Until at least the end of the year – and possibly permanently – I won’t be posting entries here at Bitchypoo on Wednesdays. I will still be posting entries at Love & Hisses, complete with far too many cat pictures, so you can always click over there to get your daily dose of cute.
No, this is NOT the beginning of the end. I just feel like I’m spending too much time online and am never caught up, and want to cut down a little.
Don’t be sad.
Also, Friday Comment-Answering-Extravaganzas will be going away. I’ll respond to comments in the comments (what a concept) unless, I suppose, you’re dying for opinions from others. Let’s do it this way – if you want me to put your comment up on Friday so other readers can give an opinion, just let me know in the comment. Otherwise, I’ll respond in the comments. Fridays will revert to regular ol’ entries.
Make sense?
(And I will post this on Tuesdays for the next few weeks because somehow not everyone reads and memorizes every word I post, some people just (GASP!) skim and forget everything as soon as they read it. Hmph.)
I made apple crisp over the weekend, and boy was it GOOD. And then I had leftover apple crisp for lunch yesterday – just apple crisp, nothing else -and OY THE GAS.
One day I’m going to learn that I can’t do that any more, eat nothing but a bowl of apple crisp and a scoop of ice cream for lunch and not have to suffer the consequences. If I’d had something with some protein in it, and THEN had the apple crisp, I would have been fine. You’d think after almost four years, I’d remember. And yet, I do not.
Hmph.
I also made a double batch of Caramel-Apple Jam yesterday, and tomorrow I’m going to make another double batch, and then on Friday I’ll make ANOTHER double batch, and then maybe that freakin’ huge-ass bag of Granny Smiths in the laundry room will be gone. (Might take one more double batch, though.) When the apples are gone, I’m done with the Caramel-Apple Jam making ’til next year. It’s awfully good, that jam, but kind of a pain in the ass to make, with the peeling and chopping.
I got the recycling taken to the recycling center, spent plenty of time with the Wonkas, vacuumed. Did laundry.
It was sunny Sunday AND yesterday, and boy was it nice to see the sun after so many gray, overcast days. The chickens and dogs and cats seemed to appreciate the sunshine, too.
I hear our sunny days are limited, though. SIGH.
I decided on Saturday, after I was about halfway through the latest Greg Iles book, that I am pretty much Iles’d out. I’ve liked his books in the past, but the last couple, I just haven’t been feeling the love. I actually felt guilty for refusing to finish the book.
But fuck that shit – feeling GUILTY for not finishing a book that isn’t holding my interest? How idiotic is THAT? Life is too goddamn short for that shit. If a book can’t hold my interest in the first fifty pages, it doesn’t deserve to be read, how about THAT? It’s not like Greg Iles won’t get the money I spent on the book, I am not TAKING money out of his POCKET, what the fuck is there to feel guilty about, I ask you?
So I didn’t finish the damn book. Instead, I picked up the next book in line, Lopsided: How Having Breast Cancer Can Be Really Distracting by Meredith Norton.
You wouldn’t think a book about a woman who was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer and had to go through chemotherapy and a mastectomy would be laugh-out-loud funny, would you? Seriously, toward the end of the book I was laying on the couch reading, and there was this one section that made me laugh so hard I cried. I laughed out loud at least six or seven times in the course of reading this book, and I made Fred read four different sections that made me laugh.
I never do that.
I highly recommend Meredith Norton’s book.
Greg Iles’s book? Not so much.
The Wonkas are now bottle-free and have been formula-free since I moved them to the kitten room on Saturday.
“I sure am glad they’re off the bottle,” I said to Fred. “I don’t know that I really want to have bottle babies again. They make me worry too much.”
Cue the distant laughter of GOD.
Yesterday afternoon, the driveway alarm went off. Fred looked out the window and told me that it was our neighbor from two doors down and her oldest daughter. She rang the doorbell, and Fred went off to see what was what.
A minute later, he came back in the front door and called me.
“What?” I said, walking toward the front door.
“I need you out here,” he said.
“Why?” I said.
“Just! Come! Here!” he hissed.
So I did. And standing on the front porch was our neighbor and her oldest daughter.
Her daughter was holding a box. Of kittens. Tiny kittens.
I considered bellowing “OH HELL NO!” and going back inside the house, but I am far too polite for that.
It turns out that a mother cat had just been hit by a car and killed, leaving behind five – YES I SAID FIVE – babies. They were alert and had their eyes open, but were obviously still small enough to need to be bottle fed. Our neighbor couldn’t keep them because she has a job and can’t feed them every few hours, and she knows we’re crazy cat people so she threw herself on our mercy.
“Well,” I said. “The guest bedroom is free!”
We brought them inside, and I made bottles while Fred weighed them. The smallest weighed 9 ounces and the largest 11, which I decided means that they’re about three weeks old.
I stimulated them to pee (and they all peed well, which meant, I suppose, that they’d eaten well the last time they ate), and then we fed them. They weren’t terribly interested in eating, but we got some formula into all of them before we put them in the cage with a heating pad and stuffed animal.
They are adorable.
So, four kittens gone to the adoption center, and five added to the household. Apparently it’s very important to God that we have bottle babies in the house. SIGH.
(We haven’t even thought of names for them yet – but I’m sure we will in the next few days!)
There are four tabby-points (I think that’s what they are) (three girls, one boy) and one black and white (a boy).
The Wonkas are doing just fine. They like their new home, and they like that sun shines through the windows of their home, and they especially like that I come and visit with them lots (which they also liked in their OLD home, the guest bedroom downstairs).
::CHOMP::
“I KNEW there was something fishy about that “Balloon Boy” kid and his family.”
“Hey! GUYS! She’s handing out pettins. You better hurry, you don’t wanna miss out!”
Gus is totally the Cosmo Kramer of the kitten world.
And of course Sookie and Terry have made themselves RIGHT at home.
Terry gives Elwood a bath. Hey, SOMEONE’s gotta.
Sookie, playing in the guest bedroom.
Speaking of the True Bloods, the Saturday morning volunteer, who cleans cages at the adoption center at PetSmart told me this funny story about Hoyt and Bill:
I was cleaning their cage, and Sander (Mr. Alpha Male) was also out. Sander always attacks all the other kittens, (just playing I am sure to him). Well Hoyt and Bill were having none of that – they both ran after Sander and he went to hide in the litterbox that I had taken out of their cage while I was cleaning it. One sat on top, one sat in front of the box and Sander was so glad when I put him back in his cage!
I guess my boys are doing just fine.
The dryer is the happenin’ place to be, these days. I don’t know if it’s because it’s near a window overlooking the back yard or because it’s near the back door (it’s not because it’s warm, because when I actually start the dryer, whoever’s laying there usually leaves).
Previously
2008: King Suggie snoozes in his pile o’ cat beds.
2007: No entry.
2006: Biscuits for everyone!
2005: Your fascinating tidbit for the day.
2004: More Myrtle Beach.
2003: It’s got to be early-onset Alzheimer’s, y’all.
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: I think back on the shit I pulled as a senior in high school, and I’m flat-out amazed that I managed to graduate.
1999: Just an all-around relaxing day.