Fostering – Page 96

10/18/06

fallentree We were DAMN lucky. So instead of spending all evening painting, we spent all evening dragging the tree to the back forty, next to the burn pile. Well. I myself dragged six or seven (big! heavy!) branches back to the burn pile, then spent lots of time standing around watching Fred work. And playing with Momma and Daddy Kitty and their kittens, who appear to have taken up residence in our garage. Seeing as how possession is 9/10ths of the law I think that means they belong to us and we could take them in to be fixed, right? Yeah, Fred didn’t see it that way, either. He’s still going to talk to the cats’ owners. The cats and kittens would come out, play on the fallen tree, then run away when Fred came back with the tractor to drag some more of it to the back forty. When he was done, Fred said “I sure am glad I didn’t kill any cats while I was doing this. I was afraid I was going to!” Momma and Daddy had been keeping a close eye on the kittens, though, and made sure to chase them away from the tree if there was any danger. They’re good parents, those two. At one point Fred was using the chainsaw to cut a limb, and Momma Kitty went running by with something in her mouth. I looked closer as she ran by and realized she had a seriously mangled dead squirrel. She ran into the garage and wandered out again a few minutes later. “Um. Whatcha do with that squirrel, Momma?” I asked. She blinked at me and strolled away. Later, I found the squirrel hidden under the stairs in the garage. Like Momma was saving it in case there was a hungry time in the future and no cat food in the bowls. Seriously. If Momma Kitty’s using the stairs under my garage as storage, doesn’t that mean she considers it her home? “Nope, I didn’t do it. Really! It was… um… the squirrel! The squirrel did it! Which is why Momma had to kill him.” I guess they’re not completely weaned. And doesn’t Momma look thrilled about it! Poor Momma. Those kittens are practically as big as she is! As it got dark, Fred yelled for me to come to the back yard and pointed to the back forty. Low-lying fog was starting to roll in. It looked pretty neat. Fred’s eventually going to cut this tree down. When the other tree was standing, it looked okay because they were next to each other, but now that the other one is gone, it looks kind of funny. Plus it kind of looks like it’s ready to keel over at any second anyway. Once it was too dark to get anything else done outside (Fred managed to get the entire tree dragged (drug?) back to the burn pile area of the back forty (and I need to get a picture of the burn pile. That fucker is HUGE.)), we went inside where I started painting a door and Fred started painting the room that was going to be his room, but is now likely going to be the guest bedroom. I hadn’t even finished ONE SIDE of ONE DOOR when he came in, said he was done painting the room (just the walls, not around the trim) and ready to go because he was tired and starting to get sore. He helped me finish the ONE SIDE of ONE DOOR, and then we left. Tonight we plan to do nothing but paint. Fred will probably get the entire downstairs, garage, shed, and outside of the house painted. Maybe I’ll get ONE SIDE of ONE DOOR painted. I’m a slow painter, but a careful one. Those doors will be somethin’ to look at, that’s for sure. I hope I mean that in a good way. I’m not sure yet.

* * * I haven’t managed to get a picture of it yet, but Maddy’s new favorite game is one she plays by herself. She’ll lay on her back, kick herself in the face with her back foot, and whine like someone’s picking on her. I think she’s hit the “dumb teenager” stage of her life.

“Foot! Leave me alone! Or I will kick your butt!”

“Pillow! Leave me alone! Or I will kick your butt!”

Quite clearly it is a rough and difficult life for Maddy. Please, won’t someone save her from the daily torture and strife? More pictures are here. * * * Previously 2005: For at least five full seconds a big cartoon question mark appeared above my head and my brain flipped frantically through the instruction manual trying to figure out just what the fuck was going on. 2004: Myrtle Beach recap. 2003: No entry. 2002: Poor, deformed Miz Poo. 2001: Ya gotta love the Poo. 2000: Remember that episode? 1999: I just love it when I don’t have to cook.]]>

10/17/06

Nicole 1. The phone rings. Who do you want it to be? Well aside from the fact that I want it to not ring in the first place, I guess I’ll say I want it to be Fred or the spud or Debbie. 2. Do you take compliments well? I try to smile and say “Thank you”, but a lifetime of scoffing at compliments is a hard habit to break. 3. Do you like to ride horses? Unfortunately, I don’t. I wish I was a horse person, because we’ve got enough land for one or two of them, but I’ve just never been into horses. Though when I was a teenager I was, and when we were on a family vacation we went horseback riding where my horse kept walking so close to the horse in front of us that the horse in front of us kicked and his hoof caught my knee. And it fucking hurt. And then later, I was sitting in the saddle and it started going sideways and I’d never really been on a horse before, so I had no idea I could have stood up in the stirrups and put my weight on the other side so the saddle would straighten out, and I fell onto the ground. 4. What was your favorite game as a kid? DOCTOR DEATH AND MISTER ALIVE! It was a dorky game my brothers made up wherein one of them was Dr. Death and the other was Mr. Alive, and if Dr. Death got us we were “dead” and could only come to “life” and rejoin the game if Mr. Alive came along. Or something like that. 5. Can you speak another language? I know very few words in French. Not even enough to carry on a conversation. So, no. 6. What is your favorite children’s book? The Little House series. I saved up my allowance for ages to buy those damn books, and I still have them all. 7. When was the last time you were at Olive Garden? I… don’t know. Maybe around Christmas time? Debbie and Brian and my mother picked us up and we went out to lunch. I don’t know if that was at Christmas time or last Summer or just exactly when the hell it was. 8. What are your keys on your key chain for? One to the house, one to the car, one to the PO Box, and one to the new house. I think that’s about it. 9. What’s your favorite color? Yellow, though I have a definite fondness for blue, too. 10. Where is your current pain at? I’m feeling no pain. 11. Do you look like your mom or dad? My Dad, at least according to my mother. 12. What movie do you want to see right now? At this point, I can’t think of a single movie I want to see. Mostly because I don’t know what’s out, I guess. 13. Do you put lotion on your dog or cats? We used to put lotion on Spot (they make a ~~hydrocodone~~ hydrocortisone lotion for animals) because he was overgrooming his stomach and we thought it might be because of an itching issue. 14. What did you do for New Year’s? I… don’t know. Went to bed before midnight, I’m sure. 15. Do you think The Grudge was scary? Not terribly so. 16. What was the cause of your last accident? My incredible clumsiness, I’m sure. 17. What do you buy at the movies? Usually just a bottle of water. I sneak weight watchers candy in with me, and steal some popcorn from whomever’s with me. 18. What do you wear to sleep? Not a damn thing. Unless you count the inevitable cat draped over my hip. 19. Anything big ever happen in your hometown? Stephen King grew up across the river and went to my high school. It hosts the Moxie Festival every year. I think that’s about it. 20. Do you use cuss words in other languages? No, but that sounds like something that would be fun to take up. Y’all teach me how to say fuck, shit, and goddamnit in other languages, eh?

* * * Yesterday after I got home from the pet store, I took a shower and decided it was too goddamned cold in the house to be running the air. Our thermostat is from the ancient ages where you have to have it on either “heat” or “cold”, along with the temperature you want to keep the house at. If you have it on “cold” and the temperature drops to like 55 degrees, you could freeze to death waiting for the heat to come on. That’s how it is at the new house, too, and I’ve decreed that come hell or high water, SOMEONE is going to install a thermostat you can set so that if it goes below 68 the heat will come on, and if it goes above 72 the air will come on. I don’t care if I have to pay a professional, it’s gonna happen in the new house, because this time of year it’s a pain in the ass to always be switching it back and forth between “heat” and “cold”. Anyway, I stopped at looked at the thermostat and saw that the current temperature on the stairs (where the thermostat is located – one of the things I hate about this house is that it doesn’t have separate thermostats for upstairs and downstairs) was 70. I decided I’d turn the dial thingy to 70 and switch it over to heat. I went downstairs, ate breakfast, puttered around, and thought “GodDAMN, why am I still so cold?” I wrote my entry and got colder and colder. When the tip of my nose was about ready to turn blue with how stinkin’ cold I was, I went upstairs to get my slippers. Usually if my feet are warm, the rest of me tends to stay warm, too. On the way up, I stopped and looked at the thermostat. Not only had I NOT set the dial thingy on 70, I’d set it several degrees below 70 AND I’d forgotten to click the thing over to “heat”. No wonder I was so goddamn cold. I set the dial thing to 75 and clicked it over to heat, and was toasty warm for the rest of the day. * * * Oh, I forgot to mention my doctor appointment on Friday. As I mentioned, it was with an orthopedic surgeon, about the “possible Osteochondromas” on my hips. The surgeon told me that they were, indeed, Osteochondromas, and that they treated it by doing nothing. Since I was having no pain or symptoms and they weren’t bothering me, it wasn’t necessary to remove them, but I should come back if I started having pain or they started bothering me. He did say that in some cases they could turn cancerous, but the chances of that were slight and if it did happen it wouldn’t be until my 70s or 80s. And since I’ll be dead long before then from (1) PSC, (2) Weight Loss Surgery (3) Heart Murmur or (4) Throat Chewed Open By Crazy Wild Cats, I’m not going to worry too much about it. He did show me where the Osteochondroma on my left side is and the fact that it’s on the left side, not the right, and a lot higher than where I thought it was, probably explains why I couldn’t find it on my own. Duhr. * * *

“Hahahah! Ha! Ha! Mom, you are SUCH a dork!”

“Hahahahah! Ha! Ha! Mom, you are SO funny!” (Maddy learns the art of sarcasm)

“Bring your hand down here. I won’t bite. Promise!” More pictures hither. * * *

Nothing makes him happier than airin his harbl. * * * Previously 2005: And I like Nicole Kidman and I loathe Sean Penn and didn’t want to see him rubbing his liver lips all over her. 2004: No entry. 2003: Poor Stanley. All he wants to do it play, and none of the big cats will play with him. 2002: That’s a lot of poop to scoop. 2001: “I don’t like it,” he said haughtily. “It’s not even REAL lemon juice. It’s citric acid!” 2000: Now I just have to decide what to spend it on. 1999: When I got to the top of the stairs I found Tubby huddled there soaking wet, and Mr. Fancypants circling him in a hostile manner. ]]>

10/16/06

reading Rise and Shine by Anna Quindlen and enjoying it, but there was this one bit toward the beginning of the book that had me howling: I’m sure Evan had never encountered anyone like Meghan before. Evan’s parents are the quietest people on earth. When she’s feeling froggy, his mother will say, “Oh, you,” to her husband, and he’ll squeeze her forearm. That’s the equivalent of all hell breaking loose in the Grater household. Laughed my ASS off.

