Month: September 2008

Holy crap! It’s been two years since we closed on this house. I can’t believe it’s been ours for that long!

I love it even more now than I did back then!

Liz’s flight landed a little early on Wednesday and so when she texted me to let me know she’d landed (but was still on the plane), I was still a few minutes away from the airport, and I sat at a stop sign a little too long to text her back that I’d be there in a few minutes, and the guy in the big-ass bubba truck behind me got so irate I thought he was going to go Nicholson on my ass. Swear to god, I maybe sat there ten seconds longer than I ordinarily would have. Fucker.

I picked her up, we got her luggage, and we went directly to Captain D’s. Liz is addicted to hushpuppies and they apparently don’t have them anywhere in the Northeast, so we went to get her her fix. The employees at Captain D’s (at least the one near the airport in Madison) are super-extra friendly. It’s kind of nice.

Wednesday night we watched an episode of The Office, Season 4 and the most recent episode of The Shield, then Fred went to bed and Liz and I watched an episode of Footballers’ Wives. Since I had to get up early Thursday morning to do my stint at the pet store, I gave Liz instructions on how to turn the TV off and went to bed.

Thursday morning I felt like every step I took in the house was extra loud, but Liz told me later she didn’t hear a thing. I went to the pet store, ran by Target, and got home a little after 9:00. We’d planned to go to Cracker Barrel for breakfast, but just as we were about to leave, I realized I hadn’t seen Kara at all in the half an hour or so since I’d gotten home, and thus began the search for the damn cat.

“What does she look like?” Liz asked.

“She’s a brown tabby,” I said.

Liz grinned. “I don’t know what a tabby is.”

“Kind of tiger stripe-y” I said.

“Is that her?” Liz asked.

“No, that’s Mister Boogers,” I said.

“Oh, there’s one. Is that her?”

“No, that’s Tommy.”

And so on. I went outside and called for her in that special cat-calling voice (oh, don’t look at me, you do it too, you freak) and walked all over the property, and came back inside the house and looked in every nook and cranny, and finally I decided we should just go ahead and go have breakfast, I’d leave the back door open, and if she showed back up, she’d be able to get inside.

So we went and had breakfast at Cracker Barrel, ran by the movie store, and then went to the new Nestle Tollhouse store that opened up at some point in the past few months. I’d been eyeballing it and Liz was willing to go in with me, so stop we did. We ended up getting a big frosted cookie, and it was gooooooood.

Thursday afternoon we watched the Sex and the City movie (just as good the second time around!) and hung out and we were sitting on the couch talking and I was trying to decide if I smelled cat pee when I glanced over at the fireplace at the other end of the front room. Just in time to see Kara.

DISAPPEARING UP THE CHIMNEY.

“Holy shit!” I said, getting up and running to the fireplace. “Holy shit! She went up the chimney! SHE WENT UP THE CHIMNEY!”

“Should I get Fred?” Liz asked.

“Um… yeah!” I said. Liz ran to the back of the house to call Fred, and I pulled the pillows out of the chimney.

The chimney that belongs to that fireplace had, at one point, a cap over the top of it to prevent birds from building nests inside the chimney and from crapping down the chimney into the front room, but the cap blew off at some point and calls to the chimney sweep company who’d done the work were fruitless, since the number had been disconnected. So to stop all that stuff from ending up in the front room, I stuffed a couple of pillows up there, and so far it’d been working pretty well.

When I grabbed the first pillow, a cloud of dust and soot came out. When I grabbed and pulled the second pillow, a bigger cloud of dust and soot came out, along with Kara, who hauled ass across the room and hid behind the couch.

So it appears that while I’d been frantically calling for Kara that morning, she’d been hanging out up inside the chimney (there’s a ledge inside the chimney right over the fireplace, but then it smooths out, so I don’t think she could have climbed up the chimney, at least not very far). I guess she wanted a little alone time.

