Author: Robyn

Thanks, all y’all, for your well-wishes for Miz Poo. I picked her up yesterday morning after I dropped the kittens off at the other vet to be spayed and neutered. She was doped up to the gills, but seemed glad to see me. The vet said that it would probably be best to keep her crated until her drain comes out next Monday, but there’s just no way I could see trying to keep a portly Poo in a little crate. I set up a litter box and some blankets and a bowl of food and water in the upstairs bathroom and put her in there. She hated it.

She was wearing a cone collar when I picked her up because like I mentioned, she has a drain in place and without something to stop her, she’ll try to pull it out, and to lick at her stitches. I went up and sat with her for an hour at a time several times yesterday, and each time she would slowly climb into my lap and sit there while I petted her. Eventually she’d purr.

My poor Poo.

When Fred got home, he called the vet’s office to see if there was a particular reason they’d put a cone collar on her instead of a collar like the one they’d put on Sugarbutt back when he was having issues with his foot and had to be restrained from licking. They told him they’d tried one on her, but she was still able to reach her back end. He hung up and told me we should give it a try anyway.

We put the collar on her and she didn’t like it, but in my opinion it was better than the cone collar – at least with the no-cone collar, there’s nothing right there in her face. Fred sat with her on the couch for a while, and then I sat with her on my lap while we were watching TV. She couldn’t get in a comfortable position with the no-cone collar on, though, so we switched her back to the cone, and she mostly snoozed the entire time we watched TV. By the end of the evening she was moving around better than she had been, so that’s a good thing, right? I put her in the guest bedroom, and she flopped down in a cat bed and went to sleep, and didn’t make a noise all night long.

She’s on pain medication for the next few days, so I’m hoping that that will keep her doped up enough that all she’ll want to do is sleep, at least until some good healing gets underway.

Every night at bedtime, after Fred and I spent time with the kittens, we go into my bedroom and lay in there in the dark, talking and petting Kara and whichever cat comes along.

(Usually Mister Boogers tromps across the bed and then digs frantically at the covers until Fred holds them up. Then Mister Boogers climbs under the covers, curls up next to Fred’s legs, and then if Fred dares to move even the slightest bit, Mister Boogers bitches at him for having THE UTTER NERVE.)

After half an hour or so of cuddling, talking, and hanging out, Fred kisses me goodnight and goes to his room.

Now, very important point here: Fred’s door doesn’t close right, so to prevent the cats from getting into his room during the day, there’s a hook on the outside of the door. To prevent the cats from getting inside his room at night (he’s a light sleeper and often unable to get back to sleep once he’s been woken up) there’s a hook on the inside of the door.

So Saturday night, Fred toddled off to bed. I wasn’t tired, though, so I decided to stay up and read. Half an hour later, I was deep into my book when I heard Fred cry out frantically from his room. I can’t swear one hundred percent to it, but it sounded very much like he said “Help!”, and like I said, he sounded frantic.

I jumped out of bed immediately and went to the door to his room. I was mostly hoping that he was just dreaming, but as you can imagine I was pretty freaked out.

“Hey,” I said in a low voice, knocking lightly on his door. “Hey.” Usually this is more than enough to wake him up. He didn’t respond. I knocked slightly harder and when there was no response, I grabbed the door handle and pulled on it.

At this point, I was completely certain that, in the midst of a fatal heart attack he’d summoned the strength to cry out “Help!” and then died. After pulling on the door handle as hard as I could, I resumed knocking on the door, only this time instead of knocking I was pounding and instead of quietly saying “Hey,” I was bellowing “HEY!” I don’t know how long this went on, maybe ten seconds and I was just on the verge of going downstairs to find something to break the door down with, when I finally heard a disoriented “Huh?” from Fred.

“ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?” I bellowed. “ARE YOU OKAY?”

Sounding slightly annoyed, Fred said “What?”

“OPEN THE DOOR!” I yelled.

Finally, he stumbled to the door, opened it, and blinked at me. I felt his forehead (I don’t know, it seemed like the thing to do) and made sure he wasn’t in the midst of a heart attack, told him briefly what happened, and let him go back to bed.

I listened at his door a few times, making sure I could hear him breathing, before I went to sleep.

