Can't resist!

Thanks to I Can Has Cheezeburger.

Oreo puck

I hit a prickly spot in the 'Sword & Scabbard' edit late this afternoon. The chapters weren't flowing right, so I changed the order, but it still wasn't right. (Thank goodness for Write It Now; moving chapters in Word is a pain in the butt.) When I went downstairs to start dinner, I thought of the solution. Sometimes it really helps to step away for a while.

After dinner I headed back to the salt mine with a mug of ice coffee and a couple of Oreo cookies. I put them on the table beside me and got back to work. Chloe heard me come back upstairs and naturally thought I'd come to pay attention to her. Poor thing--she got a little scritchy and nothing more, so of course she decided to investigate everything nearby. I was on a really good roll when I felt her bunch up against my side. Before I could turn to see what she was doing, she gave one of my cookies a good whack and sent it half-way across the room. She was heading after it when I fussed at her. I found her something else to play with, but for now she's opted to sit across the room and watch me. Goofy cat.

I do have to say that although this edit is threatening to consume my entire life, it feels good to be writing again. Alex goes to school in 11 days and has made me promise to turn his room into an office. The goal is to have this done by then so I'm not taking old baggage into my new space.

The Furminator

I don't usually do product endorsements, but I have to brag on the Furminator. A couple different friends told me how great it was, and since we started the Great Spring Shed recently I decided to try it out.

Essentially, it's a scaled-down curry comb. The instructions say to use it in an area that's easy to clean since it will extract an abundance of fur. Oh, boy howdy, they were not kidding! I sat down on the kitchen floor with Ryan and had a huge hand-full of fur in no time flat. A couple more passes and he won't have anything left to make a fur ball! Tessie seemed to like it, too, but so far Chloe had just bitten it. That's fine; she'll settle down later and I'll get her, too. I just have to get her when she's in the mood to be brushed.

It does come in a variety of sizes. In fact, a friend told me that other day that they make them for horses. I got the small one and it's just right. I highly recommend it for anyone who has pets that shed. Really, you can brush that undercoat out, or vacuum it out of the carpet later.

Crack Mouse

I bought a package of catnip mice for the cats the other day. Of course they've been a little more twitchy than usual. What I didn't expect was to walk into the kitchen the other day to hear Vicky in the living room telling Ryan to get the crack mouse. I had to ask if I'd heard right! I never really thought of catnip as kitty crack, but I guess it works. If I can get decent pictures, I'll post them.

In other news, I took another 30 lbs. of stuff to Goodwill.

Over-sensitivie furr-ometer?

The rain from what's left of Heir Gustav is supposed to be here tonight or tomorrow. I keep checking the radar, but so far the rain is moving away from us. Seriously, it's curling off to the west like it can't get away from us fast enough. I know it's coming eventually, though, because Ryan is full of the devil this morning. So far he hasn't gone after Tess, Chloe, or me, but he has attacked an unsuspecting keyboard cord and a plastic soda cap. I fell asleep last night with his paws planted firmly in my belly and he was still there when I woke up. He's been grumbling a lot, and he doesn't particularly want to cuddle.

I have no idea what his life was like before our friends took him in and passed him on to us. I'm fairly certain he was born to a stray or abandoned young since he wasn't fully grown when we got him. He must have been outside because he's still afraid of storms and has made no attempt to sneak out the door, unlike the girls. Probably someone was feeding him; he wasn't malnourished or afraid of people. The first time we met he crawled into my lap. I've been his person ever since, but he's not picky about where he gets scritchies or who's lap he naps in.

I expect pretty soon I'll find him sleeping on the stairs. That's where he naps when the weather is changing; it's close enough to downstairs to hear food cans open and half-way to his hiding spot under the bed if he hears wind or thunder. He may be there when I get home from work, or he may be hiding somewhere. It's going to be a long week for him.

Trapped

I woke up early this morning, so I brought my book downstairs and poured a cup of coffee. When I fed the furries, I got two out of three. I figured Tess was sleeping with Alex; if she's downstairs and hears a can pop open, she's usually front and center. (No, it doesn't matter what's in the can; I opened a can of pineapple one day and she gave me a dirty look when I let her smell it.)

