Bitchypoo

FOAM #5: Food: I pressure cooked 9 chickens on Tuesday and canned them yesterday. 9 chickens = 6 quarts of chicken.
Outside: Turkey on the porch. I guarantee you that if I’d stepped back, that turkey would have come right into the house.
Abstract: My grandmother cross-stitched this cat picture for the spud when she was little. It’s currently hanging in the foster room, and every time I look at it, I think of my grandmother. I love it.
Myself: Lap full o’ Wonkas! (Gus is not really three times bigger than the others, he’s just closer to the camera.)

If you’re interested, there are new jam flavors available hither.

1. I do not know if the Apricot Confetti Habanero Jam is going to remain a regular item or will be a one-time thing. Fred called it “odd”, but my other taste tester liked it. Depends on demand, I suppose.

2. The Cranberry Cruelty Habanero Jam is going to be a seasonal thing – available ’til mid-December, depending on supply and how hard/ expensive it is to find cranberries ’til then.

3. There is no #3. That’s all, folks!

I imagine that if our next door neighbor’s son – the one who likes to stand in his back yard and “fish” – had a blog, his entry on Tuesday would have gone along the lines of something like…

Dear Diary,

Fishing Frank.

Oh, my Wonkas. They sure would like to be set free to run through the entire house. I know this because every time I go upstairs, they crowd the door at the end of the hallway and try to slip through. Mike’s made it halfway down the stairs; Gus was pretty close behind. And after I spend time with them and have to leave to go do something (whether I’ve spent five minutes with them, or an hour, it makes no difference), Mike tries to herd me away from the door.

Actually, I guess what they’re really telling me is that they want to be able to follow me around and sit on my lap 24 hours a day!

LESS than 30 days ’til their Combo test, which (I am certain) will show them to be FIV negative, and I guarantee you that when we get home from the vet that day, the first thing I’m going to do is introduce them to the rest of the house!

Sometimes a man’s gotta DANCE.

So, feeding time in the Cookie room goes like this: we put canned food on two plates, and carry two saucers of watered-down formula into the room. Everyone but Pink runs over and either starts eating off the plate or lapping out of the saucers. Pink comes over to us and gives us the Big Eyes of Hope and meows.

I pick her up and take her into the living room and give her a bottle. And she drinks about a tablespoon at each feeding. Last night, she drank far less than that. But she’s still gaining weight, she’s still healthy, and so I strongly suspect that when we’re not in the room, she’s eating out of the bowl of Baby Cat we keep full at all times.

In fact, Tuesday afternoon I was sitting in the room with them, and I glanced over to see her eating a piece of food from the bowl. Then it was like she remembered – “Oh! If they think I’ll eat on my own the bottles will stop!” – and she scurried away from the food.

I’m wise to your game, bratty little Pink!

“Who, ME?”

“Did you say ‘bottle’?”

“I’ll just wait right here for my bottle, thank you.”

Belly = full. Brain = in shutdown mode. Zzzzzs to commence in 4… 3… 2…

“We don’t think it’s fair that Pink still gets and bottle and the rest of us don’t. I’m heading up the protest.”

Yeah, I’d buy into your protest a little more if you didn’t outweigh every other kitten by at least four ounces, porky. I don’t think you’re starving.

Something has disturbed Miz Poo.

Previously
2008: Fucking drama queen.
2007: Whatever I do, I’m sure it’ll be exciting!
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.
2004: NOTHING gets by him. NOTHING.
2003: Yep. When you have a crush on a fictional character and whine about how no one in a NOVEL is telling you anything, it’s about time to get a life, say true.
2002: Obviously she’d never taken Customer Service 101, wherein the “‘Thanks!’ = go away” equation is covered thoroughly.
2001: Poor Sadie. Those damn mean cats just refuse to play with her…
2000: No entry.
1999: No entry.

FOAM 4: Food: New jam flavors.
Outside: Leaves are turning – and falling!
Abstract(ish): Okra pods, drying over the fireplace.
Myself: Sitting in the recliner in my room, being ignored by the kittens. Brats.

I understand and appreciate y’all wanting to buy chicken from us (both frozen and canned), but the word on high from Fred is: no. We’d have to charge too much to make it worth our while (and you might be willing to pay a lot, but we’re not willing to charge a lot, thus the conundrum), and in the end, the chickens are really worth more to us as food rather than an income source, since each chicken provides us with two or more meals.

I’ll let you know if that changes.

Our next door neighbor has a son in his (I think) 20s. Maybe early 30s. He doesn’t always live with her, he seems to show up around the beginning of summer and stay until late fall, from what I can tell. He seems to be the bored sort, and when he’s bored, he comes up with things to do. For a while, he was building small fires (even asked Fred if it was okay to take stuff off our burn pile to get his fires going). Occasionally, he goes into their shed and there’s the sound of hammer hitting something for a while (I have no idea what he’s building, if anything. Maybe he’s just working off his frustrations). Lately, he’s been taking up fishing.

In the back yard.

I guess, strictly speaking, he’s practicing fishing in the back yard. He stands out there with his fishing pole and he casts. Then he reels his line back in, and casts again.

(“He might be casting a weight,” Fred tells me. I’m not sure that really means anything; Fred might be throwing words together to mock my lack of knowledge of fishing. He doesn’t know that I’m a fishing aficionado from way back. Why, when I was a kid, I spent many an afternoon catching and releasing the same damn catfish from Malabeam Lake with my Dad.)

Last year’s attempt to stave off the boredom was hitting golf balls into our garden (which had been put to bed for the winter before this began) and tromping through the garden to retrieve his ball. If you’ve ever had a dog who wasn’t allowed in the living room (RIP Taffy!), you know that they’ll occasionally do something like “accidentally” drop a ball so that it rolls into forbidden territory, and then they prance after it, all “What? It’s my ball. I know I’m not allowed in here, but my ball! I can’t allow it to remain in here!” Same idea.

Recently, Fred happened to see the neighbor’s son inching closer and closer to our property line, casting further and further onto our property. We talked about going over and saying something, but it seems childish to be all “Could you not cast your FISHING LINE into our garden, please?” when Maxi and Newt tromp across their back yard all the damn time and they haven’t complained.

