in their fence and they ATE HER. Well, most of her. It was not pretty. I would much rather have goats than pigs.

Yeah, we’ve talked about getting pigs, raising them to slaughtering weight, and then… sending them off to be slaughtered (although I’ve told Fred that he should slaughter them himself because I look forward to writing the entry about how he tried to kill the pig, but cried like a baby and ultimately couldn’t do it). I don’t know if we’re definitely going to do it, but we’re considering it.

It’s not a matter of goats or pigs, though. We’re getting the goddamn goats just to shut Fred up (and because he said we could get a couple of pygmies!), but there’s room back there for a couple of pigs. Or a cow. We’ll see.

 

Here’s something for you to puzzle on: Every few years (anywhere from 2 to 5), my mother will discover – out of nowhere – a pile of maggots on her kitchen floor, about half of which are dead and half alive. Not always exactly the same place, but close – within a foot or so. In the middle of the floor, not close to any cupboards, cabinets, or walls.

They went so far, several years ago, as having the entire floor retiled, thinking that despite the floor being apparently water-tight and uncracked there must be a tiny crack somewhere through which the larvae were coming. Removing the tiles showed nothing under the floor, no evidence of any water seepage (and if water can’t get down, nothing else should be able to get up, right?), and no evidence of insect life under the tiles. The original tiles were replaced with larger tiles (I don’t know if they’re terrazo or ceramic or what), but a year or two or three later, there was another pile of maggots – in the center of one of the new tiles.

The first time or two it happened, they had two cats, so my mom thought the cats must have found something maggot-infested and brought it to that spot and eaten it, leaving the maggots behind; however, they were catless (entirely indoor-pet-less, in fact) the last several times it’s happened. My mother, I should add, is almost Germanic in her cleanliness, so it’s not a question of a dirty house.

I want one of my readers to solve this mystery, because I think would be cool for Elayne to say to her mother “This crazy internet chick I know helped figure it out!” So get to guessing, y’all!

 

I have a question…First, my cat, Angel, is a little OCD, so it’s possible that there is nothing wrong with her. I noticed the last few days that she has been scratching a lot. When she occasionally gets fleas, I have to cut her claws down to keep her from scratching herself bloody AFTER the fleas are gone, but she doesn’t seem to have fleas this time. She’s mostly white, so I can see the little buggers when they crop up. ANYWAY, she’s scratching and I can’t SEE anything wrong, but she’s kicking up dander something fierce. Is it possible that she’s having the same problem that I am? (Super dry warm air inside, cold wet air outside)I’ve actually scratched MYSELF raw, it’s pretty bad. Does that sound right to you?

and

I used to have a dog who’d get “hot spots” like that – we lived in a tropical climate so dry skin wasn’t a problem, the vet said it was something akin to eczema. The only thing that’d make them go away was a tapering course of oral steroids (the animal equivalent of a Medrol Dosepak). Maybe your vet can suggest something similar.

I was going to say that it sounded like the dry air thing, but maybe not! Is she scratching herself in one spot, or just kind of all over? In any case, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to get her to the vet and make sure it’s the dry air and not something that needs steroids!

 

Have you been to this website? Some of the product descriptions are priceless!

I had not! I love it when companies show their sense of humor on their web site. And I love those cat plates – but not for $45 for 4 of them! 🙂

 

When evenings are cold, I settle under the electric blanket on the couch. Sometimes Fred’s cold, too, so I share my blanket with him. Inevitably, Mister Boogers gets in on the warmth, and stretches out and sleeps the sleeps like a log.

Whenever I get groceries, as I empty the bags, I leave them on the kitchen floor. Tommy comes running in and writhes around on them for some reason. Whatever makes him happy, I s’pose.

 

Previously
2007: I judiciously left off the “You fucking motherfucking asshole.” part.
2006: And then the spud said “Is he trying to go to Narnia?”
2005: I’ll take my anonymous life, thank you.
2004: No entry.
2003: No entry.
2002: “What?” he said. “I WASN’T geeky!”
2001: No entry.
2000: Tomorrow, I’m going to go see Dr. Judy for my ear, out of which I still cannot hear anything but constant white noise.

For weeks now, we’ve had little bitty moths randomly appearing and flying around the kitchen. Also, occasionally, we’d see a little inchworm. The cats have been enjoying both the moths and the inchworms, and are pretty good at chasing down, eating – and barfing up – the moths. I had a canister of cornmeal on top of the pantry, and when I got my lazy ass to looking around for the source of the moths and inchworms, I found many moths and inchworms in the canister of cornmeal.

I put the canister of cornmeal in the refrigerator and over the next few days fed the cornmeal (and the moths/ inchworms) to the girlz. Problem solved!

Or so I thought. It’s never that easy, is it?

The moths kept appearing and the inchworms kept inching, and I checked the flour and the sugar and found nothing.

“I think it’s just the moths and inchworms left over from the cornmeal. They were hiding somewhere, the cats will eventually catch and eat them all, and then there’ll be no more,” I theorized to Fred.

But the moths kept coming.

Yesterday, finally annoyed enough to do something about it, I cleaned out the pantry. In the pantry, I found a forgotten bag of cornmeal (once upon a time sealed in a OneZip bag, but which had been chewed through) that was loaded up with moths and inchworms. I also found a bag of tortillas, rock-hard and loaded up with the same.

I emptied the pantry and tossed out the old stuff, wiped down the shelves, wiped everything off, and put it back in an organized manner.

NOW perhaps the problem is solved.

It’s amazing how much more room you end up with when things are organized in a cabinet rather than just tossed in there any old way, isn’t it?

