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You Should Get a MFA (Masters of Fine Arts)
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You’re a blooming artistic talent, even if you aren’t quite convinced.
You’d make an incredible artist, photographer, or film maker.
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I think not. I have no l33t artistic skillz.
I hate those stupid tests. I always think I’m going to find out some deep, hidden truth about myself, and then I get “Oh! You should be an artist! You’re the artistic type!” Bah.
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I ended up making a last-minute trip to Wal-Mart yesterday. Not because I particularly care for Wal-Mart, but when I was there last week returning the security monitor I’d bought (the one I got to keep an eye on Callie back before we were letting them out to run around the house during the day) I started looking around and bought a couple of inexpensive fleece baby blankets to sew together to make a cat pillow.
(Shaddup. I’d ended up stealing several cat beds for the kitten rooms, and there was no bed in the corner of the room where Spot likes to sleep. Spot is old and decrepit and deserves to be comfortable. He DOES.)
At the same time I bought a couple of cat beds that looked interesting and, according to the package (but then, you can never really trust the package, can you?) they “hold heat” and cats like them because cats like warm things. So I bought the cat beds and put one temporarily in the corner of the room where Spot sleeps, and the other downstairs near the window. And the one downstairs was a huge hit with the kittens, because it’s a light bed and they could crawl under it and pretend it was a tent, or they could get on their sides and kick at the bed, and move it across the room to wedge it under the couch where it would stay for days and days because I never did quite get around to pulling it out and smoothing it down so it would fit many kitties.
The problem with the downstairs bed is that the kittens were kind of ripping it apart, and there were bed guts strewn across the floor.
Oh, this is what the bed looks like:
See the little piece of bed gut over there to the left?
Anyway, the cat beds stayed on the floor, and the baby blankets I’d bought to sew together stayed on top of my dresser where I’d set them when I got home from Wal-Mart that day, and a week or so passed. Spot was sleeping on the cat bed in the corner of the room, but he shot me very clear “I’m only sleeping on this stupid thing because this is where I sleep, and this is where this ugly cat bed is, and don’t think FOR ONE SECOND I like this stupid bed!” Finally, Sunday I decided to go ahead and make the baby-blanket cat bed, and I spread the blankets out on the bed to see exactly how big this bed would be, and I caught sight of Spot’s bed in the corner of the bedroom, and a lightbulb went on over my head.
“Self,” I said. “I could basically sew the blankets together with the cat bed inside, and that would solve the falling-apart problem, and would make the cat bed more comfortable for rickety old Spot, and it would look a whole lot better!”
So I measured the blankets and cut them to an appropriate size (I only had to cut about two inches off), pinned them together, and started sewing. I sewed three sides of the blankets, turned them inside out (or outside in), put the cat bed between the blankets, and sewed the fourth side.
I would provide you with a picture, but the cat bed is upstairs and I am downstairs and I don’t love you that much. Okay, maybe I do. Check out the crappy sewing job and uneven seams:
While I was sewing the blankets together, Smitty and Bear noticed that I had something potentially comfortable on my lap, so they jumped up and settled down and batted at the thread I was using. Altogether, it took me about two hours to sew the damn thing together, because I’m a horribly slow seamstress, also not a very good seamstress, and when the thread you’re using makes a little black kitten go wild-eyed and wild with the batting at the thread, it tends to slow you down.
So the bed seems to be a hit with Spot, since he’s been sleeping on it. But then again, probably if I put a little bed of thorns and nails over there, he’d still sleep on it. A creature of habit is our Spot.
The trip to Wal-Mart was supposedly so I could grab another couple of baby blankets to put over the cat bed downstairs, but really I was craving
Jack Links Prime Rib Tender Cuts. I discovered those when I was at Wal-Mart last week and between Fred and I (but to be honest, it was more “I” than “Fred”), we polished off two bags in less than a day.
Hey. We NEED our protein, you know.
So I grabbed a couple of bags of the Jack Links Prime Rib Tender Cuts and wandered back to the baby section, where I realized that the only cheap fleece baby blankets that were left all had, well, baby designs on them. The blankets I’d gotten last week were both plain blue. I finally ended up grabbing a couple of blue and white check baby blankets, then went over to the craft section of the store to buy matching thread. I ended up looking around for a while, and ran across a kit that included a large piece of fleece and ties so you could make your own pillowcase – basically you cut slits around the edges of two matching pieces of fleece, and put ties in the slits (with an end result of something like
this). For less than the two baby blankets, I could buy the kit and get a big-ass piece of fleece and ties (which I didn’t need, but they came with the kit), and have plenty of material to cover the cat bed.