We ended up keeping the pillows out of the chimney and just sealing off the hole with brown paper and duct tape, which I believe you’ll agree adds an elegant and classy finish to the front room.

Maybe duct tape should be my decorating statement piece.

For dinner, Liz and I went to the BBQ restaurant we always go to when she comes to visit, and she tried catfish. She said it wasn’t bad, but I don’t think it’s destined to become one of her favorites.

We watched another episode of The Office, Season 4 and then both hours of Survivor (don’t know how much I’m going to like this season, I found everyone very annoying) and then Fred went off to bed and Liz and I started watching Son of Sam, because we like to rent cheesy movies about serial killers (we’ve done John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer in the past). We made it about 7 minutes in before we decided “FUCK THIS” because it was so bad, and put The Footballers’ Wives in instead.

I intended to stay up late, but I was so tired from getting up at 5 am that I was honkshu* through most of the show. Liz was pretty tired, too, so it was lights out.

Friday morning around 7:30, I was sitting in front of my computer sending an email when there was a terrific crash and the whole house shook. I thought for sure that there’d been a car crash in front of the house, and I stood up to look out the side door.

Standing in the yard, right in front of the stoop, was a deer. It gave me a panicked look, shook its head, then wheeled and ran toward the chicken yard, jumped over the fence, ran across the chicken yard, paused in confusion, and jumped over the other fence before bounding across the back forty and disappearing into the woods.

Given that I am horrific in an emergency and given to freezing and gaping in horror, I’m rather proud of myself that – as I was gasping “Holy shit! HOLY SHIT!” – I grabbed the camera and ran out into the back yard to snap a few pictures. (I later second-guessed myself; I could have simple stepped out on the side stoop and shot pictures. Although now that I type that, I remember that it was my thought that I could open the back gate to allow the deer to get out, because I mistook his confused pause as an inability to jump the back fence.)

After I’d snapped a few pictures, I turned to look toward the side yard to see if there might be any more deer coming along, and I saw that the fence between the side gate and the house was bent quite a bit, and the gate was hanging open. What I think happened is that the deer tried to jump that fence, didn’t leap high enough, and thus bounced off the fence.

I was shaky for a good ten or fifteen minutes after that little experience, just because the sound had startled me so badly.

Liz got up eventually, and we hung out and talked for a few hours and watched TV, and then we headed out for Cracker Barrel for lunch. We ate pretty quickly and got out of there, headed for the movie theater in Huntsville to see The Women. Being that it was a school day, there were only two other people in the theater.

I thought the movie was kind of ehhh, mildly funny in some parts, very distracting every time Meg Ryan’s face was in close-up (I’m considering suing her plastic surgeon for emotional distress or possibly damage to a national institution), Debra Messing wasn’t the slightest bit funny, and why is it that in EVERY GODDAMN MOVIE that contains a pregnant woman, there is ALWAYS going to be a scene where her water breaks and she has to be rushed to the hospital? To me, the only real standout in that movie was Debi Mazar and that kid who played Meg Ryan’s daughter was a knockout.

Let me take a moment here to confess that despite the fact that I am assuredly not a Nicholas Sparks fan, I am finding myself compelled to go see Nights in Rodanthe. Anyone see it yet? Is it worth my time?

Liz wasn’t feeling well – kind of dizzy and nauseous – so we headed home and she went off to take a nap while I hung out in front of my computer. After a few hours she felt a bit better and we were both hungry, so we went off to Bojangles to get dinner. I’d never been there before, but I remembered Liz mentioning it favorably many times back when she lived in the South.

It wasn’t bad food, but I don’t know that I’ll necessarily go out of my way to go back there. The fried chicken was okay, but what I really liked was the dirty rice.

We spent the evening watching the season premiere of The Office (I think I squealed when you-know-what happened; I don’t want to ruin it for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet) and then an episode of The Office from last season (I got the first three DVDs from Netflix) and then Fred went to bed and Liz and I watched a couple of episodes of Footballers’ Wives. I was alert for the first one but honkshu** through most of the second, but Liz woke me up at a crucial plot point, so I don’t think I missed anything too important.

