reading: Shakespeare’s Champion, by Charlaine Harris.
Finished last night: A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby. Good book, but I feel like it dragged on and ON at the end. Thanks to reader Martha for lending it to me!
Oh, and here’s a quote from the book that perfectly describes my point of view:
How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are all these gaps in speech where you just have to put a “fuck.”
A-fuckin’-men to that!
* * *
So, we (by “we”, I mean “Fred”, of course) got robynanderson.com and onefatbitchypoo.com transferred over to the new server. Fred set up WordPress for the Petstore Kitties page, and for OneFatBitchypoo, and I spent a good part of the weekend fiddling with the templates and pointing out problems (with the templates) that Fred fixed.
Fred is, you should be aware, The Shit. And The Man. And the King of Geeks.
Check out the new
petstore kitties page and the new
OneFatBitchypoo page (which hasn’t been updated in three months! Ugh.). Yeah, they’re the same template in different colors. Can you tell I found a template I really like?
My entries from Bitchypoo have been imported into WordPress, though let me tell you, there was much moaning and groaning and whining during the whole process, and it wasn’t coming from ME. See, back when I started my journal almost six years ago I named my entries one way, and then I changed how I named them, and it was basically a big fucking mess. Not to mention that the first three years’ worth of entries were done in Dreamweaver, in a table, so Fred had to write some program to strip out the tables.
Do you realize I’ve written something like 1700 entries in the past almost-six years? Good lord; the mind boggles, doesn’t it?
So, I need to tweak the template and go through all the old entries, fixing links and stuff. God only knows how long THAT’s going to take.
* * *
By the way, the current pet store kitties entry is
here.
* * *
I fully expected to see the price of gas shoot up over $4 a gallon over the weekend and I’m sure that in some parts of the country it did, but at the gas station where I always get my gas, it remained at a steady $2.73 for the cheap stuff.
If you’d told me a year ago I’d be thrilled to be paying $2.73 per gallon for gas, I would never have believed it.
I suppose it makes me REALLY FRICKIN’ OLD that I fondly remember gas dipping down to way under a buck a gallon the summer I was 19, huh? Liz and I would be out cruising in Lewiston, and I’d catch sight of the gas prices and gasp, and she’d get all excited, thinking I’d seen a good-looking guy. Then she’d get mad at me for being excited at the price of gas.
I suppose it IS a pretty dorky thing to get excited about when you’re 19.
I suspect we’ll never see it under $2 a gallon again.
* * *
I don’t believe I’ve ever mentioned this before, but the window upstairs in the kittens’ room is starting to rot around the bottom. It’s a big window with a narrower window on either side (I’m sure there’s a name for that kind of window, but I’ll be damned if I have any clue what it is), and if you push on the bottom of either of the narrow windows, you can feel how mushy and rotten they are. Obviously we need to have it fixed or replaced, and we’ve got a guy coming out sometime this week or next to take a look at it.
Anyway, there’s a small gap between the windows and the windowsill. This will be important in a moment.
Friday night I went upstairs to give the kittens a scoop of food and get one last snuggle from each of them before closing the door and leaving them there for the night. I flipped on the light and walked in and I was MIGHTY FUCKING HORRIFIED to find that there was a trail of ants from the window, around the room, to the kittens’ food bowl, which was absolutely covered in ants.
Ants just really fucking piss me off, you know?
So I had Fred put the kittens in our bathroom, and I got out the vacuum cleaner and threw the kittens’ food bowl in the spud’s sink and ran hot water over it. I vacuumed up every ant I could find, and then I had Fred bring the bottle of cinnamon upstairs with him, and I was just about to sprinkle cinnamon along the windowsill – they were very clearly coming through the gap between the window and windowsill – when I realized I hadn’t turned off the water in the spud’s bathroom, and went to do so.
Because I’m an idiot, when I’d turned the water on, I’d plugged the sink, and because it had been something like ten minutes, there was water EVERYWHERE. I got out towels and started mopping up the water, but then Fred pointed out that there was water in the other part of her bathroom. I went to get more towels, but he had a better idea: we have a steam cleaner for the rug, and one of the things the steam cleaner does? Sucks liquid up from the floor! Yay! So he did that, and I went back into the kittens’ room to check for ants. A bunch more had come in while I was dealing with the water, so I vacuumed them up and ran a line of cinnamon across the windowsill.
