Guess who I got to see yesterday? The kittens formerly known as River and Inara (they’re Nate and Dora now).
I was afraid that they’d run from me, since they’ve been in their new home for two weeks now. They were a little cautious at first, but then they let me pet and hold them, and they ran around and played and just generally put on a show. They kill me with how cute they are – they’d run off and play, but if we walked into another room, they’d be “Wait! Where my Momma and that lady go?!” and come find us. Luckily, I didn’t squeeze them to death, but it was hard not to.
They are definitely very happy in their new home and with their new Momma and big sister (who pretends she cannot STAND them, but is clearly very entertained by them), it was so good to visit with them and their Momma!
I’ve been told the bitey during petting thing is a dominance issue. Not sure how to cure it though. The strays that have tried that with me usually end up just not getting petted, or else immediately put down and left alone, which did seem to cure one of them of it. Another reason I think it’s a dominance issue is that the same cats that will bite at me don’t bite at my husband. Any cat behavior experts out there?
When a cat gets overwhelmed by petting, I stop them by blowing in their face. The majority of them HATE that and will stop immediately. Sometimes they’ll try biting again, but if blow a puff of air in their face, they’ll usually give up and either calm down or (most often) run off. But in any case, here’s an explanation for it:
OooOOooo! I have the answer to the bitey cat question. I was reading a book by Dr. Bruce Fogle called “The Cat’s Mind” and he talks about bitey cat. He says that cats like to be petted because over the years they’ve been bred so that their development has been sort of stunted in a permanent kittenhood state. Petting is a lot like what momma cat does when she licks her kittens so they really dig that. Except cats as a breed aren’t really social contact creatures (like dogs are) so it kinda freaks them out to have prolonged contact like a marathon petting session. So while the pettins feel really good, they also wig the cat out because lots o’ touching triggers their fight or flight response. Thus, the cat will hang around until he/she MUST LEAVE ARRRGH! bite and take off.
I’m adding that book to my wish list, it sounds like an interesting one!
BTW… squirrels really like the suet cakes for birds… You need to get the butcher to save some of the hog fat so you could render into lard to make homemade suet cakes…
I wish I’d thought of that – though to be honest, that sounds like more work than I’m willing to do for some suet cakes. I have a feeder hanging on one of our trees, and I fill it with peanut butter suet balls, and those damn squirrels are always out there picking at the suet through the screen of the feeder. I’m pretty sure that the birds never actually get any of the suet balls! I do have a suet feeder on another tree (it’s bird-feeding central in our side yard!) that the squirrels don’t seem to care for, and there’s usually a woodpecker hanging upside-down eating the suet. I sure do hate the smell of suet, though – when I need to fill the suet holder, I put on gloves to handle the suet because if I don’t, my hands smell like old grease for the rest of the day and NOTHING gets that stink off!
When do we get the house tour promised so, so long ago? Huh??
It’s on my mental “to-do” list, I swear it! I need to just stop worrying about whether the house is clean and picked up and just take the damn pictures already!
My mom describes Asians as “Or-ree-EH-ul.”
My mom-in-law call vitamins “The Minrels.”
Instead of the word “themselves” my husband says, “theirselves.”
My daughter calls the killer whale, Shamu, “SHUH-moo”, and Spiderman, “SPIDER-mun.”
Once I was at a museum and my husband asked if we could do something (I can’t even remember what) and I responded, “Okey Dokey Pokey!” A woman spun around and strongly expressed her disgust that I said that, and to a grown man! It still makes me smile to think that I could make someone soooo affronted!
I am weirdly fascinated by “Or-ree-EH-ul.” I feel like I have a stuffed-up nose when I say it out loud. Heh.
And for god’s sake, of all the things to snarl at someone about! You’ve gotta assume that that woman was either having a bad day, or is one of those people who goes around waiting to be offended.
I have a friend that says “basketti” for spaghetti and “vodika” for vodka. Too funny.
Danielle (the spud) and Brian always said “pasketti” when they were little and I do believe Debbie and I picked it up from them, at least for a little while.
I’ve watched “America Unchained”, it was on tv here in the UK a few months ago and it’s pretty interesting. I enjoyed it a lot but then I’m a sucker for documentaries anyway. The guy who did it is a British comedian and he’s got a pretty dry sense of humour imop. Worth watching anyway.
I went to add it to my Netflix queue, and it’s not on Netflix! What’s that about? I thought EVERYTHING was on Netflix!
Will the new pigs use the old wallow, since it’s full of the other pigs, uhh, stuff?
Yeah, as gross as it is, the new pigs are using the wallow. Fred scooped as much of the nasty green stuff off the top of the water as he could (I told him I think we need a pool skimmer to remove the green nastiness effectively!), but the new pigs don’t seem bothered by it at ALL. They don’t actually, uh, wallow in the wallow, they seem to just kind of get in long enough to get wet, then get back out again.