I was in bed by midnight and slept like a rock until 7 Saturday morning, when Fred came up to report that Mister Boogers had escaped the back yard but had returned. I got up a little while later and did a few morning chores, then Liz got up and we left mid-morning to go to the flea market. Liz was especially interested in the purses for sale at the flea market; the Gucci and Coach knockoffs, to be exact. There were actually two booths selling purses, and she ended up buying three of them. They were such a good price that I ended up buying a couple of purses myself, but because I liked the purses, not necessarily because of the brand name (one was a Coach knockoff; I don’t think the other one was any particular brand, just a leather purse I liked).

We left the flea market and went to Cracker Barrel for lunch, then browsed the store, returned a movie, and came home. We watched The Other Boleyn Girl (pretty good movie, and makes me want to read the book, though I understand the book is different from the movie, according to the special feature we watched about it). We hung out for a while longer, then ran into town to return the movie, stop by Wal-Mart, pick up dinner, and swing by the Dollar store.

Liz snoozed on the couch for a while, while Fred and I watched an episode of The Office, one of Arrested Development, and one of My Name is Earl. She woke up when Fred and I went upstairs, and after Fred went to bed and I came back downstairs, she made a few calls, checking with her brother and friends in Maine. All day Saturday the news channels were reporting that Hurricane Kyle was supposed to hit Maine mid-day Sunday, and Liz was worried that she’d fly to Detroit and then get stuck there if the hurricane hit Maine and the airport closed.

We finally decided that if they told her at the airport that the weather in Maine was iffy (as far as whether her flight would be able to land), she’d just reschedule for the next day and come back home with me.

We watched an episode of Footballers’ Wives, and I wanted to stay up for another episode, but I was very tired, so I apologized for pooping out on her (she said it was no problem, she’d just flip channels and text) and went to bed.

Sunday morning we got to the airport in plenty of time for her flight and it turned out that Kyle was now supposed to hit further north, so her flight shouldn’t have any problems. She checked her bag and paid for it (which shocked the hell out of me – I had no idea you have to pay to check a bag these days! $15 for the first, $25 for the second, $100 for the third. !!!!) and then we went up, checked out the gift shop, said our goodbyes, and she went through Security, waved to me, and was gone.

She got home with no problems at all, but in the meantime I went and got groceries, and when I got home Fred suggested that we go to the flea market in Tennessee “just to look around”, and I was up for that, so off we went.

And came home with nine new chickens, about the size of the ones currently in the brooder in the garage.

Yes, it’s an illness. I offer to you that, um, what’s the word I’m looking for, here? Oh, right. SHADDUP. We justify it to ourselves this way: several of the chicks we hatched from the eggs we bought in Amish country died so we needed to replace them, right?

Did I mention SHADDUP, YOU?

I love the way this one looks like a Buff Orpington wearing a Rhode Island Red coat.

Besides, the odds of averages dictate (according to Fred, who minored in Math and claims to know this sort of thing) of the 27 small chicks we now have, 13 or so should turn out to be roosters, and you can only have a limited number of roosters in your flock, thus designating the extra roosters for, as they say, freezer camp.

When we got home, I stripped the bed in the guest bedroom and tossed the sheets in the washer, then remade the bed with waterproof mattress covers so the cats can go in there, did some cleaning around the house, and just generally hung out.

Due to my stern warning to Liz to keep the door to the bedroom closed at all times and not to allow cats in there, none of her stuff got peed on.

I consider it a victory of sorts.

By the way, despite the fact that Liz is not a cat person at ALL, Mister Boogers fell COMPLETELY in love with her. Any time Liz was in a reclining position on the couch, Mister Boogers climbed up on her and purred so loud I could hear him from two rooms away. I’d say that now she’s gone he’s prostrate with grief, but he seems to be none the worse for wear.

