HG has gone to the pet store – room opened up, so I took him with me yesterday when I went to scoop and feed. He was quiet – worried – on the trip there, and a little hesitant when I let him out of the carrier in the cat room. He roamed the cat room while I did my thing, sniffing all around, making friends with the other cats. He was the last one I put in his cage when I was done cleaning – and I waited until I absolutely had to leave to make my 9:00 appointment – and he immediately climbed into the litter box and meowed sadly at me when I walked by the window.
Poor HG. He’s under strict instructions to get adopted by next Thursday. Hopefully he will!
(The sidebar will be updated by the third of When I Get the Fuck Around to it.)
If you get a chance to add this to tomorrow’s part 2: When you freeze the onions (and bell peppers too, since you told me I could), how do you store them so that you can get only as much onion as you need out later? I thought I was clever the first time I froze onions and chopped up like four huge onions and put it in a tupperware-knockoff figuring I’d just open it up, scoop out how much chopped onion I needed, and close it back up. Brainiac that I am, I didn’t think about the fact that it’d all be frozen into a solid onion brick. So, what do you do, a few teaspoons between sheets of waxed paper? Individual baggies? There’s got to be something easier and more sensible…
I put my chopped onions in sandwich bags and stick them in the door of the freezer. If I just need a few Tablespoons, I roll the bag back and forth between my hands so that the lump of frozen-together onions break up, then measure out what I need. Voila!
How to figure out the girl kitties from the boys:
On their back side:
Boys will look like this = o
Girls will look like this = +
Just sayin’!
Yeah, we’ve actually sexed kittens pretty often. I find this page pretty helpful, but once you’ve done it a few times and know what you’re looking for, it’s not too hard.
Why is your ire so damned funny, Robyn? (Does Fred think so, too?)
Because it’s ALWAYS funny when someone’s pissed off and it isn’t directed at you!
Fred usually finds it funny when I get pissed off as long as it’s not at him (though sometimes if I’m over-the-top swearing and stomping-around annoyed, he finds it funny even if it’s directed at him) and as long as it’s not something he’ll have to fix (ie, the GODDAMN COMPUTER).
How very organized of your cats to place themselves so symmetrically on your bed! A tad OCD, isn’t it? And oh my GOD those kittens are to die for! I can just hear the tiny mewing. I so envy you!! Except all that litter box cleaning, eck. No thanks!
I think it’s funny that they were located equidistant from each other. Apparently they all have the same personal space requirements!
The litter box cleaning isn’t so bad yet, since Kara’s taking care of all the kittens and their elimination needs. Once they start using the litter box (another 2 to 3 weeks, I believe – hard to believe those little squirmy things that sometimes can’t quite locate a nipple that’s right in front of them will be using litter boxes so soon, isn’t it?) the scooping will be a pain, but it’s worth it!
I’ve been meaning to ask you this and keep forgetting! I had my husband rototill half of our freaking yard last week, so our veggie garden is going to be HUGE this year. I’ve never tried canning and I was wondering if there was a book or anything you’d recommend for someone who has no idea what she’s doing. Did you learn any hot tips last year?
The Ball Blue Book of Preserving. Absolutely, without a doubt, the most useful book when it comes to canning. When I got my pressure canner, it came with a book and I read the book and was instantly in a panic, saying “This doesn’t make SENSE, I don’t UNDERSTAND, I’m never going to be able to figure this OUT!” The Ball Blue Book takes you by the hand and leads you step-by-step and makes it so very, very simple. Two thumbs up – and actually, once you understand how to can, the world is open to you, because you can go online and get tons of cool recipes online! It might seem complicated at first, but it’s really not. Just take a deep breath and dive in!
So cute. Those pink toes – I just want to nibble on them!
I can report that those pink toes taste like cotton candy. In case you were wondering. Not that I would lick them myself or anything!
Does the sideswipe blade get the stuff down in the little divot at the bottom of the bowl too? That’s the stuff that drives me nuts. I have to dump my cookie dough out and remix the bottom part to make sure the good stuff is all evenly distributed. I might have some sort of cookie-related OCD.
