Fostering – Page 76

11-12-08

Best review of Twilight (the book, not the movie) I’ve read. It would be as if you or I were dating an apple fritter. made me laugh my ass off. & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & Sometimes when Fred and … Continue reading “11-12-08”

Best review of Twilight (the book, not the movie) I’ve read. It would be as if you or I were dating an apple fritter. made me laugh my ass off.

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Sometimes when Fred and I are sitting in the living room watching TV, I consider screaming and flailing wildly, then jumping up and running down the hall and out the back door.

Just to see what he’d do.

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Monday night after it got dark out, Fred and I spent an hour moving the chickens to the new coop. Rather than moving them one-by-one (which would have taken forever), we put them in a big carrier, six or seven at a time and carried them out in that. Fred caught the chickens one by one, and I lifted and lowered the door to the carrier as he put them in. Most of them were pretty quiet once they were in the carrier, but there was one bitchy little squawker who acted like we were strangling her, she screamed when Fred caught her, screamed once she was in the carrier, and screamed all the way to the new coop. Fucking drama queen.

(By the way, we waited until after dark so we could just get them straight from the coop rather than having to chase them around the chicken yard.)

We left them in the coop all day yesterday so they’d imprint on it as home, and Fred went out several times to check on them. They seemed to be adjusting pretty well, especially considering that we put the twenty-five small chicks (ranging in age from 6 to 10 weeks) in with the forty grown chickens. (Yes, we have sixty-five chickens. We also have twenty-six more on the way. Shaddup.) Fred had read somewhere that the best time to merge two flocks is when you’re moving them to a new coop. It seemed to work pretty well.

Now they have a huge chicken yard to roam around in, and hopefully we won’t lose any of them to passing hawks.

Pretty sure that little one in the front is a rooster.

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Yesterday morning, Fred got the gates on the front part of the new chicken yard put up, and then he had no plans. I’d mentioned the day before the idea of venturing up to Tennessee, but Fred hadn’t wanted to, so I figured we’d be hanging around the house all day. After he got the gates up, he asked if I still wanted to go to Tennessee. I did, so we headed out.

Before we got too far, we decided that neither of us was really in the mood for the long drive, so we ended up going to the movie store and picking up movies, then going out to lunch at Logan’s Roadhouse before going home and hanging out for the rest of the day watching movies.

We got about ten minutes into 88 Minutes and Fred needed a nap, so he sacked out on the couch while I went upstairs and hung out with the kittens. He called up to me when he was awake again, so I came back downstairs and we watched some more of the movie. With about fifteen minutes left in the movie, the phone rang. I talked to my sister for a few minutes, and while I talked Fred fell asleep on the couch again for about twenty minutes.

When he woke up again, he went out to feed the pigs and I went to clean the kitchen. Then we finished the movie, and let me tell you – that movie was clunkily written and horribly acted despite the cast of usually good actors, and there was a point at the end where Leelee Sobieski threw her head back and laughed in an attempt to be sinister, which I mocked several times, to my great amusement.

We took another break, then sat down to watch The Happening.

(Let me point out here that during both these movies I had my laptop on my lap and I was surfing the entire time, which is the only reason I watched both movies all the way through.)

I knew I was in for a special treat about two minutes into the movie when I turned to Fred and said “Why is Marky Mark talking to these high school students like they’re second graders?” The movie met my expectations, sucking right to the end. I honestly do not understand who in Hollywood keeps giving M. Night Shyamalan money; alls I can guess is that he’s got some really good blackmail material on someone big.

We watched True Blood (I LOVE YOU, SAM) and then I went upstairs to spend some time with the kittens while Fred watched TV. When I came back downstairs, he started watching Paranormal State while I surfed, and he occasionally tried to convince me that we could fake having a ghost problem to get Ryan and the gang to Crooked Acres (when I told him I didn’t want to expend the energy on faking a ghost problem, he suggested we claim Mister Boogers was possessed. That just might work!).

We started the latest episode of Heroes, which Fred paused about ten minutes in and said “I honestly don’t care about this show any more” and I said “Me either!”, so he deleted it and we watched Dirty Jobs instead.

So yeah, it was a total slacker, TV-watching, nap-taking day for us. Fred’s been working so hard on the chicken coop and fencing the back forty that I think he deserved it. I haven’t necessarily been working so hard, but hey – someone needed to keep him company, right?

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I learned something yesterday. For days I’ve been going upstairs to hang out with the kittens, and wondering why they weren’t exploring the upstairs. Sometimes one or two of them would be hanging out in my room and go running back to the kitten room when I appeared. But once I was upstairs, they’d never leave the kitten room.

Yesterday, I hung out with them for a few minutes and then I thought Hmm… I wonder if they’d come hang out with me in my room? I went into my room, lay down on the bed and started reading, and within a few minutes the kittens started appearing on the bed beside me. Eventually all four of them were on the bed with me, rolling around and purring. Apparently the reason they were spending all their time hanging out in the kitten room while I was upstairs is because I was in there.

Ya learn something new every day!

Jazz paws!

More pictures over at L&H.

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Oh, the humiliation!

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Previously
2007: Whatever I do, I’m sure it’ll be exciting!
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.
2004: NOTHING gets by him. NOTHING.
2003: Yep. When you have a crush on a fictional character and whine about how no one in a NOVEL is telling you anything, it’s about time to get a life, say true.
2002: Obviously she’d never taken Customer Service 101, wherein the “‘Thanks!’ = go away” equation is covered thoroughly.
2001: Poor Sadie. Those damn mean cats just refuse to play with her…
2000: No entry.
1999: No entry.

11-11-08

Happy Veteran’s Day! Go hug yourself a veteran. & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & Yesterday morning I was trying to decide what I needed to get done during the day, when an email came in from the Monday morning … Continue reading “11-11-08”

Happy Veteran’s Day! Go hug yourself a veteran.

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Yesterday morning I was trying to decide what I needed to get done during the day, when an email came in from the Monday morning pet store volunteer. She was sick and needed someone to cover for her, and was throwing herself on the mercy of the volunteer mailing list. Since I had nothing big planned, I told her I’d do it, and ten minutes after I’d read the email, I was headed for Huntsville.

On Thursdays mornings, I usually leave the house at 6:30ish in an attempt to avoid the traffic going into Huntsville. Yesterday, there was hardly any traffic at 8:00. Either the traffic doesn’t happen ’til later, it happens between 7 and 8, or a LOT of people took yesterday off to extend their three-day weekend into four days.

At the pet store, I had a moment where I glanced into a cage to see a new cat, and my heart just sank. I was pretty sure it was Zoe, and Zoe always was my favorite kitten (sometimes), and I couldn’t see that there was any way I could leave her in a cage without sobbing hysterically.

And then I took a closer look, and the cat in the cage looked nothing at all like Zoe (I’d offer photographic proof, but I left the house without a camera in my purse), but I gave her lots of extra love, just because.

I stopped by Micha3l’s to look around and pick up a few things, stopped and got groceries, and was home shortly after 10:00.

Fred spent the day putting up the fence around the back forty, so I puttered around the house, went out to check his work, spent time with the kittens, made cookies for the pigs, and canned the last three half-pint jars of mushrooms.

I ended up getting 17 half-pint jars of mushrooms, by the way. I’ll report back, after my next trip to Sam’s, on how much money I saved by buying the big can and recanning into smaller jars. Watch it end up being like 75 cents, right?

Speaking of mushrooms, Paula asked in my comments yesterday if you can grow your own mushrooms. You can, actually. The easiest way (I assume it’s the easiest way, anyway) is to order your own kit. You can Google and find places to buy your own kits – here’s an interesting site. The more I checked out that site, the more I realized how little I know about the different kinds of mushrooms.

And speaking of making cookies for the pigs (somewhere up there I mentioned it, I think), Sunday night Fred waved at me from the back yard and pointed out toward the pigs, asking if I was ready to go give them their evening snack. Which is when I realized we’d given them the last of the cookies the night before and I’d forgotten to make more. We ended up giving them rolls instead of cookies, and do you think they even noticed? Not a bit. Food’s food as far as they’re concerned.

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Last week, I stopped on the way home from my doctor appointment at Old Time Pottery. I’ve been needing new cookie sheets and cooling racks for a while, and that store has got just about any kind of kitchen tool you could think of, so I knew they’d have what I needed. They did, and while I was there I moseyed through the pet section, eyeballed the pet beds, and ultimately bought a big cozy bed.

I put the big cozy bed on the couch where Tommy sleeps in the evening. He’d been sleeping on a couch pillow, but it was annoying me because he was getting cat hair all over the pillow.

Tommy liked the cat bed a LOT. In fact, all the cats like the cat bed a lot. Tommy uses it in the evening while we’re watching TV, but Spanky has dibs on it during the day, and I’ve seen Stinkerbelle and Miz Poo taking turns in it, too.

Not bad for a $7.99 bed.

Last night Fred and I were discussing it, and I said “Well, I have a lot of errands to run later this week, I’ll stop by Old Time Pottery and see if they have any more beds.”

