In case you missed it over the weekend, Saturday I posted updated weights and pictures of the Noms, and Sunday was just all kinds of lazy.
Y’all have a good weekend? We did. We celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by… doing nothing. Well, that’s not true, we did things. Just not in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day. Every year I make a New England Boiled Dinner because I love the hell out of corned beef. Fred always makes the gaggy face at the idea of a big pot of boiled meat and vegetables, and then when it comes time to eat said boiled meat and veggies, you better not get between him and his food or you’ll be sorry.
(Yes, I know many of you don’t like corned beef. That’s okay; unless you stop by around St. Patrick’s Day, chances are good I won’t try to force you to eat any. Also: MORE FOR ME.)
This year I made it for dinner Thursday instead of waiting until Saturday. This is how it starts, right? First you celebrate the holiday on the actual day, and then you celebrate a few days early. Another couple of years, we’ll all be eating green-tinted food for the entire month of March.
We had a pretty relaxing weekend. Fred did some mowing, I started my tomato and cucumber plants. Fred processed some chickens, I did housework. Fred’s feeling punky lately due to his allergies so he doesn’t feel like doing much. I don’t have the allergies excuse, so I guess the only reason I have for not wanting to do stuff is laziness!
Today, I clean the house. Maybe. If I can force myself to do so.
Cleaning house is borrrrrrrrrrrrrrring. But I guess those bathrooms won’t clean themselves. Why can’t I be independently wealthy and pay someone to clean my house, whyyyyy?
Hmm. Who’ll give me a million dollars for one of these kittens? They’re purebred Fluffenheinzers, y’know, the rarest breed on earth. No, really!
Sigh.
One day last week I had a book to drop off at the post office, and so I went, y’know. To the post office. With my book. That I had to mail. Imagine my surprise when I walked through the front door and found a sign announcing that the post office was closed “due to termites.”
Well. What the fuck, I ask you? How’m I gonna mail the stupid book? I went back the next three days in a row, and it continued to be closed. Stupid tenacious termites. There appears to be SOME business going on there, because I’m getting my mail every day (unless they’re sorting at a different facility and then delivering from there? Maybe?), but I was unable to catch my mail carrier, mostly because I have no idea what time she’s going to be going by and I don’t particularly want to sit on the front porch and wait for her. I have better things to do. IMPORTANT things. Like sitting on my ass in front of the computer or staring at kittens.
I finally solved the problem by making a special trip to the post office where my PO Box is located (which is about 15 minutes away) and mailing it from there.
But still. What a pain in the ass. TERMITES.
Speaking of crawling insects, I have two ant stories.
1. At the end of last Summer, Fred took the containers we use to start seeds in, stacked them up, and then put them in the wood shed (which is next to the garden), up high. We have a real ant issue over there in that anything you leave on the ground for longer than 30 seconds, the goddamn ants build a nest in it. But Fred figured that since he’d put the containers up high, we wouldn’t need to worry about it.
AU CONTRAIRE. When I started pulling the containers apart to fill them with potting mix, the fucking ants were all through them and started swarming like motherfuckers. I didn’t get bitten by any of the ants, but it startled the hell out of me.
2. I stayed up late Saturday night (into Sunday morning), because I was reading Catch Me by Lisa Gardner and I’d tell myself to PUT THE BOOK DOWN AND GO TO SLEEP, but I just couldn’t because I was dying to know how it ended. Sometime after midnight, I was still reading, when I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I looked, and there was a HUGE carpenter ant moseying along the edge of my book. I smacked it off my book, and it landed on the floor where I squooshed it, then carried it into the bathroom and flushed it. (Pro tip: never put a bug, ESPECIALLY a bug you think is dead, in the trash can. It will come back to life and BOY will it be pissed off at YOU.)
Then, of course, I kept feeling like something was crawling on me, and after I finished the book and turned off the light, I jerked awake several times because I thought something was crawling on me.
FUN TIMES.
Emmy and the Noms are doing just fine. The last few times I’ve gone into the room and she was out of the box, she kept an eye on me until I got down on the floor, but she was willing to stay out of the box. I even petted the kittens a few times without her running over to get into the box with them, so that’s pretty awesome!
They certainly do love their mama.
I love it when they pile up and sleep.
“What the- ?”
Fred thinks that the kitten right next to Emmy (I think it’s Razzie, but can’t swear to it) looks like Cartman whining “Mooooooom!”
“But Mooooooooom!”
It’s a three-kitten-pillow nap.
I snapped this through the foster room window. Is it just me or does that middle cloud look like a dog’s head?
Poor Miz Poo, she’s just getting over being sick (an upper respiratory infection). She had to go to the vet TWICE in the past two weeks, and let us just say that she is NO fan of the vet. She’s finally getting back to her old self, including carrying a toy through the house keening at the top of her lungs the entire way.
Previously
2011: No entry.
2010: Damn it, Jane, how am I supposed to depend on you to reliably answer my grammar and punctuation questions when you don’t know that derogative is, indeed, a word?
2009: Someone’s always fucking up the risotto, sending Chef Ramsay into apoplectic rages wherein he bellows at whichever hapless fuckup is in his crosshairs.
2008: That Pioneer Punk is a bad, bad influence.
2007: I am such a prize, I really am.