Yeah, that was my pet peeve, the stuff left behind in the bottom of the bowl. I love my Kitchenaid, but I’m thinking for a damn mixer that expensive, there shouldn’t be shit left in the divot at the bottom! I’ve only tried the Sideswipe once, but I can report that when I dumped the cake batter out of the bowl, there was NO unmixed stuff at the bottom of the bowl. Other Sideswipe owners, your experience?
You should totally watch Firefly… the character of Jayne is a boy (BTW), but River is a great name too!
I actually thought of naming the gray tabby Jayne, since Jayne is a boy, but I thought that might get too confusing for potential adopters!
How much do the kittehs weigh? I need to know so I can send the correct FedEx package and airbill so the kittehs can be sent to me. OkThxBai.
As of last night – one week old – they all weigh between 8 1/2 and 9 1/2 ounces. Kaylee’s the littlest and Inara is the biggest. I know you’re kidding about the FedEx, though. Only UPS properly ships kittehs!
Also, have you ever had experience with a cat with a broken elbow? I have a cat, Gracie, who broke her elbow back in January. I don’t know how she did it – I was handing out treats one morning, and she didn’t come to get hers, so I went to find her and she was laying in her favorite sleeping place, with a broken leg. She spent the last three months in a cast, and the last x-ray didn’t show much if any improvement over the previous one, so they removed the cast yesterday. I am VERY disillusioned with my vet’s office, let me tell you, first because of a billing issue last week, and then because yesterday when she had her cast off, they just took her in the back, removed it and brought her back out to me. I never saw a vet, and never got any instructions on how to care for her now.
I got her home, and her leg is weak and stiff, obviously, from being in a cast for long, and it was very much in need of a grooming. I pulled out as much of the dead hair that I could, so she wouldn’t ingest it, and she finished cleaning it up. The fur is a little thin now, but it looks much better. Anyway, though, she is using the leg, with a very obvious limp. I don’t trust her to jump down off anything onto it, so I’m watching her like a hawk to keep that from happening. But it troubles me a lot, because it doesn’t seem right to me. She even sometimes doesn’t seem to realize that her foot has turned under. She can straighten it back out, just sometimes doesn’t seem to realize she should.
I wondered if you or any of your readers have had experience with this. Since I got no instruction from my vet – am I doing the right thing by being so protective? (If she breaks the elbow again,she’ll lose her leg.) My plan right now is to have her loose when I’m home to watch her, and to encourage her to walk on it as much as possible, to try to strengthen it. (She has been living in a crate while the cast was on, and is in there now when I’m at work and at night when I’m sleeping, just so I know she won’t break it while I’m there to watch her.) Is there anything else I should be doing for her? Am I just being overprotective? (Also, there are pictures on my blog, if you want to see her when she just came home yesterday.)
I have never had any experience with a cat with a broken elbow, but I think you’re probably doing the right thing, being protective and making sure she doesn’t jump down and reinjure herself.
Readers, words of wisdom?
From Tina, in yesterday’s comments:
I have a dog that had ACL surgery, not a cat or dog with a broken elbow, so this may be assvice. With the dog, we were to gently extend the leg until he pulled back – like 10 times a couple of times a day. Then the opposite, gently push the leg in towards his body as far as he would let us. Also 10 times a couple of times a day. This gets the muscles working and the blood flowing.
I would baby the cat for a little bit – give her a “boost” onto the bed and furniture. I would slowly let her do more otherwise she won’t heal. If you are really concerned, get her some pet stairs so that she doesn’t have to jump up and down onto the furniture or bed. My arthritic cat has stairs and he uses them in both directions.
Hey, why don’t you call them back tonight at 3 in the morning so they can see how it feels?