Because what this house needs more of is cat beds, you know. The goddamn cats can’t go three feet without falling over a bed but, you know. I’m a little addicted to buying cat beds, is what I’m saying.

Fred said “Old Time Pottery?”

I said “Yeah, that’s where I got it.”

Fred said “Do they actually have pottery there?”

I said “No, they have just about anything else you could imagine, though. It’s in the old K-Mart building.”

Fred got irate. “I feel like that’s false advertising! What if people are suckered in by the name and they go in to look for pottery and there’s NO POTTERY? That’s like naming a place “Joe’s Restaurant” and then you go in, and it’s a SHOE STORE.”

I laughed.

Fred went on. “What about Pottery Barn? Do THEY sell pottery?”

I said “Well, I – uh – no, I don’t think they do. I think they have kitchen stuff and maybe furniture too, but I might be mixing them up with Ikea*.”

“That’s -”

“Well, they MIGHT sell some pottery too, I don’t know,” I added hastily.

“That’s just ridiculous. That’s fucked up. You’re forbidden to ever visit a store that calls itself “Old Time Pottery” and then doesn’t SELL pottery.”

I rolled my eyes and said “Yes, master.”

Please. I’m so going back there again. I just realized that I’ve never been to the entire left half of the store, which is apparently where they keep their sheets and quilts and stuff.

But seriously – if you’re needing any kind of kitchen utensil, plates, glasses, canisters, any kind of that stuff and there’s an Old Time Pottery near you, check it out. There’s plenty of cheap and crappy stuff, but some decent stuff, too. It’s worth a try, right?

*Sue me. I’ve been in Pottery Barn once, and never in Ikea. How would I know what the hell they sell?

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I don’t know if I’ve actually mentioned it here in the past, but I’ve certainly thought it to myself enough. I’ve been thinking that Delmar looks a lot like a little fox. Fred’s even been calling him “Foxy Brown”. When I was surfing the web the other day, I realized that it’s not a fox he looks like.

It’s a little coyote.

Here’s Delmar:

Here’s a coyote.

It’s mostly the eyes and the coloring, I think. Anyone else see the resemblance?

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He’s got the red hat, now he just needs a purple dress, and he’ll be all set to join the Red Hat Society.

This is Exhibit #1 of why I should not be allowed into the craft store, your honor. I saw the hat and I imagined putting it on a cat and I laughed and laughed and laughed. More proof forthcoming.

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Previously
2007: Why should I answer the door if I’m not expecting anyone, I ask you?
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.
2004: That girl has some serious lung power.
2003: Not holding my breath – but a girl can dream!
2002: Let me tell you about the saga of the box.
2001: No entry.
2000: No entry.
1999: No entry.

11/10/08

Things I baked on Friday: Chocolate Chip Sour Cream Cake. It was certainly good, but not something I loved (Fred liked it more than I did), and I probably won’t make it again. The pigs gave it two (four?) hooves up. Twice-Baked Shortbread (it was a Smitten Kitchen Friday for me!). I guess I should … Continue reading “11/10/08”

Things I baked on Friday:

Chocolate Chip Sour Cream Cake. It was certainly good, but not something I loved (Fred liked it more than I did), and I probably won’t make it again. The pigs gave it two (four?) hooves up.

Twice-Baked Shortbread (it was a Smitten Kitchen Friday for me!). I guess I should say I started it on Friday and finished it Saturday morning. It was simple to make, and oh my god it was good. Fred had never had shortbread before, I guess he’s lived a deprived life. When he got home, he said “What’s the doughy looking stuff on the counter?” (this was while it was “resting” in the pan overnight). I said “It’s shortbread.” He said “It smells like cookies, not bread.” Which is when I learned that he’d never had shortbread before. He declared “It tastes like pie crust”, which I guess I can kind of see. I like the shortbread a lot more than he does and the pigs don’t get ANY, is how much I like it.

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I had a pretty relaxing and low-key weekend. I spent the better part of Saturday cleaning ladybug goo from around the windows in the bathrooms, the window in the stairwell and the windows in the kitten room. That took me ’til lunchtime to finish, and then I spent the afternoon hanging out with the kittens and recanning mushrooms.

I bought a huge-ass can of mushrooms at Sam’s a few weeks ago because we use mushrooms in the two dishes we eat most – an egg scramble* and spaghetti – and it seems like I’m always buying small cans of mushrooms. I figured with the big can of mushrooms, I could recan them into half-pint jars and be set for at least a little while. I canned seven half-pint jars of mushrooms on Saturday and another seven on Sunday, and I think I still have enough mushrooms to fill at least two half-pint jars. I’d tell you how much I saved doing that, but I don’t recall how much the big can of mushrooms cost OR how much an 8-ounce can of mushrooms cost, so I’ll have to do some research and get back to you on that later this week.

We had pork chops for dinner Saturday night along with green beans and sweet potato crack, everything grown here at Crooked Acres, and I have to say, it was a pretty good meal. I’m still experimenting to figure out the best way to cook these pork chops, but with spices rubbed on them and baked in the oven, they were pretty damn good.

For dinner Sunday, we had ribs cooked all day in the crockpot, baked squash, and corn on the cob – again, everything grown here at Crooked Acres and very, very tasty.

Sunday I did a lot of puttering around – recanned more mushrooms, did laundry, checked out the new chicken coop, which Fred finished early in the day, paid bills, balanced the checking account, all that fun stuff. I had thought it was going to be sunny all day, but around eleven it clouded over and even though it never rained, the laundry was still just the tiniest bit damp when I brought it inside, so I tossed it in the dryer.

It’s definitely Fall in Alabama now – Fred had to wear a hat when he was putting up the fence around the back forty yesterday. You know, I never appreciate the warm days of September and October until we hit November and I’ve got the space heater pointed directly at me, going full-blast all day long.

*Usually once a week we have a “scramble” and oven-fried homefries for dinner. How I make a scramble: saute chopped onion ’til soft, add sausage to the pan, cook ’til the sausage is browned. Drain in a colander, rinse with warm water, wipe down the pan. Put sausage and onion back in the pan, add mushrooms to the pan, add eggs (beaten) to the pan, scramble ’til the eggs are done, voila! A scramble! We don’t always have sausage in our scramble, it depends on whether I feel like dealing with it. The good thing about a scramble is that you can put whatever strikes your fancy in it – bacon, green pepper. You could even add cooked homefries to the scramble if you want, but I personally prefer to keep my potatoes separate from the scramble. Call me picky.

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Saturday night Fred and I were watching Silkwood. I’ve seen the movie at least a couple of times before, but Fred had never seen it, and it seems to me that it’s one of those movies you should see at least once in your life.

So we were sitting and watching it, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Tommy, who was snoozing in the cat bed on the other couch, lift his head as if he were watching something. I looked to see what he was watching, and saw a wasp fly up from the floor, then land on my leg.

I reached out to flick the wasp off my leg (with the intention that I’d then get up and kill it), but as I reached out to flick the wasp, Fred glanced over and made a face of horror, and as he made the face of horror, I don’t know, I thought the wasp was in the process of trying to sting me or something, so I reacted like a big dorky freak, screamed and flailed around.

While Fred doubled over laughing, I moved the laptop off my lap and saw that the wasp was still sitting there, despite the aborted flicking and the subsequent flailing.

“It’s still there!” I yelled in panic, then flicked at it. It flew across the room and landed on the floor. Fred stayed doubled over, laughing (truth be told, I was laughing too at that point) ’til I yelled at him to kill the damn thing. He stomped on it several times before the damn thing gave up the ghost and died (probably didn’t help that Fred was wearing slippers, which have a soft sole). I got the fly swatter, nudged the dead wasp onto the business end of the swatter, carried it to the front porch and tossed it out.

While Fred continued laughing at me.

Bastard.

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Since I hadn’t vacuumed the kitten room in a long time – I think it’s actually been a couple of weeks, except for the time I took the hand vac in there and sucked up the dead ladybugs – I decided to vacuum in there while I was cleaning on Saturday. I thought about shooing the kittens into the closet (where the litter boxes are kept) and shutting them in there while I vacuumed, but in the end I just brought the vacuum cleaner upstairs and started running it, figuring they’d all find places to hide.

They found a place to hide, all right. With the entire upstairs providing many hiding places, they apparently all felt the safest atop the cat tree. All four of them crammed themselves up there and glared at me, ears pointed out to the side, while I vacuumed their room.

They forgave me quickly, though – they always do. All I have to do to get them to come snuggle with me these days, is come into their room and sit on the floor. At this point, even Claudette comes over and asks to be petted. I have proof!

Kitten pics over at L&H.

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I happened to glance out into the side yard Saturday afternoon and saw Newt looking like he was after something. A closer look showed me that he had a field mouse. He likes to catch them wherever the hell he finds them (I don’t ask) and then bring them to the side yard to kill them, whether it’s to show off for his brothers who are confined to the back yard or because he wants me to know what an awesome hunter he is. Maybe both.