The other night, Fred said “I should go out there at night and put a “NO FISHING” sign in the middle of the garden.”

We laughed ourselves stupid at the idea.

Yesterday afternoon I emailed Fred to tell him that the guy had started mowing the lawn and wondered whether he’d get the front and back lawn done in the same day (he rarely does; and yes, we might need to get a life). Fred emailed me back and said:

It probably depends on whether or not the grassfish are biting.

And I laughed myself stupid again.

This is what big-time partiers Fred and I are: Saturday we left the house after dark for the first time in forever, as I believe I mentioned in yesterday’s entry. We went to get pig feed, and then headed for the movie store. Traffic in Closeville was heavier than we’d expected, and it made Fred crazy because he’s pretty sure that no one else should ever be on the road when he wants to go somewhere – they should all just pull over and let him through.

“You just don’t expect Closeville to have this much traffic on a Saturday night,” he said.

“No kidding,” I said. “There are no bars around here, where the hell are they all going?”

“Probably Huntsville,” he said. “But there are a few bars here. There’s that one in Applebee’s, and the other one in that restaurant we always think about going to, but never have.”

I had to ponder for several long moments before I came out with it “I thought we’re in a dry county?”

“No,” he said. “This is a wet county; [other nearby county] is dry, I think, but Nearville (which is in that county) is wet.”

“Are you sure we’re not in a dry county?”

“We had this discussion like a year ago,” he said. “Doesn’t Publix sell wine and beer?”

“I have no idea at all. I never noticed.”

“Yeah, I looked in the other grocery store before Publix opened. They were selling wine and beer.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said. Obviously, alcohol isn’t a big part of our lives, if we (I) don’t even know whether we live in a county where you can buy it.

I haven’t had any kind of alcohol since before I had weight loss surgery, which is almost four years ago. Before that, I don’t know when I had any alcohol – maybe a strawberry daiquiri when I was in Maine the year or two previous. I actually bought strawberry daiquiri mix and whatever the hell alcohol goes into daiquiris (vodka? rum? It’s not gin, I know that much. Is it?) a year or so ago, thinking it would be fun to mix up a batch and drink them one Saturday night. Still haven’t done it.

I’m curious to know what the effect alcohol would have on me, since the weight loss surgery (oftentimes it hits post-op patients harder); I was a lightweight to begin with, I’m wondering if all it’d take is a couple of sips before the room was spinning.

I guess I’m not curious enough to actually give it a try, at least not yet.

Ah, well – one of these days!

Gus is famous! He was on The Daily Kitten yesterday!

The Wonkas are really and truly enjoying their extra space. They’re very good in the mornings – they hear me get up, but it’s not until it’s light out and they hear me coming up the stairs with their snack that they start howling at the door. I open the door, put down their plates, and scoop litter boxes. They eat, then they come over for a snuggle, and then they start racing around.

It was seriously cute, the first day I opened the door so they could have the run of the bathroom and my bedroom. I opened the door, and then sat on the floor of my room. They came out slowly, slinking along the way cats do when they’re not sure what’s going on, and then it’s like Gus realized he had room to really RUN, and he reared up on his back legs and ran forward five or six steps.

It was like he was popping a wheelie!

(Too bad I didn’t have the camera with me.)

Most days, I go up and give them their snack, visit once or twice during the morning, then go up after lunch to lay down on the bed with them and perhaps (usually!) take a short nap. They love to pile on and around me (Mike always claims the spot closest to my face so he can demand kisses), and we all snooze together.

There’s just nothing that makes a nap better than having a pile of purring kittens around you. I highly recommend it!

The Cookie weaning is continuing. Most of the Cookies are doing well – they understand that the plate of food IS their food, and they generally don’t demand bottles. I’ve seen most of them lapping water out of the water bowl, which makes me happy.

Milano/ Pink is proving to be a tough nut to crack, though. She’d really rather have her bottle, thank you. I’ll let HER tell you about that.

“Oh, really. REALLY. You’re under the impression that a couple of plates of canned cat food and a bowl of formula makes a meal, no bottle is required? Boy, I have news for YOU. I am uninterested in the canned cat food, and I know you’ve seen me eat crunchy food in the past, but now? Nah. Not interested. Pardon me while I put myself to bed on the heating pad. I’m going to curl up in a miserable ball of misery, and when you come back in a little while to check on us and hang out and give out pettings, I’m going to just stay here. Sad. Miserable. Starving to death. I’ll ignore you SO thoroughly that, by 4 pm, you’ll be demanding Fred hold me while you make me a bottle. And I will drink that bottle down. SUCKER. I’ll take my next bottle WHENEVER I PLEASE, thank you. Oh, and the best part? You’ll discover, next time you weigh me, that I’ve packed on another 2 1/2 ounces. Clearly I’m starving. Did I mention you’re a SUCKER?”

All five! Left to right: TimTam (Blue), Milano (Pink), Lorna Doone (Orange), Keebler, and of course Hydrox.

I don’t even have to look at the paws of that kitten on the right to know it’s TimTam. She has such a sweet, open face I know her immediately! (She’s the only one of the five who doesn’t have white paws.)

Joe Bob has such a high-pitched, creepy meow. He’s a sweet boy, but that meow can raise the hairs on the back of your neck.

Previously
2008: The pigs gave it two (four?) hooves up.
2007: Write about your day!
2006: I guess you can teach an old Fred new tricks.
2005: Can’t a girl be a dumbass without the whole world going into an uproar about it?
2004: For once, he had no good comeback.
2003: “Oh yeah. I hate this feeling. I should have just had a Diet Coke.”
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: No entry.
1999: Can you tell this irks me?

The talented and adorable Betsy recently started this picture project she calls “Project FOAM“, and after some dithering on my part and a nudge from Nance, I finally got my butt in gear and joined in.

Each day, you take four pictures, one of Food, one of Outside, one an Abstract, and one of Myself (only, take a picture of YOURself, okay? I don’t have time to get gussied up in case you stalker types are planning to stop by and snap pictures of me looking like an idiot). Post them to Flickr, and add them to the FOAM group. Easy!

Come on, you know you wanna. Join us!