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.
2004: “Have you noticed that it smells like the bodies of fifteen [gentlemen of Chinese descent] laying in a pile in the ditch, rotting?”
2003: Always something, you know?
2002: “I’m starving to death. Meh. STARVING, I’m STARVING. Meh.”
2001: My baby’s growing up!
2000: No entry.
OMG, those sweet little kitten faces are KILLING me!!!!
So we are two similar situations. (1) Gus is getting over his UTI and back to his normal bringing me his toys keening at the top of his lungs, and (2) I have jolted await thinking something is crawling on me at night. Unfortunately for me, they are Box Elder bugs and they live in my house all fucking winter. They are most active in late fall and early spring when they wake up and start crawling their way in/out of my house. I HATE Box Elder bugs because they are always crawling on me! My cats are smart enough to know they taste horrible and refuse to catch and eat them. They just ignore them because they just don’t go away!
Val
AGHHHHHH. Val, I didn’t know what a Box Elder bug was, so I went and looked, and ugh. You have my deepest sympathy, because if I woke up to find one of those on me, I’d probably never sleep again!
I’m so with you on the cleaning thing except my childlike imagination thinks magic elves should come out and do it all silently while I am asleep. I would also like to be Bewitched “when I grow up” and have the ability to nose twitch it all into perfection. I’m afraid I would feel horribly guilty about the maids doing my dirty work for me. I would hire some in the lottery win scenario but the elves or nose twitch is less complicated! This is why I have a fridge magnet proclaiming “I know I’m in my own world-it’s OK they know me here”.
I see a woman in a dress with poufy hair in a side bun in that cloud overall but I can see the dog head too-floppy eared dog, right?
Back in the old days, in the first house we lived in in Madison, when I had a job, we had a cleaning service come to clean. And on the rare occasion that I was home when they showed up, I had to leave, because to sit there while she cleaned would have made me feel like the laziest person in existence!
I prepare corned beef/cabbage in pressure cooker. Over past two weeks I’ve made it for dinner twice. Delish!!!
The Noms are so darn cute. Looking forward to when they’re out and about and investigating the foster room.
I keep trying to tempt them to come out of the box but noooooo, they aren’t having it!
No no. It is a squirrel at the upper top standing on a dog. I so love the kitties. Especially, Ms. Poo.
Back in college, I was home visiting my mom over the summer, and while lounging on the couch reading, I noticed a carpenter ant on the cushion next to me. I grabbed a shoe, squashed it, and continued reading. An hour or so later, I got up to get a drink, and when I sat back down, there was a huge stabbing pain in the back of my leg — it was the ANT HEAD, with its nasty pointy jaws clamped into my skin, chomping away! I screamed, my mom came running — she had to yank the fucker out of my leg with tweezers, and it took a chunk of skin with it. THIS is why you must ALWAYS flush the squashed bugs! Otherwise their zombie heads will exact REVENGE.
AGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!
Wasn’t ‘Catch Me’ one of the best books ever? I read alot, but that was a great one!
SO good. I honestly could NOT put it down! I love Lisa Gardner, she’s awesome. 🙂
I see a squirrel sitting on a stump, the head is facing right. But, now I can also see a dogs head facing upwards to the left. I have a vivid imagination.
I see the face of a Great Dane!!!
And when I look at those kittens pictures all I see are those tiny little stripes!! How cute can they be???Love them!!!
Looks like Cartman whining “Mooooooom!”…This made me snort laugh!
Dear Miz Poo,
I hope you are feeling better. You certainly look divine (as always, darling). I wish I lived closer, I would bring you some chicken (I am not certain that cats like chicken soup, but I am pretty sure they are fond of chicken) and pet you until you feel better. And then a couple days more just to be sure you don’t relapse.
Your Adoring Fan,
MsDarkstar
kitten pix! kitten pix! It doesn’t matter that I’ve owned dozens of stripey and black cats or raised dozens of kittens back in the 60s when no one knew what “spay/neuter” meant. Robyn, when they’re sleeping, can you arrange them in an easter basket like little furry ovoid eggs? That picture I’d love to see….. and it just occurred to me to add to your potential-name data bank:
Characters in Gone with the Wind
Characters in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (brother man, sister woman, big daddy, maggie the cat, brick, goober, and no-neck monsters)
Poetic forms: haiku, villanelle, sonnet
Crystal forms: rhombus, tetrahedron, dodecahedron, etc.
Minerals on Moh’s Scale of Hardness (cuteness?):
talCAT, gypsum, calciteCAT, fluorite, apatite, plagioCLAWS feldspar, quartzcat….
I am loving those kittens!
New England Boiled Dinner indeed. Over here in Oz we love New England Boiled Dinner but in our house (and in other houses too no doubt)we call it Corned Dog (Beef) and Mash because we serve it with mashed potatoes. We also serve it with peas and carrots and a white onion sauce. Yummo!
I think I remember you bitching about stamps.com on here so maybe you don’t like it. But the podcast I like (WTF) is sponsored by them a lot and it sounds good. No more going to tre post office. And using his WTF code you get a fee scale and $55 worth of free postage. I’m in Canada so we can’t use it, but it always sounds good to me!
That’s “free” scale. Sorry for typos, I’m on my iPod!