 

We watched Sunshine this past weekend (it was kind of eh, but we’re not as picky when it comes to movies lately, because there’s never nothin’ on TV and we’re a little desperate), and I have to say, no offense to his fans, but Cillian Murphy is THE most evil-looking man I’ve ever seen. It gives me chills (and not in a good way) just to look at him. It might be the really light eyes, or maybe he kills puppies and buries them in his back yard in his spare time, but whatever it is, I sure wouldn’t want to be stuck in an elevator with him.

I decided he’d be excellent as Randall Flagg.

Last night we started watching The Brave One, but stopped it about half an hour before the end so we could go to bed. I was under the impression, when we started watching it, that it was an hour and a half long. I might have been under this – erroneous, as it turned out – impression because when I looked on the front of the sleeve the DVD came in, it listed the length as being 1 hour 30 minutes. At 1 hour 20 minutes, I said “I do not see how on earth this movie is going to resolve in less than ten minutes.”

It didn’t, ’cause it had another 30 minutes to go. This is not the first Netflix movie that has claimed to be 1 hour 30 minutes on the sleeve, and then ended up being quite a bit longer.

In any case, it’s not bad. I love me some Jodie Foster, because she’s one of the few child stars who has her shit together as an adult. Also, she strikes me as extremely competent – if you were friends with her and you had a problem, she’d totally roll up her sleeves and get in there and fix it.

Please don’t tell me she’s a flighty mess in real life. I don’t think I could handle the heartbreak.

 

My baby.

 

Previously
2007: She became entirely liquid somehow, and flowed through my fingers and across the room, ending up under the bed.
2006: I think that the next thing Apple should create is a cell phone/ iPod player.
2005: Yes, I use the same kind of lotion as my CAT.
2004: No entry.
2003: Anyway. Enough about my underwear.
2002: You’ve been warned, skank hos out there who would swoop down upon my husband in his grief and get him to marry you.
2001: Yeah, that’s me, not giving a shit if they can see me or not…
2000: Really, what other journaller will thrill you with pictures from the litter box?

Thanks for worrying, you guys, but we are perfectly fine. The county that got hit hard is a few counties over; all we got was some wind – not even very strong wind – and torrential rain. There’s a lot of standing water, more than I’ve seen since we bought the house (granted, it’s only a year and a half, so it’s not like I’m saying “In all the 50 years we’ve lived here, I’ve never seen so much standing water!”). If we still had the pond, it would be filled to overflowing right now. The back forty is about 1/3 flooded, which SOMEONE needs to keep in mind if he plans to fence it in and put animals back there. In fact, I think where the pigs were going to go is the area that’s flooded the worst.

You have to look beyond the chicken coop to see the worst of the standing water. It’s probably easier to see if you look at the larger version at Flickr.

 

I had an appointment in South Huntsville yesterday morning, and I left here about 45 minutes before my appointment time, FLEW down the interstate to get there, and as a consequence had to cool my heels for 10 minutes. And another 20 in the exam room. Had I brought my book with me? Of course not. It’s a heavy motherfucking book, the new Stephen King, and I didn’t want to have to carry it around with me. So I stared at the walls and got more and more worked up about seeing the doctor.

It was my two year follow up visit with the surgeon who performed my gastric bypass surgery, and I’ve gained some weight, and I just KNEW I was going to catch shit from him for that. I’ve mentioned before, I think, that he does not quite have the warm and cuddly bedside manner, but he’s very good at what he does, so I’m okay with the lack of warmth coming from him.

So I waited, and I fidgeted, and I waited and I got all worked up, and then he opened the door and greeted me, and I stood up and bellowed “YES I GAINED WEIGHT WHAT BUSINESS IS IT OF YOURS I’M HAPPY WITH HOW I FEEL SO GO FUCK YOURSELF!” and stomped out.

Okay, not really.

I was primed to get defensive, though, because the bottom line is that I do feel very comfortable at this weight. 7 1/2 years ago, I wondered if I would ever be completely comfortable in my own skin. I’m not completely there yet, but I’m certainly getting closer, and oddly enough, when I weighed less than I weigh now, I was less comfortable in my own skin than I’ve ever been in my entire life. While I might now weigh what others weigh when they hit their “OH MY GOD!” wall and go on a diet to lose weight, this weight, to me, is comfortable. I can live here.

While I waited for the doctor to come in, I was all annoyed with myself, thinking just what are you under the impression he’s going to do, point his finger at you and call you a fatty? and what’s he going to do, take your birthday away? and jesus christ, would you calm the fuck DOWN? and but what if he refuses to clear me for plastic surgery?! I was so filled with anxiety that when he walked into the room and shook my hand, I started sweating profusely.

I am 40 years old, and I started SWEATING because I was SO WORRIED that the doctor would YELL AT ME about gaining weight ON MY OWN BODY.

I think I need therapy.

There was no yelling. He handed me a printed time line that showed my BMI over the past two years (I started out with a BMI of 52.1!). He mentioned that I’d gained a little weight, and then he reminded me that I was having liver issues at the time I hit my lowest weight, issues that included the most lovely chronic diarrhea, and as soon as my liver got straightened out and the diarrhea went away (you weren’t eating, I hope) it was not unusual that I would gain some weight.

He told me that he’d like to see my BMI stay under 30 (it’s 27.5), he was glad to hear that I feel so good. He told me to make an appointment with the nutritionist (it’s a yearly thing, seeing the nutritionist). The nutritionist’s office has a new toy, a body composition test that measures all kinds of neat information, most interestingly your lean body mass. I’ll have that done twice before my three-year followup visit with the surgeon, and I think it’ll be kind of interesting to see.