So I went out and shooed him away from the mouse. I didn’t touch the mouse or get too close to it, lest it get the bright idea to run up my leg, in which case I’d be typing this from the Great Beyond, but I could tell that it was pretty lively and not fatally wounded or on the edge of death, so I yelled for Fred and then kept Newt from getting too close to the mouse.

Right after this picture is when I screamed “No, no, NO! Don’t touch it, Newt!”, and he’s such a good boy that he obeyed.

Fred picked the mouse up and asked where Newt had gotten it, which is when I told him about my don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy re: field mice and the finding of such, and he took it off to let it go in the woods and Newt shrugged a “Win some, lose some” shrug and went off to snooze near the chicken yard.

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Previously
2007: Write about your day!
2006: I guess you can teach an old Fred new tricks.
2005: Can’t a girl be a dumbass without the whole world going into an uproar about it?
2004: For once, he had no good comeback.
2003: “Oh yeah. I hate this feeling. I should have just had a Diet Coke.”
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: No entry.
1999: Can you tell this irks me?

11-7-08

This is totally me: & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & How good are you at “eyeballing” stuff? (I sucked pretty badly, though I’m pretty good at figuring out where the middle of things are.) (Thanks to Katherine for both those.) … Continue reading “11-7-08”

This is totally me:

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How good are you at “eyeballing” stuff? (I sucked pretty badly, though I’m pretty good at figuring out where the middle of things are.)

(Thanks to Katherine for both those.)

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Go here and type in commands to see the cute dog obey them (make sure you type in “dance” and “kiss”, it’s pretty funny). (Thanks to Elaine for the link!)

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Love love LOVE that Shep. (Thanks to Fred for the link, and also for sharing my love for Shep.)

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Printer won’t work? This might be why… (Thanks to several people for the link!)

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Real Housewives of Atlanta; skip to the next section if you’re not interested!

So, Kim cannot sing. AT ALL. The voice coach put it as nicely as possible without actually saying the words “Kim? You could not carry a tune if Big Papa bought you a gold-plate $15,000 bucket to put it in.” And Kim’s reaction? THE VOICE COACH IS NIT-PICKING. Good god. And did you see Dallas Austin’s face when Kim was singing? I know he was thinking “Big Papa, YOU OWE ME.” My god, her voice was horrible. And I WANTED to be proven wrong, but girlfriend cannot sing. CANNOT. She can be all “I sing, because I’m a singer!” (or whatever the hell she said) all she wants, but she needs to confine that voice to the shower and not attempt to inflict it upon the world. There’s only so damn much magic they can do in the studio! Also, voice coach is SO RIGHT. Kim sings through her nose and it’s horrific.

Did DeShawn really say that she and whatshisface have been married ten years? I had no idea – I thought they were newlyweds! And I can’t believe he gave her some expensive-ass watch for her birthday and she was all “Well, I can’t wear this tonight, I’m wearing silver!” Are ya KIDDING me? RUDE. How long does it take to change your jewelry? DeShawn and her husband (his name is Eric, I just went and looked) are so stiff and awkward around each other. I suspect it’s having the cameras right there – being on camera seems to make him VERY uncomfortable. And how come we never ever ever see their kids?

I actually kind of felt sorry for NeNe, because I’m sure she never expected the “song” to blow up in her face like that. Also, is it just me, or does she appear to be drinking wine 24 hours a day? She was PLASTERED in that limo, and I think everyone but DeShawn wished she’d just shut up. Anyone think Lisa DIDN’T tell Kim about the whole thing? Very disapproving, wasn’t she?

I don’t know that Sheree has got a whole lot of room to talk about NeNe talking about Kim behind her back, given that Sheree talked a WHOLE lot of smack about NeNe not so long ago.

Man, I need to start taking notes when I watch this show. I know there was more I wanted to mention, but I can’t think of anything else! What’d I miss, y’all?

Oh! The guacamole! Really, Kim? You’re (cough) 29 years old and you don’t know what guacamole is? And then she was horrified that they mixed it up in a big stone, like it was unsanitary. Gosh, it’s too bad restaurants don’t have any way to sanitize their big guacamole-making rocks or anything, DUMBASS.

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My, Miz Poo is a bit…portly….or is that just the angle of the first photo?

No, it’s not the angle. I’m not kidding when I say she’s a portly Poo. The vet tech said Miz Poo isn’t actually obese, but she’s a big chunk of a cat. She weighs just under 11 pounds, if I recall correctly. That’s about what Sugarbutt weighs, but he’s pretty muscular, and she’s a shorter cat than he is, so she’s got the spread going on.

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Happy anniversary. Your second picture up there reminded me of this one.

I LOVE that series of school ID pictures.

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I think you should add a new cat for every anniversary.

I’d be afraid that such a move would lead to their being no more anniversaries!

(Don’t you love how I act like it’s all my fault that we have ten cats? But it isn’t ME who lobbied for the adoption of the last three we kept!)

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Just to defend calico cats – I have a 19 yr old calico who has been sick twice in her life, had one dental, and otherwise has only been to the vet for shots. She’s getting very old, but as far as I can tell that’s the only thing that’s wrong with her even now.

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You know, I love and adore Miz Poo because I’ve been reading about her for years and years, but I don’t think you can blame the vet bills on her being a tri-colour cat. I have a calico (a true calico with bright patches of colour – not a torti), and I think over the course of her 20 years of life she’s cost me about $2000 in vet bills, total (including being spayed, a couple of intestinal things, vaccinations – which she’s only gotten a couple of times in her life, etc)

Fred says it’s not that Miz Poo’s a tri-color that’s the issue, it’s that she’s just a defective cat!

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I really love my Electrolux EL1000A2 stick vac! It’s sleek, works VERY well, is pretty (which is important to me since it sits out while charging), and hasn’t let me down yet!

That IS a very pretty little stick vac.

You know, if I truly loved all y’all, I’d go out and buy these vacuums you’re recommending and try them out and report back on which is the best.

(Except Fred would kill me.)

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Happy Anniversary… I saw this article today and thought of your double-egg incident! Seems these things are international news now!!

It’s funny what makes the news, isn’t it? (Also, those Japanese are COPYCATS!)

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Please let us know what you think about “Dewey“. It sounds like a good read.

It was a VERY good read – I cried like a baby at the end! The descriptions of Dewey made me laugh out loud several times, it was definitely a good book and certainly worth the read. Four stars!

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Do you watch Celebrity Rehab? A most delicious trainwreck!

I watched the first season, but I haven’t seen any of this season. I need to set up to tape them, because I was hooked on the first season (also, I think Dr. Drew is cuuuuuuuute.).

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We didn’t have the ladybug trouble until about 4 years ago. When they first swarmed and made us hostages in our own home I thought they were the good ladybugs and hated to kill them. Those suckers are a different kind of bug and they bite the sh*t out of you. Our neighbor down the road said the Forestry Agency said that the bugs had been brought in to kill one pest and had ended up taking over. Our neighbor forgot the name of the bug but said that most indoor outdoor sprays would kill them.

and

Are you sure they are ladybugs and not Mexican bean beetles? Mexican bean beetles are considered a pest because they eat plants.

I believe they’re actually Asian Lady Beetles, because the ones I’ve looked closely at have the right markings.

Several people mentioned that since ladybugs eat aphids, they never kills ladybugs. Which is a nice sentiment, I suppose, but I’m not kidding when I say that I vacuumed up over 1,000 of them over the course of last weekend. They come in around the windows and spread through the house. If they came in and headed for the attic to hibernate, it’d be one thing, but they get in EVERYTHING, including beds, food, and the kittens’ water bowl. I’m not having it.

Luckily, the better part of the influx seems to be over, though we occasionally get one flying across the room or hanging out near the ceiling. A handful of them, I can handle. A thousand? Not so much.

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Don’t some places SELL ladybugs, as garden helpers (like commenter J said, they eat a certain type of pest)? Maybe you could collect them and make a side business out of it! (Oh, I just checked on ebay, and 1500 live ladybugs only goes for $12.99.) Would the chickens like them? How about ladybug and jalapeno jam?

I actually read that you can vacuum them up, freeze them, and then put them in your garden the next Spring, and they’ll live through the experience. I’ll have to consider doing that next year, but I’ll have to resist using the hand vacuum to catch wasps, because those things I do NOT want around.

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They’re supposed to be repelled by the smell of lemons. Maybe if you sprayed your window and door frames with the diluted juice?

I’m actually planning to give this a try next year. If it doesn’t work, at least it’ll smell nice when we walk by the windows, right? And if it DOES work, I won’t have to spend a weekend scrubbing ~~ladybug~~ asian lady beetle goo (they leave goo behind, did you know that?) off every window and window frame in the house.

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Did I miss something? When did Kara move in for good?

Several of you have asked this. The announcement was here, and the longer entry about it was here.

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I have a random-ass question for Friday. What color are the Anderson cats’ toe pads? I know you lurve kitty toes as much as I do…

I would take a picture of all their toes for you, but my helper’s already left for work, so descriptions will have to do.

Black toes: Tommy, Maxi, Kara.

Gray toes: Mister Boogers.

Pink toes: Spanky, Newt, Sugarbutt, Joe Bob.