* * * Speaking of books, the new Stephen King comes out on the 24th! I’m sure I’ll be in a mall at some point that week (my mother arrives this Saturday) so I’ll for sure be picking it up. * * * So we’ve spent another weekend working on the house, feeling alternately like we were getting nothing accomplished and getting tons accomplished. I felt like I got a lot accomplished in the yard; Fred felt like he got a lot accomplished in the house. Friday I worked in the yard until it got dark – mostly raking and hauling crap to the mulch pile – and then I went inside to play with Maddy and then find out what I could do in the house. Fred asked if I’d wet down the walls in his bedroom so he could scrape the wallpaper backing off, so I spent some time doing that, and then he suggested that I go around the room and scrub the glue off from around the bottom, because he didn’t think paint would stick to the glue. So I did that until it was time to leave, and it was FUN. Not. It was cold as hell in the house, we weren’t running the heat because we had a window open and a fan in the window because Fred didn’t particularly want us breathing the dust from the crap he was scraping off the wall. So it was cold and noisy and I had to wear a stinkin’ face mask. “Stinkin'” to be taken literally, here. That thing fucking REEKED. At one point Fred was wearing his respirator (since he was doing most of the work in the room) and I was wearing my face mask, and he said something to me, and I leaned over toward him and took my face mask off and said “Huh?”, and he laughed his ass off. It’s like when you’re in the car and you smell something, so you turn down the radio and sniff harder. (Yes, I do that.)

We got home late Friday night and went straight to bed. Saturday morning I had thought I might sleep in, but I was up and wide awake at 6:30, so I got up and did my usual morning stuff, and we were out the door by 8. Once we got to the house, we turned the heat on, and then I went into Fred’s bedroom to finish what I’d started the night before. That didn’t take long, so I spent the rest of the morning taping the spud’s bedroom and vacuuming up all the crap off the floor, and other things I can’t seem to recall at the moment. After lunch, Fred suggested that since it was such a nice day out, we spend some time working in the yard. I was ALL for that and at some point we made a trip to Lowe’s so Fred could get a new toy to make working in the yard that much easier.

You can imagine my concern. While Fred chopped down some trees and the fence posts behind the shed I walked around the yard and picked up some more crap, then got on the lawnmower and cut the yard in front of the garage (the side yard, I call it). It took me longer than I’d expected (mostly because I had to keep stopping and picking up stuff I hadn’t seen when I was walking through the yard), but when I was done the yard looked pretty damn good. Well, except for the hilly parts I’ll need a push mower to cut, that is. I didn’t relish the thought of taking the riding lawnmower up on the hilly parts and having it roll over on top of me. Naturally, I forgot the damn “before” and “after” pictures, so here’s a shot of Fred yanking down a tree.

After he’d done some Manly Man work, Fred went inside to prime the walls and trim of his bedroom and I stayed outside and dug more chunks of concrete and bricks out of the lawn next to the house. We left somewhat early on Saturday and were home before dark, which I think is a first for us. Sunday morning we were out the door early, too, and because we’d left the heat turned down to 55, it was FREAKIN COLD when we got there. I immediately turned the heat up to 68 (downstairs) and 65 (upstairs) and we got to work. I taped Fred’s bedroom so he could paint and then set to priming the closet in that bedroom. The closet is HUGE; it could practically be another room, or a nursery or something, so it took me all morning to finish. I was almost finished with one wall when Fred appeared and said “Come here, and bring your camera.” That’s always something I like to hear, so I grabbed my camera and followed him. Now, I know I’ve mentioned the little black cat – “Momma Kitty” – who first appeared a few weeks before we bought the house, who had clearly recently had a litter of kittens. She’s shown up several times since, both alone and with a male buff-colored cat who we’d taken to calling “Daddy Kitty.” Well, Momma and Daddy had come a-callin’. And they weren’t alone.

Altogether, there were four kittens – two black and white, one brown tabby and white, and one gray tabby. Two of them were friendly, but the other two were a little skittish. Momma Kitty is friendly and Daddy Kitty tends to be skittish, so I guess their kittens took after both of them. We spent quite a bit of time on the porch hanging out with them, and they ended up spending almost all day hanging out on the porch sleeping and playing. We wondered if they were homeless, but they were all in really good shape, clearly not underfed, clean silky fur, and had obviously spent time around people. I suggested to Fred that I call the shelter manager today and see if we could foster at least the kittens until space opened up at the pet store. They’re obviously old enough to be away from their parents and eating solid food. All they’d need is to be fixed and to get their shots. I was all ready to foster the kittens when Fred went over and talked to our next door neighbor and found that they belong to the people on the other side of him (the neighbor, that is). The worst part is that we’re pretty sure Momma Kitty is pregnant again. I fumed and fussed and said “I don’t CARE if she belongs to someone, if she’s pregnant again I’m bringing her inside until she has those kittens, and when they’re weaned I’m going to have her fixed and then I’ll let her back outside again!” Did I mention she has worms? Fred said “You can’t do that. She’s their cat, you can’t save the entire world of cats!” We talked some more and decided that we (I nominate Fred) should talk to the neighbors and offer to (1) find homes for the kittens through the shelter and (2) offer to have Momma Kitty and Daddy Kitty fixed. Yeah, #2 might make them feel like jerks and could possibly offend them, but Momma Kitty needs a break from the whole creating-life giving-birth thing! I’ll report back how that conversation goes. So after I finished priming the closet and Fred finished painting the spud’s room, we decided to do some work in the yard. Fred went off to cut down some more trees, and I went into the front yard to clear the pile of crap around the big tree next to the house. It didn’t look like that much, but what I ended up with were piles of leaves and branches and wood that took Fred five or six trips with the tractor so I could load up the frontloader and he could carry it back to the burn pile. I would have just run over the leaves with the lawnmower, but there were so many branches – very thick ones, too – that I was afraid I’d end up breaking the lawnmover blade. I don’t know if that’s something that could happen, but it seemed like it might. While I was clearing out the pile of trash, I found some interesting things.

Rusty axe. Because where would one put a rusty axe? Under the tree in the yard, of course. Unless maybe a serial killer dumped it under the tree on his way out of town. And now my fingerprints are all over it. Uh oh!

Free kitten’s what? Kitten’s mittens? Kitten’s toes? Kitten’s kittens?

Air rifle. I only know it’s an air rifle (and not, say, a BB gun) because it says “Air Rifle” on it. I don’t know what one does with an air rifle (does it shoot air?), but I know this one’s going on the pile o’ crap we’re tossing into a dump truck this weekend. I think we’d intended (at least, I intended) to leave the house around 5, but it was almost 6 by the time we pulled out of the driveway, because it took me longer than I thought it would to mow the front yard. It looks really good – at least, I think so – but again, we need to bring the push mower out so I can mow the hilly areas. And that was our exciting house-working weekend. This week I want to get the other side of the house and the back yard cleared of rocks, concrete and bricks, and then mowed. I also have to start painting the doors that go to the spud’s bedroom and the guest bedroom. Fred took them down and I’d intended to start painting them over the weekend, but just didn’t get around to it. * * *

While recovering from his brush with Malevolent Madeleine, Spidey keeps an eye out for trouble. * * *

Ugh. These things are everywhere. * * *

Zombie cat!

I need a bigger desk. Miz Poo isn’t going to take the usurpation of her bed by that stinkin’ kitten very well.

Soda tickles her nose. More pictures here. * * * Previously 2005: No entry. 2004: No entry. 2003: “That’s because it fucking HURTS!” I yelled. 2002: TV talk. 2001: Is it just Fred and I that immediately think “Chrissie-anthemums”, or did y’all see that episode of Three’s Company as well? 2000: The Spider Dance.]]>

10/12/06

2 Words meme, seen many places, most recently on my brother’s diary. The idea is to answer each question in two words, but I’m too damn lazy to work that hard, so I’ll use AS MANY WORDS AS I WANT TO. 1. When was the last time you shaved? Tuesday morning. 2. Explain what ended your last relationship. Divorce! I’d say we just grew apart and had very little in common. 3. What were you doing this morning at 8 a.m.? I was either feeding Maddy, or in the shower. 4. What were you doing 15 minutes ago? Looking at my CT scan results. 5. Are you any good at math? Not “good”, but competent in the day-to-day dealing with numbers. 6. Your prom night? Which one? My Junior prom, I hung out with a lot of friends, went to the prom with a guy I had a crush on, and had a decent time. My Senior prom, my date (upon whom I had a crush; different guy than the Junior prom guy) and I went with another couple, and it was a fairly crappy time. 7. Do you have any famous ancestors? I AM the famous ancestor. In generations to come, they’ll be talking about the Crazy Cat Lady and her penchant for boring others online with her daily musings. 8. Have you had to take a loan out for school? I did. 9. Do you know the words to the song on your myspace profile? I don’t have a song on my myspace profile, but if I did, I’d probably know the words to it. At this point I have no desire to add a song, though. 10. Last thing received in the mail? A bunch of magazines. 11. How many different beverages have you had today? Two – water and hot cocoa. 12. Do you ever leave messages on people’s answering machine? Yes, but no one ever listens to them (DEBBIE), they just call and say “I saw you called. What’s up?” With everyone having caller ID, no one even needs voicemail or answering machines anymore. 13. Who did you lose your CONCERT virginity to? Great White and Judas Priest. Unless you count Shaun Cassidy, which I don’t really. 14. Do you draw your name in the sand when you go to the beach? Nope; never have. 15. What’s the most painful dental procedure you’ve had? Having my wisdom teeth out 12 years ago. 16. What is out your back door? In Madison, a yard, a couple of trees, and a fence. In Smallville, a ton of land, a bunch of trees, and a pond. 17. Any plans for Friday night? Working on the Smallville house. It’s like date night! 18. Do you like what the ocean does to your hair? Yeah, I kinda like the windblown look. 19. Have you ever received one of those big tins of 3 different popcorns? Yes, and they’re AWESOME. Haven’t had one in many years, though. 20. Have you ever been to a planetarium? I’m sure I have, but I retain no memory of it. 21. Do you re-use towels after you shower? Yes. We reuse them for about a week. Why not? You’re CLEAN when you step out of the shower and dry off, after all. 22. Some things you are excited about? Cats, books, the new house. 23. What is your favorite flavor of JELLO? I don’t really care for JELLO, but if forced to choose, maybe strawberry. 24. Describe your keychain(s)? Nail clippers, #1 Mom, a light-up Maine keychain, and a metal keychain with an image of Miz Poo lasered onto it. 25. Where do you keep your change? In a gallon-size water jug. Well actually, in a smiley-face mug near my desk, and when that fills up, I dump it into the gallon water jug in the kitchen. 26. When was the last time you spoke in front of a large group of people? I don’t remember. I don’t want to remember, I’m sure my voice got all shaky and I sounded like an idiot. 27. What kind of winter coat do you own? A yellow jacket I got from Land’s End a few years ago. I couldn’t wear it before now because (although it was supposedly big enough for me) it didn’t fit. Now it’s too big, but I’m still going to wear the damn thing. It’s yellow! 28. What was the weather like on your graduation day? I don’t for the life of me remember. 29. Do you sleep with the door to your room open or closed? I start out the night with it cracked open, but the cats run back and forth and knock it all the way open.

