There’s a limited pet food recall going on – if you use anything manufactured by Mars Petcare, give this a look.
Okay, the Crooked Acres house tour is up, beginning here.
If you’d like to see it in the future, over there in the right-hand sidebar, under the “about” heading, there’s a “Virtual House Tour” link. Click on it, and it’ll take you to a page that lists the house tour for this house and our two previous houses, as well as the “before and after” renovation tour.
It took me hours and hours of work to get this house tour up and running. But I did it ’cause I LURVE YOU.
If you have a question about anything you see, or you’d like to see a close-up picture of anything or there’s something I didn’t get a shot of that you want to see, feel free to ask.
Now that the hatching is over (we ended up with 17 chicks from an original 24 eggs. That’s pretty damn good!), Fred moved all the babies out to the brooder in the garage (along with the older chicks we got last week), and put the camera out there.
Check out the Brooder Cam.
I spent all day – ALL DAY – Saturday cleaning the house. For the first time in ages I did a deep cleaning of the foster kitty room. I was in there almost two hours, moving stuff around, vacuuming everywhere, vacuuming the cat tree, scrubbing the litter box and refilling it with clean litter. The whole time, Kara would sit and watch me, run off when I ran the vacuum, then come back to see what else I was doing.
I cleaned all three bathrooms, I dusted (dusting being the one chore I hate above every other chore in existence), I vacuumed, I went around with the canister vacuum and vacuumed the cat tree downstairs, the set of carpet-covered steps near the window in the computer room, vacuumed all the cat hair off the couch and couch cushions, then flipped and rearranged the cushions. I even moved the couches and vacuumed underneath them (there was surprisingly little dust, but I did find a petrified okra pod under one couch!).
It took me ’til dinner time to get the house cleaned, and I swear to god the house doesn’t look any different at ALL.
Since I worked so hard getting the house in order on Saturday, I spent Sunday doing plenty of slacking. I had thought that I might rake up all the leaves and bird seed on the ground outside the side door, but it was too windy for that, and then it started raining. So before it rained, I went around with the long-handled clippers and cut down the branches that have been hanging too close to the ground so that next time I mow the lawn (next year, at the rate things go around here) I won’t have to keep ducking under them.
And then I read for a long time, and then I took a nap, and then I read some more, and I finished up the afternoon by making a late lunch/ early dinner of crockpotted ham roast, green beans, and corn on the cob.
YUM.
Except for one trip to Closeville for dinner on Saturday, we didn’t leave the house, except for the trips Fred made to the corner gas station to fill up our cars. He paid $4.09 per gallon on Saturday morning, but when he was there filling up my car, there was a woman inside telling the owner that a few cities away, gas was going for almost $6 a gallon. Lordy.
So, Friday wasn’t much fun at all. I left the house around 10:30, to take Zoe and Kaylee to the pet store. Adoptions were starting at 1:00, so I wanted to get them in their cage and settled and have a few hours to adapt to their surroundings.
They’d only ever been in a carrier in a car once before, and that was when they went to be spayed, so they were less than thrilled about the trip in the car. They both burrowed under the lap quilt I’d put in there, and whenever I had to stop at a stop sign or red light, they’d pop out, meow at me, and burrow under again.
At the store, I let them out into the kitten room while I got their cage ready, and they both did that low-and-slinky walk that cats do when they’re nervous and scared. I gave them a lot of kisses and cuddles, but eventually I had to either put them in the cage and leave, or take them home with me and face a divorce.
(Fred outranks cats, if you were wondering. But just barely. I’m not sure I outrank the chickens, though.)
They did NOT want to be in that cage, and they weren’t even interested in sniffing around, they just sat there and stared at me like “Okay, ha ha, very funny, let us OUT.”
I went outside the cat room and watched them, and they sat there waiting for me to come back, which is when I got seriously teary-eyed, and had to go out to the car to compose myself because I had to go back IN and buy bags of cat food for our cats. The cat food our cats eat is not, of course, available at Wal-Mart or Target, and 9 times out of 10 when I do my Thursday morning stint I’m home before the store even opens.
So I went back in and got the bags of cat food and peeked down the aisle at the kittens, who had given up on waiting and were sniffing around their cage. Zoe even batted at a toy mouse. That made me feel marginally better.
‘Til I got home and Kara gave me the wide-eyed nervous look of “I can’t find the kittens anywhere, I think I lost them!” and then proceeded to spend the rest of the weekend running hopefully toward me every time I went upstairs only to look disappointed when she saw no kittens in my arms, and coming down to look around the downstairs often. I gave her a lot of extra attention and by the end of Sunday she seemed to be back to her usual self, so maybe she’s dealing with the loss. I hope she is, anyway.
Poor Kara.
Imagine my surprise Friday when I went across the back yard toward the chicken yard to check for eggs, and realized that among the greenery in the back yard where the cats (especially Tommy and Joe Bob) like to hang out, is a Rose of Sharon bush. I’d been planning to cut down that greenery over the winter, but I’m going to be leaving that Rose of Sharon bush alone. I think they have the prettiest flowers, and I especially like the flowers on this one.
On the Rose of Sharon bush, a bug. I think it’s an assassin bug and I’ve heard they have painful bites, so I left it alone.
Hopefully the cats will leave it alone, too.
All the expensive cat beds and cat condos in this house, and they’re fighting over this one damn box. There’s always a cat in the box, looking smugly at all the other cats like “Ha ha! I have claimed the box as mine, and from here on out, it shall be known as The Poo Cave!” (Or the Boog Cave or the Tom Cave, etc.)
Ingrates.
Previously
2007: No entry.
2006: He shifted position and eyed Fred with bright-eye malevolence.
2005: Maybe I just like to bitch, y’think?
2004: Waiting for Ivan.
2003: No more Benifer. How sad.
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: Speaking of N Sync – that Lance Bass is a cutie, but I get the distinct feeling that although the lights are on, no one’s home.