Black and pink: Miz Poo.

Undetermined: Stinkerbelle (I can’t get a good look at her toes, but will report in the future.)

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Loved those polls! The chicken hat, without a doubt, was overly persuasive and I just had to vote for Mr. Cullen. Who was his running mate?

No running mates this time around – but keep an eye out in mid-2012 for a much fancier campaign.

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Did you happen to catch Ellen’s Halloween show? I finally watched it last night and the clips of her scaring people made me laugh and laugh.

I haven’t seen it yet, but after I watch Grey’s Anatomy here in a little while, I’m going to go over to YouTube and catch up on Ellen!

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CAT “comedy!!!” (Say in Jesse Joyce’s voice.) Thanks for talking about KATG on your site. I always assumed it was a local radio station from your area. When Hubby got me a Ipod last Xmas, I thought I would look for KATG on itunes. What a great way to laugh away my doldrums.

I LOVE Jesse Joyce, especially when he gets nit-picky. He’s such a bitch about some things, he cracks me up.

Also, I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – I LOVE Keith and the Girl. They always crack me up.

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You could be a new superhero: Super Scoop!

I meant to get Fred to take a picture of me in a badass gangsta position, but completely forgot. Next time!

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Mister Boogers looks giant in that picture where he’s in front of you.

It’s the angle. He’s a pretty average-size cat, though his het does make him look bigger.

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If you’re looking for additional uses for other things, we use the bucket on my dad’s loader for all sorts of things. I climb in it and my dad raises it up so I can clean out the gutters at their house. He’s also boosted me waaaaay up to fix the roof on the owl house in the highest tree on the property. However, I will not go near the bucket when my brother is driving the tractor. I have a feeling he’d send the bucket as high as it would go and then wander off (on purpose) for a day or two.

There’s a tree in the back yard that has a web of those worms on it (I can’t think of what they’re called, but y’all know what I mean? A big web forms and then worms come out of it and eat the hell out of your tree?) and I’ve told Fred that he needs to bring the tractor into the back yard and lift me up so I can cut that branch down and burn it.

I suspect if I get myself lifted up in the bucket of the tractor in the future, there will be pictures taken.

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And when you told Fred that you wanted him to take a bunch of pictures with you doing things with scoop hands, he didn’t think you were crazy?!

Nah, he usually goes along with whatever I need him to take pictures of, though sometimes he grumbles about being pulled away from what he’s doing. This time he informed me that I have too much time on my (SCOOP) hands and perhaps I need a hobby.

Um. I HAVE a hobby, and it’s called bitchypoo.com! DUH.

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I love how you look completely confounded and frustrated by the picking of carrots, just like the infomercials.

“You flip, and they flop!” *Woman looking frustrated and overwhelmed by the flipping of pancakes*

“Love pasta, but hate draining the hot water?” How do you separate pasta from water?

Fred said “Now, scowl!” and I did, and then he laughed and snapped the picture. I can scowl with the best of ’em!

I have to ask, y’all, what’s the big deal with pasta draining? Why are there so many tools to drain pasta? Is it really that big of an issue, to dump the pasta into a colander? That’s what I usually do, but am I doing it wrong? Do I really need a tool especially made for draining pasta?

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Just think of how fast you could swim with those on! lol

I bet I’d totally make it to the Olympics with those things (though somehow I suspect the Olympics are anti SCOOP HANDS). Hmmm. Maybe I should take on the English Channel with SCOOP HANDS!

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There is a neat site that displays the front pages of tons of newspapers. The link takes you there, but it’ll be for today’s date. You can switch to November 5th to see the post-election pages.

How neat is that! Thanks for the link!

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I was reading past entries (sometimes those “previously” snippets pull me in), so now I must know. The spud had a brown hamster and a gray hamster 8 years ago that were “getting jiggy with it.” Did you end up with hamster babies or were they both male, like the pet store guy said they were???

Oh no, they were NOT both male like that fucking pet store guy said they were. One of them was female, and we ended up with a litter (?) of hamsters, which I wrote about here. I wrote here about persuading Fred to let the spud keep two of the baby hamsters (with the idea of keeping a female in the cage with the mother and a male in the cage with the father). Then, when the baby hamsters were about a month old, we took all of them back to the pet store at the spud’s request. And the mother hamster was pregnant again already.

Apparently I didn’t take a single picture of the baby hamsters. Good GOD things have changed – these days, it’d be all hamster pictures all the time until y’all begged for mercy!

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where did you get that bird bath/watering thing? I love it and *must* have one for my backyard!

At the Country Store Catalog site, here to be exact. I have two of those bird baths, one hanging on the front porch and one hanging in the side yard, and I LOVE them. They’re not the most gorgeous bird baths/ waterers around, but they’re easy to clean and they hold a lot of water and the birds really seem to like them. The squirrels too, for that matter.

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I think you should shorten Maxi “Outside Mama”‘s name to Maxi Omama.

Hmm. Maxi Omama And3rson. Kind of has a ring to it, no?

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I know you read the books, but have you seen this?

Oh man – how neat would it be to have Stanley J. Boogerton – or Crooked Acres! – in a Charlaine Harris novel? The bidding’s already up to $870, which is way too pricey for my blood, but if anyone wants to bid on Mister Boogers’ behalf, go for it!

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The kittens are continuing to do well. They had the run of the entire upstairs yesterday, and when I went up to hang out with them in the evening, Kara followed me up because she just loves to hang out in my bedroom. She ran into my bedroom and apparently Marion was in there, on the bed, and Kara sniffed at her and Marion hissed and flew out of my room and into the kitten room.

Delmar and Lem were snoozing on their cat tree, but I didn’t see Claudette anywhere, so I went looking for her. When I walked into my bedroom, I saw her scoot out from under my bed, into the closet, where she hid behind some boxes. I picked her up and she allowed that for a few minutes, then fought for me to put her down. When I did, she flew into the kitten room.

I went into the kitten room and all the kittens glared at me from atop the cat tree, but as soon as I sat down, they all came over for love and petting. They’re getting friendlier every day – Claudette actually demanded that I pet her yesterday. She purrs so loud. It’s hard to believe that volume of sound is coming from such a little thing!

A few more pics at L&H.

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Kara LOVES being outside.

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Previously
2007: I nominate Fred to do all the slaughtering himself.
2006: Questions answered.
2005: This makes me want to wrap my child in bubble wrap and lock her in her room until she’s 35.
2004: No entry.
2003: Meme.
2002: “How fucking much is that goddamn bread? A dollar ninety-fucking-five? Okay, put a couple of the motherfuckers in my cart, would you, fuckwad?”
2001: I briefly considered making a citizen’s arrest.
2000: (ie, “It’s all the fault of that fat bitch you married!”)
1999: I woke this morning at 2:30ish, feeling something wasn’t quite right.

11-3-08

New month, new banner! (You might need to clear your cache if you don’t see it up there at the top.) This was created by Aly, who has created so many of my banners in the past. Thanks again, Aly – you rock!!! & & & & & & & & & & & & … Continue reading “11-3-08”

New month, new banner! (You might need to clear your cache if you don’t see it up there at the top.)

This was created by Aly, who has created so many of my banners in the past. Thanks again, Aly – you rock!!!

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Site housekeeping stuff:

Over there in the right column at the bottom is my “currently reading” widget from Good Reads. I don’t know why I felt compelled to add that to the sidebar, it’s just that the right and left sidebars are way unbalanced and it was bugging me. I might just move everything not cat-related from the left sidebar to the right to make it work out right. We’ll see. I’m not currently feeling the urge to houseclean the page, but I can feel it coming.

Over in the left sidebar, in case you hadn’t noticed, Kara’s been moved to the “permanent residents” list and the new fosters have been added to the “fosters” list.

Hmm…. I thought there was more, but it appears that that’s about it.

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I woke up Saturday with an aching hip. Ever since I painted the shed last week, my hip had been aching, and it got worse Friday and Saturday instead of better. So I limped around, swearing to myself that I’d make an appointment with my doctor as soon as possible.

(And then of course Sunday morning I woke up with it much improved, so now I’m going to put it off ’til after my visit to the gynecologist next week!)

Fred came upstairs after I got out of the shower to ask where I keep the cleaning rags (I’d make fun of him for that, except I just moved them. This is like the fourth time I’ve moved where I keep them since we’ve lived in this house. I don’t know, I just can’t find the perfect place, sue me!) because Joe Bob had gotten into the litter box I’d put in the guest bedroom for Miz Poo, and instead of peeing IN the litter box, he peed straight back and hit my cedar chest and left a big nasty puddle of cat pee on the floor.

Thus would begin my own personal HELL DAY wherein I must have cleaned up ten zillion Joe Bob sprays. I don’t know what the holy fuck is going on with him, but he walked over to a bookcase and sprayed it while we were RIGHT there, he peed on the table, he peed on the floor, he peed on the rug by the back door. (Poet! Knowit!) I got so over-the-top pissed (PUN INTENDED) off at him that I yelled at him to get out of my house, and when he obeyed by running out the cat door into the back yard (don’t be too impressed – he was headed for the cat door before I yelled, so it’s not like he UNDERSTOOD what I was saying, but my yelling certainly sped him on his way) I shut the door and left it shut for an hour.