I settled in with my book and a while later I heard, "Meow?" Then I heard it again, and I thought, "Surely Tess didn't get out in the garage last night." Three times is the charm; I put the book down, chased Chloe out of the laundry room, and checked the garage. No Tess, but she heard my voice and yelled louder.

Tess loves to sleep in laundry. If there's a basket up high where Chloe and Ryan can't see her, she'll sleep in it indefinitely. I guess she thought the dryer was just a big basket. The door was open last night, closed this morning, so it must have been too dark or too late to see her in there when it got closed.

Goofy cat.

Resistance is futile

Ryan has been with us over two years now. Tess still doesn't like him much. She yells at him a lot, and she's usually justified, but sometimes she's just in a snit. Imagine my surprise when I went upstairs this afternoon to see this:



Maybe in another two years they'll actually be buddies.

Purr-fect way to spend a winter evening

Busy day--errands and stuff, and then we had a baby shower at The Day Job. By the time I got home and had dinner, the only thing on my agenda was to finish "Last Girl Dancing," which I did, with Ryan's help.

Various and sundry bits

Our snow was melted yesterday by heavy rain; near as I can tell we got almost an inch yesterday, but it looks like a lot more with the melted snow. The ground is smooshy and flash flooding is becoming a concern in some areas. We may have more snow in the next few days. Alex has decided he never wants to live in Illinois again, and he doesn't believe me when I tell him the whole state isn't like this, and that Champaign and Chicago have actual winters for months at a time.

The cats had their annual check-up yesterday. The girls were due for rabies, so I got them the 3-year shot, and they're both feeling poorly. Ryan isn't due until next year, so he just got the feline leukemia thing, but he's been alternating between 'I want my mommy' mode and hiding under the bed from the thunderstorms we had last night. Nobody wanted breakfast this morning, which is highly unusual. I'm almost wishing it wasn't Wednesday so I'd be home to keep an eye on them, but they'll probably just sleep all day. Tess curled up on the foot of our bed when we got home yesterday and as near as I can tell has only moved to use the litter box. Poor babies. Looks like I'll be choosing the 1-year vaccine from now on. If I have to take them every year for the feline leukemia, I might as well get rabies every year, too.

I've been reading through the rest of 'The Artist's Way' and it's been shaking loose all kinds of different blocks and preconceptions. Yesterday I was reading about how artists allow themselves to stay blocked by becoming martyrs. They really want to set up a dark room in the basement, but buy new living room furniture for their spouse instead. Or they pour all their time into caring for an elderly parent instead of carving out time to paint, and they can't figure out why they're angry and resentful all the time. I'd been thinking for a while about moving my work space out of my bedroom. I have it in there for a couple of reasons, mostly because I have the space. Our bedroom is huge--bigger than we've ever had, and frankly, I put my desk in there because I needed to fill the space! I don't know how to live in a bedroom that's not crammed with furniture, and while it's still not crammed, it's comfortably full now. The trouble is that if Eric is sleeping in or sick, I have to relocate to work. I decided that I should have an alternate workspace and started rearranging the guest room again. I've moved the bed and the two smaller bookcases. The next step is to move the bigger bookcase, and that was a good stopping point last night. My plan is to put my camp table by the window so I can work in there for a while, and if it works out all right I'll move my desk in there, too. That will give me more space to work and I won't have to move the laptop when I need to work on hard copies or do a test for school. We don't have guests for more than two or three weeks a year total, so this will be a more effective use of that space. It's not like I get a lot of work done when we have company, and laptops were made for moving.

So that's the excitement here for now. Oh, yeah, and I'm 6 1/2 miles down the West Coast Trail. I had a slow start but made good progress yesterday. Amazing what happens when you leave the TV off and move furniture.

Speaking of cats

Less than five minutes after I posted, I ran across this. Gemmak is the one who designed my blog template, back when she did that stuff, and I believe is one of the few people in the world who loves cats more than I do!

Why I like boys more

The only girl cat I've ever had that came close to doing this was Rylla, and she was 10 when we got her. She wasn't big on lap snuggling unless it was cold, but she did sleep with me. I don't know how many times I woke up, verging on spontaneous combustion, with Rylla curled against my stomach and Eric against my back! I don't know why she didn't sleep with him; he's a walking space heater.