That night, I had an anxiety dream. My anxiety dreams have taken a turn these past few years. It used to be that in my anxiety dreams, I’d dream that Fred had died. I didn’t have them often, maybe a few times a year, but I always woke up crying. Since we bought this house, my anxiety dreams have taken the form wherein we decided on the spur of the moment to sell this house and – when the dreams take place – we’re living in a soulless McMansion on a postage-stamp piece of land. We are always completely miserable, can’t understand what got into our heads, and are scheming to sell the McMansion and buy this house back.

I’d like to stop with the anxiety dreams, thank you.

The next morning I gave Fred hell (“Sleep WELL, did you?”) and made him reposition the hook on his door so that NEXT TIME he calls out in his sleep, I can open the damn door and get to him instead of just standing there like an idiot, pounding on the door, and bellowing to wake him up.

With the weather turning so much cooler lately (it’s supposed to go down below freezing tonight), the wasps have started looking for a warm place to hang out. They think my house would do quite nicely.

Yesterday, 17 wasps came into the house. They mostly come into the dining room and computer room – I think they’re coming down the chimney – and I’ve gotten to the point where instead of getting out the Dyson hand held vacuum, it’s become easier for me to just grab a piece of paper towel (I have a folded square of paper towel on a corner of my desk for just this purpose), snatch the wasp up, open the door, and toss the wasp out. The wasps usually take flight and fly directly away from the house, though I’ve wondered if the same three wasps are coming into the house over and over again.

I should paint tiny numbers on their legs so I can track them.

So when I grabbed wasp number 17 yesterday, I assumed all would go as usual, I’d open the door, toss the wasp, and it’d fly off as fast as its wings could carry it.

Not so much. Instead, wasp number 17 flew away from me for a very short distance, got confused, flew back at me and tried to land ON MY FACE.

I think the dance I immediately performed would be best described as a jig. I flailed around, arms flying everywhere, screaming some wordless sound of horror.

Luckily no one else was around.

The wasp rethought its flight plan and eventually turned around and headed back out toward freedom, and apparently sent out word to his wasp brethren that our house is not so much the place to be.

I don’t expect that’s the last wasp I’ll see in the house, but it certainly would be nice to NOT have another 17-wasp day, please.

The kittens could not have been any easier to put in the carriers for their trip to the vet yesterday. In fact, I walked in to find that Delmar was already sitting in one of the carriers. He came running over to me when I walked in, and I picked him up and put him back in the carrier and closed the top (our carriers are the kind that open at one end and on top), grabbed Lem and put him in the carrier, then put the two girls in the other carrier. They all looked confused and worried, and they were obviously scared during the car trip, but they behaved themselves very well when they were being weighed. Quite the difference from their first trip to the vet!

I picked them up last night, and they were dopey and groggy and I thought for sure they’d never forgive me, but an hour after I got them home I went upstairs and Delmar and Lem were all over me, rubbing against me, purring, telling me how awesome I am. Marion and Claudette stayed on the cat tree and let me know that they didn’t think I was awesome at ALL. That’s okay; they’ll forgive me soon enough. And if not, I can always buy their love with a plate of chicken baby food!

More pics at L&H.

I completely forgot that this kitty condo – located in a corner of the guest bedroom – was there until I happened to glance over one day and saw Newt all settled in.

Previously
2007: I have no idea on earth how we’d ever tell if a chicken was insane, since they seem to lean toward The Crazy even when they’re (we assume) perfectly normal.
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.
2004: In case you were wondering, we are officially Crazy Cat People.
2003: I always look like a fucking lunatic when I take my own picture.
2002: (Is it just me who always thinks of Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally saying “I would be pleased to partake of your pecan piiiiiiiiiiiiie” when I hear, say, or read the word “partake”?)
2001: (For the record, her verdict was that the real-life prostitutes were “creepy”.)
2000: No entry.
1999: And going blind would just suck.

I spent a good part of Saturday morning feeling disgruntled and not wanting to do anything. Fred made a bunch of dorky suggestions of what I could do (“Let’s go get some more chickens! You could go to the mall! You could go to the movies!”), but it turned out that I wanted to sulk around, do nothing for a few hours, and then get my ass in gear.

Sulking and doing nothing is greatly helped by a sweet little litter of fluffy kittens, if you were curious.

After lunch, I finally geared up and made a batch of Caramel-Apple Jam. I think I told y’all that last weekend I’d made a batch of Caramel-Apple Jam with the apple diced in small pieces, and I was intending to make a batch that started with cooked, pureed apple to see which I liked more. (The recipe for the kind using small pieces of apple here, the recipe using pureed apple here.)