Here are mine so far:

FOAM 1: Food: Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup (they were on sale!)
Outside: Under the bird feeder (seeds fell on the ground and sprouted; that’s not grass)
Abstract: Some people call it “blurry”, I call it abstract! Heh.
Myself: Me and one of the Cookies. I spend far too much time with kittens perched on my shoulders.

FOAM 2: Food: Mmmmm, Bugles (I swear every food picture won’t be of packaged foods!)
Outside: The weather has been all sunny and blue skies this week.
Abstract: Hummingbird feeder that desperately needs to be taken down and cleaned and stored for the winter.
Myself: All gussied up (HA!) for Walmart.

Food: Shrimp (before cooking).
Outside: The thing growing between the garage and workshop. Someone told me what it was; I don’t remember.
Abstract: Cat bed.
Myself: Kitten on my shoulder, sniffing my eyeball.

We actually left the house after dark on Saturday AND I DO NOT KNOW HOW THE EARTH REMAINED ON ITS AXIS. We were very low on pig food, so we ran up to get a bag of it at Tractor Supply, and then we stopped at the movie store on the way home and rented The Proposal.

(Because we’ve been watching so little TV lately, I changed our Netflix plan down to the lowest level, where you get two movies per month. When we go back to watching more TV (whenever that might be), I’ll change it back again. ‘Til then, that generally means when we feel like watching TV and have already watched V (liked it), Modern Family (LOVE it), How I Met Your Mother, and Two and a Half Men, we’re shit out of luck because there’s nothing left on the DVR.)

We watched The Proposal, and although there was nothing unpredictable about the movie, I like Sandra Bullock a lot, and Ryan Reynolds is really fucking funny. How come no one ever told me how damn funny he is? When he’s standing in the office after Sandra Bullock told her boss that they’re getting married, the look on his face had us howling.

Fred is conflicted, and I have to say that I am, too. We have too goddamn many chickens, we really do. I mean, that doesn’t stop us from sticking eggs under hens when they go broody so we end up with MORE chickens, but still. We have too goddamn many chickens.

He processed 15 chickens a few weeks ago, and it didn’t even make a dent in the population.

Saturday morning, when he put the “Eggs: $2/ dozen” sign out, he also put the “Chickens for Sale” sign out. Eventually someone stopped and wanted to buy a chicken. Fred sold them one of our older roosters (they specifically wanted an older chicken), which they were planning to eat.

(And then we both felt sorry for the rooster. EVEN THOUGH he was on the list to be processed by us, soon! We’re dorks.)

Later that day, a man stopped by and asked how much our hens were. Fred told him, and he said that that was more than he’d wanted to spend. He said that he’d been hoping to get a “good price” on them, because then he’d buy a bunch of them and take them up to the flea market and sell them.

Fred immediately went and took the “Chickens for Sale” sign down. We have too many chickens, and this might sound strange, but we’d both rather kill and eat those chickens than to sell them to someone who’d keep them crammed in a cage and sell them to someone who might keep them penned up in a tiny yard.

Our chickens live the life of Riley. They have plenty of room to roam, they have dirt for dust bathing, food provided to them, friends to hang out with, and occasional treats tossed out to them. If they get sick, they’re treated for whatever their illness is. They’re safe and protected, and I think that in their own chicken way, they’re happy. We can’t stand the thought of them going from this life to a life where they’re not as happy.

See how we are? We immediately assume that no one else would treat the chickens as well as we do. Mighty impressed with ourselves, aren’t we?

So Sunday morning Fred got up and processed ten more chickens, older ones who’ll be perfect for cooking in the pressure cooker and canning, later this week.

He’s considering processing another ten on Wednesday, and then thinks that once that’s done he’ll do another ten in a couple of weeks.

Our freezer is going to be STUFFED. And of course, the problem is that one chicken will last us for at least two meals, if not more. With something like 50 chickens in the freezer and (in a month or so) an entire pig in there as well, we are going to be SET.

Once the chicken population is down to something manageable, we’re seriously considering turning the maternity yard into a yard for our Light Brahmas, who’ll be our meat chickens (they get very big, but they do it a lot slower than Cornish Cross chickens). The largest part of the chicken population will remain in the back 40 to provide eggs (and remain under the protection of George and Gracie), and then we’re talking about moving the little coop to the back yard, and keeping the Silkies, Crested Polish, and the crippled chickens (Charlie, and one of the Black Copper Marans who has some sort of foot deformity) back there. They’re so little that I’m afraid they’ll end up being harassed and ultimately hurt by the full-sized roosters.

Wow. I can go on and ON about chickens, can’t I? I bet that’s more than you ever wanted to know about the Crooked Acres chicken population!

One month down, one to go! It’s been a month since the Wonkas failed their Combo test (for the new readers, they all showed up as FIV positive). One more month, and they can be retested – and I’m certain they’re going to end up negative this time around.

I’m pretty sure you can actually see the ear floof growing longer.

“Something doesn’t feel quite right…”

A basket full o’ Violet = a basket full o’ LOVE.

We are in the process of weaning the Cookies off their bottles. Fred got up Sunday morning and gave them canned food on a couple of plates, and two bowls of watered-down formula (we’ve seen them all lapping out of a bowl in recent days). When I got up a few hours later, the plates were empty, and so were the bowls. I went ahead and tried bottle-feeding them, but except for Milano (Pink) and Hydrox, no one was interested.

At noontime, I gave them two more plates of canned food and two more saucers of formula. The food didn’t disappear as quickly (though I did give them more this time around), and there was still formula in the saucers a couple of hours later. Everyone seemed happy and not starving to death, except for Milano/ Pink. She seemed kind of sleepy and slow to move, but she was also sleeping when I walked into the room, and I think it takes her a little while to wake up. She came over and sat in my lap and asked to be petted, and then she played with her siblings for a while. When I got up to leave the room after half an hour, she ran over to the side of the bed (which is where I sit when I bottle feed them – they can get up onto the bed from the floor just yet, so I can feed one of them at a time without the others trying to steal the bottle away) and howled and howled.

I talked to Fred about it, and he said “Well, make a bottle and I’ll see if she’s interested.”

I did, and she was. So was Hydrox. And between those two and the minimal drinking the rest of them did, we emptied about a bottle and a half.