*Stolen from Kinzie’s daughter.

** I giggle every time I type it.

Previously
2007: No entry.
2006: No need to send out the announcement that we’re freaks just yet, I suppose.
2005: What a fucking day, I tells ya.
2004: Which makes me think he’s out there talking shit about me, of course.
2003: He’s an awfully cute little kitty.
2002: No entry.
2001: I swear, my work is NEVER done.
2000: No entry.

Saturday evening, Fred and I had to leave the house to look for Italian dressing. We were having Pizza Pork Hoagies for dinner on Sunday and I’d cut up the pork chops to marinate in Italian dressing, but then realized I had no damn Italian dressing.

We stopped at the Dollar store first, and not only did they have Italian dressing, they had THREE kinds of Italian dressing (we opted for the ZESTY! kind), so we bought that and then drove to Closeville. When Fred started replacing our miniblinds with plantation blinds last year, he got the front room, the guest bedroom, and my room done, then stopped completely. I’ve been wanting to get the blinds in the computer room replaced and thus have been harassing him, especially because I want to replace the blinds on the doors with cordless blinds (you use a button on the bottom of the blinds to raise and lower them). The cords on the current blinds are all kinds of in the way during the day, because I like to raise them close to the very top so I can see what’s going on outside, and so there are cords hanging all over the place and it annoys me.

We got to Lowe’s to find out that, naturally, the cordless blinds they have in stock don’t come any longer than 64 inches, and we need 68 inches. And, naturally, the woman who orders blinds was on her lunch break. So we got the blinds for the three windows over my desk and told the blind-cutting people what width we needed them cut in, and then we wandered around the store for half an hour.

But wait, I got off my point. What I meant to say is that before we left the house, I turned to Fred and I said “Do I have any stains on the front of my shirt?”, and Fred looked me over carefully and told me that I did not, I was fine to appear in public.

So when we were in Lowe’s and still under the delusion that we’d be in and out pretty quickly, when they were beginning to cut blinds, Fred pointed down toward the end of the aisle and said “You should go see if they have any inexpensive mirrors that we can hang on the wall in the computer room.”

We want to hang a mirror on the wall near the door of the computer room so that if someone’s coming down the driveway we can just glance in the mirror and see them, rather than having to get up and look out the door. We’re lazy like that. Also, we don’t like surprises. Well, SOME surprises we like so go ahead and send that ten million dollars, but people popping up in front of the computer room door when we’re not expecting it, we don’t like that.

I went down the aisle to the mirrors, and as I usually do, I looked at myself, and then I marched back down the aisle and grabbed Fred’s upper arm very hard and hissed “Remember when I asked you if I had any stains on my shirt?”

“Yes,” he said, looking at the front of my shirt. “Why?”

“It might have been NICE if you’d MENTIONED that I was wearing a BLACK BRA under a LIGHT PINK t-shirt!”

He laughed. “I didn’t notice!”

Me = total class act.

Many evenings, we feed the pigs their snack and then take a walk around the back forty. Last night, as we approached the ditch that separates the back forty from the front part of our property, Newt came running over and then went all flat in the ditch. We talked to him and he rolled over and presented his belly for rubbing, and then Fred picked him up and carried him for a minute while petting him.

“I think he might have a tick,” Fred said with concern, his fingertip feeling around Newt’s armpit area “We need to check him when we get inside.” Newt gave him an ears-back I get no respect look, and then flailed to be let down so he could follow us into the back yard, as it was just about Snackin’! Time! and he needed to run across the back yard, climb the post, go over the fence to the side yard, and run up on the stoop so he’d be ready when I put his plate of Snackin’! Time! (which he shares with Maxi) on the stoop.

Naturally, we forgot all about the lump in Newt’s armpit, and went off to watch TV.