Then he asked if I was considering plastic surgery (lost opportunity to make him uncomfortable by looking insulted and saying “Are you saying I’m FLABBY?!”, damnit) and I said I was, and he said that if I wanted, they could refer me.

So I have a consultation with a plastic surgeon I’ve heard VERY good things about from other weight loss surgery patients at the end of the month, and then an appointment with the nutritionist in March, and my three-year follow up visit with the surgeon next February.

And now I’m all set and can take a deep breath and stop freaking out about the possibility of being scolded like a little girl for gaining weight. I’ve had quite enough of that in my life, thank you.

By the way, despite the fact that I was super stressed about the doctor visit, my blood pressure was 115/80, which is actually higher than it’s been lately. I wonder what it would have been if I hadn’t been stressed?

My surgeon now does lap band surgery. Back when I was first pursuing weight loss surgery, no one in this area did lap band surgery; you had to go to Nashville or Birmingham to find a surgeon to do it. Things have changed in the past few years, obviously. The surgeon smiled and said that he’s a “full-service bariatric surgeon, now!”

We also talked about the recent study that states A body mass index of 25 to 30, the so-called overweight range, “may be optimal,”, which is what he brought up when he mentioned he’d like to see my BMI stay below 30.

BIG SIGH OF RELIEF that that’s over!

 

For the past two days, we’ve gotten four eggs from the girlz (actually, now that I think about it, we got FIVE yesterday!). This is Big News, because for what seems to be a LONG damn time, we’ve only been getting two or three from them. We don’t know if the lack of laying is from them molting or from adding a rooster to the flock or the short days, but in any case hopefully they’re starting up again. I had to buy two dozen eggs from the grocery store in the last month, and they just do NOT compare to the stuff we can get from our own back yard when the girlz are feeling up to it.

It got well up into the 70s yesterday, and the girlz rejoiced by taking dust baths while McLovin kept an eye on them.

 

Joe Bob cannot decide whether I’m worthy of love or his worst nightmare. Sometimes he sits and gives me the Love Eyes.

And after he gives me the Love Eyes, he rolls around and flirts with me ’til I rub his belly. Other times, for no reason I can discern, he decides I’m the devil and he runs like hell from me. I have no idea what his issues are, I’m just glad we have another neurotic cat; Miss Stank needs the company.

 

Previously
2007: (DON’T JUDGE ME)
2006: I’ve been watching a lot of TV lately.
2005: No entry.
2004: And then Fictional Woman and Fictional Child share an Isn’t he DISGUSTING? look, and bid each other goodnight.
2003: Taking a nap looks like a good idea.
2002: I decide who’s King Shit of Turd Mountain, y’all, and don’t forget it.
2001: Everyone enjoys a good fart story!
2000: No entry.

For those who requested it, the Weight Watchers Choco-Java-Rubbed Sirloin recipe is here.

 

Man, we are having one hell of a time finding a decent humidifier. Fred bought one a couple of weeks ago at Sears, and it leaked all over the damn place. I bought one yesterday at Target, it had obviously been used and returned, it had no instruction booklet with it, and it also leaked.

For now, I’m keeping a pot of boiling water on the stove all day, and maybe I’ll just do that ’til the outside humidity picks up, then buy a really good humidifier over the summer.

We need some damn humidity up in this house – I’m itchy all the damn time, and Sugarbutt’s nose looks horrible. We’re giving him oil every day (and by “we”, obviously I mean “Fred”), but it’s not helping much.

I can’t complain too much about the weather, though – it rained all day Sunday and half the day yesterday, but it was in the high 60s, and it’s supposed to be in the low 70s today. I can handle rain if it’s not also really freakin’ cold out.

The temperature will be dropping back down into the 50s after today, but I can handle that. Anything higher than 45 this time of year, I’m happy.

 

A guy was supposed to show up and look at the fireplace in the front room, and give us a quote for how much it would cost to have a liner put in and a small wood stove, and after I spent all day at a low level of dread – I hate having to deal with workpeople (people PERIOD, really) – the guy never showed up. I had pulled the sheet out of the chimney (it’s there to stop the leaves and bird crap from coming down into the house – we had a cap put on the chimney last year, but it came off and the company that did it is no longer in business) to get it out of the way and to wash the sheet (it was NASTY), and after I’d tossed it in the washer, I looked around the laundry room and I reflected to myself for the millionth time that the way it was set up was very annoying to me, so I started rearranging.

Half an hour later, I’d pushed the refrigerator and freezer apart so that I could put the recycling stuff there, moved the two containers of cat food down the wall toward the doorway, moved the shelf unit we use for storage down the wall, which opened up space so I could move the bin of shoes and boots we keep by the back door so that it WASN’T blocking the washer, and put all the washing crap that was sitting on the floor (Borax, bleach, vinegar) up in the cabinets over the washer and dryer. At one point I turned around to say something to Sugarbutt, who was sitting by the screen door leading to the back yard, smacking at the cat door, and I saw every single chicken sitting on the back steps, staring expectantly at me, hoping I’d send some food their way. I wiped down the washer and dryer, and then I went upstairs, grabbed the Cat-It drinking fountain, brought it downstairs, and put it under the utility sink near the bowls of cat food. I’d had the Cat-It in the upstairs bathroom, because I thought it would help Spot drink more water. But having it up there now is a pain in the ass, because I have to carry it downstairs to the kitchen to clean it, and the cats don’t really spend all that much time upstairs these days, so I decided to relocate it. There’s no plug under the utility sink, so I ran an extension cord around the litter boxes to the area under the utility sink, cleaned out the Cat-It, refilled it, and set it up.