(Don’t GIVE ME that look. It was warm outside and there’s a bowl of water out there. If he’d stayed inside, I might have ended up throttling him.)

Fred’s going to be taking him to the vet this afternoon so they can find out if there’s something physically wrong with him. If there’s nothing physically wrong with him, we’re going to see about getting him some medication to calm him the fuck down and STOP THE GODDAMN PEEING.

This makes me despair. We’d gone a good long time without anyone peeing anywhere, and then Fred had to say “It’s been a while since we had any peeing incidents, huh?”, and the NEXT DAY? Cat pee.

Grrrr.

So I thought that perhaps His Highness (Joe Bob, that is. Not Fred.) was objecting to the cleanliness of the litter boxes. It’s been a long time since I emptied, scrubbed, and refilled them, even though I make sure I add fresh litter regularly, and the litter boxes get scooped twice a day (we are not MONSTERS, you know!). I emptied them one-by-one, scrubbed them out, let them air-dry and refilled them with clean litter. (I don’t know why I feel compelled to tell you that I filled them with clean litter. It’s not like I would have put the old nasty litter back in the clean boxes. I WOULDN’T.)

Then I decided to move stuff around in the laundry room. For one, the cat fountain is in a location where there’s no nearby plug, so I’d run an extension cord behind the litter boxes (and in front of the door where the water heater is), and it just bugged me, having it set up like that. So I moved it so it’s near a plug, moved the storage containers holding the extra cat food over by the food bowls, dusted and straightened the storage unit in the laundry room, vacuumed the entire room and scrubbed the spot (in the middle of the laundry room) where Stinkerbelle and Mister Boogers share their Snackin’! Time!, because they tend to knock some food on the floor and then tromp through it.

In and amongst all this cleaning of the laundry room, I did laundry, made lunch, and hung out with the kittens.

At one point, I went out to take popcorn to the chickens, and Fred asked me to give him a hand. Some piece that holds implements onto the tractor was stuck, and he needed to hold one end and have me pull the other end to get it out.

(THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID!)

“Be careful,” he said. “You’ll have to put all your weight into it, but it’ll probably let go suddenly.”

It did, and seeing as I’m the ungraceful sort, I landed on my ass on the driveway.

(Later that night, he stepped onto a cat toy on the rug in the kitchen and bitched about how much it hurt. I gave him the bug-eyes and said “I FELL DOWN on the driveway, and got a mild “Are you okay?” You probably shouldn’t expect too much SYMPATHY right now, big baby.”)

The biggest part of the weekend, though, was spent dealing with the GODDAMN LADYBUGS. Apparently it’s time for them to hibernate, so they’re coming into my house in DROVES, all “No, that’s okay, we can find out own hibernating spot, let me buzz by your ear on the way across the room to scare the shit out of you, ‘k?” I vacuumed up several hundred of them Friday and Saturday. By Sunday morning I’d had it, and went to L0we’s to buy something that would kill them. I don’t particularly want to kill them, I just want them to stay away, but I found nothing that claimed to be a ladybug repellent, so I opted for an indoor/ outdoor spray that would kill them on contact. It seemed to work okay, but I still had to vacuum up a ton of dead ladybugs. At least they were dying near the windows instead of spreading out throughout the house.

The worst infestation of ladybugs was upstairs in the garage, where the windows were open a little bit to allow air circulation in the garage. The window facing the street was just COVERED in ladybugs and wasps, and I took great pleasure in spraying the hell out of them Sunday afternoon.

Seriously, though. I really would prefer to repel them rather than kill them. Anyone out there have a good ladybug repelling trick, something that has worked for you personally? Do share!

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After all my making fun of Fred in my Friday entry, I ended up deciding that we should just pick up Chinese food and eat dinner at home. I didn’t want to have to change my clothes, y’see, and I was dressed like a slob. So we got Chinese food and I ended up eating too fast and getting sick and spent some time hanging over the toilet.

(Good to see that the tool is still working as it should, almost three years later!)

We watched The Devil’s Advocate, which neither of us had seen, and despite the fact that we’d stopped to buy candy at the dollar store just in case, not a single kid knocked on the door.

While we were watching the movie, I fired up the laptop (which I keep in the living room – or I guess I should say I did until Sunday, when I decided I was spending too much time online in the evenings, so I packed it away in its case.) and surfed to Flickr, and then I thought “Hmm. It’s been a while since I went through my Flickr inbox, hasn’t it? I should clear that out.”

For the uninformed, every time someone adds you as a “contact” on Flickr, you get an email in your Flickr inbox (well, I do, I can’t speak for you. I’m just assuming. I’m using a lot of parentheses in this entry, aren’t I?) and when someone adds me as a contact, I go and check out their pictures, and if I think I might be interested in seeing their pictures on a regular basis, I add them as one of my contacts. But like I said, it had been a while, so I started with the most recent emails and worked my way back.

Yeah. It’d been a while since I clean out my Flickr inbox. TWO YEARS since I’d done it.

I know, I suck. I’ll try to keep on top of it from here on out. Don’t hold your breath.

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I made a mistake Friday night with the foster kittens. I thought it would be a good idea to just open the door to their room and leave it open. I sat in there for a while and petted Delmar, but Lem, Marion and Claudette sat atop the cat tree and nervously eyed the open door. After a while, I decided to just leave them alone, hope they’d decide to explore on their own, and get comfortable being out of the room.

Then I got distracted cleaning the kitchen, going out to give the pigs their nightly snack, and locking the chicken coops. By the time I got back inside and Snackin’! Time! for our cats was over, it had been about 45 minutes since I left the kitten door open. Lem and Claudette were still on the cat tree, but Delmar and Marion were nowhere to be found. We searched the upstairs, but they weren’t up there. We searched the downstairs and didn’t find them. We searched the downstairs again, and Fred found Marion behind the bathroom door, and thus ensued a chase where we pursued Marion through the house. She ended up behind the washer, but we flushed her out with a blast of canned air to scare her out, and Fred finally caught her and carried her upstairs.

We looked all over the place and couldn’t find Delmar anywhere. After three or four circuits of the downstairs, looking in every nook and cranny, I finally discovered him hiding behind the water heater in the hall closet. I lured him out with a toy, and he let me carry him back upstairs to familiar territory.

I tried to lure them out of the room several times on Saturday, but none of them were going for it, so I spent as much time in the kitten room as I could, petting them and telling them how sweet they are. Most of them forgave me, but Marion seems to be holding a grudge.

They got their first vaccination shots Saturday evening, and were kind of knocked out from that Saturday evening and most of Sunday. I decided to pull back on trying to throw them into new and scary situations, so instead of just leaving their door open on Sunday, I left the door open but put a couple of baby gates in the doorway in hopes that being able to see the hall and see the traffic (ie, the big cats and us) would eventually make them curious.

So far it’s not working, but y’know. It takes time!

More pics at L&H.

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Tommy, Sugarbutt, and Joe Bob, laying in the yard. I’m not sure what they were watching – probably chickens, since that’s what’s usually on the other side of that fence.

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Previously
2007: Newt was a total teeny baby this time last year – he was clearly NOT fully grown at that point, as this picture can attest.
2006: Maddy’s new Mommy and Daddy came a-visitin’ yesterday.
2005: Huh. I was wondering why Tom Cullen was snooping around in the stamp drawer
2004: The spud and I stood patiently by while the man chattered at the school employees for several minutes and then my head exploded, scattering brain matter everywhere.
2003: “Jessica Lynch!” I said. “Isn’t she the only POW we’ve ever had in all of history?”
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: No entry.
1999: She went in and treated the whole office to a very loud gagging sound (she gets that from her mother), and came out a few minutes later a little less green.

10/31/08

Holy crap! Ten years! “Let’s do a picture with serious faces, Bessie.” “Okay. Wait. I don’t think I can stop from smirking. Are you making a face back there?” “Who, me? No.” “Okay, I think I had a straight face.” “Me too.” “Were you making a face back there?” “No, not at all.” (Bastard) (I … Continue reading “10/31/08”

Holy crap! Ten years!

“Let’s do a picture with serious faces, Bessie.”
“Okay. Wait. I don’t think I can stop from smirking. Are you making a face back there?”
“Who, me? No.”

“Okay, I think I had a straight face.”
“Me too.”
“Were you making a face back there?”
“No, not at all.”
(Bastard)

(I need a haircut in a serious way.)

Happy tenth anniversary, you cat-wrangling, coop-building, chicken-herding bastard!

(I give it another ten before you flee screaming from the house of ten thousand cats.)

And happy anniversary to our wedding twins Shelly and R, too!

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A few years ago, I announced that I’d started a savings account at Emigrant Direct to save up for a really nice tenth anniversary vacation. We were talking about going to the Bahamas or Hawaii. We were going to spend an entire week and do it up right.

And then we bought Crooked Acres and used all the vacation money to renovate the inside of the house.