* * * Yesterday morning I opened the blinds in my bedroom windows as I do every morning, and then I stood and looked out at the yard. As I always do. Over by the fence I saw something white, and I stared down at it, wondering what it was. I decided that perhaps I was seeing a yellow leaf that had fallen from one of the trees, and it just looked white, and then I shrugged and my mind wandered off and I followed it and thought no more of the white thing. After I’d eaten lunch yesterday, I was settled in at my computer looking at bras (I think I’ve found the perfect bra, but I cannot say for sure until I get more of them and can make sure the one I have that fits perfectly isn’t just a fluke. I will report upon this when I can reliably say that it’s the perfect bra.) when Spot came running inside and stopped behind me and made a funny squeaky noise. I turned, and he had something on the floor in front of him and was chewing on part of it. “Whatcha got there, buddy?” I asked, and he looked up at me with a guilty face. I went over to investigate, and found what appeared to be the bottom part of a McDonald’s biscuit. “Dude, that’s gross,” I said to Spot, who didn’t care and gave me a nasty look as I picked it up and threw it away. “Don’t give me the dirty look,” I said further to Spot. “You shouldn’t have brought it inside if you didn’t want it taken away from you!” And then my mind wandered off and I followed it and thought no more of the fact that there had been a biscuit in our back yard for some reason, though last time I checked, biscuits don’t belong in back yards. But this is Alabama. Possibly they’ve passed a law stating that there must always be a biscuit within two hundred feet of your residence and I just didn’t hear about it. Later, after Fred got home from work and we lay on the bed talking, I thought to tell him about the biscuit. “I bet some fucker walking by our back yard, or driving by our back yard, threw a fucking McDonald’s biscuit into our back yard,” I said, immediately incensed at the thought. “Fucking fuckers!” “Maybe so,” Fred said, unconcerned, his mind clearly wandering. A few minutes later he went outside to play with his new tool (heh. Sounds dirty, doesn’t it?) and I said “Look over by the fence and see if you see anymore signs of a biscuit or wrapper or anything.” A few minutes later he came back inside and said “I think I found the top to that biscuit.” and he threw it away. Now I ask you. You’re wandering or driving along with a biscuit, and you suddenly realize you don’t want it anymore. WHY THE HOLY FUCKING HELL would you toss it in someone’s back yard? Fucking fuckers. * * * Last week I was upstairs, just out of the shower, about to blowdry my hair, when I heard what sounded like Spot downstairs meowing. Now, I know I’ve mentioned before that Spot has a weird, squeaky meow because when he was a bitty kitten and showed up at Fred’s back door he howled and howled and howled, and did damage to his vocal chords, so now all he can do is squeak out a weird, eerie meow. Anyway, the sound I heard last week sounded like that meow, only much louder. I heard it a second time. “Spot!” I yelled, hoping to shut him up. I heard it a third time, and it dawned on me that there was something going on and I should check it out. I walked out of the bedroom to find Sugarbutt and Miz Poo sitting at the top of the stairs staring down toward the first floor, their eyes dark. Another meow. I walked past Sugarbutt and Miz Poo and started walking down the stairs. I heard the sound I’d thought was a meow yet another time, and that’s when I realized it was the sound of a pissed-off cat screaming, and then Tommy went flying by me, and I knew exactly what I was hearing. There’s a black and white cat who lives somewhere in our neighborhood, and he apparently exists solely to irritate our cats. He’ll show up in our back yard, get them all freaked out, and as soon as Fred or I steps into the back yard, he flies over the fence and away from us. Actually, when he first started showing up, I think he wanted to be friends with us, but we didn’t want to encourage him to hang out in our back yard, so we’d shout at him and wave our arms, and he quickly came to realize that we weren’t interested in being friends. Really, when it comes down to it, we’re very protective of our cats, and this black and white cat looks like he could kick some serious ass. So last week when I heard the sound of a pissed-off cat screaming, I knew without a doubt that the black and white cat had come into the house through the cat door. The idea scared me (like I said, I think he could easily kick some And3rson kitty ass) and I screamed and picked up the pace. I FLEW down those stairs, y’all, and ran toward the room we call the library (because it holds nothing but a couple of bookcases and Fred’s grandmother’s secretary), and as I approached the doorway between the hallway and kitchen, Mister Boogers went flying by me, and the black and white cat flew into the living room. “Get out of my house!” I said, like a great big fucking idiot, because how was he supposed to get out of the house? The back door wasn’t open, and I was between him and the cat door, and he was a little scared of me (though not as much as he SHOULD have been). So as he stood as far away from me as he could, I opened the back door and I waved my arms and reiterated, “GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!” And he did. And I didn’t see a single damn one of our cats, who were most likely cowering under various beds and other bits of furniture, for at least two hours afterward. * * * I think I’m going to cross-stitch “There aren’t any extra points for suffering“, frame it, and hang it somewhere where I’ll see it every day. * * * I let Maddy stay out of her room almost all day yesterday, and she survived the experience. In fact, I do believe she started a fight with Tommy at one point and he just good-naturedly swatted at her ’til she went away. She gives Miz Poo a wide berth, though – I guess she’s learned you don’t mess with the cranky old lady of the bunch.

One of my (many) favorite things about Maddy is the dot of gray above her mouth and the dot below. It looks like she’s got a little kewpie-doll mouth.

I love her tangle of whiskers in this shot. More pictures here. * * *

Such a rough life. * * * Previously 2005: 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. 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.]]>

10/11/06

The little black Momma kitty we first saw a month or so ago was back, this time with a friend. Possibly he was the father of her babies – he was definitely a “he”, anyway! He got a little too close, and Momma Kitty let him know she needed her space. I finished mostly with the closet in the spud’s bedroom Friday night – just had the walls to wipe down – and so Saturday when we got to the house I finished completely with the one closet, and then cleaned the cedar closet, which wasn’t too bad, since it was just a couple of shelves and a dirty, messy floor. I scrubbed the floor a few times, and then told Fred I was ready to do whatever he needed me to do. What he suggested I do – since we’d talked about it the night before – was start priming the trim and doors in the spud’s bedroom. I’ve never painted anything before in my life and so we decided that priming was a good place to start. I think I must be the slowest painter on earth, because it took me the entire day to do the baseboards, the trim around the closets, the trim around the windows, and all three doors. (In my defense, those doors are a bitch – they have inset sections where it’s hard to get the paint into the inset part.) I left the inside of the big closet for Sunday, knocked off a little early, and went in to play with Maddy and document the adventures of Spiderman Vs. Malevolent Madeleine while Fred kept working on the guest bedroom. This tractor in the front yard of the house next door (the brother of the woman who sold us the house lives there; the tractor is the one Fred almost bought from the owners, but decided not to) get a LOT of attention. At least four times a day we’ll look out the window to see people – always men, what a shock – looking over the tractor. Hasn’t sold yet, though. Sunday when we got to the house, Fred went into the guest bedroom, and I started priming the inside of the big closet (not the cedar closet – we’re leaving that as a cedar closet, of course). Would you freaking believe it took me ALL DAY to prime the inside of that damn closet, and when we left, I still had a section of wall left to do? I did make the time pass a little faster by talking to my sister on my cell phone, and I said to her “Life would be a whole lot easier for me if I had a cell phone that was Bluetooth compatible and I could wear a headset and talk to you. I could just paint and talk to you all day!” I did manage to balance the cell phone on my shoulder and paint while I talked to her, but yeah – would have been easier with a headset. All weekend long I had been saying “When I get (whatever) done, I’m going to go out, walk the yard, pick up all the bricks and chunks of concrete, and mow the lawn!” Saturday I said “When I’m done priming this room and the closet!”, not having any idea it was going to take all day just to do the room. Sunday I said “When I’m done priming the closet!”, not having any idea it was going to take all day just to do the closet. Monday I said “When I’m done with this section of the closet!”, and so I finally got to go outside and start walking around the yard, picking up bricks, chunks of concrete, and various other pieces of (not literal) crap. Luckily I didn’t have to pick up each piece of concrete or brick or whatever and carry it over to the pile I’d started on the driveway, because Fred and I had to go to Tract0r Supply Saturday (or maybe Sunday? It’s all a blur.) and while we were there, we bought a wagon. We bought it for the size and price, NOT the color. Really! So I’d fill up the wagon – or fill it up enough that it got to be too heavy to pull easily – and then go dump it out on the driveway. I spent about an hour doing that in the side yard, and finally I had to give up. Because the side yard is located under two very large trees, and what are trees doing right about now? Yeah. Dropping leaves. So although I was getting a lot of stuff picked up, I couldn’t see under the leaves and couldn’t be sure I was getting all the rocks and concrete up. Fred came out to tell me to come in and check out the light he’d just finished putting up in the guest bedroom, and I roped him into taking me to the Co-Op to buy a rake. While we were there, we bought a shovel as well, because we thought it would come in handy in the future. Back at the house, he went back inside, and I started raking the side yard. I found a fucking TON of rocks and concrete chunks and tossed them into the bucket I’d found amongst the crap piled by the side door (the one without steps). I also picked up the bigger branches I came across, because I didn’t particularly want to run over them in the riding lawnmower. I don’t know how long it took me to rake the leaves from the side yard into a pile, maybe two hours, but rather than picking the leaves up and bagging them, I took Fred’s suggestion and started running over the leaves with the riding lawnmower. We have a grass catcher on the back of the riding lawnmower, so it would be easier to run over the piles of leaves, then drive out to the back forty and dump them, right? Right. I ended up making six or seven trips to the back forty to dump the grasscatcher bags, and then it got to the point where all I was doing was blowing the chopped-up leaves and crap around the yard. But there was more crap in the yard then I wanted to have there, and so what I ended up doing was raking everything into a pile, then using the shovel to dump it all into the grasscatcher bags, drove the lawnmower back to the pile I’d started, dump everything, then back to the side yard for more raking and shoveling. It was some serious hard fucking labor, folks. You have NO IDEA how good it felt, though, to be shoveling and doing some real physical labor for the first time in I don’t know how long. I think I made about ten more trips back to the pile before Fred came out and told me he was about ready to leave. The pile, with my glove atop it to give you some idea of the size. I think I made another three or four trips after I snapped this picture. The side yard. Yeah, I didn’t get much done in five hours of working my ass off, did I? You’d be more impressed if I’d snapped a “before” picture, I assure you. And keep in mind all those bricks and chunks of crap in the picture up higher in the entry were from this one little piece of yard. I don’t have a clue what we’re going to do with this section of yard. It’s located under trees that block the sun – is there some kind of grass that doesn’t need much sun to grow? Any suggestions will be much welcomed, guys! Happy Robyn on the lawnmower. But there’s no horn on my lawnmower! Fred’s tractor has a horn! How come HE gets a horn and I don’t? What if I need to get someone’s attention while I’m on the lawnmower? The tools of my trade. That rake held up really well for all the stress I put it under, considering it cost less than $6. By the time Fred came out to tell me it was time to go, I was starting to feel a bit lightheaded from the unaccustomed physical labor and definitely ready to go. Monday night while we were laying in bed I started scheming about how I could sneak out to the house and do some work in the yard on Tuesday while Fred was at work. I didn’t – after that long weekend, we both needed a break from working on the house – but I was seriously tempted! Tonight I’m going to do some work in the yard, and then probably start priming the baseboards in Fred’s bedroom, and the closet as well. I’ve about convinced him that we should take the doors off and put them on a dropcloth downstairs, where I can prime and paint them. I think it would be one hell of a lot easier to paint them that way, rather than having to do it while they’re standing. It’d also make it a lot easier to prime and paint around the doorway, for sure. This appears to be the bottom of a cut-off barrel, filled with water. I’m not sure what its purpose was – maybe to water the chickens? In any case, it’s going to go. Fred says this is another Katydid. It’s a lot less creepy than the one from last week, that’s for sure. There are several of these huge mushrooms in the yard between the garage and the street. When I first saw them, I had no idea they were mushrooms, they’re so big. I don’t know why, but I thought they were ostrich eggs someone had tossed in the yard. I’m a dork. The only things turning a lovely shade of red on the property is the TON of poison ivy. Too bad it’s so evil, ’cause it sure is pretty. (And if that’s not poison ivy, someone tell me what it is. I was told it’s poison ivy, and since I couldn’t identify the stuff with a three week course on it, I went with it.) Saw, found in the yard. Hey! We needed a saw like that! Swiss Army knife. I brought it home to clean it up and see what kind of shape it’s in, but now I don’t know where the hell it is. Somewhere a Barbie is going without her camouflage pants, the damn hussy. Yesterday, Miss Maddy Mack weighed in at 1 pound, 4 ounces. She’s starting to eat hard kitten food when it’s mixed up with the soft stuff – and sometimes on its own – and when we were at the Smallville house over the weekend, I looked over to see her drinking water out of the water bowl! Clearly she’s a genius. She’s getting feistier by the day and can pretty much hold her own with the older cats, so I’ve been letting her stay out for longer periods of time. She likes to spend the evenings sleeping on me. She’s such a pretty princess. Also, she can kick Spiderman’s butt! What more can you hope for from a kitten? I adore – ADORE – this picture. She was squeaking at me because I kept holding the mouse just out of reach. More pictures (and there are some good ones!) are hither.