Ants really, really don’t like cinnamon. I think one of you told me that they inhale the powder and it kills them, or something along those lines. I can verify that when faced with a line of cinnamon, ants will turn around and return from whence they came.
So after all that, I gave the kittens a scoop of food, got a last cuddle from each of them, and went to bed.
Saturday morning when I got up around 9, I called down to Fred to close the cat door, and I opened the door to let the kittens out. And there was a motherfucking line of ants from the TOP of the window, across the wall, to the bowl of cat food.
GodDAMN do I HATE ants.
Fred came upstairs and put the kittens in our bathroom, and I got out the vacuum cleaner again and started sucking up the ants. Fred opened the window and popped out the screen and tried to figure out how the fuckers were getting into the house. He decided that they were crawling up the track that the window runs on, and he went and got his caulking gun and closed up the gap and I suggested that he spray outside the window with ant & roach spray, and we could sprinkle cinnamon along the windowsill, and we did so.
We haven’t seen an ant since. For good measure I went out and got some of those ant traps, the kind with bait inside that the ants carry back to their colony and eventually kills the whole damn colony, and we put them between the window and the screen.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned that I REALLY FUCKING HATE ANTS, have I?
Sunday night, we watched an episode of
Dirty Jobs, and one of the dirty jobs Mike Rowe did, was to work with exterminators from a company called
Vexcon. They dealt with rats and snakes for a while, and then they went to this trailer that was absolutely overrun with roaches.
German roaches, I think they were.
When they first went in, any cabinet doors they opened were just covered with swarms of roaches. It was SO nasty and totally gave me the ickies.
When the show was over, I turned to Fred and said “Between the ants we’ve been dealing with, and seeing that show, I’d like to drag everything we own out into the yard, burn it, and scrub every surface of the house down with bleach.”
He wouldn’t go for it, though. He sux the fun out of everything.
* * *
Look! Look what the wonderful Jeannine, guest designer at
Trinket Trunk, sent me!
Very “me”, don’t you think? I’ve been wearing it non-stop since I got it. Thanks, Jeannine!
Y’all go check out
Trinket Trunk and buy something, won’t you?
* * *
The Kitten Section.
Jodie has, in the past few days, gotten incredibly friendly and loving. She’s always been friendly, but we had a problem with her being so overwhelmed with love that she’d bite us, and I cannot abide a bitey kitten. Whenever she’d bite, I’d say “NO”, and put her down. She’d come back up on my desk and rub on me and purr, and as long as she didn’t bite, she could rub and purr to her heart’s content.
It took a little while, but she got the idea that biting wasn’t good, and she’s pretty much stopped it. But she is SO full of love she has to do SOMETHING, so she licks.
And licks and licks and licks.
You know, being licked by a kitten 10 times is cute. After 10,000 times, it really starts to kind of hurt. But she’s so damn full of love, I haven’t got the heart to stop her. At least not ’til she draws blood.
Remember when I put a cat bed on either side of my desk, with the idea that the kittens could sleep in one and Miz Poo could have her usual bed? Yeah. Well, that’s not quite working out the way I’d planned.
Squeaky to the left of me.
Squinky to the right.
Here I am, stuck in the middle with Poo.
Fred has started referring to Rambo and Jodie as Squeaky and Squinky. I don’t know why, but I gotta say – it fits them pretty well. I tend to just call them The Monkeys, because they run around like little howler monkeys when they’re not dead asleep on my desk.
When she’s had enough of the licking, Jodie will retreat to the cat bed, and sit there and knead really hard (look at the paw!) and shoot me looks o’ love.
This picture cracks me UP.
Snuggly kittens.
* * *
Previously
2004: No entry.
2003: No entry.
2002: I think that, much like dreams, the only person interested in hearing the myriad details of drug stories are the people involved.
2001: I don’t use the “c” word lightly, y’all.
2000: No entry.]]>