Well worth it, in my opinion.

(Now I’ll start saving for our 15th anniversary. By then we’ll probably have about 3,000 chickens, so I’ll need to factor in the money to pay someone for a week of house sitting, chicken wrangling, and cat herding!)

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By the way, I facetiously said to Fred last week, “What special thing are we going to do for our anniversary?” (facetious because we don’t really ever do anything special on our anniversary because we are special snowflakes and WE don’t need a SPECIAL DAY to show that we love each other, we show each other EACH AND EVERY DAY how much we consider the other to be a great big pain in the ass!), Fred said “We should go out to dinner!”

I snorted. “Yeah, right.”

I’d eat out all the time if I had someone to go with, but Fred doesn’t like to go out to dinner (he claims I’m incorrect when I say this, but he lies.), so I figured he was just attempting to be funny.

So far, he seems to actually be serious about it. I’m not discounting the possibility that he’ll do a last-minute pick-up-dinner-on-the-way-home end run, but it looks like we might really do it.

HE REALLY DOES LOVE ME!!!!

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Anyone out there still watching The Shield? With four episodes left, they’re ratcheting up the tension nicely, aren’t they?

I predict that Shane and Vic are both going to end up dead and Ronnie will head up some new Strike Team. Or maybe Ronnie’ll be dead, too. I fell like there’s just no way Vic can come out of this alive, though.

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Once you came to live with Fred what surprised you, in a good way, that you hadn’t known about his personality?

How rock-solid and straight-forward he is. He doesn’t play games, he doesn’t use what you’ve said against you, he doesn’t avoid confrontation. He’d rather talk it out and clear the air and get it over with. He doesn’t hold grudges. He sees right through the manipulative bullshit people like to pull, and he doesn’t put up with that shit. He’s supportive and smart and he makes me laugh like nobody’s business. He can do absolutely anything he puts his mind to. Twelve years in, he still manages to surprise me often and did I mention how funny he is? He’s my safe place to fall, my rock (but not an island), and my best and most trusted and trustworthy friend. He’s my lobster, my bridge over troubled water.

Pardon the mush, but it’s my 10th anniversary. If I can’t be mushy now, when can I?

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Possibly asked and answered (though I didn’t see it listed in your book list) : Have you read Outlander by Diana Gabaldon?

I own it, but I haven’t read it yet. I believe it’s on the top shelf of my bookcase, which means it’s getting to the front of the queue to be read! I’m simultaneously looking forward to it, since so many of you loved it, and dreading it because HELLO that is one thick motherfucker of a book!

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I have a question about the frozen eggs (actually, I have a question for my coworker who just got her first chickens this summer). Can you do all the egg stuff with frozen eggs that you can with fresh eggs or does freezing do something to the texture and they become good for only baking and such?

and

I have never heard of freezing eggs! So what do you do when you are ready to cook them? Just thaw them out? Can you fix them any style and do they taste the same as fresh?

Frozen eggs, once thawed, can be used for all the same things you use fresh eggs for (aside from hard-boiling them, obviously), and to me the texture and taste is exactly the same. I’ve used them to bake with, I’ve made quiches with them, and I’ve scrambled them and had them for breakfast, and honestly can’t tell the difference between the ones that were frozen, and the fresh ones.

To thaw them out, just put them in a small bowl and set them on the counter ’til they’re thawed. If you need one right away, you can put the frozen egg in a sandwich baggie and put it in warm water.

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My uncle yells out in his sleep all the time. It’s gotten to the point that he wife doesn’t even do anything. That man has some really scary dreams. I actually heard him when I was kid and visiting them. I hope Fred was able to get back to sleep.

Oh, Fred was able to get back to sleep NO PROBLEM, the bastard. In fact, I finished reading about ten minutes later and when I put my book on the dresser, it fell off and landed on the floor with a loud bang. The next morning, I said “Did the book falling wake you up?” and he said that he hadn’t heard a thing. Hmph.

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I’ll be the first to say it. Maybe it wasn’t Fred who called out in the night. Maybe it was your house ghost? HA! just kidding of course.

One of the closets in my room (I have two!) tends to pop open in the middle of the night. I, personally, know that it’s because the temperature in my room and the temperature in the closet tends to vary widely, and the pressure causes the closet door to pop open.

Fred prefers to believe it’s due to a ghost.

I don’t believe in ghosts, and it’s going to take more than a door popping open occasionally to convince me otherwise.

THAT’S RIGHT, GHOSTS! I’M CALLING YOU OUT!

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What are you, Jainist? Squish the wasps.

Damn you for making me go look up Jainism. (For those who don’t want to go read, Compassion for all life, human and non-human, is central to Jainism.) Given my love for a nice cut of meat –

(pardon me while I snort like a 13 year-old boy)

I am SO not a Jainist. I don’t squish the wasps because I don’t like the crunching sound (or feeling) they make when squished. In fact, just thinking about that crunching sound/ feeling makes my skin crawl. BLEH.

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Bobpod is DEAD?!?!? Or was this Bobpod 2? I hope you get a replacement soon – KATG is finally posting shows again!

This was the second iPod, which I named Bawbpod. And I know they’re finally posting KATG shows again – it figures that they’re finally back from England and Israel, and my iPod craps out on me!

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I put my cell phone in my bra all the time. Sometimes I sweat and it stops working for a few days, but eventually drys out. Don’t buy a new one until you give it time to dry completely. I also heard you can put it in a jar of rice…who knows??

I’ve put that damn iPod in a bowl of (dry) rice, and am giving it the weekend to straighten itself out. If it doesn’t get its shit together by Monday, I’m going to buy a cheaper mp3 player and stop downloading TV shows on iTunes, since I hardly ever get around to watching them anyway!

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I was just reading back to you getting Miz Poo and Mr. Boogers, and I was wondering if the cats ever see you come home with another cat and just think “oh, Jesus CHRIST here they go again…”

I always wonder what on earth our cats must think about the comings and goings of other cats. Because I know at first every time there was a new cat, they’d all have a fit and hiss and growl at the new one and flounce about and have temper tantrums for days. These days, it’s kind of like “Oh, look. New cat. Le hiss. THAT never happens. Wonder if this one is staying or just visiting?”

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Poor Miz Poo! Freaky puffy lip, freaky butt tumor. I swear calico (or tortis or whatever) cats are just weird when it comes to health issues.

If Miz Poo’s anything to go by, tri-color cats are money pits. I always refer to Miz Poo as our “trouble child” when I’m talking to the vet’s assistant. Not only does she (Miz Poo, that is, not the vet’s assistant. That I’m aware of, anyway.) have puffy lip and butt tumor issues, she used to have problems with her eyes. Nothing’s flared up with her eyes in years, though, so I’m sure we’re just about due for something to happen THERE.

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Saturday must have been the day for cats bursting open. One of ours had a lovely (horrible) cyst burst and a big ol’ hole. We did take her to the emergency vet and blew $300 as she was obviously feeling miserable. May the rest of the week be better for cats and iPods.

When the vet said that he saw tumor tissue on Monday, I immediately recalled the fact that it seems like there’ve been a LOT of bloggers/ journalers who’ve had to put their cats to sleep lately, and my heart just sank. I mean, I know that 9 years old is getting up there for cats, but I hope like hell that Miz Poo is around for a good long time yet.

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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.

Pure.
Unadulterated.
Genius.

My other genius move is what I did last week. The spud’s birthday was on Sunday, so I sent out her box of birthday presents on Wednesday, and since I was having a hankering for cookies – these cookies are SO FREAKIN’ GOOD – I made a double batch of the cookies, sent a bunch to her with her birthday presents, sent a bunch more to my sister and nephew (I was sending her a box of books), and then had a few for us to eat ourselves.

I wouldn’t put it past myself to put chocolate chip cookies on the giveaway page at some point, just so I can make them, send most of them off to other people, and have a few to myself.

(Yes, I could make the dough, bake a few cookies, and put the rest of the dough in the freezer. What makes you think I wouldn’t eat frozen cookie dough straight from the freezer until I was sick? Do I strike you as having that kind of self control?)

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OMG, my cats also pee and have tried to poo in the drain. Like they aim in the drain and go about their business. And it doesn’t matter if the litter box is clean or not… OMG… I thought it was just me!!!!

Pleasepleaseplease oh please god, don’t let me utter the words “If any of my cats ever pooped in the sink I would strangle him with my bare hands”, please god, please note I AM NOT SAYING THAT because I know you are a cruel and angry god who would immediately make Mister Boogers go poop in the sink and I don’t want to have to kill him. Pleasepleaseplease.

I strongly suspect that it was that bastard Newt who taught Mister Boogers to pee in the kitchen sink, because one day NO ONE was peeing in the sink and the next day Newt did it and Mister Boogers was doing it, too. How did Newt know that peeing in the sink was acceptable (in our house, maybe not in everyone’s, but better in the sink than on the bed and I swear I scrub out that sink every single morning.), is what I want to know? Peeing in the sink he can master, but the cat door? Not so much.

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A nice Autumn/Winter wreath would look good above that table on your porch…

I agree!