* * *

Sugarbutt loves you. * * * Previously 2005: Did you feel the earth shake too? 2004: No entry. 2003: No entry. 2002: No entry. 2001: No entry. 2000: My breasts are strawberry scented. 1999: I was ambitious today.]]>

10/5/06

A “before” shot of one side of the closet. This top shelf is the last one I did before we left. Took me about 45 minutes. This is before… They appear to have glued old magazine or newspaper articles to random places on the shelves. I didn’t see a date anywhere, but they’re old enough that the phone numbers are listed 5-5555 instead of 555-5555, or even (256) 555-5555. Clean shelf. When I first went into the closet, I thought a quick wipe of the shelves with a wet rag would clean them up nicely, but like I mentioned, there was a ground-in dirt issue. I got out the Mr. Clean Magic Erasers (which I invariably refer to as “magic sponges”, because please. They’re sponges!) and that helped get up the grime, but it was taking forever to get one little section done, and those sponges don’t hold up all that well. I was going through them pretty quickly. I got Fred’s keys and went to Wal-Mart for a second bucket and some of those Scotch Brite scouring pads. By the time I got back from Wal-Mart, it was 7, so we took a break and had snacktime (another apple for me – I love it when apples are in season) on the front porch. Oh, and I should point out, I didn’t spend all the time until snack time scrubbing shelves – I took a break to tape around the trim in the spud’s bedroom so that when Fred’s ready to start painting in there he won’t have to wait. Anyway, after snack time we went back inside and I broke out the scouring pads. They worked a lot faster than the magic erasers had, and so for the next hour and twenty minutes or so, I scrubbed the hell out of the shelves. By the time we left, the top shelves were clean around the entire closet, but I still have most of the middle shelves to do, and all of the bottom shelves. Guess I know what I’ll be doing on Friday, huh?

“So, when they put up the December 1953 calendar, do you suppose they were unaware that December 1953 was going to end, and then the calendar was going to be useless?” “Not very forward-thinking of them, was it?”

The rags used on that closet: ONE MEELLION.

We found these old cans of floor cleaner in the guest bedroom closet. I don’t know how old they are – there’s no date on them – but there’s still liquid in both cans. Not that I’m going to try to use them. God knows what the stuff inside has turned into!

There was apparently a ladybug orgy at some point in the past. They didn’t care that their houses were afire and their children alone, I guess.

Abandoned dirt dawber nest in the guest bedroom chimney access.

Spiderman might protect us from the evil bugs, but does he clean? NO HE DOES NOT. Tonight we’re taking a break from house-cleaning and -painting to sit on our asses at home. Well, except that the lumber yard will be delivering a load of crown molding and corner molding at some point this afternoon, so one or the other of us will have to go out there and meet them. Then tomorrow we’ll be out there after Fred gets off work until late, all weekend, and Monday as well. Hooray for holiday weekends! * * * Maddy continues to grow and be a little feisty, wild thing. She’s learned bouncing, so now she goes bouncebouncebounce across the room, and then she scares herself and fluffs up her fur and runs sideways and is so damn cute I have to pick her up and kiss her, which makes her want to bite me. She’s a bitey little monster.

Warning: cat cannot hold her licker.

If I had mad Photoshopping skillz, I’d totally Photoshop that sproingy thing out of the picture so it looks like Maddy has troll hair. More pictures are here. * * * Yawny pet pics!

Laura says, This is our cat, Norman. He’s a big tomcat that loves to play. Six years ago, Paul picked him up from a guy he works with, his name is Norman, so Paul decided to name him such. He’s the best cat ever. I love how it looks like Norman is yelling “GOT IT!”

Teri says, This is my kitty yawning pic. This is Claire and she is Trouble with a capital T (and that rhymes with C and that stands for Claire!)(yes, I sing to my cats all the time!) Anyway, she thinks she rules the house…ok, she DOES rule the house and our other two cats. You… sing to your cats? We NEVER do that. Ever. Really! Heh.

Miss Pink Ponsonby says, Here is the Back of the Head yawn by Mackie! And also, I know you would like to take up quilting but let me assure you, the amount of eager ‘help’ you would recieve would make it darn near impossible to ever get a quilt made. Witness THIS: (notice what he is crushing beneath his rhythmical feet), and this (my blog archive entry in which I get a LOT of assistance in making an apron) I hadn’t even thought about that. Considering how “helpful” they all are when I’m trying to cross-stitch (sometimes it’s more than they can bear, and suddenly I’ve got a cat in my lap with a length of thread in his mouth because I’ve apparently been teasing them with the back and forth of the thread), I’m sure it would take me six years to get a lap quilt finished!

Maren says, I thought I would send you a yawning picture of my son’s kitten Freddie – he’s 5 months old & is a real cutie. I must have chased him around for weeks trying to get a decent yawning picture of him. He’s feeling pretty puny today as he spent part of the morning at the vet’s with vomiting & diarrhea. Turns out he has roundworm! UGH! Poor Freddie. Worms are the worst!

We’ve seen Amy‘s Zoe before, but Zoe was nice enough to pose for another yawny pic! Such a thoughtful girl, that Zoe.

Brenda says, My Yenta is a talker, been talking since the day we met her and she and I have running conversations all the time. When we first brought her home from the shelter, and realized just what a talker she is, I told me hunny we needed to come up with a name for someone who talks all the time. He replied ‘oh, a yenta’ which is Yiddish for a female gossip. Well, that was just perfect. She’s my little Yenta. The smaller picture shows her in mid-speech, not yawning. The second pic shows her in her favorite spot on top of my old monitor. She thoroughly disapproves of my new flat panel monitor, especially after leaping onto it and discovering she had no purchase. Was scary and hilarious at the same time!! I LOVE that monitor picture – I could totally see Sugarbutt doing something like that!

Jupe says, This is my mom’s cat, Pasha. Do you think he has enough toys? He was also found at about 3-4 weeks old and bottle fed before my mom adopted him. He is now almost 20 pounds. One year he absconded with a Christmas ham almost as big as he was (thankfully still wrapped), and had it halfway up the stairs before he was stopped. There’s no such thing as enough toys for a cat! I can totally see Tommy stealing a ham and dragging it up the stairs! Laura, Teri, Miss Pink, Maren, Amy, Brenda and Jupe, thank you for sharing your cat pictures with me! Thanks to everyone who’s shared their cat and dog pictures with me. That’s it for this go-round – I’ve posted all the pictures I received; let me know if you sent me one and I didn’t post it – maybe we’ll do it again in a few months! * * * Previously 2005: And then the last straw came along and broke the fat woman’s back. 2004: Because he’s a skinny bastard. 2003: No entry. 2002: No entry. 2001: Day One. 2000: So obviously I don’t know nothing’ ’bout picking out no paint.]]>