It’s actually a lot easier to make the jam with apple puree, because you can core and cut the apples, cook them, then run them through a food mill or Magic Tomato Machine, which takes care of the pureeing and the skins at the same time.

I ended up with 9 half-pints of Caramel-Apple Jam, and I have to say that on the whole, I actually prefer the kind with the tiny diced apple pieces. The kind with the pureed apple was certainly very good, but the texture reminds me a lot of applesauce. The kind with the tiny diced apple pieces tastes sweeter to me (Fred had some explanation for why that was, but I don’t remember what he said) and god knows I like the sweet stuff.

I’d tell you what I did Saturday afternoon, but fuck if I can remember.

Sunday morning I woke up all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and I popped out of bed (after sleeping ’til 7 ’cause I’m a slacker) and put Fred’s laundry in, went to the recycling center and Lowe’s with Fred, came home and vacuumed the downstairs, then went to the Dollar Store to pick up a few things.

Then I put a dozen eggs in the freezer to freeze. How do I do this, you ask? Well, let me tell you! I bought a dozen silicone cupcake liners at Target one day. To freeze eggs, I put the cupcake liners on a cookie sheet, crack one egg into each liner, then put the whole thing in the freezer for a couple of hours until each egg is good and frozen. Then I pop each egg out of its liner, put them in a Ziploc bag, write the date on the outside of the bag, and put the whole bag back in the freezer.

Why do I freeze eggs, you ask? Because chickens tend to lay less in the winter and last year I had to buy several dozen eggs FROM THE STORE, the horror!

I ended up freezing four dozen eggs, and would like to do another six or so to get us through the winter. The girls aren’t putting out quite as many eggs as they were a month ago (14 – 17 a day), and at least two of them have started to moult, so I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before production drops way down.

Once the eggs were in the freezer, I went out to the front porch and carried all the plants that were there across the yard into the garage. I’ve had two big potted impatiens on the front porch since the beginning of summer, and two big potted Mexican Heather plants, and I’d like to see if I can get them to stay alive in the garage ’til next summer, whereupon they can adorn the front porch again. It’s supposed to get pretty cold this week, so I figured now was the time to move them. I also had four house plants to move to the garage – yes, I could move them into the house, but I get annoyed at cleaning up barfed-up plant pieces, so I’d rather have them in the garage. The top floor of the garage – which we were originally going to finish out to use for a cat room, but ended up using for storage – has some windows that catch the light all day long. Hopefully the plants will be happy up there, as long as I remember to water them once a week or so.

The front porch looks kind of empty now. I need to come up with some sort of seasonal decoration for the plant rack next to the door, and maybe the steps.

I took a short break, cuddling the kittens, and then went back into the kitchen. It has absolutely reeked under the kitchen sink for the past little while, and so it was my intention to scrub under there and take care of the smell (I won’t go into specifics, but it involves CATS PEEING IN THE GODDAMN SINK and a crappy sink). I thought at first I’d just use lots of hot water and soap and scrub where the smell is coming from, but it just so ended up that after taking a look at the pipes under the sink, it’s not so very hard to take the pipes under the sink apart and clean them, and soon Fred was walking into the kitchen to get a drink, and found me sitting there with towels and rags all over the place, spraying pieces of pipe and scrubbing the hell out of them. He ended up having to run silicone under the drain (?), and I got all the pipes put back together not QUITE correctly, but Fred realized there was a problem right away and fixed it, so no big deal.

(It still stinks under the sink a little bit, but there’s only so damn much I can do, right?)

I took a break for lunch, spent a little more time with the kittens, and then started up the ol’ KitchenAid mixer. We’ve been feeding the pigs crappy cookies from the dollar store lately, but we were low on those cookies and I had all the ingredients for Piggerdoodles, so I decided to make a double batch of cookies for them.

I threw in a couple of handfuls of romaine lettuce at the end of the mixing to keep the indoor pigs (Fred and I) the hell out of the cookies. Sometimes I toss dried cherry tomatoes in the cookies, sometimes I toss in a handful of collard greens, whatever’s on hand and makes us think “Ewwww!” will work.

That double batch made a ton of cookies, so we’re set on pig cookies for a good long time.

I also did laundry, picked up around the house, spent a little more time with the kittens, checked out Fred’s progress on the big-ass chicken coop (I assume he’ll put up an entry about that later, but let me tell you – that is one BIG-ASS chicken coop. He said, as we were standing inside it, “We could fit two hundred chickens in here if we had to!”