Anyhoo, all three of my boy cats have been lap snugglers, and all of them felt free to jump in my lap if I was sitting, even for a minute. The only place it's not authorized is the dinner table, and so far Ryan is the only one who's tested that. He's about three now, and while he's technically not a kitten, he still has a lot of kitten in him. He's smart, though, and has picked up enough words to make life a lot of fun. Because he's a big boy (about 12 lbs--you can see he's a lapful in the pictures), we nicknamed him Bubba. I can stand in the middle of the house and say, "Bubba! 'Mere!" and if he's not hiding from scary weather, he'll usually come. The other night, Vicky and I were playing with him, and Alex, always the wisecracker, chimed in from the kitchen in a cheesy accent, "I am the Supreme Sultan Bubbamere!" Vicky and I cracked up, of course, and in less than a minute had dubbed the girls 'Empress Chloemere' and 'Princess Diva Tessimere.'

I had no idea, when I got hornswaggled into bringing Rylla home, that cats were so much fun! I can say, though, that it's hard to take a picture of a napping cat without disturbing him.

Baby pictures

I got a new keyboard for the laptop, so I spent some time cleaning up my desk and work space. I was organizing files on a thumb drive and ran across Charcoal's kitten pictures. Coal was my first kitten. We'd had two adult cats, one of whom died a few months before we adopted Coal. Since we still had our adult Siamese, Rylla, we blockaded the kitchen to keep them separated for a while. It didn't last long.

He was with us just a few hours when he acquired his first nickname: Commando Kitty. Needless to say, his tenure in the kitchen lasted less than a week, although he did sleep in there a little longer.

He was, what they call in the South, a mess. He was into everything, all the time, just like a toddler. Like a toddler, he would run rampant over all of us, and just when I thought I was going to lose it, he'd curl up in my lap and suck on my sleeve until he went to sleep. He was definitely my cat, although we were all crazy about him.

Coal went with us to Italy. When we lived in the hotel, he would occasionally go and sit by the door, which meant he wanted to go out. Of course, he couldn't just go outside, but I'd harness trained him almost as soon as we got him. The Italians got a good laugh every time I'd harness him and take him for a walk. We were in the hotel for a month before we moved into our house. Less than a month later, Coal was gone. He went outside one Monday morning, and we found him dead in the neighbors yard before dinner. We think he got a hold of some rat poison; he didn't have a mark on him.

That was just over four years ago. It doesn't seem possible. I still miss him so much. I was wondering just the other day what I'd done with his kitten pictures. My project this weekend is to burn them to a CD, and have some printed.

We miss you, Coal.

Pineapple

A friend sent me an article a while back about growing pineapples. Apparently you cut off the top and stick it in dirt. I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but since pineapples aren't expensive I decided to give it a shot. Eric put it on the floor for the cats to investigate while were were putting away groceries:


All three were surrounding it when I grabbed the camera. Ryan was sitting next to the rug and apparently sniffed too hard because I almost fell over on Tess. She was less than impressed and chased him off, which is why I only have Tess and Chloe in the picture. Not surprisingly, Tess stayed with the pineapple for several minutes after Chloe wandered off. Tess loves anything plant-related. If there are fresh flowers in the house, they're probably on the floor. She will climb as high as necessary to get to them, so we just put the vase where she can get to it for a day or two. I even caught her on the mantle once with her face buried in a vase full of fake flowers!

Sometimes they're worse than kids, I swear.

Cat zukes!

My garden is doing well, and the zucchini seem to be very happy if the size of the squash I've been getting is any indication. I've been experimented with breading and baking it rather than frying. Today for lunch I used Bisquik instead of bread crumbs, just for the heck of it. The result was all right but not stellar and I was about to toss it when Ryan came for a scritchy. He sniffed at my plate, which is normal. When it became something more than a perfunctory smell I put it on the floor for him.

He took a few tentative licks and looked up and me, and I told him to go ahead. He was only licking the breading off, but it was still funny to watch, especially when he picked up the edge of one piece and shook it. Of course, Chloe saw him eating and came to investigate. When he licked his chops and walked away, she came to have to turn. Tess, of course, turned her nose up. By that time it had tabby cooties.

Who knew tabbies like zucchini?