So the plan for now is to bottle feed them in the morning and again at bedtime, and supplement the bottle feedings with canned food (and formula in saucers) at both those times, and again in the middle of the day. Obviously, if anyone begins to lose weight or seems to need it, I can supplement with bottles in the middle of the day, but I’ve seen all of them eating either canned or crunchy cat food AND lapping formula out of the saucers, so there’s no reason they should go hungry.

Speaking of not going hungry – TimTam/ Blue feels so heavy these days, because she’s SUCH a good eater (she was the first to eat the canned food) and has such a big round belly that I said to Fred, “I swear to god, she’s gained a pound. I’m going to weigh her!” She’d gained an ounce and a half in the two days since I last weighed her. It’s funny that she felt heavy to me – god knows that if I were to pick her up in one hand and a Wonka in the other, she’d feel like she weighs nothing. I would dearly love to get a picture of a Cookie next to a Wonka next to Elwood next to one of our big cats (maybe Tommy), just for a size reference. There’s just no way I could pull THAT off, though!

All slap fights end with a lick. It’s the rules!

Is it just me, or does it look like someone just got a TALKIN’-TO?

It’s rough to be this cute.

Time to balance on my foot! Here we have TimTam/ Blue, making herself at home.

Maxi would like it known that she will put up with NONE of your tomfoolery, thank you.

Previously
2008: No entry.
2007: Stupid bossy car.
2006: “Damn pansy-ass city folk.”
2005: as a customer and a HUMAN, I outrank the computer, and I’d like a little RESPECT, thank you.
2004: All this cleaning is making me lightheaded.
2003: No entry.
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: Little things make me happy.
1999: Guest entry by Fred.

Vote for Suzanne!

Good Mood Gig from SAM-e

I finally got the Anderson Kitties Calendar for 2010 put together (you can see it in the sidebar to the right). I’ve got the pictures for the Foster Kitties 2010 Calendar narrowed down – now I just need to put names on each picture and get them uploaded. I expect to get that done later today, and will add it to the sidebar.

I don’t expect anyone but us is interested in a calendar of chicken and pig pictures, but I always put one together for Fred to put up in his office, so I’ll link that in the sidebar as well, once it’s done.

This year, I’m adding $2 to the base cost of the calendar. As always, any money that’s made off the calendars goes straight to Challenger’s House.

I’m sorry it took me so long to get them put together. The problem is that I copy all the pictures I take, all year long, into a folder and then when it’s calendar time, I have to go through them. And I take a freakin’ LOT OF PICTURES in the course of a year!

I’m going to experiment with a new way of saving pictures that will hopefully save time next year.

I have been a canning fool this week. Monday, I made two batches of Caramel-Apple Jam and then experimented with a couple of jams. One of the jams was a definite NO, so that batch got tossed on the compost heap. The other batch is a maybe, so we’ll see.

Tuesday, I canned 13 pints of applesauce. It’s amazing how you can have a huge pot of apples, cook them, puree them, and end up with a relatively small amount of applesauce, let me tell you. My applesauce is probably boring to the average applesauce connoisseur, because it’s literally nothing but cooked, mashed apples, and a little bit of water. No cinnamon, no sugar. Just good ol’ apples. I use most of the applesauce I can to make sweet habanero hot sauce. I also use it to make 88 calorie brownies.

(Hmm. I haven’t made those in a long time. I need to!)

What else did I do? I spent a lot of time bottle feeding kittens and hanging out with the Wonkas. I got laundry folded and put away, did some decluttering.

I had to take Miz Poo to the vet because the rodent ulcer on her upper lip was starting to act up again, so she needed a shot of steroids. Because she was way overdue for her yearly vaccinations, I had them do a Combo test on her (she was negative for everything, as I expected – but the vet tech discovered that her veins are in odd places. Miz Poo, a weirdo? Say it ain’t so!).

My New Year’s Resolution for 2010: keep everyone current on their shots and stop being such a slackery slacker! 90% of the time when I get fosters, they’ve already been tested – but when things happen like Fred coming home with the Wonkas or the lady down the street bringing us the Cookies and they’re too little to be tested, all we need is to get a batch with Feline Leukemia, and watch it take down the Crooked Acres gang.

(We do keep the fosters separate from our guys ’til after they’ve been tested, and we’re super careful about washing our hands after spending time with them, but you just never know, do you?)

As I was paying, a woman came in with three medium-sized dogs. She said she had two more in the car, and she wanted to get rabies shots for all of them. I smiled and told her she had her hands full, and left.

In her car, in the parking lot, were her two other dogs. One was a Great Pyr (like George and Gracie) and the other was a black lab. And her car was NOT any bigger than mine. Those two dogs were taking up the back seat of that car, and I could only wonder how she managed to fit all those dogs AND herself AND her daughter in the car at the same time.

Just as I snapped the picture, the Lab dropped out of view, of course. But still – is that one FULL back seat, or what?

I tell you what, I don’t know what the hell else I did this week, but I kept busy and got a lot accomplished, believe you me!

Today I’ve got some more jam experimenting to do, need to make some hot sauce, and get some laundry done. Also, I’d like to get some decluttering done around the house, but I don’t want to be TOO ambitious!

Okay, here’s a question for those of you who shop at Publix: Where the holy hell do they keep the canned pumpkin? I swear to god, yesterday I must have spent ten minutes walking up and down the freakin’ aisles looking for it. It’s NOT where the canned sweet potatoes are, and I couldn’t find any near the pie crusts. What the hell? Where IS it?

Anyone?

Wait. I’m thinking maybe I didn’t look near the canned fruit. That’s where it is, isn’t it? FIGURES.

I need me some pumpkin! Well, the fosters do, anyway. I think I’ve mentioned that I believe the only place pumpkin belongs is in a pie, haven’t I?

How is it that I stopped at the super craptastic, always disappointing Pet Dep0t yesterday and ended up signing up for a freakin’ “savings card”?

I always walk into that store with high hopes, and always walk out without buying anything -except yesterday, when I went in looking for canned Fancy Feast Medleys (which is what I give our cats at Snackin’! Time!) and left with a bag of bird seed. They have six thousand different kinds of dog food, but like three kinds of cat food and it annoys the shit out of me.