We were about halfway through Made of Honor (cute, but I honestly don’t remember a damn thing about the movie today, except for the exceptionally HOT Kevin McKidd, ::drool:: ) when Fred paused the movie.

“Shit!” he exclaimed. “We forgot to check Nick for toots!”

I am sad to report that I stared at him and said “Who the hell is Nick?”

We did get up and check Newt’s armpit, eventually. Newt did not appreciate his armpit being probed twice in one day, but he allowed it, and he was tick-free. Apparently the lump Fred had felt was a rash rather than a tick.

I unexpectedly had a whole chicken the other day and needed to figure out a way to make a good dinner from it, so I made chicken enchiladas and they were DIVINE. Also, simple.

I’ll definitely be making those again!

Fostering news! The shelter manager told me that Kaylee got herself adopted Friday evening to a nice couple with an older cat. This is good news because yay! My little raccoon got adopted!

This is bad news because boo! My little peanut is sitting in a cage by herself!

I am seriously keeping my fingers crossed that Zoe gets adopted during adoption hours Tuesday night because you KNOW she’s always been my favorite*, and I don’t know that I’ll be able to leave her there if she’s still there on Thursday.

*Okay, they’ve ALL been my favorite from time to time. I don’t like to think of her being alone and scared, though. My poor baby!

There cannot be enough orange in one’s life.

Previously
2007: No entry.
2006: If I were manic-depressive (wait. Do they call it bipolar now? I haven’t kept up on my psychiatrically politically correct terms lately), I think I would have been considered to be in a manic state yesterday.
2005: Never-ending.
2004: If you had any idea how much time I spent backspacing and retyping words when I write my entries, you’d burst into tears of sympathy.
2003: Who the fuck are Nikki and Paris Hilton, and why would I give a good goddamn what they’re wearing or doing or driving or fucking?
2002: No entry.
2001: You know you’re getting old when you have to ask a 12 year-old girl who’s on the TV.
2000: No entry.

There’s a limited pet food recall going on – if you use anything manufactured by Mars Petcare, give this a look.

Okay, the Crooked Acres house tour is up, beginning here.

If you’d like to see it in the future, over there in the right-hand sidebar, under the “about” heading, there’s a “Virtual House Tour” link. Click on it, and it’ll take you to a page that lists the house tour for this house and our two previous houses, as well as the “before and after” renovation tour.

It took me hours and hours of work to get this house tour up and running. But I did it ’cause I LURVE YOU.

If you have a question about anything you see, or you’d like to see a close-up picture of anything or there’s something I didn’t get a shot of that you want to see, feel free to ask.

Now that the hatching is over (we ended up with 17 chicks from an original 24 eggs. That’s pretty damn good!), Fred moved all the babies out to the brooder in the garage (along with the older chicks we got last week), and put the camera out there.

Check out the Brooder Cam.

I spent all day – ALL DAY – Saturday cleaning the house. For the first time in ages I did a deep cleaning of the foster kitty room. I was in there almost two hours, moving stuff around, vacuuming everywhere, vacuuming the cat tree, scrubbing the litter box and refilling it with clean litter. The whole time, Kara would sit and watch me, run off when I ran the vacuum, then come back to see what else I was doing.

I cleaned all three bathrooms, I dusted (dusting being the one chore I hate above every other chore in existence), I vacuumed, I went around with the canister vacuum and vacuumed the cat tree downstairs, the set of carpet-covered steps near the window in the computer room, vacuumed all the cat hair off the couch and couch cushions, then flipped and rearranged the cushions. I even moved the couches and vacuumed underneath them (there was surprisingly little dust, but I did find a petrified okra pod under one couch!).

It took me ’til dinner time to get the house cleaned, and I swear to god the house doesn’t look any different at ALL.

Since I worked so hard getting the house in order on Saturday, I spent Sunday doing plenty of slacking. I had thought that I might rake up all the leaves and bird seed on the ground outside the side door, but it was too windy for that, and then it started raining. So before it rained, I went around with the long-handled clippers and cut down the branches that have been hanging too close to the ground so that next time I mow the lawn (next year, at the rate things go around here) I won’t have to keep ducking under them.