The Cat-It, by the way, is a hit with a couple of the cats, but not all of them are big fans. That’s about what I expected, so I consider it money well spent.

While I waited for the chimney guy to show up, I watched TV. Then he didn’t show up, and I was simultaneously thrilled because I wouldn’t have to deal with him, and pissed because I know I’ll have to SOMEDAY.

 

Joe Bob appears to be frightened of me. We kept him in the foster kitten room overnight Sunday night, and then Fred let him out yesterday morning, and before I left for the pet store he was perfectly fine. When I got back, I puttered around and did some vacuuming, and when I went upstairs to see where he was, he was hiding atop the cat tree. He let me pet him, but he didn’t like it much, and although he followed me back downstairs, every time I walked in his direction he ran away.

Fred thinks it’s because I smelled like the cat room at the pet store, but I think Joe Bob is just an INGRATE and hates me and that is FINE. Fucker. I don’t have to be loved by ALL my cats, but if he comes looking for love tonight, I don’t know that there will be any love to SHARE.

Hmph.

******************

Brudderly love is alive and well.

******************

Previously
2007: God. That sounds just like a herd of elephants, I thought.
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.
2004: I DON’T KNOW YOU, I CAN’T CHAT WITH YOU, PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE.
2003: Pictures found.
2002: That’s just the kind of sucky slacking emailer I am.
2001: You know, if I had ANY self-control at all, I’d wait to buy these books ’til they come out in paperback.
2000: No entry.

Nance has moved! She’s now located at Knucklehead Convention. Update your bookmarks!

 

Okay, here we go. The main cat page has been updated, each cat’s personal page has a link to their Catster profile, and if you look there to the left sidebar and down a bit, each cat has a small picture, underneath which are the names I usually call them, and if you click on their names, you’ll go to their personal page (on my site, not on Catster).

There’s no page for Skittles and Elle because I just plumb ran out of time. I’ll get to it sometime this week, perhaps.

 

After a couple of days of leaving him in the foster kitten room, we started opening the door and letting Joe Bob explore when he wanted to. A few times over the weekend, Fred went up and got him out of the room (even with the door open, he didn’t show all that much inclination to explore very far) and brought him downstairs. By Sunday afternoon, he’d discovered that he could sit at the side door and watch the birds, and he proceeded to do so for several hours.

There was lots of hissing, and we discovered that Joe Bob has quite the yowl on him (and here we thought it was only his sister!), but things went pretty well. We’re still putting him up in the foster room at bedtime for a few more nights, but maybe tomorrow night we’ll try leaving it open all night and see how that goes.

He’s definitely discovered the kitchen and what it’s for, because Fred brought him down for Snackin’ Time and gave him his own little plate, so now when Joe Bob is around and he sees me go in there, he runs in all excited, like “Hey there! Got food?! Is it Snackin’ Time?!”

I think he’ll fit right in.

 

I had a dream the other night that Fred and impulsively sold Crooked Acres and bought a house on a tiny plot of land in Madison. We were settling into our new house, when we determined that we’d made a big mistake, and we were panicking and trying to decide what to do.

I woke up, heart racing, and had to think about it for a few long moments before I realized it was a dream.

I hate dreams like that.

 

So, this weekend I got the latest issue of People Magazine, and I looked down at the cover, and I saw Michelle Williams’ face, and I got pissed off, and I decided fuck this shit, and I canceled my subscription to People, and then for good measure I canceled my subscription to US Magazine, because it’s gotten to the point where I just can’t stomach supporting magazines that purport to have “the real story” about “the big breakup!” and “inside sources” who know “what really went on”, because if nothing else, Michelle Williams has always struck me as someone who very much values her privacy and to have these goddamn magazines blaring that they know the truth (hint: No one knows the whole truth except for the two who were in the relationship) can be nothing but hurtful to her.

(Though I’ll admit that I was also a little surprised that she thought that releasing a statement to the press asking to be allowed to grieve in peace would work – we are, after all, talking about the slavering pack of hyenas who responded to Owen Wilson’s suicide attempt by respectfully keeping a distance. Ha! Ha! I mean, by following his every step and printing picture after picture of him and howling “WHERE’S THE SCAR?! HERE ARE HIS WRISTS, WHERE’S THE SCAAAAAAAAAAR?!”)

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m no SAINT. I’ll still read celebrity news online, but at least I’m not sending money to the online sites, so I don’t feel like I’m really “supporting” them – though of course my click to their site probably brings them money in some way, shape, or form.

Anyway. No more People or US for me! I’m probably saving like six trees a year by canceling my subscriptions.

 

Saturday morning I spent a couple of hours walking around the yard picking up branches that had fallen from the trees. We’ve had a couple of very windy days lately, so I ended up filling up the yellow wagon four times with branches and twigs, which I dumped on the burn pile. Fred started work on the fence around the new chicken coop, got pissed off about the mud, stayed inside for a couple of hours, and then decided to give it the old college try. In the time he’d been inside, the mud dried a lot, so he got a good part of the fencing put up.

He was going to mostly finish it yesterday, but around midmorning it started raining – despite the fact that weather.com had told us nothing about no damn rain on the way – and it rained all day long. He came in when the rain got to be too much, and spent the afternoon reading and bonding with Joe Bob. I did laundry all day, worked on the cat pages, and then made lasagna for dinner. It was a lasagna I’d put together a few weeks ago and then froze for future consumption, so all I had to do was thaw it out (which I did Saturday) and then cook it. I love having the freezer space to be able to make meals ahead, then when I’m feeling uninspired or not in the mood for cooking, I can find something in the freezer. We could probably get by for a couple of weeks just on what’s in the freezer.