I put the baby blankets back and bought the kit. I haven’t covered the cat bed yet, but when I do, I’ll make sure to take a picture for y’all, so you can laugh at my crappy sewing job.
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Currently
reading:
Not Tonight Honey, Wait ‘Til I’m a Size Six, by Susan Reinhardt. I’m about halfway through it, and it’s pretty damn funny.
Finished the other night:
Wish You Were Here, by Rita Mae and Sneaky Pie Brown. Good book (I mean, when one of the main characters is a cat, you KNOW I’m going to like it!), but I don’t know that I’m going to go out and buy the rest in the series. Maybe when my current book inventory goes down a little I might consider it, because I really did enjoy it.
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Pet store kitty pics from Monday are
here.
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Okay. Don’t get excited about this and jump to conclusions. On my desk right now as I type this:
No, we aren’t adopting him. Yesterday, a few hours before I was going to take the whole bunch to the pet store, I noticed that Bear wasn’t acting like himself. I picked him up and held him like a baby – which he usually loves – and he let out a growly little hissing noise, and struggled to get away. I just figured he wanted to go play, but a little while later I noticed that if any of the other kittens approached and wanted to play (he was laying on the cat bed in the living room), he’d growl at them. I picked him up again, and again he did the growly-hiss thing. All he wanted to do was lay on the bed and sleep, and at one point he got up and walked over to the water bowl and was moving slowly and not quite, but almost limping.
I called the shelter manager, and she offered up a few things that it could be. I asked if it would be okay to take the other kittens to the pet store and keep Bear here to keep an eye on for a day on, and if he didn’t improve, or got worse, I’d take him to the vet. Of course she said that was fine, so when I took Smitty, Sugarbutt, and Callie to the pet store, Bear stayed here.
All I’ll say about leaving the three at the pet store – the boys in one cage, and Callie in a cage by herself – is that it sucked as usual, and it didn’t help that Callie was scared and meowing pitifully for me to come rescue her. I cried a little on the way home, because it really bothers me that she has to be in a cage by herself. I didn’t feel too bad for Sugarbutt and Smitty, because they at least had each other, but Callie all by herself, scared, made me very sad.
So for most of the rest of the evening Bear slept on the cat bed in the living room, though he did get up a couple of times to drink water – which made me happy, because at least I knew he wasn’t going to get dehydrated – and for a little while he jumped up and snoozed on top of me (I was laying on the couch). We put him in the kitten room when we went upstairs, but when Fred came downstairs for a minute and then back upstairs, Bear heard him (the stairs go right by the kitten room) and started scratching and meowing to be let out. I felt sorry for him and suggested that we let him out of the room for the night.
Fred let him out, and brought him into my bedroom, where for the next half hour or so, Bear snuggled up next to me, under the covers, and snoozed. Then he jumped down and went to get some food and water, and Mister Boogers was right on his butt, sniffing and making his “I’m disturbed” noise. Bear ate and drank, and then actually batted at a toy for a few minutes, then went out of the room to explore. Mister Boogers continued to follow him around making his “I’m disturbed” noise and after about fifteen minutes of that, I went out to see what was going on, and Bear was sitting on the top stair looking a little scared and Mister Boogers was being a pain and all I could think was, “I’m tired and I don’t want to listen to this all night”, so I scooped Bear up, gave him a kiss on the head, and put him in the kitten room and shut the door.
He meowed pitifully a few times, then settled down and (I assume) went to sleep.
This morning at 8:00 when I opened the door, he was sitting right by the door, and he looked up at me and purred and pranced out of the room and trotted off to check out the food situation in our bathroom, and played and touched noses with Mister Boogers. In other words, he acted like his old self. He’s limping a little bit, but he’s acting like himself, so we suspect that he just landed wrong on one of his legs while he was playing or something, and had a sore leg. I’m going to keep him here for a few more days just to be sure he’s okay, and then Friday he’ll be going to the pet store.
I think he’s a little bored with us, since he doesn’t have any other kittens to play with at the moment.
Torties in the sun.
Callie in motion. Nothing scared her, I just happened to snap a picture when she felt like running across the room.
“Give. Me. THAT.”
Flyin’ Bear.
I love the little spread-out claws.
All of today’s uploaded kitten pics are
here.
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Previously
2004: No entry.
2003: No entry.
2002: No entry.
2001: TV talk.
2000: I’m about the laziest chick in the world, I think.
1999: Yeah. I’m a bitch.]]>