I never heard that phrase (“said my piece and counted to three”) until I saw O Brother Where Art Thou? a few years back. My husband and I say it now.
and
“I’ve said my piece and counted to three.” Too funny. O’Brother is one of my all-time favorite movies. That line, and when Holly Hunter responds to George Clooney’s question, “Why are you telling our gals I was hit by a train?” and she says, “Lots of respectable people have been hit by trains.” Cracks me up.
O Brother is probably one of our favorite movies. There are so many lines in that movie that just crack me up. I was never a George Clooney fan – I mean, I didn’t hate him or anything, I was just mostly “Eh. George Clooney. Whatever.” – but he was just so perfect in the movie that I started to really like him. Every line in the movie is just a masterpiece.
I always half-hope when I say “I’ve said my piece and counted to three” (which I apparently messed up – it’s “I’ve spoken my piece and counted to three in the movie, according to IMDB) that Fred will counter with “She counted to three. Goddamnit! She counted to three. Sonofabitch!”, but he hasn’t. YET.
Did we change from “who’s ready for the snackin’?!” to Yummin’ time?!
“Who ready for the snackin’?!” is for the permanent residents. “Who wants de yummins?!” is for the fosters. The fosters get their snack at a different time than the residents, so I don’t want to get the residents all riled up by yelling “Who ready for the snackin’!” when they won’t get anything.
I might need a life.
So when you say the kittehs are not giving you the love, may I ask if it’s… um… they’re just not that into you, or is it that they aren’t that sort of kitteh?
It’s more that they just don’t like the snuggling and the being-kissed. They’ll give love, it’s just in their own way, usually consisting of slumping against me and allowing me to pet them, or (in Zoe’s case), climbing up under my shirt when I’m laying on the bed with them and smacking at my stomach. There’s love to be had, but when it involves snuggling or kissing, they’d rather get that kind of love from Kara. Brats.
My cats, on the other hand, will start purring if you kiss them on top of their head – especially Miz Poo, Mister Boogers, Tommy, and Sugarbutt. Joe Bob, too. And Spanky. Really, all of them except Stinkerbelle. I’ve never tried kissing Stinkerbelle on top of her head, because I strongly suspect that she’d respond by clawing my face off and then swishing off down the hallway to rub against Her Boyfriend Tommy.
I cannot imagine the pecking order fights in your house. It’s bad enough in mine and I only have 3 cats. Of course, two believe they are top cat and hence the fighting. They tend to conduct their power wars during the middle of the night. I just love being awakened by a cat screaming and the thunder of running cats. I’ve actually had to put one cat in “time out” several times because he just don’t know when to stop. Five minutes in the bathroom by himself does wonders.
These days, the pecking order fights almost always include Joe Bob or Stinkerbelle, and both those cats have got some big, bad lung power. If you hear a hellcat scream from the other end of the house, you can rest assured that it’s one of those two. If we can identify the offending party (very often Mister Boogers, SHOCK) we’ll usually put him out in the back yard until he calms down a little.
My comment is really for yesterday, but it being a holiday and all I treated it like a weekend day and didn’t read your blog. When I don’t go to work my routine’s all messed up. Anyway, the pic of new little pig standing in the trough should win some kind of prize. It’s wonderful and should be framed! Really!
Yeah, I have to agree that’s a pretty good picture. It’s like she’s posing in a beauty pageant, you know how they walk to the microphone, say their name and where they’re from, then walk over, pose, and then walk back to their “spot”? She’s totally posing before she walks back to her “spot”!
How many chickens are there all together now? I seem to have lost track, but then there were some sitting on eggs. Wow! Quite the chicken farmers y’all are turning out to be.
I don’t know the exact number and neither does Fred, but it’s in the area of 50. We also have 24 eggs in the incubator (the eggs we bought in Tennessee from an Amish man), due to hatch in a couple of weeks, and Fred’s candled them the other day and thinks we’ll get between 16 and 18 chicks from that batch.
I think we might be chicken hoarders.
That spider was S.C.A.R.Y!!!!!!!!!!!!! How big was it??????? Those eyes made me scream on the inside. YUCK.
I might be remembering wrong (that thing creeped me OUT), but I think, legs and all, it was about the size of my hand.
You know, I remember that my Mom used to wash our shower curtain liners every so often, but the last time I tried to do that, the liner came out full of holes from the machine, and I had to go buy a new one. Do you have to use a gentle cycle?
Yeah, you definitely need to wash it on the gentle cycle!
I wash my shower liners, too, but I hang them right back up in the shower from whence they came. Hanging them up outside to dry sounds like too much work!