Lady Asian Beetle season has hit in full force, and the Wonkas are finding it rather fascinating. The mornings are okay, but when the sun hits the end of the house where their room is, the beetles start squeezing in around the windows (looking for a place to hibernate, I guess?) and the Wonkas find it much fun to jump and leap and try to catch them.

I’m sure they’ve gotten their paws on plenty of beetles – there are SO MANY of them, it drives me nuts – but I suspect one or two bites of the nasty things has shown them that they’re not food.

This would have been SUCH a beautiful picture, they sat there POSING for a good long time. But I was laying on my back (they were actually sitting on my stomach) and just couldn’t seem to get a good shot of them. ::sigh::

I find it hilarious that the kitten who was the slowest to come around (if you’ll recall, he was Mr. Standoffish for several days) is the biggest baby, and will lay like this in my lap for ages.

Isn’t he a smug little brat?

Gus isn’t ALWAYS the laid-back one.

“I dub thee… Sir Poopypants! Hee hee hee!”

He haz claws.

I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel with the Cookies. All five of them have been spotted eating either canned food (TimTam, Lorna Doone, and Keebler) or crunchy food in the form of Baby Cat (Milano, Keebler, and Hydrox). I didn’t think Hydrox was ever going to show any interest in real food EVER. A few days ago I put a little canned cat food in his mouth, and he looked SO disgusted, it was like I’d shoved Metronidazole in his mouth, he was so horrified. But yesterday I saw him eating pieces of Baby Cat off the floor, and then later he was eating it directly from the dish.

I’m seeing an end to the days when I have to get up at 4:30 to feed them!

(Dear God: That is not an invitation to send more bottle babies my way. Love, Robyn.)

this is either Milano (Pink) or Lorna Doone (Orange), I’m not quite sure which.

“Who, me? NOTHIN. Okay, I was checking to be sure it’s machine washable before I go use the litter box, step in my poop, and track it all over the bed, if you MUST know.”

Fred and I were snuggling with the babies after feeding time one night, and he decided he had things to do (sitting on the hardwood floor starts to hurt him after a while), so he got up and left. Every Cookie followed him to the door and HOWLED for several minutes, their feelings hurt that he’d abandoned them so coldly.

The girls gave up after several minutes, but Hydrox was determined to call Fred back to the room. Look at him standing there, so determined, howling his little head off. And he’s usually the quiet one!

I had to pull everything off the bottom shelf of this cupboard because ants showed up to swarm all over a poorly-cleaned bottle of corn syrup, and after I’d cleaned the shelf, Sugarbutt wandered along and was like “Oh, hey, what’s this?” He fits perfectly – but he found it wasn’t terribly exciting.

Previously
2008: WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH SCOOP HANDS?!
2007: I thought if the remote was lost, you were screwed.
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.
2004: Did you think I was writing this from The Great Beyond?
2003: Wonder if I appear too old and feeble to help with the loading of the groceries.
2002: That’s your trivia fact for the day. You’re welcome!
2001: Amish country.
2000: No entry.
1999: Hey, this is some exciting stuff, isn’t it? What will I talk about next, dryer lint? Woohoo, somebody stop me!

New month, new logo! This one was created by Christine, who did one of my logos last month, and has done many awesome banners in the past.

Thanks, Christine!!!

That said, I’m taking today and tomorrow (and Wednesday, as usual) off from updating. (Clearly I am NOT taking part in NaBloPoMo this year.) I’ve got jam-making, applesauce-canning, and house-cleaning to get done. I’ll be updating over at Love & Hisses, but I’ll be back here Thursday with bells on. See ya then!

Could you just DIE? He looks like a toothless old man. An EXCITED toothless old man. Like, “I heard they was servin’ chocolate pudding at the Senior Center. Outta my WAY!”

(More cuteness over at Love & Hisses.)

Previously
2008: No entry.
2007: How’sabout you win us $100 billion in the lottery and we’ll negotiate the terms after that, foolio!
2006: No entry.
2005: He’s a class act, that Vincent Gallo
2004: “Squee!” it reiterated. “Squee! Squee! Squee!”
2003: No entry.
2002: No entry.
2001: Is it just me, or do you get pissed off when you’re the victim of unexpected pain?
2000: No entry.
1999: Damn that Halloween candy!

A couple of people have asked why the SAM-e voting thing is no longer at the top of my page.

Basically, I lost interest. The voting has been going on and on and ON and isn’t slated to end until November 3rd or 6th (I don’t remember which), and then there’s a whole second section to the “competition” where you have to make a video and people vote AND the SAM-e people get a say in the matter. So it’s not a popular vote sort of thing, it’s a popular vote AND the SAM-e people deciding who would be the best spokesperson for their supplement (which may be the best thing since sliced bread as far as I know; I haven’t bothered to research it at all), and I’m stretched kind of thin between the kittens and the two blogs (though to be fair, all I do most of the time over at Love & Hisses is cut and paste what I wrote about the kittens here), so I’ve lost interest.

Also, I might find it hard to be THAT positive all the time. Sometimes a girl’s gotta bitch, right?

I say we all vote for Suzanne McMinn. I’d really like to see her get the job!

The goddamn lady asian beetle invasion has begun. It’s not as bad yet as it will get, but it’s a little worse every day. They climb in my window, crawl all over my curtains leaving their nasty stinky orange trail behind, and then they die and I get to clean up the mess.

Fucking things.

At this point, only a few days in, I’m just sweeping them to a corner ’til the evening, then vacuuming them up and tossing them. I’m wondering if weatherstripping around the windows would help keep them out.

It’s certainly worth a try.

Along with the lady beetle invasion comes the wasp invasion. They seem to come inside when the sun hits the house and warms it up in the afternoon. I’m not sure where they’re getting in, but I suspect it’s at the top of the fireplace in the dining room. The other day I killed 17 wasps in the course of about an hour. (They’re not aggressive wasps – they don’t fly at you, they fly away from you. Mostly, they fly at the window trying to figure out how the hell to get back outside.)

The cats are excellent wasp detectors. If I walk into a room and the cats are all staring at the ceiling, I know it’s time to get out the vacuum cleaner. I only use the vacuum cleaner to catch them when they’re up high. The rest of the time, I grab them with a piece of paper towel, squish them ’til I hear a cracking sound, and then either toss them in the toilet or out the door.