Knowing us, we’ll either need to add on to the chicken coop, or have a second coop by this time next year.

All in all, a pretty good weekend.

The kittens are going to be spayed and neutered tomorrow, poor babies. Last night I got two carriers out and put them in the kitten room. Marion and Lem thought they were the funnest toys ever, kept running in and sniffing them and then racing back out. Delmar and Claudette were uninterested. Hopefully they’ll remain uninterested right until I pick them up and pop them inside tomorrow morning.

Know what’s annoying? Let me TELL you what’s annoying. I go up and visit with the kittens many times a day. I bring them a snack. I pet them. I tell them how pretty they are. I rub their fuzzy little bellies. I gently toss toy mice across the room for them to chase. I lay down and let them crawl all over me. They purr and rub against me, they tell me I’m awesome.

And then. AND THEN. At bedtime, Fred goes upstairs and into the kitten room. I don’t know what he does in there in the few minutes that I’m brushing my teeth and taking out my contacts, but when I go into the room, the kittens could NOT care less about me. They’re chasing the feather-on-a-stick toy, they’re rolling around on their backs play-fighting with Fred, they’re rubbing against him purring and telling him how awesome he is.

They might eventually come over and allow me to pet them for a brief instant before they go back to THE FUN GUY, but they always abandon me for him.

I’m the one who gives them snacks! I’m the one who scoops out their litter boxes!

This is completely unfair.

More pictures at L&H.

Uh oh… that’s Suggie’s bed! He is NOT going to be happy when he sees this…

Previously
2007: No entry.
2006: No entry.
2005: I’m sorry, but “Sell yourself to me” is Interviewer-speak for “I’m too lazy to come up with a real question, so try to answer this stupid-ass question I read on a bad interview webpage somewhere or perhaps even pulled directly from my ass.”
2004: I cannot stand this song. I cannot stand this video. I am filled with extreme hatred every time I happen across either the song or the video.
2003: We went to see Miss Saigon on Sunday.
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: The man drove two hours to spend one hour with his grandchild and then drove two hours back. How cool is that?
1999: May I say that the child gets an UNGODLY amount of presents.

According to my sister, the products on this page kick ass (especially the cupcake lotion!), but I’m under orders not to order anything for myself, since she’s getting me some stuff for Christmas.

So go forth, order, and smell good! I guess I’ll have to wait for Christmas to smell good!

I noticed before I posted my entry yesterday that in my entry from 9 years ago (!), I actually said But as I see it, more than 2 cats makes you a weird cat person. Am I wrong? Is it three, or some incredible number like ten?

Talk about your foreshadowing!

What’s even better is that my entry from 9 years ago today contains any essay by Fred. It is titled Why we don’t need another cat, by Fred.

And that’s when we had four cats and I was pushing for a fifth! Ha!

So, the story of Kara coming back to live with us is a pretty straightforward one. When I took her to the pet store two weeks ago today, I hated leaving her there, hated it more than I’ve hated leaving any cats there in a long time. I hoped and prayed that someone would take one look at her and fall in love and adopt her, and she’d go off to be pampered and live in luxury for the rest of her life, the end.

Except that I kept waiting to hear that she’d been adopted, and she wasn’t… and she wasn’t… and she wasn’t. And then I went to the pet store last Thursday and she gave me the big dark eyes and when I took her out of her cage she clung to me. She hissed at the other cats and she didn’t want any of them around her, she just wanted me to hold and pet her. It was really hard to leave her there last Thursday, but I just KNEW she’d be adopted over the weekend.

Then on Sunday, Fred and I were talking for the umpteenth time about how we need a dog to watch over the chickens (his opinion, not mine), and he said “We could get goats and a dog, and I’d let you get Kara!”

(For the record, whenever I type in that we called her “Kara”, you should probably know that what we really said was “Upstairs Mama” or “Mama”, but in the interest of not confusing Kara with Maxi (“Outside Mama”), I call them by their proper names.)

I talked him down about the dog and the goats for perhaps the zillionth time (DO NOT WANT A DOG. DO NOT WANT GOATS. PERIOD.), and then later, something clicked in my mind and I said, oh-so-very-casually, “So you’re saying you want to adopt Kara?”

Fred wasn’t fooled. He wanted me to go get her right then and there. He’ll tell you that he “let” me get Kara, but the truth is that he always loves the female cats with the intense eyes and I’d say that he probably wanted her even more than I did.