10/4/06

* * * People, I just don’t get it. I don’t get how the previous owners of our new house lived in it like that. Because seriously, the paint job makes my teeth hurt. There’s a spot in the yellow bathroom where they apparently needed to do some touch-up painting, and what color paint did they use to touch up the yellow bathroom? Why, orange. OBVIOUSLY. It was my hypothesis that the previous owners and their five (!) kids moved into the house and thought they’d be there for years, and that they could take their time to get the house looking the way they wanted. Then her mother went into a nursing home and they wanted to be closer to her, so they had to give the house a lick and a promise and hoped to sell it to people who could recognize the lovely underlying bones of the house. Like us. If I could point to one single room where the paint job was anything better than slapdash, I might be able to stand behind my hypothesis. However, I cannot say “The master bedroom (or the living room or the computer room or ANY room) is well-painted and the trim is neatly painted. Obviously they finished off this room and then realized they were going to have to move.”, because there ARE no rooms like that. And it isn’t like the rooms were carefully painted and it’s just the result of wear and tear that they look like they do now. On the ceiling in at least one of the rooms, the ceiling is painted pretty well, but they painted up TO the light fixture, and then there’s this whole area around the light fixture that is unpainted. Then there’s the dirt. See, I really like the previous owners, and they seem like nice people, but the fact that I spent an hour and a half cleaning a CLOSET last night (scrubbing the floor twice to get it somewhat clean, the walls, the ceiling, the shelves) makes me wonder what was going on. He seems to work long hours and she’s a stay-at-home mom with five kids (the oldest three being college aged) and I’m sure her life is a busy one, so did she think the kids were keeping their rooms and closets clean, but they were just shoving everything in the closet and when it was time to move it was just like “Oh good lord, just pack everything up and we’ll let the new owners worry about cleaning the closet!”? I don’t know. But I must say, it’s more gratifying to clean a filthy closet than a mostly-clean one, because you can see a huge difference when you’re done. I was originally going to help Fred put a second coat of primer on the walls in the guest bedroom, but Fred ended up determining that one coat was enough, so after we went and registered my car, we went to Lowe’s and decided on a paint color, and when we got to the house Fred carried everything upstairs and I went upstairs to look and get my painting mojo going, but then I opened the closet and LORD. “Oh, NOTHING’S happening in this closet ’til I clean!” I declared. And like I said, I spent the next hour and a half cleaning the closet, taking down nails and screws, and scrubbing the floor, twice. (And I still feel like it could use a third scrubbing.) Once the closet was done, I taped around the baseboards and doorways so Fred could do around the trim without painting it blue (a lovely smokey blue is what we decided on for the guest bedroom, by the way), and then we took a break and sat on the front porch in the dark and had a snack (I had an apple, and it was good) and we watched the cars go by. So then he went upstairs and painted around the trim and I took the blinds and went into the other room and cleaned each and every slat of the blinds, and then I scrubbed the baseboards around what will be the spud’s bedroom, which took us past eight o’clock, so we headed for home. Tonight, I’m cleaning the closets in what will be the spud’s bedroom (there are two!), which are even worse than the closet last night (and tonight I’m taking the camera with me to show you!), and then I have to tape around the baseboards and doorways so Fred can begin with the ~~primering~~ priming of the spud’s bedroom. I feel like we’re making really good progress. Originally Fred was going to primer the entire house before he started painting, but now he’s thinking he’ll completely finish out one room at a time, instead. I can’t wait to show you pictures of the guest bedroom, once it’s finished!

* * * Because when I have the radio going, it’s usually country music, I generally hear Paul Harvey at least once a day. I like Paul Harvey enough, I suppose, I usually hear at least one interesting tidbit of news each time I listen to him. But he annoys me a little, too. For one, he likes to say “Half a hundred” instead of “fifty.” Why? WHY, Paul Harvey? “Fifty” is so much more timesaving than “half a hundred” and so much less ANNOYING, too, why be pretentious? WHY? And the other thing he does that invariably annoys me enough so that if I realize it’s coming I’ll turn the radio off or to another channel, is the bit at the end, where he tells a story that is – at the most – mildly humorous. Then he signs off the broadcast by saying “Good day!”, but he says it with this sound to his voice like he is THIS CLOSE to busting out laughing, because the story he told? SO FUNNY. SO SO SO FUNNY. Paul Harvey can barely contain his hysterical laughter at such a funny story, but because he is a PROFESSIONAL, he will contain himself, though you should know that the instant he signs off the air, he will fall over backwards and hold onto his gut and he will let forth gales of laughter. This reminds me of the people online who use LOL as a punctuation mark. Now, I’m not a fan of LOL, but I do realize that it’s gone from meaning “I am sitting here laughing out loud so hard I’m PEEING MY PANTS, JANE!” to “I think that is kind of funny and it made me smile, possibly even laugh quietly to myself, so here is notification of that fact.” At least, that’s how it SHOULD be used. But then there are people who just randomly LOL out of nowhere, for no reason. Like it’s a punctuation mark. “Dear Robyn – Hi, how are you? LOL! I was just thinking that I should email you and tell you I love cats, too. LOL I live in California, and it’s pretty nice, weather-wise, lately. LOL I was wondering, could you tell me when you had gastric bypass surgery? I can’t seem to find the exact date in your archives. LOL Sincerely, Suzie Q.*” Don’t get me started on ROFL. Anyway. What was I saying? Whatever. Paul Harvey? Annoying but informative. LOL? Unnecessary and annoying. LOVEYOUBYE! *Fictional email, totally. But you get the idea. LOL!** **I couldn’t resist. * * * All is well in Maddy-ville. She’s getting feistier and more playful by the day. She can go up and down stairs (though that last step down makes her a little leery, since she’s going from carpeted step to wooden floor) and can climb up onto the couch. The big cats are starting to play with her, and since everywhere she goes, she goes at a run, Mister Boogers likes to chase her around like she’s a toy. Or prey, one or the other.

Bitey McBiterson strikes again. More pictures here. * * *

Caren says, Since you are crossing over (to the dog side) you have to see my dog Abby. She is yawning in the picture but I swear it looks like she is screaming “I can’t take this crazy place any longer”. She does! Or like she’s screaming “Make the lambs stop screaming…” Heh!

Bev says, This is my kitten, Stanley. My hubby found him standing in the middle of a highway. He’s ADORABLE!! This is pretty much my favorite picture of him. EXCELLENT picture! Don’t you love it when all the stars align and you happen to have your camera handy and ready to go and get a picture like this?

Chris says, This is my 13 year old cat named Katie. Katie is a tiny little thing but she’s got no less moxie than the biggest cat in the world. The poor thing was rescued by my husband when she was about 4 weeks old and weighed less than a pound, and we brought her in to a home with two other dogs. She held her own and is still doesn’t take any shit off of them now. She does love to snuggle with them and we swear she laughs at their antics, but don’t tell her I told you that. Anyway, I think she’s actually meowing here, but we like to think she’s laughing at another thing those damn dogs did. It looks like a yawn right?

Andria says, You said you liked pictures of cats with their tongues out, so I thought I’d send you my favorite picture of my cat Chile, from when she was a kitten. Chile looks a LOT like Tommy did when he was a wee one, before he grew into the behemoth he is today. I love it when cats are at the rumpled stage before they grow out of their kitten-ness.

t0rie says, Ever since your request for yawning kitty pics I’ve been trying to get a picture of our cat, Inca, yawning. Sneaky thing yawns all the time, but not in front of the camera. Finally caught one, but it’s not the greatest shot. (Hey – it’s a camera phone, whaddya expect!) But here you go. And had to attach a couple other Cute Kitty Pics of Inca, who is our rescue Burmilla from Mallorca. (Long story, but involved a long weekend in Mallorca then flying back with extra hand luggage of her at my feet on the plane!) What gorgeous green eyes! She reminds me a little of Fred’s old cat Poot, for some reason. Maybe the eyes! Thank you Caren, Bev, Chris, Andria, and t0rie, for sharing your pictures! * * *

Not as innocent as he looks. * * * Previously 2005: Annnnnnnnd that’s just a little glimpse into the dorkiness that is my life. 2004: ARRRGH. 2003: No entry. 2002: Wow. Apparently I’ve been doing the pet store thing for three years now. 2001: Day Zero. 2000: I’m back!]]>

10/3/06

here.

* * * Things I forgot to mention yesterday: 1. The garage at the Smallville house is very much open to the elements. I was in the upstairs of the garage on Saturday sweeping up all the crap, and I realized that you could see directly outside from the second floor. No wonder there are so many dirt dawber and yellowjacket nests. We’re going to have to do something about that if we’re turning part of the second floor of the garage into a foster kitten room, since exposed to the elements = too hot in summer, too cold in winter, and a window air conditioner/ heater won’t help all that much. I actually tried to convince Fred that we should turn half of the front room (which will be half living room, half sitting area/ reading room) into a foster kitten room, just put up a wall and door, but he wouldn’t go for it. 2. We stopped at a little country store less than half a mile from the new house on Sunday. They have a little deli section at the back of the store, and we’d brought bread and condiments with us, and bought some deli ham and cheese at the store, so we could make ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch. The cheese was DIVINE. As I was eating one of the extra slices of cheese, I said to Fred, “I don’t guess this is 2% cheddar, huh?” “I doubt it,” he said. No wonder it was so damn good! 3. As we were eating lunch on Sunday and watching the traffic go by, Fred said that he kind of wished the house was a little further from the road. “We could just tear the house down and build a new one at the very back of the back forty. And then we could have a long driveway with huge trees lining the driveway, like the road in Forrest Gump!” Fred said, “Yeah, except the trees wouldn’t get that big in our lifetime!” He’s always a party pooper. 4. I tried to convince Fred that we should put a pool in the middle of the back forty, and put a screened-in gazebo next to it. It would be quiet and peaceful, and all we’d hear would be the sounds of the crickets singing, birds chirping, and the gentle splash of the tequila as it hit my glass. (Or not – one of the sucky things about being diagnosed with a liver disease is that you can’t drink much because it taxes your liver. This is heartbreaking to me because I am SUCH a big drinker.) Fred pointed out that probably after the first few months of having to trek back to the middle of the back forty to use the pool, we’d get tired of it and never go back there again. This is true – but Fred’s still a party pooper. * * * We went to Lowe’s and bought a refrigerator last night. The space where the refrigerator will be going is kind of small, so our choices were limited. We found one that would fit perfectly, and then it was just a matter of choosing the color – black, white, or bisque. I kind of wanted the black one, because our white refrigerator gets so grimy, especially on the handles, but I thought a black refrigerator would look odd in the kitchen, so we opted for the white. There was a stainless steel one that I REALLY liked, but it would have stuck out too far. Also, it was way more expensive than the one we got, so there you go. They’re going to call when it arrives at Lowe’s to set up delivery. I hope it’s soon, because lugging the cooler back and forth is getting to be a bit of a pain in the ass. We stopped by the house so Fred could try to get the rollbar on the tractor put down (which he did) and I could drop off the clean cleaning rags. Neither of the bird feeders I hung up on Sunday had been touched at all; I guess it’ll take a few days before the birds decide to start checking out the feeders. The dirt dawber was still hanging out in the laundry room. If I’d had something to smack at him with from a distance, I would have killed him, but I didn’t (need to get a fly swatter), so he’s still there. Tonight, we’re heading out there as soon as Fred gets home. We’re going to finish primer-ing the guest bedroom, hopefully, and perhaps start on the spud’s bedroom. I’ve never painted a damn thing before; hopefully I won’t fuck it up too badly. * * * Maddy is officially off the bottle! She hasn’t had any formula in two days, and she’s still using the litterbox plenty and is bouncing around with as much energy as ever – if not a little more. She and Sugarbutt actually PLAYED this morning, and I got a little movie of it, but it’ll be a few days before I get around to putting the movie up for y’all to see. This morning Maddy weighed in at 1 pound, 3 ounces (or thereabouts – it’s hard to get an exact weight on her at this point, she’s so wiggly and squirmy), which means that she’s almost doubled in weight (and probably size as well!) since we got her. As of Thursday, she’ll be guesstimated to be 6 weeks old, and I’ll be giving her her first vaccination. They grow so fast, don’t they?