I need to go shopping.

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Robyn, you MUST get a jack-o-lantern on that front porch ASAP!!!! 😀

I talked about it, actually, but Fred said “That would be like a friendly invitation for people to come knock on the door on Halloween!” He’s such a curmudgeon.

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In terms of beans and their effect on the digestive system: a few drops of beano (or a beano tablet) eaten with the beans works wonders for me. It’s a great product for reducing gas. Of course, if you have high blood pressure,you may want to keep the gas, but that’s another story….

and

Regarding beans and gas – if you soak dried beans and change the water 3 times during the first day, then the morning of the second day, you can cook them and will not get gas. (my father – who is from the country here in Texas) told me this recently – I had no idea.

I have absolutely tried Beano and also the changing of the water, and both of them work nicely, but Fred is so very sad when beans do NOT give him gas that I can’t bring myself to disappoint him.

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Kim is SO not 29!

and

No way in hell is that Kim woman 29!!! And what are these emails of which you speak?

I’m starting to think that Kim is one of those “29 and holding” women and might be closer to 40.

The emails I was referring to (which I quoted from the past two weeks regarding RHoATL) are just emails I traded with a friend. I probably oughta just start up a forum somewhere for us to talk about the show, shouldn’t I?

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LOVING the True Blood! Bill, fine; Sam, fine; Rene? HOT. AS. FIRE.

I have to say, I do like me some Rene (though I have to admit that my favorite male on the show is LaFayette. He cracks me up every week.).

This most recent episode, where Sookie and Bill were babysitting Arlene’s kids? That whole scene with them goofing off at the kitchen table was just stupid and goofy and contrived and I hated it. I DO NOT WANT MY VAMPIRES TO ACT LIKE GOOFBALLS AND TRY TO CHARM CHILDREN, PLEASE.

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Thanks for asking about hand-held vacuums. I’m looking forward to the answers. Sounds like Dysons are hit or miss, but whatever I end up buying, I’ll use the heck out of for a week and return if it can’t do the job. My friend in Canada likes her Eureka EZ Clean Bagless Hand Vacuum; anybody else have one of those? A local friend likes her hand-held, but doesn’t remember what it is. She’s supposed to bring it to work on Monday and let me try it out for a couple of days.

and

For picking up the food that drops (or is thrown)off the trays of my just turned three year old, active, messy little boys, I use a cordless Black and Decker CHV1560 15.6 volt cyclonic action dustbuster. It works fine picking up both dry and wet things, like oatmeal.

Anyone else got a hand vacuum they love?

My Dyson hand held is currently housing about 10 wasps. I actually tried to free them, since you can just hit the lever to let the bottom drop open, and when I dropped the bottom off the canister, the dumbasses climbed up higher in the canister. I figure, if they’re going to be THAT GODDAMN STUPID when I’m trying to give them their freedom, then THEY DESERVE TO DIE.

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Does Kara ever get sad about not having her babies around? I must have missed the entry where you announced her adoption

I wrote about our adopting Kara here. Wow, it’s only been a week? It seems like it’s been much longer – I guess because she was with us for six months before we decided to adopt her!

Kara was sad and quiet and contemplative for a few days after her babies left, but she got over it pretty quickly. I often wonder what she’d do if she came face-to-face with one of her babies, whether she’d remember them or not. I had kind of hoped that when she saw the new foster kittens that her maternal instinct might kick in and she might want to mother them a little, but not so much: she continues to hiss and growl at them.

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Do the cats poop outside or save it for indoors?

It depends on the cat. Some of them prefer the outdoors, some of them prefer the indoors. I swear that Tommy, Sugarbutt, Mister Boogers, and Joe Bob will wait until I happen to glance out the window before they get into position right there where I can see them. The girls prefer to come inside and use the litter box, and Spanky can go either way.

Suffice it to say that we don’t walk barefoot through our back yard.

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Are you finding the pork from your piggies tastes different than store bought? We recently got a hobby farm side of beef and I found it delicious while hubby found it ‘gamey’. I think we are so used to all the crap in meats we don’t know what it is supposed to taste like.

We’re finding that the pork from Big Pig is very, very flavorful and tender, but it tends toward being fatty. Big Pig was a fat bastard, and we also let them get bigger than we should have before we took them off to be processed, so that probably has something to do with the amount of fat on our roasts and pork chops. The butcher took some of the shoulder and sliced it into very thin steaks, and OH MY GOD, that is the best stuff ever. Taste-wise, when pork shoulder steaks are cooked on the grill, it tastes just like beef. It’s a minor inconvenience to have to cut the fat off from around the edges of the meat.

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Foster kittens are doing well. I’m going to start letting them out of their room this weekend and see how that goes. So far, Lem seems most interested in finding out what’s on the other side of the door, but they’re kittens and thus nosy, so I suspect we’ll have them roaming all over the house before too long.

I wonder which kitten will be first to befriend one of our cats?

I suspect Lem.

More pics at L&H.

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I let Miz Poo out of the guest bedroom yesterday morning. Well, that is to say that I opened the guest bedroom door and she was snoozing on top of the kitty condo in a corner of the room. She stayed there for a couple of hours (I left the door open so she could come out whenever she wanted), and then all of a sudden I was sitting at my computer, and glanced out the window to see her slinking across the yard.

She spent the rest of the day alternating between hanging out in the back yard and snoozing in a cat bed in the front room.

I’d say she’s feeling better (and getting accustomed to the no-cone collar).

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Previously
2007: Holy crap, I’ve been married for 9 years!
2006: We’ve been married for eight years now. And they said it’d never last!
2005: Let the Seven Year Itch commence!
2004: Happy anniversary, you walnut-farting motherfucker.
2003: We’ve been married for five years as of today.
2002: He even sent me flowers.
2001: And they said it’d never last.
2000: And happy anniversary to Fred, who married me two years ago tonight, which was the smartest thing he’s ever done.
1999: “We don’t have to get married. We could just wait ’til next year. Shouldn’t we get married on the anniversary of the day we met? That would be more romantic!”

10/30/08

So, I couldn’t get online before I left for the pet store this morning, so I reacted like a great big baby and had a temper tantrum and posted some pictures via Flickr. You got to see me whine about my internet being down, whine about the sun in my eyes on the way to … Continue reading “10/30/08”

Who says it’s unexciting around here?!

If you ever check this site and see a crappy camera phone picture posted via Flickr, you can assume it’s because my goddamn internet is down AGAIN and the only way I can post is via Flickr (did I mention that Flickr ROCKS?).

I think if I’m going to be posting camera phone pictures, I need a phone that takes better pictures. Dontchathink?

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I belong to Goodreads, and every so often one of you ask to be my Goodreads BFF, and of course I’m happy to add you as a friend, even though I’m horribly bad at keeping up with adding the books I’ve read to my list.

But what really annoys me is when someone requests to be added as a Goodreads friend for the sole goddamn purpose of spamming me because they’ve written some shitty book and think because I read books, I’ll want to read the poorly-written book they’re flogging.

Hint: throwing extra adjectives into a book summary doesn’t actually make it sound more interesting. It makes it sound like it was written by a fifth grader with a thesaurus in hand.

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Do not cry for Miz Poo, y’all. She is being babied and given the full Princess treatment, to the max. Yesterday morning when I walked into the guest bedroom, she was hanging out in the cubby of the bedside table. I carried her out into the living room with me and we watched The Real Housewives of Atlanta (more on that in a moment), and I took the cone collar off her and scratched her ears and around her neck until she drooled. And then she slept for a long time, and demanded more scratching, and more drooling ensued. I eventually put her back in the guest bedroom so I could go out and touch up the paint on the new chicken coop (when I’m not around to keep an eye on her, I put her in the guest bedroom so the other cats won’t harass her), and then I spent another couple of hours on the couch with her in the afternoon. When I don’t actually have her in my lap, I put the no-cone collar on her. She hasn’t actually shown any interest in licking or biting at the drain or her stitches, but I’d hate to leave her alone and come back to find that she’d pulled the drain out.

Pardon me while I shudder at the idea.

She was a lot more bright-eyed and with-it yesterday morning than she’d been the night before, but we’ve got her on the pain medication so she’s still pretty doped up and sleeps a lot. I think the pain medication is doing a good job, because she doesn’t appear to be in any pain.

Last night when we sat down to watch TV, we took her collar off. She sat on a pillow on my lap for two and a half hours, and she cleaned herself for about two hours and twenty minutes of that time. She did try to lick at her stitches and drain, but I stopped her every time, and she’d look at me like “THIS IS MY BODY I WILL DO WHAT I WANT I HATE YOU WILL YOU SCRATCH MY EARS PLEASE?”

She’ll be fine – don’t worry about my baby, I’ll keep her spoiled rotten.

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Real Housewives of Atlanta (skip to the next section if you’re not interested!)