For the first thirty-something years of my life, I was TERRIFIED of flying bugs. In my 20s, I ran screaming out of my parents’ garage because there was a DRAGONFLY flying around. I once took a shower huddled at the end of the shower with one eye on a HUGE spider because I just knew it was going to fly up and chew my face off. When my sister and I were teenagers, we found a huge spider in my room, and instead of squishing it or smacking it with a magazine, we sprayed half a can of furniture polish on it (that’s how much furniture polish it took before the damn thing stopped moving).

It seems that the way to get over that fear is to have to deal with bugs on a daily basis. The first year we owned this house (before we moved in), I’d smack at the wasps with a magazine and then run screaming from the room. A few months later, I’d go after the wasp with the vacuum, and run screaming from the room after I heard the “SLOOP” sound of the wasp being sucked into the vacuum. Last year and this year, I’m using a piece of paper towel and squishing them. Who knows what I’ll be doing next year?

Probably catching and squishing them with my bare hands.

::Shudder::

I didn’t get the calendars created last weekend, obviously. I swear upon all that is holy that I’ll get them available by Monday. It’s my one big goal for this weekend! Pinky swear!

And if I don’t get them done by Monday, you have my full permission to harass me about it every single day.

So, the dropping off of Terry and Sookie went okay. As well as could be expected, I guess. They only howled half the way there, then settled down and snoozed the rest of the way. They were mostly curious about the cat room at Petsmart.

Until I opened the cage Lafayette and Bill were in, that is. Bill and Lafayette ran over to Sookie and were all “Hey! Hi! Howyadoin’?!” and Sookie was all “EXCUSE me, I do not KNOW you, please stop sniffing my butt!”

I let them all run around and mingle for a good long while, and the hisses from Sookie and Terry kept coming, but they weren’t quite as adamant about it. Finally, I gave them all hugs and kisses, put them in their cage, and left. I ran some errands and then stopped back by Petsmart after they’d opened (I needed to stock up on cat food. Don’t I always?!). I stood at the end of the aisle where the cats couldn’t see me, and watched them.

Bill and Lafayette were all sprawled out on the floor of the cage, sound asleep. Terry and Sookie were sitting up on the shelf staring down at them, clearly thinking “What fresh hell is this?”

My poor babies.

“Did I mention DO NOT SNIFF ME?”

Bill did not want to be held and kissed. Bill wanted to run! And play! And run some more!

Lafayette, in a rare moment of stillness.

The Wonkas are doing well. They’ve gone from that round baby kitten stage, to the long ‘n lanky stage. They race around like little wild things, but when I come into the room they pile on me and I LOVE it. Nothing like having a lap full of sweet purring kittens.

Sweet until they start smacking at my eyelashes or grabbing at my mouth with their sharp little claws, that is. We trimmed their claws the other night, and life in the Wonka room is now a little less painful for me.

I don’t think anyone was actually even touching him here, he was just being all drama queen-y.

I got this cheap little basket at (I think) the dollar store with the intention of storing cat toys in it. The cats ADORE hanging out in it. When I clean and vacuum their room, I pile all the toys in this basket, and within ten minutes of setting them free in their room, they’ve got the basket emptied and someone’s sitting in it.

Fightin’ brudders.

I just love the white whiskers against the dark fur.

“Belly rub, please?”

I have no pictures of the Cookies to share today, because I’ve been lax about taking the camera into the room with me. I’ll try to remedy that later today!

Elwood, annoyed.

Previously
2008: My poor Poo.
2007: I have no idea on earth how we’d ever tell if a chicken was insane, since they seem to lean toward The Crazy even when they’re (we assume) perfectly normal.
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.
2004: In case you were wondering, we are officially Crazy Cat People.
2003: I always look like a fucking lunatic when I take my own picture.
2002: (Is it just me who always thinks of Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally saying “I would be pleased to partake of your pecan piiiiiiiiiiiiie” when I hear, say, or read the word “partake”?)
2001: (For the record, her verdict was that the real-life prostitutes were “creepy”.)
2000: No entry.
1999: And going blind would just suck.

Someone searched on “Caramel Apple Jam” last night. If you’re looking for the recipe, it’s here (I used to link to it on Suzanne McMinn’s forum, but that link no longer works and I can’t seem to find the forum post). If you’re looking for where to buy the Caramel Apple Jam I’m selling, that page is here.

I finally got around to making a batch of Caramel Apple Jam yesterday, and I used my new Dutch Oven instead of the cheap and crappy pot I’ve been using, and I have to say that the dutch oven heated so much better and more evenly, that it took me about half the time to make the jam. It was nice to have a batch cranked out by breakfast!

In my comments yesterday, Catsy said: What brand and shade of hair color do you have Fred put in your hair? Nance looks great in her new color, doesn’t she? I was hoping for a photo of you. Hydrox is a keeper; his little size was a surprise to me, too.

I use L’Oreal 5CB “Medium Chestnut Brown”. Then underneath, it says “warmer”; I’m not sure what that means. For some reason it came out a lot redder than last time, I’m not sure why.

Please note that the past week of 6 hours of sleep a night because I get up at 4:30 to feed baby kittens is catching up with me and making me look OLD. Also making me look OLD: the fact that I am OLD.

Yeah, Nance looks awesome, damnit. That looks like a salon job, doesn’t it? Rick will probably demand we start calling him “Monsieur Ree-chard” from here on out.

(I took French 1 & 2 when I was in high school (I can still count to 10 in French!), and there was a girl in my French 2 class who pronounced “Monsieur” like “Mon-sewer” and it used to drive my French teacher NUTS but I think of that girl every time I see the word and it makes me smile.)

The other day we switched the Cookies from the ferret cage they were in, to the other cage we have. The bars on the cage they’re in now are vertical so they can’t climb them. The ferret cage has horizontal bars, so the little monsters were climbing the bars and then diving off them, only there was no mosh pit to land in. I was worried they’d crack their little noggins open, and no one wants to have to clean up Cookie noggin from the bottom of the cage.

(I suspect that if one of the Cookies cracked their noggin open, marshmallow fluff would come puffing out. Except for Hydrox, who’s a genius, and I’ll get to that in a moment.)