Maddy does her rabid bat impression.

Sleeping. The only time she’s still. More pictures over here. * * * Reader yawny pet pics:

Ariel says, I couldn’t resist contributing to your yawny pet pics section and the chance to give my kitty her 15 minutes of fame. 😉 This is Neko, who is about 10 years old and has been my companion since she was maybe 6 months old. She’s the sweetest cat on the planet, but these pics crack me up because they make her look so decidedly evil. Awww, she doesn’t look evil. She looks like she’s giggling! Okay, maybe in an evil way…

Melissa says, Kitty pictures, my favorite! I’ve included a few of my little boy, Mr. Puss (or Stinky as we so lovingly refer to him) … he’s still a baby and not too cooperative with getting the yawn pictures caught on file, but I’m working on it! I love the way Mr. Puss looks like he’s smiling in the top picture! What gorgeous eyes he has.

Hey mom, is it hockey season yet??!

Psycho kitty with curved fangs

She thinks you’re REALLY funny!

I mean REALLLLLLY funny!

She doesn’t like stupid people… Isis (the top two pictures) and Murron (the bottom three) belong to Lisa. I LOVE that second picture of Murron – she looks like a little vampire kitty.

Alice belongs to Turtlemama, who says, This is just one of our three cats. This is Alice, whom we call Pretty Miss Alice or “Ow! Don’t fucking bite me!” Sometimes it’s both, “Hey Pretty Miss Alice! OW! DON’T FUCKING BITE ME!”. She likes to bite for no good reason…she’s always done it, she’s her own cat and no one can make her change. yeah. Anyway, it’s not yawning, but they are good ‘Kitty sticky tonguey outie’ pictures! Is it just me, or in that first picture does Alice look like she’s thinking “You want a piece of me? ‘Cause I will MESS YOU UP!”?

Lisa says, Here’s my yawning Smudgie, tending bar! Looks like Smudgie’s been partaking of the bar a little, too! Thanks for sharing your cat pics, Ariel, Melissa, Lisa, Turtlemama, and Lisa! * * * Previously 2005: If I hadn’ta covered my head with my hands, I might be DEAD right now! 2004: No entry. 2003: “No,” Fred said. “You’re the muffinhead. DID SHE STAND OVER YOU AND MAKE YOU INSTALL IT??” 2002: Spanky is the Lance Bass of our family. 2001: I guess if tomorrow’s Day Zero and Friday is Day One, that makes today Day Negative One. 2000: No entry.]]>

10/2/06

logo, this one created by the wonderful Carol! Thanks, Carol! And speaking of logos, I could use a Thanksgiving/ Turkey themed logo for next month, if anyone’s feeling creative.

* * * What I love the most about living in the country (though we’re not living there yet, and it’s not like middle-of-nowhere country) is the complete and utter randomness. I walked through the back yard yesterday, and I’d be walking along and then it would be like “Oh, look. A brick. Right there in the middle of nowhere, for no apparent reason. A brick.” Or a chunk of cement, or a golf ball – apparently the owner’s kids liked to hit golf balls into the back forty (why is it, I ask you, that it’s spelled “forty” and not “fourty”? That just doesn’t seem right, and every time I need to type it, I have to debate with myself the correct spelling) and they’re all over the place. Here are some pictures of randomness for you.

Random pile of bricks in the yard. What were they going to use them for? I don’t know. Maybe to finish off the driveway? Maybe to edge a flower garden? Make a walking path? It’s a mystery!

Frying pan in the front flower bed.

“Maaaa! What should I do with the roll of rusty wire fence and the cinder block?” “Put it by the magnolia tree of course!”

“I put a random brick by the wood pile, Ma.” “Perfect, son!”

Set of wheels by the wood pile. Maybe they were on the wood pile wagon and just fell off?

Not so random – they put these bricks here to step on when it rained very hard and the yard got a little swampy. We’re going to replace them with stepping stones at some point. * * * So, Friday afternoon Fred got home from work ready to head for the new house, only to find that I wasn’t up for a trip to the new house. Apparently something I’d eaten had disagreed with me, and I was laying on the couch, sleepy and nauseous and gassy (oh my!). Since the tractor was being delivered at 5 and the roof guy was supposed to meet him at the house at 4:30, he headed out there, and I said I’d come out if I started feeling better, knowing that probably wasn’t going to happen. Surprisingly enough when he called to check on me a few minutes before 5, I was feeling a great deal better, so I jumped into my brand-spanking-new car and headed out to the house. I arrived just as the tractor guy and his wife were getting there, so I went into the house to drop off a few things (a cooler of ice and some bottled water), looked around a little, did a “Ours! All ours!” dance, and went back out to watch the tractor guy instruct Fred in the finer points of tractoring. I made awkward small talk with the tractor guy’s wife (she said she’s more of a town girl than a country girl; I pointed out that we’re only about five minutes from one city large enough to support a Wal-Mart, Lowe’s and a thousand other stores, and about ten minutes from another, larger, city so we weren’t missing out on too many conveniences), and then the tractor guy and his wife headed out. It was really too dark for Fred to do anything with the tractor, so he spent about 45 minutes putting the various tractor implements away, put the tractor away, and we headed out for dinner. There’s a small restaurant not more than half a mile from the new house that we decided to try out. It ended up being REALLY good food and very inexpensive, so we’ll definitely be going back there. Saturday morning we were up and out of the house a little after 9 (with Maddy in a carrier at my feet – we were planning to be at the house all day, and I didn’t want to have to drive back to Madison to feed her and check on her. Luckily she’s portable, so I loaded her and her toys and litter box and food up and took her with us.). We’d intended to be at the house as soon as possible, but we needed to find a certain gas station that has diesel fuel, and GoogleMaps showed us the general direction of where it was located, but we couldn’t seem to find it and Fred’s car was running low on gas, so we turned around and went to the gas station by our house. Fred gassed up, got something to eat and a few sodas, and asked for directions to the place that sells diesel. Apparently if we’d kept going for another few hundred yards, we would have found the place. So Fred filled up the gas cans and we headed to the house. We unloaded everything into the house, and Fred went out to hook up the mower to the tractor, and I put Maddy in what will be Fred’s bedroom, shut the door, and started cleaning the upstairs bathroom. Seriously, I thought it might take me an hour, hour and a half, tops, to clean the bathroom. It took me three hours. THREE HOURS. Three hours and a ton of cleaning rags and half a bottle of Pine-Sol and toilet bowl cleaner and shower cleaner. I scrubbed every inch of that bathroom, and by the time I was done you could have eaten off any surface in that bathroom. When Fred came in to tell me something or see what I was doing, I said “I would really, really, REALLY like to pull down that plastic stuff around the bathtub and put up tile.” He looked at me as though I were brain damaged. “Well, yeah,” he said. “I thought we’d decided we were going to do that.” “Before we move in, though,” I said. “Yeah, of course.” Whew! The plastic stuff around the bathtub is just to protect the wall, and it’s pretty ugly. Not only ugly, but there was soap scum an inch thick on it. So basically I spent a lot of time scrubbing down a plastic wall that we’re going to be ripping down before we’ll have a chance to use the shower, anyway. Urgh. Also, the mildew was so bad that it’s gotten under the grout around the tub and as much scrubbing and digging as I did, I couldn’t get the damn stuff out. DAMNIT. The upstairs bathroom, after:

This cubbyhole, I think, would be perfect for a linen closet. I’d love to put a wall up here and build a linen closet from the hallway (on the other side of that right-side wall), but I’m sure I’m the only one who feels that way, and also it’s probably beyond our beginner’s skillz at this point. Once I was done with the bathroom (which will be the spud’s/ guest bathroom, by the way), Fred and I took a break and had lunch. I went out and admired the back forty, which he’d spent a couple of hours mowing. It had been bushhogged last week, but the idea at this point is to keep it mowed every couple of weeks so we won’t need to have it bushhogged again. When lunch was over, I headed back inside to feed Maddy and once she was done eating and I’d played with her for a little while, I put her back in the guest bedroom and went downstairs to start on the downstairs bathroom. And there went another two hours of my day. The master bathroom was, if possible, even dirtier than the upstairs bathroom, and I ended up having to scrub the shower down three times (yes, even the plastic walls, which we’ll be replacing with tile), and the outside of the tub was pretty bad, too. But like the upstairs bathroom, you can now eat off any surface in the bathroom without fear.

I took a break for a while when I was done with the master bathroom, went upstairs to see what Fred was doing (puttying holes in the guest bedroom) and told him I was ready to try driving the tractor. I went out toward the back forty so he could disconnect the mower from the tractor, and waited for him to bring the tractor to me.

And then I drove the tractor! It was a little confusing at first, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly, and drove all over the back forty while Fred watched and snapped some pictures.

I turned the tractor back over to Fred – who was visibly itching to get back behind the driver’s seat – and went back inside to clean the last bathroom. The third bathroom – it’s just a half bath – off the computer room took me maybe half an hour to clean, since there’s not much to it. I thought about starting to clean the kitchen, but it was starting to get late, I was running out of cleaning rags (of the two 24-packs of rags I’d bought at Lowe’s last week, I’d used all but three or four on the bathrooms), and I just didn’t wanna clean anymore that day. So I went out and watched Fred clear up some of the brush around one of the trees in the back yard, snapped a few pictures, and went out on the front porch to sit in a rocker and read.

After I got bored with reading and rocking, I went upstairs and hung out with Maddy until Fred was ready to go. I packed her up in her carrier, we grabbed a bunch of stuff we needed to take home with us (trash, dirty cleaning rags that needed to be washed), and loaded up the car and headed for home. We unloaded the car at home, I threw the rags into the washer, put Maddy in her room, and then we headed out to eat dinner. We decided to try a “country cooking” restaurant not far from home, and while the food was very very good, there was only one waitress working, so we had to wait forever for our food. Not the waitress’s fault (we left a good tip; I ALWAYS leave a good tip. The one thing about working as a waitress for my very first job is that I will, for the rest of my life, leave good tips.), but I don’t know that we’re going to go back there real soon. Saturday evening we watched TV and were planning to stay up until 11 so we could make sure the spud got home okay, but I whined and bitched about how tired I was, so we went to bed and talked for a while, then said goodnight, and Fred went to wait for the spud and I went to sleep. I fell asleep pretty quickly, too – apparently the spud rolled in about ten minutes before 11 (which is almost unheard of – she tends to push it up to the last minute) and I didn’t even hear the garage door go up. Sunday morning I’d intended to sleep in a little, but I woke up a little after 7 and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I got up and did all my morning stuff (clean the litter box, do laundry, open the door to Maddy’s room and greet her, encourage her to follow me downstairs), then took a shower and was actually ready to go a little after 8. We left the house at about 9, Maddy in tow, and made a few stops. We stopped at Lowe’s for work gloves for me, Fred’s new favorite store for a couple of bird feeders (me), a hat (Fred), and some bird seed (the birds, obviously. DUH.). We got to the house, unloaded, and Fred went out and worked on getting the post-hole digger attached to the tractor, while I got Maddy settled and started cleaning the kitchen.