I hate dripping water on the hardwood floors, which is the only reason I hang them up on the clothesline before I take them through the house to hang them back up in the bathroom.
What’s with cats and their stainless steel brushes? My cats play with ours too. They insist on trying to bite it – bristles and all. I have to hide the brush in the tissue box on the end table so they don’t see it. I keep it on the end table so when they are sitting with me and they are all sheddy, I brush them. I swear I’m going to get the Furminator – but since we are ending the shedding season, I might put it on my wish list.
There’s got to be something about the pointy little ends of the cat brush that makes cats want to bite them, because every cat that I try to brush with that brush ends up grabbing and biting it.
I love the Furminator. LOVE IT. I just got it out the drawer the other day for the first time in ages, and went out to the back yard and brushed Tommy and Mister Boogers with it. There was SO much fur flying around the back yard when I was done, you could have easily made another cat with it! The Furminator is just AWESOME. I highly recommend it!
Have you seen the Am. Funniest Home Video of the college boys and the praying mantis. One of the boys pretends he’s boxing it, the praying mantis takes his foolishness for about 10 seconds and then jumps at him. The shrieking and running that ensues is priceless. I’m sure the young man needed a change of underwear once the camera was off. Big bad frat boy 0 praying mantis 1.
That sounds very familiar – I’m sure we’ve seen it.
Recently there was an America’s Funniest Home Video of a couple of women and a very small child, and they saw a frog (or a toad) on the sidewalk, so they stopped to look at it, and then the toad jumped at the small child, all ::SPROIIIIIING!!!:: and landed on the child’s leg, and they all screamed and the woman holding the child’s hand picked him up by one hand, the abject TERROR on that child’s face made us laugh until we wheezed. We actually saved it on the DVR so we can watch it whenever we want. We also saved the episode of AFV that had a woman and a bird – a cockatoo, maybe? A big bird, anyway – and she’s patting the bed and saying “Jump, Kramer, jump! Jump, Kramer, jump!”, and the cockatoo considers for a moment and then starts jumping and it makes us laugh our asses off.
When you know you want “pork” for dinner, do you let it thaw just that day? And do you thaw it in the frig or on the counter? My mom always used to thaw meat on the counter and it makes me insane. I’m OCD about my meat and how long it’s been “sitting out.” I’m always curious as to how other people take care of this instead of going to buy meat every time you want it, which is what I do. Which is NOT cost effective OR time effective, but I’m a freak.
It depends on when I know we’re going to want to have pork (or beef, or whatever). If I know the night before that we’re having, say, pork chops for dinner the next day, I take the pack out of the freezer, put it on a plate and leave it in the fridge to defrost. If I don’t know until that morning that we’re having pork chops for dinner, I leave the pack on the counter (on a plate) to thaw. If I forget to take the pork chops out of the freezer until mid-day, I’ll put the whole pack in cold water in the sink, and it usually only takes a few hours to thaw.
I know you’re not supposed to thaw meat at room temperature, but I’ve been doing it for 20 years and my mother always did it that way, and we’re still here to tell the tale, so I imagine I’ll keep on doing it when I need to!
I noticed that last year’s entry talked about ants in the kitchen. I have little, black ants in my kitchen that I CANNOT get rid of. Did you ever find a solution? I’d love to hear it!
The only thing that worked for me was cleaning the damn counters off (with my favorite cleaning spray) and never ever leaving any kind of food out. Oddly enough, we didn’t get any ants this year, despite the fact that we keep a bucket on the counter in which we toss scraps and egg shells and things of that sort for the pigs, and I don’t think I’ve seen a single ant inside the house this year.
Was suggie stretching or does he always sleep with his toes spread out?
He was stretching. I actually grabbed the camera because he was laying with his head hanging over the edge of the bookcase, but he heard me move and lifted his head up, looked at me, then put his head back down, stretched his toes, and went back to sleep.
I had to go squeeze him and kiss him on top of his head after I looked at that picture. I sure do love my Suggie.
Yoga kitteh is surprised that you’d interrupt her during such a crucial exercise. Sideward Facing KittenDog with a Twist is a difficult position and requires concentration!
What I love about this picture is how evil Tommy looks in the background and how completely unaware Mister Boogers looks. He has NO IDEA the evil that lurks behind him!
Previously
2007: I wanted to take a BATH in the stuff, I wanted to stick it in my purse and take it home, I wanted to marry it.
2006: Mister Boogers seemed to disapprove of the land, and at one point the seller of the land started having a discussion with Mister Boogers, only instead of “Mister Boogers”, he referred to him as “Curtis.”
2005: No entry.
2004: No entry.
2003: It’s a good day, indeed.
2002: FUCKING telemarketers.
2001: I turned to Fred and said “He looks all dilemmanated, doesn’t he?”
2000: Trip to Tennessee.