Saturday, I made steak, and we had steak salads. When I was in Maine, I read my mother’s Weight Watchers magazine, and found a recipe in there for “Choco java-rubbed sirloin”, and wanted to try it. I tried it when I got home, and I didn’t care for the choco-java part of the recipe, but the way I cooked the steak, it was very tender, and REALLY good, so I’ve made it that way ever since. Basically, I buy a good cut of meat (usually a sirloin), cut off any fat that’s around the edges, season it with butt rub (I’ve tried seasoning it different ways, but the butt rub is the tastiest to us), sear it in a pan over medium-high heat, two minutes on each side, then pop it into the oven on 400ºFarenheit, cook it six minutes, flip it, and cook it another six, put it on a wooden cutting board, cover loosely with foil for 10 minutes, and then eat. (Edited to add: I didn’t bring it to room temperature first – it came directly out of the refrigerator, got rubbed with seasoning, and went into the pan.)

I put some bagged salad in a bowl, toss in some cherry tomatoes and sliced cucumber, and put sliced steak on top. It is FABULOUS.

The best part is that there’s always enough steak left over to have for lunch the next day, and it’s just as good heated up again. My only issue is that Fred and I both like our steak medium-rare, and this gets it done too well for us. I started out with cooking it in the oven for 10 minutes on one side, then flipped it over for another 8, but I’m slowly reducing the amount of time it spends in the oven. Saturday I tried it for 6 minutes each side, and there was just a hint of pink in the middle. Next time, I’ll try 5 minutes each side and see how that is.

 

Eye update; skip to the next section, ya big babies, if you don’t want to see the crazy zombie eye!

This was what it looked like last Saturday:

(pic)

This is what it looks like now:

(pic)

HUGE improvement, just in the last few days. It may very well be mostly gone by this weekend. I hope so!

 

Dog update

The vet tech emailed Fred over the weekend to report that Romeo (what she’s named the dog) was discovered to have a raging case of tapeworms. They treated him and, well, I won’t say what she said it looked like… BUT I HOPE YOU’RE NOT EATING ITALIAN RIGHT NOW.

She said that after treatment,

he has been gaining like mad. His appetite is wonderful — he’s eagerly
eating about six meals a day. He has been more active and coughing
less since his first heartworm treatment. He’ll get his next
intestinal worm treatment tomorrow, we’re rechecking his kidney
disease in two more weeks, and his next heartworm treatment will be in
three weeks. I’m hoping he’ll be healthy enough to neuter and get his
teeth cleaned in six weeks. So far, things are looking real good for
him.

I took his picture today, showing his current body condition.
Compared with your picture, his ribs are definitely not as easy to
count anymore. He was 22 pounds when I weighed him Monday. I’ll be
eager to see what it’s up to when I weigh him again tomorrow.

And here’s the picture:

He looks AMAZING compared to how he looked when he wandered into our yard. That is one lucky dog!

 

 

Previously
2007: No entry.
2006: No entry.
2005: How does one become a house appraiser?
2004: I told Fred about how little things remind me anew of our loss strike me when I’m least expecting it, and I cried again.
2003: And, oh and does fred annoy you? Not any more than I annoy him, probably. 🙂
2002: See something on the floor? Sit on it.
2001: No entry.
2000: Here’s a cute story to satiate your bitchypoo jones until then

Nance has moved! She’s now located at Knucklehead Convention. Update your bookmarks!

 

New month, new logo! This one was created by the wonderful Aly, who has made many banners for me in the past. I think the forbidden lurrrrrve of Tommy and Stinkerbelle is a perfect theme for February!

Thanks, Aly!

 

I would like to transition my cat’s litter from the normal clay to the clumping kind, what would be the best way? Also he needs a new litter box, should I introduce that first and then change the litter or the other way around?

Although I’ve never changed cat litter from the regular clay to the clumping stuff (we’re clumping litter users from way back), I imagine that slowly adding the clumping to the non-clumping stuff, adding more clumping stuff every few days, would work. That gets them used to the new stuff gradually, rather than all at once. And definitely use the new litter box with the old stuff for a while – maybe a week? – before starting the changing of the litter. If any readers have more experience regarding the changing-to-a-new-litter question, feel free to leave a comment!

Finally we’ve noticed he’s got a hard lump on his side, pretty small, about the size of a dime (or maybe a little smaller), it doesn’t seem to bother him when we touch it, it is dry, not oozing anything, he isn’t biting at it or scratching….what could this be? Is it something that I should be taking him to the vet for or just monitor as needed?

I’d get him to the vet when you can, just to make sure it’s nothing serious – it doesn’t sound like anything our cats have dealt with (YET – now that I’ve said that, one of them will immediately develop such an issue, I assure you), so I’m not sure what it could be.

 

After reading that very interesting article on litter boxes from cat’s point of view, I first wondered how many perma-cats you have (answered above) and then, how many litter boxes you have? Do the cats all stay inside or do they do their “bidness” outside sometimes? I really wish I had a former coworker’s email address so that I could direct a link of that article to her. She had two cats and only changed the box when they were “climbing rocks”. That she could even joke about it made me want to toss my cookies.

We have seven permanent cats, two “not ours” cats (cats that supposedly don’t belong to us, but they spend about 3/4 of their time in our house, eating our food, and 1/8 of their time killing things and leaving them on the porch for us), and two fosters. More on them in a later section.