!!!!!! May I just say “OY”? That kitchen, I looked at it, and I swear to god, it looked perfectly clean, but once I started cleaning, it became apparent that it was going to be a whole-day thing. And it was. I spent all day cleaning out cupboards (things I found while cleaning out the cupboards: a “Sno-Motion” snow-cone machine, Magic Chef dehydrator, pizza (?) pans, a framed gardenia picture, a corn cutter & creamer, about a thousand straight pins, and a key to a GM vehicle), wiping down the front of the cupboards, crawling around on my hands and knees and cleaning the bottom cupboards (and wiping those down as well), pulling out the stove and cleaning behind it, and the side of the stove (nas-TAY), and at the very end, I Swiffered the floor four times before getting down on my hands and knees with a soapy bucket of hot water, a thousand cleaning rags, and scrubbed the entire floor twice. (Fred helpfully said “You didn’t really need to clean the floor, since we’re having them redone!” HE JUST DOESN’T GET IT. HMPH.) People, if you love me, you will go pull out your stove and clean behind it, and clean the side of the stove. Because that shit apparently gets quite nasty (who knew?!). Just call it your good deed for the day. Also, at one point I had to stop cleaning and go outside to help Fred dig a hole for the mailbox post. It’s a two-person job I guess, at least if you need to dig a hole straight down on a hilly area. Fred actually held the auger while I ran it (don’t ask me how I ran it; I just followed the directions he yelled at me). I noted that Fred likes to stand FAR too close to the tractor while I’m behind the wheel, making me want to yell “The tractor is a wild beast, mate! I canna control it! STAND BACK!” (I imagine yelling that in a Scottish accent, for some reason) When I accidentally (or should I say “accidentally”) run Fred over with the tractor next weekend because he’s standing too close, you can consider that above paragraph foreshadowing.

The second pass with the Swiffer. Just as dirty as the first.

Side of the stove. Ugh. I’m pretty sure it could have been much, much worse, though.

Clean kitchen.

More clean kitchen. When the kitchen was done, I told Fred (who was upstairs painting the guest bedroom with primer) not to walk across the kitchen. He was ready to take a break, so we met on the front porch and rocked for a little while. He said he was going to try to get the guest bedroom walls completely painted with primer before we left, so I told him I was going to get the bird feeders filled and hung up and then read for a little while. (I’m such a slacker compared to him!) I realized, as I wandered around the back yard looking for a place to hang the bird feeders, that I needed (a) a stepladder, because there were no low branches to hang the bird feeders from and (b) chains to hang the bird feeders on, because all the branches were very thick. I ended up hanging one bird feeder from the post that holds the laundry lines and the other on a stump of a branch sticking out of the side of the cedar tree. I sat and watched for a few minutes, but no birds showed any interest, so I went off to the front porch to watch traffic and read.

The back forty, after Fred cut it.

The black Momma cat we first saw about a month ago was back Friday night. I gave her food and water and she ate some, but didn’t appear to be starving. I’m afraid she might be pregnant again, because she’s not nearly as skinny as she was. Then again, maybe her kittens are weaned, and she’s just gained back some of the weight she’s lost. Anyway – does she look like a bat in this picture, or what?

The mailbox (the previous owners didn’t have a mailbox; they used a PO Box instead).

Magnolia tree.

Daddy longlegs on the door Saturday.

Daddy longlegs on the back of the house Sunday (probably not the same one, unless he got into a fight at some point between the two pictures and lost a few legs).

I didn’t know what this was, so asked Fred. He thinks it’s a Katydid. It’s kind of scary looking, if you ask me.

Home sweet home.

Front yard.

Probably wishes he had a less slackery wife.

I don’t know if I like these curtains or not. I just can’t decide!

Does leaving out cat food and water for the neighborhood cats (and possums, most likely) make me a crazy cat lady?

The cement slab where the dog run was. We were talking about putting a gazebo on it, and then we were talking about putting a hot tub on it, but I don’t know that we’d use a hot tub all that much, so we’re talking about putting a deck over it. We haven’t decided, though.

Cedar tree avec bird feeder. Too bad this tree’s coming down; I’m starting to like it more and more.

Yes, the laundry lines are going to need to be restrung.

Dirt Dauber? Wasp? I don’t know. Alls I know is that they SCARE me with their buzzing and their flying around.

Side doors leading to the computer room. I think we’re just going to put some simple steps there, unless I can talk Fred into a small deck. Today, muscles all over my body are hurting. My quads and hamstrings from balancing on one foot on the ladder in the kitchen for so long (I needed the ladder to get to the top shelves), my back from crawling around on the floor scrubbing, but what hurts most of all is my right forearm. My right arm is my scrubbin’ arm, and god knows I did a LOT of scrubbin’ this weekend! We’re not going out to the house tonight, because Fred needs to mow the lawn here, and then we’re going to Lowe’s to buy a refrigerator for the new house. The one we have here is too big and won’t fit in the space (we’re going to keep it and put it in the laundry room when we move, though), and we really need to have someplace to put our food while we’re working on the house for the next several months, so it’s off to Lowe’s we go. * * * First of all, I made a movie of Maddy. This movie illustrates why Fred calls Maddy “Miss Squeaks.” YouTube link. Secondly, Maddy is pretty much off the formula at this point and eating nothin’ but soft cat food. I’m such an enabler, though – ever since she started eating the soft cat food, she’d eat a little and then squeak at me, and I’d push the pile of cat food up into a little mountain so she could eat it more easily, and I’d say “Look, Maddy! Meat mountain! Meat mountain!” and tap on the plate, and she’d go over and eat some more. She was hungry this morning, though, and I was distracted, so when she squeaked at me I didn’t respond quickly enough, and know what she did? Did she sit there and starve? Why, no. She went over and ate the cat food that was NOT in a meat mountain shape. Apparently she’s able to eat non-mountainous cat food, she just wanted to put me through my paces. In a few more days I’ll start introducing her to dry cat food and water and see how that goes.

“What’s brown and sticky? Give up? A STICK! Bahahahahaha! Heeheehee! Hahahaha! Oh, boy, that joke ALWAYS gets me! Hee! Hee! Heh. Hmm.”

She’s gotten very talkative lately.

Princess Maddy. More pictures hither. * * * Reader yawny pet pics!

This is Gus, who belongs to Fran. Fran says, This is Gus, a Maine Coon Cat who is exiled in California. Sometimes he is too tired to yawn and meow separately so he combines it in a “meow-yawn” He has a very exhausting life. A me-yawn! Heh. Miz Poo does that, too, and it never fails to crack us up.

Sarabeth says, I’ve tried to catch my cat yawning. I’ve followed her around, watched her closely, camera nearby for a few days now and I’ve come to one conclusion. Cordie doesn’t yawn. She doesn’t yawn because SHE NEVER SLEEPS. She may close her eyes from time to time, but she’s really just plotting on how to shred and destroy something a little later on. These pictures should give you an idea. She may look innocent in the first one, but I had just caught her sinking her claws into that roll of paper towels that she had STOLEN FROM THE KITCHEN. The second picture shows her true nature. Why do cats love destroying paper towels? WHY? Probably because it makes such a mess, the little brats.

Jennifer says, Chloe is the yawning kitty, Izzy is the one staring at her like she’s sprouted two heads. Chloe’s 4 years old, and Izzy’s just a little over a year now. They get along, when Izzy isn’t trying to copy everything Chloe does. I love how Chloe’s white patch looks almost like it’s heart-shaped.

Alicia says, Here’s a couple pictures of Max! He doesn’t have quite the same piercing stare as Mister Boogers, but I think they share the same sassy attitude. Heh – I think you mean Max doesn’t look as EVIL as Mister Boogers! In that second picture, the look Max is giving you as he lays in the sink? I’ve seen that exact same expression on Tommy’s face a million times. I can’t decide whether it means “I love you” or “Come over here and let me rip your throat out while I purr madly.” I keep my distance, just in case.

Megan says, Here is my cat Jimmy, yawning and showing us his broken fang. We took Jimmy in a year ago on September 22nd. He was a stray that we became fond of and thought we’d give a home. I don’t believe I’ve mentioned how much I adore orange kitties, have I? I think the broken fang gives him a rakish air! Thank you to Fran, Sarabeth, Jennifer, Alicia, and Megan for sharing your pictures! * * * Previously 2005: No entry. 2004: No entry. 2003: She seems a little wishy-washy about it. I think she might secretly like the book. 2002: (He always calls when I’m in the shower or eating. I think he has a hidden camera somewhere in hopes of catching me with my non-existent luvah-on-the-side Juan.) 2001: No entry. 2000: No entry.]]>

9/29/06

Proud owners of a second home – at least for the next several months. I can’t wait to get started!!!

* * * Things that have made me laugh out loud lately:

Fred did both of these, but the one that really made me laugh out loud was this one, which he posted over on his site:

All of the three above are in the vein of this, in case you’re wondering.