So I took the ferret cage into the kitchen and wiped down the bars of the top of the cage. Then I put the base of the cage across the sinks, and ran hot water into it, and dumped ammonia into it. When there were several inches of water, I began scrubbing the bottom of the cage.

I wasn’t wearing gloves.

Have I ever mentioned that when you bottle feed baby kittens, your hands get absolutely shredded? I’ve tried wearing gardening gloves when bottle feeding, but they just don’t give me enough dexterity. So plunging my half-shredded hands into a mixture of ammonia and hot water REALLY stung.

Not one of the smarter moves I’ve made. I’d like to say that I won’t make that mistake again, but please – I think we all know I will, and I’ll be super surprised at how much it stings next time, too.

So, this is how Hydrox is a genius:

1. As I went in to feed the kittens this afternoon, all the others were trying to fit their faces through the bars or climb the bars. Hydrox sat back and looked consideringly up at the latches because HE KNOWS how the door opens. I give it three days ’til he’s figured out how to balance on the other kittens and push the latch back so he can open the door.

2. There was a lot of pee in the litter box, so I didn’t worry about pottying them before feeding them. Then after everyone had eaten, I was pottying Blue, and Hydrox came over and sniffed at the pile of paper towels, squatted down, and peed next to them. (True genius would have been going into the cage to use the litter box, but he’s got those short, stubby legs and that huge belly hindering him).

3. He PLAYED WITH A TOY last night. None of his siblings have any idea what toys are, but Hydrox totally looked at the toy I put down in front of him, smacked it with one paw and then waddled off to look for food. GENIUS.

Speaking of Hydrox, I keep meaning to mention this: Fred wanted to name him E.L. Fudge. When I said “Yeah, except that everyone will misread his name and call him “El Fudge”, Fred laughed and said “Even more perfect!”

Paws up, y’all!

Waiting patiently for the petting.

“Kind lady, I will clean MY OWN FOOT, there’s no need to use obscenities. “Bath” indeed!”

“I SAID I WILL CLEAN IT MYSELF THERE IS NO NEED FOR A BATH IN THE SINK. UNHAND ME!”

“What?”

“PLEASE HELP ME THEY ARE SQUOOSHING ME!”

Snoozin’ Hydrox. That boy can sleep like nobody’s business, and then he comes awake all of a sudden and wants to know where the food is.

Lap full o’ kittens.

“I YAM A FEARSOME BEAST!”

Off I go to drop Sookie and Terry at the adoption center. I hope they remember Lafayette and Bill and are happy to see them. I hope they (all of them!) get adopted quickly. I hope they aren’t scared.

Jake and Elwood are going to miss those two something fierce. We’ve had the True Bloods longer than we’ve had Jake and Elwood! They practically grew up together, and now Jake and Elwood will be wondering where their brother and sister went.

I don’t know how I’m going to sleep tonight. I’ve gotten used to Sookie sleeping on one side of me and Terry sleeping on the other, making it absolutely impossible to turn over without dislodging one or the other and causing a litany of complaints from the injured party requiring much petting and kissing.

Ugh. I HATE THIS PART SO SO SO MUCH!

Fingers crossed that they get adopted super fast!

(I’ll see if I can’t snap a picture or two of Lafayette and Bill while I’m there!)

Jake the Smug.

Previously
2008: Sulking and doing nothing is greatly helped by a sweet little litter of fluffy kittens, if you were curious.
2007: No entry.
2006: No entry.
2005: I’m sorry, but “Sell yourself to me” is Interviewer-speak for “I’m too lazy to come up with a real question, so try to answer this stupid-ass question I read on a bad interview webpage somewhere or perhaps even pulled directly from my ass.”
2004: I cannot stand this song. I cannot stand this video. I am filled with extreme hatred every time I happen across either the song or the video.
2003: We went to see Miss Saigon on Sunday.
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: The man drove two hours to spend one hour with his grandchild and then drove two hours back. How cool is that?
1999: May I say that the child gets an UNGODLY amount of presents.

From this:

to this:

in 21 short years.

Amazing, isn’t it?

This entry from two years ago still says it all.

I love you.

(Now behave* yourself tonight!!!!)

*When Danielle was little – three or so, I’m thinking – she would do or get into something she shouldn’t, and her father would say “Dani, behave!”

And she would say “I’m bein’ have!”

Then I would squish her to death.

This weekend went by so quickly, I hardly know what on earth I did. Let’s see… Friday morning I decided that I would try making some Peanut Butter S’mores Turnovers, because hello – graham cracker, chocolate, and peanut butter in a pastry dough, baked and then marshmallow fluff drizzled on top? How could that not be good??

Well. It kind of wasn’t great. I will happily send you the link to the recipe, but I don’t wan to link to it and then say it wasn’t all that, because I feel like it would be rude. There was too much peanut butter – it was overwhelming, actually. I couldn’t taste the chocolate, and the graham cracker kind of disintegrated. Fred tried one when he got home, and agreed with me.

Then he came up with an interesting idea in the turnover category, so Saturday morning I got up and unfolded puff pastry dough (you didn’t think I make my own, did you? CRAZY.), cut each sheet into 9 pieces, put a blop (that’s the scientific term – I didn’t measure it, I just used a spoon and put enough that it looked right) of Caramel-Apple Jam on each piece, then folded them over, sealed the edges, put them on a cookie sheet, brushed them with a beaten egg mixed with 1 T of water, sprinkled Turbinado sugar on top, and baked for 15 minutes at 400.

And they. Were. Fabulous.

My husband, I’ve gotta say, has an eye for making up recipes on the fly and having them come out pretty damn good.

The best thing about these turnovers (and they’re really more mini turnovers – they’re not like huge, full-sized turnovers) is that you can fill them with whatever sounds good to you – you don’t have to make an entire batch of Caramel-Apple Turnovers if you don’t want to. I actually used lemon curd in four of them (instead of the Caramel-Apple Jam, not in addition to) and they were pretty damn good.

(The Caramel-Apple Jam ones were better, though.)