The cats who belong to us sometimes stay in, and sometimes are allowed out back in the (fenced-in) yard, depending on the weather. Some of them will come in from outside specifically to use the litter box, but there are three (Mister Boogers, Sugarbutt, and Tommy) who will always take the opportunity to go outside, dig in the dirt, and leave a little somethin’ behind. I’m torn between being glad that there’s that much less mess in the litter box and being peeved that there’s that much more mess in MY BACKYARD.

We have four litter boxes – two in the laundry room, one in the upstairs bathroom, and one in the foster kitten room. I clean them out twice a day, in the morning and again at night. I keep them as clean as possible, and if I decide it needs to be done, I’ll do a quick middle-of-the-day scooping.

I understand why people hate to clean out the litter box – it’s a nasty, thankless business – but do they not realize that after their cats dig through a nasty never-cleaned-out litter box, they then take their nasty germ-covered paws and tromp all over the furniture, and their owners? It behooves an owner to keep those litter boxes sparkling!

 

i had a really fucked up dream last night after i fell asleep watching tmz. in my dream, heath ledger’s death and spot’s demise were both caused by mary kate olsen, who was actually trying to get heathcliff the cat whacked. but bob saget and dave collier fucked it all up and that damn heathcliff is still terrorizing the neighborhood. it was a very special episode of “full house.”

I love it when you guys have crazy, fucked-up dreams about me! I had a dream about Nance the other night, that I was visiting her and she told me that she was going to adopt a baby from Africa. Then I called her Nance-elina Jolie, and she got mad at me. Hee!

 

Have you ever seen Alien 3??? You look JUST like Sigourney Weaver.

That’s because me and Ripley, we’re the same kind of badass. Ripley kicks alien ass, I kick… flying insect ass!

 

just wondering if you’ve ever been noticed by a reader when you’re out and about at Petco, Target or even in Maine? I know I’d reconize you right away !

I’ve never had anyone come up to me and ask if I’m me (“Bitchypoo?!”), and the only reader I know of who spotted me was Sara, who probably spotted me on my way to the pet store one Monday morning. Oh, and several years ago when we were in Gatlinburg, a reader saw me, but didn’t say anything to me directly. That’s it as far as I know, but who knows? If anyone sees me, this is a blanket invitation to come up and say hi!

 

How long will it [your eye] be like that?

I expected it to look a lot better than it does by now (it looks better – Fred even agreed last night – but it’s slow going), but if I had to guess, I’d say it’ll probably be a week, week and half before it’s completely gone, if not a little longer. I’ll put up a picture of it on Monday so y’all can see how it looks, how about that?

Do they [the cats] like the girlz or ever go after them ?

For the most part, the cats and the chickens completely ignore each other. There were issues, when the girlz were smaller, with Maxi and Newt occasionally chasing one. As soon as we saw that, we’d kick the offending cat out of the back yard. Every now and then if McLovin is chasing one of the girlz around, and the hen runs by a cat, the cat might join in the chase for a moment, but McLovin usually puts a stop to that. I’ve also seen a chicken chase a cat for a short distance, too. I think McLovin sometimes mistakes Sugarbutt (who’s orange) for one of the yellow chickens, but he comes to his senses before any real chicken lovin’ attempts happen.

 

Has Fred *ever* traveled outside of Alabama/Tennessee? I understand loving your home and all, but – did he have to do a lot of traveling for work at one point and get burned out? How is it he has no interest in going, well, ANYWHERE?

Yeah, Fred’s done some traveling. I know he’s been to Illinois, to Fort Worth, to Rhode Island once, for work. Oh, and he had a work trip to Maryland, and I went with him. We’ve both been to Florida, and to Vicksburg, Mississippi, and to Pennsylvania (almost 12 years ago!) and Virginia. He just really isn’t interested in traveling – there’s nowhere on earth he’d rather be, than home on the farm puttering around outside or hanging out with me. I could complain about that (I, myself, really would like to travel some, thank you!), but can I really complain that his favorite place is home with me? I don’t think so. At least, not very much!

 

So, did you go and build a tiny 2″ snowman with your newly fallen snow? HEE!

Hush, troublemaker. I would have had an easier time of it making a snowman out of chicken poop than out of the amount of snow we got. But then I guess it wouldn’t have been a snowman, it would have been a poopman. A dropping man?

 

Um, did I miss it? Are Skittles and Elleh-Belleh permanent Anders0ns now?

They are not. More on them in a later section.

 

I have this vague memory that at one point, eons ago, Mama and Newt really weren’t your cats. Didn’t you talk a neighbor into taking them if you paid to have them fixed? Has that neighbor ever said anything about “her” cats living with you? Or am I remembering this totally wrong?

Nope, you’re remembering that right. But apparently Mama and Newt didn’t like being indoor kitties, and when they were let outside, they decided it was more comfy over here, where there’s a heated cat house on the front porch, and lots of food and water available. It was never MY intention to let them inside – why would we? They have food water and shelter on the front porch! – but FRED started letting them inside when it was cold out, and now they spend part of the day and most nights in the house with us. It works out pretty well, and Mama and Newt are always ready to go outside first thing in the morning. The neighbor’s never said anything about us “stealing” her cats, but they do go over there and visit with her from time to time, too.

 

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

The obvious issue with your question is that there’s no time constraint on it – how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood…. in an hour? A day? Forever? And are we talking an old woodchuck, a young one, or just a generic woodchuck somewhere in the middle? And what kind of wood?

I have a mug on my desk that says “How much shit could a dipshit dip if a dipshit could dip shit?” I love it.

 

Could you please give me a recommendation for a good digital camera thats under $350?

I really really really like our Sony DSC-P200. I have one, and Fred has one, and I love the pictures they take. We’ve had several Sony digital cameras (we also have a DSLR – A100, which is more expensive than what you’re looking to spend) and have absolutely loved every one of them.