And then I read for a long time, and then I took a nap, and then I read some more, and I finished up the afternoon by making a late lunch/ early dinner of crockpotted ham roast, green beans, and corn on the cob.

YUM.

Except for one trip to Closeville for dinner on Saturday, we didn’t leave the house, except for the trips Fred made to the corner gas station to fill up our cars. He paid $4.09 per gallon on Saturday morning, but when he was there filling up my car, there was a woman inside telling the owner that a few cities away, gas was going for almost $6 a gallon. Lordy.

So, Friday wasn’t much fun at all. I left the house around 10:30, to take Zoe and Kaylee to the pet store. Adoptions were starting at 1:00, so I wanted to get them in their cage and settled and have a few hours to adapt to their surroundings.

They’d only ever been in a carrier in a car once before, and that was when they went to be spayed, so they were less than thrilled about the trip in the car. They both burrowed under the lap quilt I’d put in there, and whenever I had to stop at a stop sign or red light, they’d pop out, meow at me, and burrow under again.

At the store, I let them out into the kitten room while I got their cage ready, and they both did that low-and-slinky walk that cats do when they’re nervous and scared. I gave them a lot of kisses and cuddles, but eventually I had to either put them in the cage and leave, or take them home with me and face a divorce.

(Fred outranks cats, if you were wondering. But just barely. I’m not sure I outrank the chickens, though.)

They did NOT want to be in that cage, and they weren’t even interested in sniffing around, they just sat there and stared at me like “Okay, ha ha, very funny, let us OUT.”

I went outside the cat room and watched them, and they sat there waiting for me to come back, which is when I got seriously teary-eyed, and had to go out to the car to compose myself because I had to go back IN and buy bags of cat food for our cats. The cat food our cats eat is not, of course, available at Wal-Mart or Target, and 9 times out of 10 when I do my Thursday morning stint I’m home before the store even opens.

So I went back in and got the bags of cat food and peeked down the aisle at the kittens, who had given up on waiting and were sniffing around their cage. Zoe even batted at a toy mouse. That made me feel marginally better.

‘Til I got home and Kara gave me the wide-eyed nervous look of “I can’t find the kittens anywhere, I think I lost them!” and then proceeded to spend the rest of the weekend running hopefully toward me every time I went upstairs only to look disappointed when she saw no kittens in my arms, and coming down to look around the downstairs often. I gave her a lot of extra attention and by the end of Sunday she seemed to be back to her usual self, so maybe she’s dealing with the loss. I hope she is, anyway.

Poor Kara.

Imagine my surprise Friday when I went across the back yard toward the chicken yard to check for eggs, and realized that among the greenery in the back yard where the cats (especially Tommy and Joe Bob) like to hang out, is a Rose of Sharon bush. I’d been planning to cut down that greenery over the winter, but I’m going to be leaving that Rose of Sharon bush alone. I think they have the prettiest flowers, and I especially like the flowers on this one.

On the Rose of Sharon bush, a bug. I think it’s an assassin bug and I’ve heard they have painful bites, so I left it alone.

Hopefully the cats will leave it alone, too.

All the expensive cat beds and cat condos in this house, and they’re fighting over this one damn box. There’s always a cat in the box, looking smugly at all the other cats like “Ha ha! I have claimed the box as mine, and from here on out, it shall be known as The Poo Cave!” (Or the Boog Cave or the Tom Cave, etc.)

Ingrates.

Previously
2007: No entry.
2006: He shifted position and eyed Fred with bright-eye malevolence.
2005: Maybe I just like to bitch, y’think?
2004: Waiting for Ivan.
2003: No more Benifer. How sad.
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: Speaking of N Sync – that Lance Bass is a cutie, but I get the distinct feeling that although the lights are on, no one’s home.