5/5/08

Oh. My. God. I read over at Tessie’s that Center Stage 2 is in production. I cannot tell you how excited I got when I read that. I love the HELL out of Center Stage, I in fact OWN IT, and I’ve probably watched it 7 or 8 times. Pretty people dancing! The underdog kicking ass and taking names! The snotty princess telling her stage mother where to get off! Peter Gallagher’s eyebrows! Is there a better dancing movie in existence? I don’t think so.

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Late last week, the Saturday morning volunteer at the pet store sent out an email asking if anyone could cover Saturday for her. After some deliberation, I volunteered and decided to make it my big errand-running day. I hadn’t realized, when I was out on Thursday, that I needed all kinds of cat food and litter, and since I was going to be out anyway, I would stop for groceries so I wouldn’t have to get up Sunday morning and go get them. I could SLEEP IN.

So I got up Saturday morning and did my usual morning chores, took a shower, puttered around in front of the computer, and left the house at almost exactly 7:30. It takes me about an hour to get everything done at the pet store (probably the fact that I spend a lot of time kitty-snuggling is why it takes me so long), and so I’d wanted to get there no later than 8. The store opens at 9, and I don’t like to be in the cat room cleaning after the store opens, because people are always peering in at me or knocking on the door to ask questions.

Poor HG was still there, so I gave him some extra snuggling time, and he just about broke my heart when he rubbed his face on the sleeve of my shirt and then rested his head on my shoulder. He is SUCH a good boy and he so likes other cats, I hope he’s adopted soon, into a home with lots of other cats for him to befriend. He’s a little ambassador in training!

I got done cleaning and scooping (and snuggling) a few minutes after the pet store opened, so I bought two big bags of dry cat food for our cats, cheap cat food for the bowl on the front porch and a ton of canned adult and kitten food. Then, I drove down the road to Sam’s Club. Luckily, Sam’s opens on Saturdays at 9, so I didn’t have to kill time until it opened. Saturday morning is apparently THE time to go to Sam’s, because I don’t think there were 20 cars in the parking lot, and I was able to get in, get what I needed, and I didn’t even have to stand in line to check out. That has NEVER happened for me at Sam’s before, so now I know when to go!

I loaded my six 40-pound buckets of Fresh Step into the car (alongside the million pounds of cat food I’d bought at the pet store) and headed toward home. On the way, I realized that Bed, Bath and Beyond was open, so I stopped there to see if I could find an over-the-door towel bar (which a couple of you mentioned in my comments last week), and after some searching, I found one. Yay!

Then I headed for home and stopped on the way to get groceries. I swear to god, I can never remember from one trip to the next where the hell they keep the white vinegar (which I use as a fabric softener, and no – you can’t smell the vinegar on the laundry once it’s dry), but I finally located a bottle of it, and was on my way home.

Three and a half hours after I’d left the house, I was home again with a back seat full of buckets of litter and cat food (if I’d been thinking, I would have taken a picture of it. It sure did scream CRAZY CAT LADY.) and a trunk full of groceries. Fred and I unloaded the car, I made lunch, and then spent the next few hours recovering from my busy morning, spending time with Kara and the kittens, and just generally being a slacker.

Also, I cleaned up the kitchen, made hamburger patties, sliced tomatoes and onions, and chopped up strawberries for strawberry shortcake. I bought a big-ass container of locally-grown strawberries on my way home Thursday, and I decided to toss together some strawberry shortcake and then dehydrate the rest of the strawberries for snackin’. Unfortunately, once I had enough strawberries for the shortcake, I discovered that most of what was left had started to mold, so I tossed those in the pig bucket.

We started watching Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, watched about 20 minutes of it, and decided we weren’t all that interested in it, so turned it off. We watched Earl and Scrubs, and then since we didn’t have anything else to watch, we started watching the most recent episode of The Office again. I watched up until the opening credits played, then I fell asleep while Fred watched another ten minutes or so.

Then I was wide awake, and after Fred toddled off to bed I was all “Oh, I’ll read my Harlan Coben book for half an hour or so, then go to bed!”, only of course I couldn’t put the damn book down and I was like “One more chapter, then I’m turning the light off!” and I’d get to the end of the chapter and be all “OMG! What happens next?!” and kept on reading and it was close to midnight by the time I’d finished the book. I highly recommend it. Harlan Coben is definitely one of my favorite authors.

(THANK YOU, Dora, for sending it my way! You rock!)