A week after my hubby got back from afghanistan, my brother called my house at 3 am… i woke up freakin’ and shaking because I forgot hubby was back and thought they were calling me to tell me he was injured or died… 3 am phone calls only mean one thing to me and that is death! It took at least an hour for me to calm down enough to even TRY to get back to sleep. I haven’t spoke to my brother since then either…
I tell you what, I was tempted – except that I would have had to get up at 3 am to call them, and I need my beauty sleep! The very next night after they called at 3 am and woke me up, I was sound asleep and the phone rang and woke me up and my immediate thought was “Are these people FUCKING KIDDING ME?” But it was actually only 10:45, and it was my friend Liz, so all was good.
Also, after that 3 am call, I actually went back to sleep and dreamed that it had been a call from someone telling me that Fred had died, and then the Real Housewives of NYC came over, Luann was lecturing me on the proper way to write thank you cards, and Ramona was trying to get me to go out dancing with her. Good lord.
So – does Kara keep that towel clean or do you have multiple purple towels that you keep replacing daily?
Kara keeps that towel perfectly clean, except for all the cat hair that’s starting to build up. I’ve thought of putting a clean towel down, but right now I think it’s probably best to leave that towel in place, because I’m sure it smells like Kara to the kittens, and smells like home to them. Once their eyes are open and they can see what’s going on, I’ll replace the towel on a somewhat regular basis.
Since you DID answer the phone at 3am.. have you ever thought of running for president? LOL
I tell you what, you do NOT want President Bitchypoo answering the phone at 3 am. “HELLO? Do you know what TIME it is? Oh REALLY. Well, did anyone DIE, someone better have DIED for you to call me at 3 am! They…. HOW many? GodDAMN it. Nuke those fuckers and don’t call me back ’til after 8 am, you hear me?!”
Are those your NEW purple towels?!
HELLZ no. That purple towel under Kara and the kittens is an old one I’ve had kicking around for a long time. We have quite a collection of old towels, there’s no reason to sacrifice my nice new ones!
I have read a lot of birth stories on the Internet and this is the only one that made me teary.
I actually got teary several times during the process, first because it was so hard to see Kara in pain (always easier to BE in pain than watch someone in pain, I always say!), then because – well – MIRACLE OF LIFE!, and then because I was thinking about our cats and imagining what they must have looked like as newborns. I bet Mister Boogers was one seriously cute (yet hetful) little thing.
By the way, started the morning today at 5:30 with an earthquake and then went in for a job interview during which we had an aftershock. Not sure if that is a good sign or bad.
We actually felt that earthquake! Well, the aftershock, I guess. We were both awake, me in my room and Fred in his. I felt it, but thought it was a cat tromping across my bed. Fred felt it and knew it was no cat, ’cause the cats aren’t allowed in his room at night, so when he got up he checked the news and found that, indeed, it had been an earthquake.
What is Firefly? I’ve never heard of it.
There’s a sudden lack of oxygen as the entire internet just gasped in horror. Firefly is a cult hit TV show (that is no longer on) that everyone appears to LOVE, and you can read more about it here. And when I’m done with October Road (shut UP), Firefly’s going to the top of my Netflix queue, promise!
The look on Kara’s face – with the tongue stuck out – is cracking me UP. “No milk for YOU!”
Pretty Kara.
Kara was out wandering around the room yesterday afternoon, so I gave her a catnip bag to see what she’d do. What she did was roll around on it and get high and then get aggressive with me (grabbing my arm and nipping it), so I took the catnip bag away from her ’cause I didn’t want her eating no kittens!
She’s a mean drunk.
(pic) Miss Momma (Maxi), snoozing on my bed. She haz a nipple. Let her show you it.
Previously
2007: Alternately, I came up with “expressional”.
2006: A belly rub is a religious experience for Our Tommy.
2005: Friday sucked ass for the following reasons
2004: No entry.
2003: I am apparently married to a 100 year-old man.
2002: “Your air gap floopy.”
2001: And thought about putting my motherfucking fist through my motherfucking monitor because my motherfucking internet access has been going down every 9.8 seconds.
2000: “There’s no Easter bunny, there’s no tooth fairy, and Bruce Willis is DEAD, he’s DEAD, DEAD!”