Readers, do you have digital camera recommendations?

 

I’m confused! Who is Skittles? Your cat page is out of date.Can you give us a run-down? I thought I was good till you mentioned Fred said you have 10 cats and now there’s pictures of Skittles and all of a sudden I woke up and said “wait. Who’s Skittles?”

and

I have to agree with the general confusion about your cats. Skittles has sure been there a long time to be a foster. Also – it would be good to have a picture of each cat with all of their names/nicknames along the sidebar. You know, a quick-reference guide. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if you have a new cat or just a new name for an existing one.

Okay, here we go. A picture of each cat with his/ her name and nicknames, and what the hell they’re doing in our house. I’ll start with the temporaries.

I’m confused! Who is Skittles? Your cat page is out of date.Can you give us a run-down? I thought I was good till you mentioned Fred said you have 10 cats and now there’s pictures of Skittles and all of a sudden I woke up and said “wait. Who’s Skittles?”

and

I have to agree with the general confusion about your cats. Skittles has sure been there a long time to be a foster. Also – it would be good to have a picture of each cat with all of their names/nicknames along the sidebar. You know, a quick-reference guide. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if you have a new cat or just a new name for an existing one.

Okay, here we go. A picture of each cat with his/ her name and nicknames, and what they’re doing in our house. I’ll start with the temporaries.

Skittles. Nicknames: Twittles, Missy, Little Sister.
Skittles is a foster kitten, and yes – she’s been with us for a long time. This is because her two sisters at the pet store – Punki and Felicia – haven’t been adopted yet. Once one (or both!) of them are adopted, there’ll be room for Skittles and Elle. I think she’s about eight months old.

Elle. Nicknames: Elleh-Belleh, Missy, Sister.
Elle’s a foster. She’s been with us for quite some time, too, for the same reason as Skittles has. They’re both awfully sweet – and no, we’re not adopting them. She’s about eight months old, I think.

Maxi. Nicknames: Miss Mama, Mama, Tony Soprano.
Maxi (we usually call her Miss Mama, though) showed up in our back yard before the house was ours. She had obviously recently given birth, and it was probably a month later that she showed up on our front porch with her litter of kittens. With her was Newt (below), who we assumed was the father of the kittens. He was very, very attached to Miss Mama and would rub up against her and follow her around and give her the Love Eyes.

Eventually, we snatched Maxi and Newt up and brought them inside. We had the whole lot of them spayed and neutered, adopted the kittens out through the shelter I volunteer for, and Miss Mama and Newt were supposed to belong to a neighbor, who offered to take them in. As I mentioned above, Maxi and Newt had other plans, and adopted us. They were supposed to be outside-only cats, but Fred is a great big softie, and ended up bringing them inside. They stay inside a lot, but anytime they want out, they let us know. We don’t keep them inside against their will. Also, we always claim they’re “Not ours”, though no one (not even us!) believes us. I have no idea how old she is.

Newt. Nickname: Newtles.
As mentioned above, when we first saw Newt, we thought he was the father of Maxi’s kittens. The vet said she thought he might be one of her kittens from an earlier litter. At the time (a year ago), she said she didn’t think he was completely grown yet. I’d guess he’s somewhere in the vicinity of two years old now.

Spanky. Nickname: Skitty-boo.
Spanky’s the elder statesman of our cats. We got him when he was itty-bitty; less than 10 weeks old, I think. He was very very clingy and friendly at first, but then Spot taught him to be skittish and scared of people. He’ll eventually – once he gets to know you – come out from hiding and walk around the room, stretching, but he prefers not to be touched by you, thx. He’s about eleven and a half years old.

Scrappy. Nickname: Miz Poo, Poo, Poo pie, Pootypants.
Miz Poo (we never ever call her “Scrappy”) is my baby, and for a long time was the only girl. I got her when she was about 10 weeks old, I think. I saw her in the store that the rescue I now volunteer for used to run, fell in love with her, harassed Fred to let me get her, decided not to, and then went back two weeks later, she took one look at me and howled and howled, and I had to have her. She rules the roost with an iron paw, but if any of the other cats fight back she’ll run away hissing. She’s clingy and needy and a pain, but I love her so much. She’s 8 years old.

Stanley. Nickname: Mister Boogers, Boogs, Boogie, Stumpy.
Though his “legal” name is Stanley, we never call him that – he’s always Mister Boogers, Boogs, or Boogie to us. We got him in October of 2003, a little while after our cat Fancypants went missing. One day, Fred decided it was time for a new cat. I had shown Fred a picture of one of the kittens at the shelter, and Fred was so amused by the look on his face (he was named “Paw Paw” at the time) that he asked to see him. Mister Boogers was by himself in a bathroom because he was recovering from an upper respiratory infection, and as soon as Fred picked him up, he purred so hard that his little cheeks puffed out. It was pretty much a done deal the instant Mister Boogers waggled his little stump of a tail. For a little while I called him “Beanie” or “The Bean”, but that was before his true nickname – “Mister Boogers” – evolved. Though I have been known to put up a picture (or a thousand of them) of Mister Boogers proclaiming that he hates you, the deep dark secret is that Mister Boogers is a total sweetheart and a lovebug. Don’t tell him I told you that. He’s about five and a half years old.