“She could protect you at night!” he said gleefully. Over the past couple of nights, apparently realizing that Kara was no longer around to rule the upstairs with an iron paw, Miz Poo and Mister Boogers had taken to sleeping with me again, and unlike Kara (who would occasionally check on me, but spend most of the night at my feet, sleeping quietly and not tromping all over me like they do), they were waking me up many times a night with the tromping and the hissing and growling at each other.

I put him off on Sunday, telling him that if she didn’t get adopted by Thursday, my regular stint at the pet store, I’d bring her home with me.

Tuesday, I sent an email to the shelter manager, so very casually asking if anyone had shown any interest in adopting Kara. She said that as far as she knew, no one had, and I told her that if Kara was still there on Thursday, we wanted to adopt her, and she said that sounded good to her.

I made the mistake of calling Fred to tell him that no one had inquired about Kara, and he started up the “Go get her! Go get her! Go get her!” harassment. I was determined, though, that we’d wait until Thursday. And then I allowed that IF she wasn’t adopted Tuesday night and IF it was okay with shelter manager, it’d be okay with me if he stopped and picked Kara up on his way home Wednesday.

The harassment continued, with Fred pointing out that it was dumb to leave her there for another two nights and “She’ll forget us by Thursday! She won’t feel like she’s come home!” and so forth. I held strong and finally told him to hush up, and thought I’d heard the last of that, at least for the time being.

Tuesday afternoon, I was upstairs in the kitten room hanging out with the kittens, which is where I usually am when Fred gets home from work. I heard him come upstairs, and then he called to me.

“Are you coming in?” I asked, because he usually comes in to greet the kittens.

“No,” he said.

“What?” I said. “Why not?”

“Well… okay…” he said, and opened the door. And Kara leapt out of his arms, ran into the room, and saw the kittens. They hissed at her, she hissed at them, and then she ran back out.

It wasn’t until that moment that I realized just how much I’d missed having her around. Fred and I sat and talked to her, and she checked out the upstairs, and then we led her downstairs. I fully expected the other cats to hiss and growl at her, but every one of them looked at her as if to say “Oh, you’re back? I wondered where you were!” and went about their business.

She obviously remembers being here before, because she immediately took up hanging out in her favorite places – my bed, the window in the computer room, atop the washer in the laundry room – and the best part was that at night she settles down at the end of the bed, and I sleep like a charm.

We’re planning to rename her. Kara is a pretty name, but now that I know her, I want something a little more fitting. Fred has suggested Serendipity, with the nickname Sara, and I kind of like that. He’s suggested Annie, too, which I like too. At night we lay in bed and throw out names, even though we know in the end, chances are good we’ll keep on calling her Mama.

I suggested Mother McGee, which Fred didn’t like. He suggested Cat Sass, and I countered with Momma Sass. Mother Abigail? Maybe. Last night I suggested Miss Jingles (the mouse in The Green Mile was called Mr. Jingles), and when Fred and I went through our political names phase (“Hilary?” “No.” “Kara-boo Barbie?” “No.” “John McCain?” “I THINK NOT.”) I came up with Omama, and Fred countered with O’Mama.

Other names that have been suggested and discarded:

Cornbread (I don’t know why Fred thinks this is so funny, but he laughs himself into a coughing fit when he talks about it)
Weezy
Ouisa Boudreau
Delilah Magoo
Dierdre the Mad
Annie Wilkes
Stormy Llewellyn
Ma Kent
Moll Flanders
Octavia
Livia
Delilah

Sassy McGee is in the running. We both kind of like Ellie-Belly (which is what we called the last sweet brown tabby we had, back at the end of last year, beginning of this). I suggested names that shows she’s the cat in charge of making sure everyone behaves – Officer McGee, for one (yes, the last name “McGee” for a cat makes me laugh for some reason). Sheriff McGee. This morning I said “We should just call her “The Law”, since she’s the law ’round these parts.”

I don’t know. I’m sure we’ll come up with something that strikes us as just right and when we do, I’ll be sure to let you know!

The monkeys are going to be spayed and neutered next Tuesday. I’m hoping that they don’t freak out too much (I’m sure they will, though, ’cause that’s just the way it is with skittish little monkeys) and that they forgive me for carting them off to the scary place.

Delmar is just the sweetest little lovebug. When his sister and brother have gotten enough love and go off to play (or nap), he flops down across my arm and purrs and falls asleep while I lay there and read. Yesterday he climbed up on my stomach and rolled around while I rubbed his tummy, and he got so happy he rolled right off me, and I swear he grinned up at me.