Sent to me by reader Penny. I opened the picture and looked at it, and literally laughed out loud. * * * A few days ago Fred and I went to the water and sewer authority to have the water/ sewer service at the new house turned over to our names as of… why, today, as a matter of fact. Anyway, there was a form I had to fill out with our names and social security numbers, and all that good stuff. One of the questions was “List ALL individuals who will be residing at this address”, and I was equally torn between writing down “Fred And3rson, Robyn And3rson, Danielle HerLastName, Spot J. Buhhhdy, Spanky Q. Annoying, Miz Pootie McPooterson, Stanley J. Boogerstein, Sugar Buttocks, and Thomas Cullen the Third, along with temporary resident Miss Maddy Mack (Mack! Mack!)”, and just writing down “That is none of your goddamn business, you fuckers, as long as the water and sewer bill gets paid, you just don’t worry your PRETTY LITTLE HEAD about who-all is beneath MY ROOF. GODDAMN GOVERNMENT.” In the end, I just opted to put Fred’s, mine, and the spud’s names down. No need to send out the announcement that we’re freaks just yet, I suppose. * * * I’m seriously considering changing my name. Not my first name (I am nothing if not a “Robyn”, after being “Robyn” for 38 years) or my last name (since I share it with Fred and about 16 million other And3rsons), but my middle name. I don’t like my middle name – Leslie – and have never really liked it. Which is not meant to insult any Leslies out there – it’s a perfectly nice name, but I just don’t like it as MY name, you know? What I’ve been thinking of changing my name to is Robyn [My Maiden Name] And3rson. Obviously I’m not going to tell y’all what my maiden name is, but I like the ring of having my maiden name as my middle name. So how does one go about changing their name, someone tell me. Do I need to go to court and swear to the judge that I’m not trying to dodge a crime or bill collectors, or is it just a matter of changing my name with social security? I know someone out there knows the answer to this. Tell me! * * * Last week, I started having some slight abdominal pain, right around my belly button. I thought perhaps I’d overdone it in the previous few days, so I took it easy for a few days, and the abdominal pain never really got better, so I started to worry. It wasn’t hurting all the time, or all that badly, but of course my immediate thought was that I’d been lifting too much too soon, and popped a hernia. I waited for a few more days, hoping it would go the hell away (sometimes that works, you know. Just wait and it goes away. Like magic! Or like there was never anything wrong…), but Tuesday was the worst day yet and so I resolved to call and make an appointment with my primary care physician the next morning. I called promptly at 8:00 when the office opened, and got lucky because there was a 9:30 cancellation. I took that, and a few minutes after 9:00 I headed for the doctor’s office. After waiting for an hour (thank GOD I brought my book), I finally got to see the doctor, and she felt the area and found the part where it really hurt the most, directly above my belly button. “Please tell me it’s not a hernia,” I said. “I don’t think it’s a hernia,” she said. “But I need to get some x-rays and bloodwork.” She asked several times if I was having any urinary problems, I guess thinking that it might be a urinary tract infection, but I hadn’t had any problems, and I told her so. After bloodwork and an x-ray, I sat back in the exam room and waited for her to come in and tell me what was going on. She did, and guess what? I’m full of shit. Literally. “There’s stool backed way up,” she told me. “I’m pretty sure the problem is that you’re constipated. Get an enema and take a couple of Dulcolax and stay near the bathroom.” “Really?” I said. “But I’ve been going just fine, no problems.” She repeated the bit about the stool all along my intestines, then told me she was sending me for a CAT scan, just to be sure. “Also, there’s a bony abnormality on your right hip, and I’d like to have that scanned, too. It’s probably nothing, maybe arthritis that developed when you were so overweight. ” She showed me where the “bony abnormality” is, but I’ll be damned if I can find it again. My right and left hips feel exactly the same as far as I can tell. And I’ve never had any problems with my hips. I went by Wal-Mart for the enema and Dulcolax, and when I got home I used both the enema and the Dulcolax and sat back, waiting for the wave of poo to crash upon Casa And3rson, but I’ve gotta say (TMI! TMI!), the results were fairly underwhelming. So today, after getting up early and eating breakfast, I got to fast for six hours and go in for a CAT scan. And guess what I got to have? OH LUCKY ME. I got to spend almost an hour choking down two HUGE cups of barium. Even just typing the word “barium” gave me goosebumps and made me shudder. Because that stuff if FUCKING NASTY, I know y’all know that, but let me repeat: FUCKING NASTY. It’s like liquid plastic with a little soupcon of ass and maybe a sprinkle of dirty feet, all mixed together and treated with a fake berry taste to hide the nastiness. (It doesn’t work.) I choked down the first one, then had to chew gum for a few minutes to get the ass taste out of my mouth. I got into a rhythm of drinking as much as I could before I started gagging (at first, that was four or five sips. Toward the end, it was a single sip at a time.), then flipping through a Martha Stewart Living magazine (holy god, does that woman cook ANYTHING without oil? Because it would appear not.) to take my mind off the torture I was inflicting on my tastebuds. I called Fred and my sister to bitch about the nastiness of the crap I was drinking, but neither of them answered their phone so I left messages. Finally, the CAT scanologist came out to get me, had me take my shirt and bra off and put a classy, stylish, yet FUNCTIONAL hospital johnny on, and then she commenced the scanning. I didn’t see any cats, though. At one point, she injected me with contrast and told me that I’d feel warm all over “Especially your bottom.” INDEED. All in all, it took about 40 minutes to do the whole thing, and the only thing that sucked is that the barium had gone through my stomach so fast that I had to drink some more while I was laying on the table. And it was WARM, and it was citrus-flavored, and if the cold, berry-flavored barium tasted like it had a soupcon of ass added, the warm citrus-flavored barium tasted like they’d added the whole left cheek, and I thought for sure I was going to barf, but luckily I did not and only had to endure the whole thing for another few minutes before she let me go. I suspect my scan’s going to come back just fine. That, or they’ll need to do another one JUST TO TORTURE ME. * * * Last weekend, Fred and I started talking about new cars. Specifically, a new car for me. The spud had saved up enough money for a down payment on a car, and we decided back at the beginning of the summer that she would buy my car from me, and I’d get a new one. I love E’gar, but as someone in my comments posted, the spud has put more miles and wear and tear on it than I have, so why not sell it to her (I owe less than $5,000 on it), since we know it’s in good shape and has low mileage (a year and a half old, and it has about 12,000 miles on it) and it would most likely (god willing and the creek don’t rise) get her through college quite nicely. What I really wanted was a Toyota Yaris. They’re adorable, not too expensive, and get good gas mileage. We stopped at the Toyota dealership in Huntsville while we were out having dinner Friday night, and they didn’t have any Yaris hatchbacks, so Saturday we stopped in Decatur and I drove a 4-door Yaris. I liked it, but I didn’t want to drive one car and decide that I liked it, so we exchanged names and numbers with the salesguy and went on our way to the fair. Saturday evening, Fred was looking around online and found that Hyundai has a small car, the Accent, and when he showed me the picture, I decided it was pretty cute and I wanted to drive it. We drove into Huntsville to the Hyundai dealership and I drove an Accent. I liked it, more than the Yaris, actually, but Fred was pushing for me to at least test-drive a Suzuki (they’re inexpensive and we get a “loyalty discount” from Suzuki for buying more than one car through the dealership). We stopped by the Suzuki dealership on the way home and got a couple of informational flyers about a couple of Suzukis – the SX4, and the Reno. Monday I picked Fred up at his office and we went over to the Suzuki dealership. I drove a Reno around, and really, really liked it. I decided I didn’t like the look of the SX4, but there was a red Aerio sedan I thought was cute, so I test drove that, and after driving the Reno I didn’t much care for the way the Aerio sedan handled. So we got me a Suzuki Reno. In red. Yes, I’m back to a non-yellow car, but I like it, I think it’s adorable (I was thinking of getting the blue, but when I saw the red, I thought it was so pretty that I decided I wanted that instead), and I can pay that baby off in just a few years, and start saving for my next, more expensive car. (Who wants to bet I’ll just end up with another Suzuki?) Anyway, that’s what I’ve been alluding to this week, when I said that I ran an errand I couldn’t tell you about. We were shopping for, and buying cars. And without further ado, meet…

Delmar. (Named after Tim Blake Nelson’s character in O Brother, Where Art Thou?) (“We THOUGHT you was a TOAD!”)

TWENTY miles on it. Time to sell! * * * Miss Maddy continues to do well. Last night when we watched TV, she spent the entire evening curled up on me. If I moved a little too much for her liking, she’d lift up her head and meow at me, then go back to sleep. She also started yawning last night! I didn’t happen to have my camera handy when she was a yawning fool, but I think y’all can expect some yawny pics in the near future. She’s eating well, though for her last feeding in the evening, she hasn’t been much interested in anything to eat. She eats plenty in the morning and afternoon, though, and she’s continuing to gain weight every day, so I’m not going to worry about it. Someone asked yesterday what I meant when I said I put Maddy up on Saturday. When we’re not home, we don’t let Maddy roam the house, because I trust that most of the cats wouldn’t hurt her, but Mister Boogers makes me nervous with his angry growl if she annoys him and I’d hate it if she got hurt. So I put her in the kitten room (I leave the cage door open all the time now), so she’ll be safe. I’ve thought about putting Tommy in there with her, since he’s the gentlest, most good-natured, and is most interested in her, but then I’d have to put a litter box in there for him (his big butt wouldn’t fit in her little litter box), so no. It’s good for her to learn to play by herself every once in a while, I think.

This can’t end well. More pictures here. * * * Reader yawny pet pics!

This is Amy’s bulldog, Rene. Amy says, Robyn – I finally captured my dog yawning! I couldn’t decide which pic to send so I’ll let you choose which is best. This is Rene, she is a French Bulldog. I don’t mean to sound cocky but she is THE best dog in the world. She is hilarious and has more personality in her right bat ear than a 1000 dogs put together. We joke that she is part dog, cat, pig, bat, rabbit and rhinocerous. She is a very special girl – and very spoiled. You can TELL she’s the best dog in the world. I love the way she looks like she’s laughing!

This is Anita‘s baby, Frank. In the interest of full disclosure, Frankie and Miz Poo have had a torrid… er, lukewarm… er, okay, TEPID love affair going on. They’re both whiny babies whose owners LURVE them to death. Mo says, I can never capture the little bastard yawning, but I did manage to get him right BEFORE he yawned. Last night he was sitting on top of the tractor wheel, and I managed to get him in between a yawn and a whine. Ain’t he cuuuuuuute? I love me some Frankie, yes ma’am.

This is Jeannine’s Sofie. Jeannine says, i don’t have a yawny pic but i do have an incredibly cute one of my Sofie. i was on the computer and i looked up and saw this…… This is one of the problems with a flat-screen monitor – the cats can’t quiiiiite fit on top of it. I kind of miss looking up and seeing Spanky’s goofy face.

This is Suzy’s Leo. Suzy says, My daughter’s cat Leo is a character who thinks he is human and sits to watch TV – its not a yawn picture, but it sure does make him unique! That’s for sure – I expect to look over and see Tommy sitting just like this one of these days!

This is Hulda’s cat Zoey, who reminds me SO much of Tom Cullen, especially the second one down. That is a TOTAL Tommy face. Hulda says, She is the princess around here and everytime she’s done a number two in her box she calls for me and I have to come wipe her ass with a moist baby wipe. She can’t clean herself because she is so big and she can’t quite reach her bits if you know what I mean, she’s almost 20 pounds and that’s on a controlled diet. Some cats are just meant to be big and that’s just fine as long as she’s healthy 🙂 You know, I was going to say “Now, that’s a dedicated cat lover!”, but really – I think that we all know that if it came down to it, I’d TOTALLY wipe any of our cats’ butts if they needed to be wiped. I’d probably bitch about it, but I’d do it! Thanks for sharing your pictures Amy, Anita, Jeannine, Suzy, and Hulda! * * * Previously 2005: What a fucking day, I tells ya. 2004: Which makes me think he’s out there talking shit about me, of course. 2003: He’s an awfully cute little kitty. 2002: No entry. 2001: I swear, my work is NEVER done. 2000: No entry.]]>