I meant to make more Caramel-Apple Jam over the weekend, but between spending time with the Wonkas and bottle feeding and spending time with the Cookies, and then spending time with Terry and Sookie and doing three hundred loads of laundry in between all that, there wasn’t a whole lot of leftover time to be chopping up apples. Maybe I’ll get to that today. We’ll see.

Have I mentioned that having babies in the house makes for a lot of laundry? It doesn’t help that several of them are still pooping in their cage (the litter box is RIGHT THERE, damnit!) and then tromping through it. I clean them as best I can with baby wipes, but at a certain point you’ve got to give up and give them a bath. I don’t like to bathe them too often, because I don’t think it’s great for their skin and also it scares them and stresses them out, but when they’ve got poop smeared down their sides, I just can’t stand having them like that. So I use towels for that, I use blankets to line their cage (which have to be changed out when they’re pooped upon), and I use towels in my lap when I’m pottying them just in case something dribbles when I’m not paying attention. I’m doing one full load of towels, washcloths, and blankets every day. On bad days, I’m doing two loads.

Ah well. Could be worse, right?

Sunday I… don’t know. I did my own laundry (having babies tromp through their poo and then across my lap makes for a lot of my own laundry), I did more baby laundry, I…

Oh, I know. I didn’t get up ’til 5:30, because Fred has one of those automatic clocks that gets the correct time from space aliens or something, and the space aliens decided that since they’re turning clocks back for Europe, clearly the clock residing on Citizen Anderson’s bedside table needs to be turned back an hour, right? So Fred thought he was getting up at 4:30, but it was actually 5:30, and he didn’t realize it until he came to wake me up and saw the correct time on my clock.

(We’ve been getting up at 4:30 every morning to feed the Cookies. I hate the first five minutes after rolling out of bed at 4:30, but I like being up early and getting stuff done. I’ll still be glad when the Cookies are bigger and I can sleep a little later.)

Once the Cookies were fed and the kitchen was cleaned up, I gave the Wonkas their morning snack, then had Fred put hair color on my hair. I was originally going to grow my natural color out, because I was getting tired of coloring my hair, but after three months, when I could see just how much gray hair there was, I changed my mind. Fred has to help me out by putting the color on my hair, because if it were left to me, I’d probably only get about a third of the back of my hair covered.

I yelled at him a few times for getting color on my face (“I guess maybe you should have RICK do it!” he snarked, because I told him the other night that Rick had foil colored Nance’s hair, and marveled at that, because as I told Nance, I feel like I’m taking my life into my hands by just having Fred put color on my hair straight from the box with no fancy foiling involved), but all in all he did a pretty damn good job of it.

I’d like to say that I plan to get into a regular hair-coloring schedule from here on out, but I think we all know that that’ll happen right after Satan puts in his order for a Storm Chaser 3-in-1 Jacket (in Colonial Red, obviously).

Annnnd… what else did I do Sunday? Not a lot. Kittens, kittens, and more kittens.

It’s a rough life, but someone’s gotta live it!

If you didn’t check Love & Hisses over the weekend, you missed a good-news announcement, some great pictures, and an adorable movie on Saturday. And on Sunday, you missed ANOTHER adorable movie and some adorable pictures.

I love my Wonkas. When I walk into the foster kitten room and they are SO excited to see me that they stumble over each other in their rush to get to me, well, how can you not love that?

They like me to hold them (until they see something more interesting, of course, and then they’re off like a shot), and they like me to kiss them behind the ear (they purr super-loud when I do), and they like me to rub their bellies. Gus and Mike are so funny, because if I’m holding one of them like a baby and rubbing his belly, and then stop for a moment to pet another nearby kitten – OH do they get irate. Mike will complain in short bursts, and Gus will do a long, high-pitched meow. It cracks me up every time. The girls, on the other hand, if I’m holding Mike like a baby and Veruca feels the need for some belly-rubbin’ action, she doesn’t hesitate. She climbs up and flops across him and waits for her own belly rub. Same with Violet.

“MY toy.”

“MY toy!”

I love it when they sit with their front paws tucked under them.

Sweet Gus in the sun (with his toy!)

LOVE the whiskers.

Three of the four (Veruca was uninterested in posing.)

The thing about the Cookies is that they are so cute.

So cute.

SO cute.

And I love me a Siamese mix, but my lord.

This guy right here?

The one flopped across the stuffed Momma kitty?

“Who, ME?”

YES, you! Hydrox, you are the cutest, sweetest, most personable 4 week-old I have ever come across in my entire life! I don’t know if it’s the fact that you’re so laid-back that when you’ve eaten and gone potty, you go back into your cage and flop across the Momma kitty and go back to sleep. I don’t know if it’s the fact that you love yourself a good belly rub and know how to ask for one. I don’t know if it’s the fact that when you’re happy, you march and march and march. I don’t know if it’s the fact that you have the NEATEST feeling fur or that you’re clearly a litter box-using genius, or a fearless explorer, but Hydrox?

I am in LOVE with you.

I don’t even care that you CLEARLY prefer Fred. When he was done feeding kittens yesterday, and I was hanging out with your sisters and brother on my lap, and you FOLLOWED him to the door and then howled inconsolably at the closed door until he came back, I was all “What am I, chopped liver, you brat?!” But I was just glad that when he left again, and deposited you in my lap before he left, you deigned to stay and enjoy a belly rub before you deserted me for the stuffed Momma kitty.

Now, if I can just figure out a way to get you to teach all your siblings to use the litter box as well as you do!

In the meantime: a Hydrox movie!!!

Tomorrow, Terry and Sookie are off to the adoption center, where they’ll join Bill and Lafayette. Today, I’ll be devoting my time to snapping pictures of them, and giving them extra doses of L-U-V to carry them through until a person with good taste comes along and falls immediately in love with them.

Kara likes to hang out where it’s quiet. She has to rest up in case there’s some butt-kicking that needs to be done. It’s rough to be Sheriff Mama.

Previously
2008: No entry.
2007: I hope that the days come easy and the moments pass slow, And each road leads you where you want to go
2006: My little girl.
2005: The spud is 17 today!
2004: I hope you dance.
2003: No entry.
2002: “You want to buy STUFF faster than we get rid of it!” he accused shrilly.
2001: Well, the little bastard is home again.
2000: No entry.
1999: Boring work-related shit.