I know I say this about all our foster cats, but these guys? SO SWEET. They have the softest, silkiest fur and are so healthy looking. So many fosters have to have goop put in their eyes or be treated for one ailment or another from living outside that when we have a set of fosters who are in such good shape, it’s really kind of nice!

Claudette in the sun. I love that little white blotch by her mouth. LOVE IT.

More pictures over at L&H.

I know this is so crass and rude, but I can’t help it, it makes me laugh. Newt doesn’t stand on ceremony – if his butt needs to be licked, he plops down any ol’ place and gets the job done!

Previously
2007: Bless his fluffy little head, he’s not the brains of the outfit, for sure.
2006: “I don’t know, babe,” I said finally, hoping he wouldn’t go through another four or five possibilities. “It’s a fascinating mystery.”
2005: No entry.
2004: No entry.
2003: I believe that might be a personal record, right there.
2002: My poor baby.
2001: it’s MY journal and I’ll exaggerate if I want to.
2000: No entry.
1999: Why we don’t need another cat, by Fred

Holy cow, I added Tastespotting to my Google Reader list, and that site updates about 30 zillion times a day. I’ll think I’m all caught up on my reading, and I check Google Reader and find that I have like 30 unread items in the last hour.

I’m not complaining. It just so happened that I clicked on the picture for Chocolate Chocolate Chip Banana Bread the other day, wondering how many bananas were called for for the recipe, and found that it required two bananas. And it just so happened that I HAD two bananas (more on that in the next section, if I remember) and I was going to get groceries yesterday morning so I picked up the bittersweet chocolate I didn’t have, and I made a loaf of the bread.

I don’t like bittersweet chocolate usually (milk chocolate is more my namby-pamby speed) and I tend not to like stuff that’s doubly chocolate, but I took a slurp of the batter before I baked it, and I was all

“HELLEW.”

That was some fabulous stuff, and after Fred and I split a piece of the bread after dinner, I had to quick wrap it up and freeze it so we wouldn’t eat it all (and there was no way the pigs were getting this stuff!).

I’ve been doing a lot of stuff in the kitchen lately, actually. Last Wednesday I made Smitten Kitchen’s Mom’s Apple Cake, because I figured like most fruit-based cakes, it would taste better after the flavors had a few days to mingle (and actually, she says it tastes better the second day). We cut it on Friday and Fred liked it a lot. I thought it was good, but one of the many things I forget about myself is that I don’t really like cake with chunks of anything in it, so one small piece was enough for me. We froze some of it, and gave the rest to the pigs.

On Friday, I made a batch of Sundry’s Cow Pat Cookies, only instead of making them with healthy walnuts, I opted for the less healthy peanut butter chips. It actually makes so many cookies that I did a couple of sheets of cookies for Fred and I, and a couple (which I deliberately baked for almost 20 minutes so they’d be sturdier) for the pigs. They were good on Friday, better on Saturday, and by Sunday I had to add the remainder of the cookies to the container of cookies for the pigs, or I would surely have eaten myself into a coma.

Saturday I thawed out the frozen chicken enchiladas I’d stuck in the freezer last time I made a batch of enchiladas (three weeks or so, I think it’s been), and I can report to you that if you make the chicken enchiladas up to the point where you put them in the oven and then freeze them, thaw them out at a later date, sprinkle cheese over them, and bake them, they are DAMN GOOD. I forgot to get anything out of the freezer, veggie-wise, so Fred went out to the garden and picked us a big bowl of romaine, and we had salads.

Sunday, after getting groceries in the morning, I made bacon and eggs for breakfast for both of us. When Fred went off to work on the new chicken coop, I made a batch of Caramel Apple Jam. I went with the recipe posted in Suzanne McMinn’s forum, because whenever I make something new I like to try the original recipe before I get all fancy, but I kind of wish I’d done it Suzanne’s way, because although the diced apple pieces were fully cooked when I put the jam in the jars, in the 10 minutes in the canner, they shrunk a little extra and floated to the top, leaving a liquid on the bottom. I’m sure they’ll taste just fine right to the very bottom of the jar, but they look kind of funny.