Honest to god, I kind of thought that they’d hype DeShawn’s gala event as being a big flop only so they could jump out of the closet and scream SURPRISE! when all of a sudden the bidding started and DeShawn managed to bring one million and ONE dollars in for her foundation. But holy cripes, what a flop. I thought she was kind of uninformed and naive about how to run a gala, but I ended up feeling sorry for her because of the HUGE flop it turned out to be. They ended up spending $20,000 more on putting the gala ON than they made!

I’m curious why that one woman made a point of asking if LeBron James (I don’t know sports, but even I recognize the name) was going to be there, acted all excited that there’d be some sort of LeBron-centric package being auctioned off, and then pointedly didn’t bid.

When DeShawn was looking for Mark Hayes, I thought she was looking for some guy named Marques. Heh.

When Kim decided to buy that diamond cuff at the gala and she was all “I have to call Big Poppa and tell him I bought this!”, I assume that was a call that went along the lines of “Big Poppa, listen to what you just bought me with the credit card you gave me!”

(By the way, if you’re curious, the word on the web seems to be that “Big Poppa” is married real estate developer Lee Najjar, whoever the hell that is. I don’t know that I’d consider him a “celebrity” as Kim said in the first show, but then I’m not part of the Atlanta social scene, so maybe he’s a celebrity in Atlanta.)

Am I getting this right? Lisa was going to a trunk show to showcase her jewelry, and she and a bunch of friends were sitting around MAKING the jewelry? Because I don’t actually think of jewelry at Macy’s being stringed together by a bunch of people at a kitchen table – but then I’m also not really Macy’s target jewelry (or “JOOORY”, as everyone on this damn show pronounces it) demographic either, so what do I know? (I think Lisa is absolutely gorgeous, by the way, but I prefer her hair curly to straight.)

You know, Kim’s insistence on continually telling Sheree how beautiful she is, is just weird and I think even Sheree was getting uncomfortable with all the smoke Kim was blowing up her ass.

There’s going to be some DRAMA next week, looks like. NeNe doesn’t back down from confrontation, so it should be something to see.

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Pictures from around Crooked Acres:

Kara’s assimilation into the Crooked Acres Gang is just about complete. You can’t see it in this picture, but she’s wearing a collar. She LOVES to be outside, and she’s mostly got the hang of the cat door. When she goes outside, she flops down at the bottom of the steps and rolls around. At night, when the door is closed, she tries to lead us to the door every time we head in that direction. I’m sure she’ll understand eventually that night time means no going outside.

Hello, Fall.

We call these three the Three Musketeers. In the few days since I took this picture, they actually got too big to squeeze through the fence, but for a while there they were spending all their time in the side yard cleaning up under the bird feeders.

These girls sure do flop down and sleep hard. Sometimes we have to call them several times before they wake up.

These two have suddenly started flying up and hanging out on top of the gate between the chicken yard and the back yard. Makes me wonder if we’ve got another couple of roosters on our hands.

Hawk, checking out the chickens.

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I told Fred yesterday that if I had the naming to do over again, I’d name him Dr. Google instead of Delmar. At least once a day I get the once-over from him. He sniffs my nostrils, my eyes and my breath before he decides that I continue to be healthy. And then he gives me an arm massage before he flops down for petting. He’s part-physician, part-masseuse, ALL lovebug!

The kittens got over being mad at me for taking them off to the scary place pretty quickly – yesterday afternoon Delmar, Marion and Lem all crowded around me and climbed on me, head-butted me for petting, and then complained when I wasn’t quick enough with the petting. They’re so demanding.

Tonight they get their vaccinations, and I expect in the next few days, if they’re interested, I’ll let them out to roam the house. I’ve let Kara in the kitten room to visit with them a few times. She hisses at them and puffs up, but they just look at her like, “What’s YOUR problem?” Our cats might have freaked them out initially, but now they’re not scared at all when Kara or Tommy or Mister Boogers pokes their head into the room.

Claudette continues to be a scaredy cat. It’s like she wants to be friendly, but she’s just too scared to come over for petting. It seems like tortis are always either terrified little scaredy cats, or completely nuts.

(Well, I suppose that goes for ALL cats, really, doesn’t it?)

I expect that she’ll come around eventually, and when she gives in to her deep-down desire to be a snugglebug, she’ll really be a sight to behold.

“Whyyyyyyyy are you not petting me right now? Whyyyyyyyyyy?”

More pics over at L&H.

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Stinkerbelle would like you all to know that those of you who pointed out that she’s no longer a “little thing” can KISS HER ASS.

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Previously
2007: “Jesus christ, LENNY. I’m not going to PET THE DEAD SQUIRREL.”
2006: Isn’t it nice that I named cats that aren’t mine?
2005: No entry.
2004: List of fives.
2003: (Also, Nance called me “nice.” That bitch!)
2002: But I don’t guess that introspection is the forte of that particular diva.
2001: Who tells stories about you?
2000: This morning, red and goopy.
1999: (Side note: I did nothing, and that just pisses me off. I wish I could go back and smack the shit out of that jerk. I hope his life is hellish).

10/29/08

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

10/28/08

This is how my Monday went: 1. I didn’t sleep worth a shit Sunday night, got maybe two hours, and when Fred woke me up to say goodbye, we talked long enough that I woke up completely and couldn’t get back to sleep. 2. On Saturday, we noticed that Miz Poo had a swelling near … Continue reading “10/28/08”

This is how my Monday went:

1. I didn’t sleep worth a shit Sunday night, got maybe two hours, and when Fred woke me up to say goodbye, we talked long enough that I woke up completely and couldn’t get back to sleep.

2. On Saturday, we noticed that Miz Poo had a swelling near the base of her tail. We looked at it and Fred Googled around and we decided it was likely an abscess. We decided it wasn’t an occasion for the emergency vet (unlike a few years ago when I think we took Spot to the emergency vet and blew a few hundred dollars on the visit because he looked “funny.”) and checked on her during the day. Saturday night Fred looked over in the padded pyramid near the couch where Miz Poo was hanging out (which in itself is weird, because she’s usually on the couch with me or on the couch with Fred, she’s an equal opportunity lovah.) and she was licking at the swollen area. When he got down to check on her, he found that it had burst, and poor Miz Poo was trying to lick up the flood of bloody puss and had the most disgusted look on her face.

You weren’t eating, were you?

We did our best to clean her up, dabbed off the puss, and put antibiotic ointment on the area and checked on it again Sunday. Yesterday I took her to the vet, figuring that they’d have to clean out the area (it looked pretty nasty, but not infected) and might have to knock her out to do so. The vet looked at the area and said that he thought he saw some tumor tissue, that they needed to knock her out, remove the tissue around the area, and try to close it back up. I left her there so they could do it. Apparently they doped her up to see if they could clean the area before operating, and she vomited, so they had to wait a while to operate. Yesterday evening the vet talked to Fred and told him it turned out to be an anal gland adenoma. That they usually come back and turn into a chronic condition, but sometimes they never reoccur. Fred asked him if this was a death sentence, and the vet said that ultimately (if it turns into a chronic condition) it would probably be what kills her, but not to break out the ash and sackcloth just yet.

She stayed overnight at the vet and hopefully I’ll be able to pick her up after I drop the kittens off at the vet to be spayed and neutered.

3. I spent three hours painting the outside of the big coop (we’re going with dark green this time around). Today my leg aches like a motherfucker; I guess I stand funny when I’m using a paint roller.

I got green paint on the palm of my right hand, and I scrubbed and scrubbed at it and it mostly came off, but my hand is so dry that I can’t quite get all the paint off, so my right palm is tinged slightly green. I look like I’m about to start turning into the Hulk.

Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

4. I’m a fucking idiot and put my iPod in my bra while I was painting (what? I don’t usually wear pants with pockets, that’s where I usually store the damn thing when I’m doing stuff.) and sweated all over it. It stopped working completely at first, and now it’ll light up and I can synch it, but the menu buttons won’t work at all, so it’s pretty much useless.

If the week knows what’s good for it, things will be downhill for the next few days!

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I have to box up the kittens and take them to be spayed and neutered. I don’t know how that’s going to go – the boys are okay with being picked up (Delmar actually seems to like it) but the girls hate it, especially Claudette, who’s a tiny little scrapper when you pick her up. I put two carriers in their room Sunday and they’ve been checking them out and jumping in and out of them and sniffing them all over, so they’re not scared of carriers.

I’m sure this experience will change that!

More pictures up over at L&H.

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Stinkerbelle in the sun. Pretty little thing, isn’t she?

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Previously
2007: No entry.
2006: No entry.
2005: (”GOD. No WONDER you’re so fat, if you eat stuff like that ALL THE TIME! All you have to do is stop eating crap like that, and exercise! I should know! I’m an anonymous asshole you’ve never heard of before, so listen to me!”)
2004: No entry.
2003: I’m going to DIE. Someday, I’m going to die. I’m going to die, you’re going to die, Fred will die, the spud will die. We’re going to DIE. All of us.
2002: I’m an AMERICAN, after all. I should never, for one second feel the slightest bit of discomfort.
2001: No entry.
2000: No entry.
1999: As far as I’m concerned, to each his own.

10/27/08

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 … Continue reading “10/27/08”

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.

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.

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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.

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

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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.