(Orange) Sugarbutt. Nicknames: Suggie, Toogie, Sugarman.
(Black) Tom Cullen. Nicknames: Tom, Tommy, Tom-Tom, Toms.
Tommy and Sugarbutt were both from a litter of foster kittens we had in late summer, early fall 2005. They – along with their brother, who looked just like Sugarbutt, and their sister who was a tortie – were very little when we first got them. Sugarbutt was named “Sad Eyes” when I got him, and had what we thought was a prolapsed rectum. It was so bad that I asked the shelter manager what to do, and she said that sugar on a wet washcloth might help the swelling; this is how he ended up with the name “Sugarbutt.” (Tommy was named “Barrett”, which didn’t fit him at all – I called him “Bear” for a while before we decided to adopt him, and renamed him “Tom Cullen” for the character in Stephen King’s The Stand).

The day the whole litter was to go to the pet store, Tommy developed a mysterious limp. I decided to keep him for a few extra days just to keep an eye on him, and by the time he was better, we’d fallen in love with his solemn little face. In the meantime, Sugarbutt was adopted out and then returned by the man who’d adopted him, saying that he was bleeding rectally. I picked him up from the vet and kept him for two weeks (he was on antibiotics), and by the time the two weeks was up, there was no question but that we’d keep him. They’re quite attached to each other, and can often be found grooming and loving upon each other. We call Tommy our “Ambassador”, because he’s the first one to try to make friends with the new foster kitties. They’re about two and a half years old.

Stinkerbelle. Nicknames: Miss Stanky, Stinkybutt, Stinkybottom, Missy.
Stinkerbelle was one of a litter of kittens we had in the summer of 2007. These kittens were as close to feral as any fosters we’ve ever had, and I worried about them a LOT. Stinkerbelle was the worst – she wouldn’t let us touch her, she’d run from us, and getting medication down her throat was a nightmare. Her sister came around and decided to be friendly the fastest, so she went to the pet store first. Her brothers weren’t far behind, so they went next, which left Stinkerbelle (whose original name was Maryanne, since we went with a Gilligan’s Island theme) alone. The instant she was alone, she became a lot friendlier. She was here for several weeks after her brothers and sister were gone, and she and Fred bonded. Aside from that, she was very, very enamored of Tommy – in fact, her brothers were quite attached to Tommy, too, which led us to believe that their mother had been a black cat.

She went to the pet store on a Friday, and the following Monday morning she hadn’t been adopted, and in fact it looked like she’d spent all night trying to dig her way out of her cage. I made the mistake of telling Fred that, and he began telling me to go get her and bring her home. Bring her home. Bring her home NOW, bring her home. Although I tried my best to get him to wait and see if someone would adopt her, he wouldn’t hear of it, and instead stopped on his way home to pick her up and bring her home. The instant she heard his voice, she started howling, and that was all she wrote.

She’s a skittish little brat who runs away if you try to pet her (unless you approach her very slowly), and begins howling for Snackin’ Time an hour before it’s time. She’s gorgeous and she’s kind of a little hussy (she lurves Tommy the most, but if Tommy’s not available, she’ll get some lovin’ from Mister Boogers, and she’s even recently made advances toward Skittles, who is unimpressed) and Fred will tell you at length how soft and silky her fur is, and how beautiful her blue eyes are. He’s a man in love, I guess. She’s about nine months old.

Joe Bob. Nicknames: Joey, Bobby (he hasn’t really been around long enough to develop any long-term nicknames).
You may or may not remember Joe Bob from about a year ago. At the time, he was named Moonman, and he was a foster along with his sister Moondance. Fred said one day “He’s such a bubba!”, and I said “He looks like a Joe Bob!”, and his new name (at least to us) was born. (His sister became Myrtle to us.) Joe Bob and Myrtle were with us for a break from the pet store, where they’d been sitting in a cage for ages. They were with us for quite a while, but Myrtle was a bit of a hellbeast, and wore out her welcome. She went to the pet store and Joe Bob was soon to follow, but he developed a urinary tract infection, so we kept him for a few more weeks.

Once he was healed, he went to Petsmart as well. He sat in a cage for a lonnnnng time, and was finally adopted after a couple of months. The people who adopted him ended up returning him (I don’t know the reason why), and he went back to the shelter. And then he stayed there. His sister got adopted (she was actually very sweet but had a really scary scream on her when she was annoyed), and every so often we’d talk about Joe Bob and what a good kitty he was. Earlier this week, after we said goodbye to Spot, we started talking about the idea of adopting a new kitty. NOT because we were replacing Spot, but because the best way to honor his memory was to rescue another cat. We discussed Punki, we talked about just waiting, and then Fred said “Joe Bob! Let’s adopt Joe Bob!” I agreed, but said I wanted to wait a couple of weeks, because I wanted things to CALM DOWN around here.

But Fred is like a two year-old when he gets an idea in his head, so after work on Wednesday he went to the shelter and adopted Joe Bob. The shelter manager was VERY excited that we were adopting him. We brought him home, and he’s been in the foster kitty room ever since. He’s a little freaked out, so we’re taking it slow. He likes being petted, but he’s a little leery of the other cats. Given that he and Tommy and Sugs were good friends before he left for the pet store last year, I hope he makes friends with them again. It’ll take time, but we’ve got all the time in the world.

 

I’m toying with the idea of putting small pictures of all the cats in residence in the sidebar (and when the fosters move on and we get new ones, I can put new pictures over there) along with their names, so y’all won’t be so confused when I talk about the cats. I may do that this weekend – it’s definitely my goal to update the cat page, though!

 

Previously
2007: Stupid Mother Nature.
2006: No entry.
2005: What the hell is “California cuisine”?
2004: No entry.
2003: No entry.
2002: No entry.
2001: Just accept that I’m always right, why don’tcha.
2000: Like I’m going to just stand there all docile-like and let him kill me.