There was a little left over from that batch so I put it in a jar and stuck it in the fridge, and then Fred and I gave it a try, and HOLY COW that is some excellent stuff! I might have to try an experimental batch of the jam made with apple puree instead of apple pieces, but if I can get it to look as good as it tastes, I see something that would be GREAT to give as gifts. Two thumbs way WAY up!

Sunday afternoon I used up the rest of the apples I had (half a peck) and made chunky applesauce (I don’t add anything to our applesauce, just apples, cooked, mashed up, and canned) and the aforementioned Chocolate Chocolate Chip Banana Bread, and in between all that, I made a pork roast in the crock pot, which we had for dinner with spaghetti squash and kale, directly from our own garden.

Though I spent most of the day in the kitchen, it was still a pretty relaxed day (I got to take plenty of kitten breaks) and I ended the weekend with a clean house (Saturday, I did laundry and cleaned the bathrooms and vacuumed and got a lot of crap put away), and that’s always a good thing.

So, the banana peels. I read in a magazine recently the following:

In mid-February, I begin saving banana peels in a bag in the freezer. When it’s time to plant tomatoes, I dig a ditch 2 inches deeper than required, lay the peels end to end and cover them with dirt. Then I plant the tomatoes as usual. My tomato vines reached 8 to 10 feet, and the fruits were very sweet.

Since we don’t really eat all that many bananas on a regular basis, I thought I’d go right ahead and start getting those banana peels stored away now. Of the many banana recipes and suggestions y’all gave me back in September was Maryanne’s banana bread. Since I had enough bananas, I made the recipe for two loaves and froze one.

(VERY good banana bread, by the way! I didn’t include pecans because I had none in the cupboard and the pecans we do have need to be shelled and I wasn’t up for shelling a buttload of pecans, thankyouverymuch.)

Which left me with two bananas, and I was thinking about making NZer’s suggestion of Edmond’s Banana Cake, when I was sidetracked by the aforementioned Chocolate Chocolate Chip Banana Bread.

Anyway. That explains why I had two bananas laying around AGAIN. Fascinating, no?

When the foster kittens (or our cats, for that matter) are having litterbox issues that aren’t really optimal (that is, not diarrhea, but not quite what it should be), I like to try giving them some FortiFlora. I don’t know if it’s really the magic formula that it seems like, or if it just so happens that things clear up on their own after I start giving the FortiFlora, but I like to try it anyway. If it doesn’t really help, it also doesn’t hurt, and they tend to like the taste of the stuff.

Sometimes I mix it in a little plain yogurt, but not all cats have the best reaction to yogurt, so over the weekend I mixed a packet of FortiFlora with chicken baby food and brought it up into the foster room.

Not long after I entered the room, put the plate on the floor, and sat down, Lem decided he smelled something pretty fabulous. He came down, spotted the plate, rubbed against me, gave me the questioning “Is that for…. ME?” eyes, and then started eating. Marion heard him eating and immediately jumped down to investigate. Delmar was the third one down and eating, and then finally Claudette decided she could wait no longer to check out this treat, so down she came.

Fred was hanging out with the kittens Saturday night (he requests that I give him a little alone time with the kittens every evening before I go upstairs because sometimes the kittens get overwhelmed with both of us in there) and apparently Mister Boogers started sniffing around at the bottom of the door. Lem heard him sniffing, went over to investigate, and lost his MIND. He was hissing and growling and finally Fred turned around and pulled him away from the door. Lem ran across the room and to the top of the cat tree and arched his back and hissed, glaring at the door. His brother and sisters approached him to find out what his problem was, and he started growling and hissing at them, so they growled and hissed back at him.

I wasn’t privy to any of this, because I was still downstairs, and when I headed upstairs Mister Boogers was coming down the stairs looking completely relaxed and unimpressed. Lem refused to come back down off the tree, and his siblings were all pretty freaked out still, so after a little while we left them alone to calm down.

Next morning, they were back to their usual selves. I guess if we’re going to introduce them to our cats, we need to take it verrrrrry slow!

More pictures – and a movie! – over at Love & Hisses.

Some current pictures of Nate and Dora (formerly River and Inara) over at Love & Hisses.

King Suggie snoozes in his pile o’ cat beds.

Previously
2007: No entry.
2006: Biscuits for everyone!
2005: Your fascinating tidbit for the day.
2004: More Myrtle Beach.
2003: It’s got to be early-onset Alzheimer’s, y’all.
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: I think back on the shit I pulled as a senior in high school, and I’m flat-out amazed that I managed to graduate.
1999: Just an all-around relaxing day.