Sunday morning I slept in ’til 7:30, which is an HOUR later than I’ve been getting up. During the week, Fred wakes me up around 5:45 to kiss me goodbye before he leaves for work (AWWWWW) and I go right back to sleep, then at 6:30 my eyes pop open and I think about everything I need to do, and there’s no hope of going back to bed. So I rolled out of bed at 7:30 feeling like I was way behind in doing what needed to be done, so before I even sat down at the computer, I put laundry in to wash, scooped the litter boxes, brought Kara her morning snack (she also gets a noontime snack and a dinnertime snack as well. She’s creating food for four very quickly growing babies, y’know. She particularly likes the Science Diet Kitten Turkey and Giblets canned food.), cleaned the kitchen, and took my shower.

By midmorning I’d done everything I needed to do (which included vacuuming and dusting the house) and so I sat down at my computer and put a bunch of stuff on eBay, mostly stuff I’d been meaning to put up for ages, along with CatIt filters (after cleaning the CatIt on Saturday, I was trying to screw the bottom part back onto the globe, but the part that you turn had popped off, and upon trying to force it back into place, I cracked the globe and then I was all “FUCK THIS!”, so I’m selling the filters I had on eBay and between that and the other stuff I’m selling, maybe I’ll make enough to get a damn Drinkwell, which appears to be much damn easier to clean.). I spent a lot of time with Kara and the kittens, finished my laundry, switched the couch cushions around. You know, fun stuff like that.

Fred spent all day making cages for the tomato plants (of which we now have 54. We gave the rest away to friends, because I imagine 54 plants will be more than enough for the two of us. One hopes, anyway.) and in the afternoon I held t-posts for him while he used a sledgehammer to pound them into the ground. One day our luck’s going to run out and that sledgehammer’s going to slip and I’m going to end up rolling around the back forty in a mouth-controlled wheelchair.

If that man cripples me with the sledgehammer, y’all make sure he gets me the LUXURY wheelchair.

Then I spent time with Kara and the kittens, and my GOD those kittens are SO freakin’ cute that I literally have to bite my tongue when I’m around them so that I don’t squish them to death and my tongue is pretty much shredded at this point. (I’m not sure how it works, that biting my tongue stops me from squishing kittens, but I don’t question it.)

In and amongst all that stuff was about 10,000 trips out to the garage to look at the baby chicks. Of the 22 we started out with once the hatching was over, one has died. It was the one Fred ended up “helping” out of his shell (with my encouragement) after it had made no progress after hours of trying, which indicates I SUPPOSE that mother nature – that heartless bitch – knows what she’s doing. If we’d left the chick alone, it would have died in the shell instead of stumbling around and then dying in the brooder in the garage, surrounded by perfectly healthy chicks and being PECKED as s/he died. Poor thing.

The 21 surviving chicks appear to be perfectly healthy, they’re eating and drinking and awfully cute. Hopefully they’ll all STAY alive.

(pic)

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These kittens, y’all. They are going to be the DEATH of me, they’re killing me with the cute. Inara and River love to have belly rubs, and will come right over to me for them.

All the kittens have their eyes open – all that worrying for nothing, but what am I if not a worrier? – River’s got one eye that’s still a little bit closed, but it’s open more every day, so I think he’s okay. They’ve all got those gorgeous dark-blue eyes and they’re still working on the focusing part. Inara spent a good five minutes yesterday trying to figure out how to touch my arm with her front paw and when she accomplished it, you could see the “So THAT’S how it’s done!” connections being made in her brain.

I made a video of them yesterday. I apologize profusely for the fact that I am a blithering goddamn idiot and apparently cannot shut my mouth to save my life. I watched the video after I’d uploaded it and just cringed. The horror lies not so much in the incessant talking as the incessant INANE talking in a baby voice. Ugh.

But anyway, admire the cute here, at YouTube:

or see it here, in MPG format.

It’s getting much easier to take pictures of them, because they’re spending so much more time out of the box. They sure are adorable little things.

(pic) Kaylee, waiting for the belly rub.

(pic) Inara, waiting for the belly rub.

(pic) Zoe, Inara, and River.

Buttloads of kitten pictures up over at Flickr.

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(pic) This is how Newt gets in and out of the back yard. He can’t figure out the cat door in the laundry room, so he asks to go out the side door, runs over to this fence post, climbs it, and jumps down into the yard. Bless his little heart.

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Previously
2007: No entry.
2006: “Motherfucker say WHAT? You wanna prance?”
2005: Did you know you could use it to relieve muscle soreness, as a plant fertilizer, and as a laxative?
2004: Okay, girlfriend? Just how fucking stupid ARE you?
2003: No entry.
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: God, please tell me when I was 19 I didn’t sound that much like an airhead…