Category Archives: Pets

(Bonk!) Pet me!

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Dave’s cat Beaumont reminds me a lot of Kris’s cat Toby (who, sadly, passed away about a year ago). Both cats have got a very loud, mournful-sounding meow, can’t ever seem to get enough attention, are total food scroungers – don’t leave anything on the table/counter if they’re in the house – and they’re both kind of uncoordinated goofballs. Overall, very sweet and endearing cats, except for the fact that Beaumont drools when you pet him. But when Toby sat on someone’s lap, he’d grab a piece of his or her shirt in his mouth and nurse on it (we always suspected he was separated from his mother too early), so with both cats, whoever doles out affection ends up with some kind of wet spot on them. Ick. The funniest thing about Beaumont is that when he wants attention, he doesn’t just rub the side of his face along your leg like most cats do. Instead, he full-on head butts you. It’s the weirdest thing, but it’s so funny. So I’ve now started head-butting Dave when I want attention, since it seems to work for the cat. For some reason, it seems to annoy him less than my playing Punch Bug every time we pass a VW Beetle on the road.

We got more accomplished this weekend than I was expecting. The living room and dining room are totally painted now, which was the goal of the weekend. The light sage green looks awesome, too. We made two trips to Home Depot – yesterday’s was by far the biggest trip to HD yet, because we got all the flooring stuff (22 boxes!), a circular saw, and 400 sq. ft. of plywood because we have to shore up the new floors to make them level with the existing floors. At some point, Dave had to go get a nail gun (for the plywood – we got the easy snap-together floors), and rather than pull the several-hundred pound flatbed cart o’ stuff across the store, I just waited in the main aisle for him while he went to get it. Here’s something I learned: You don’t ever want to be the girl standing next to a huge cartload of stuff in Home Depot. I got more unwanted attention in that 5 minutes than I’ve gotten in a loooong time. I had a few Home Depot guys come up to me asking if I needed help – ok, fine, that’s their job, but it felt kind of sexist. Like oh woe is me, how am I ever going to pull this big wheeled cart around? And then a few guys walked by, eyed the flatbed’s contents and made comments like “Wow, that looks like quite a project!” Yeah, it is. Now go away. I imagine the fact that I had a sinus headache and that Home Depot tends to suck my energy out of me didn’t help my attitude.

Anyway, we started on the floors when we got back from Home Depot. I have to say, I’ve never used a nail gun before, and it was SO COOL!! I can’t really explain why. I think it’s because I’ve lived in apartments for years, so I’ve always had to be cautious about my noise level. But the nail gun is so loud, and Dave’s nearest neighbor is far enough away that they can’t hear anything – it was cool to know that I could make as much racket as I wanted, and it was fine. I was heady from the rush of power tools. 🙂 So we got part of the dining room started, and we’ll finish it sometime in the next couple of weeks. Dave’s birthday is on Sunday, so we’re taking a weekend off from home renovations. We should have enough time to get it all done before the gorgeous new furniture shows up.

Sunday evening, we chilled out, watched the season finale of “Six Feet Under” (my god, that was great), and then we played some XBox game (I can’t remember the name of it) where the objective is to crash into as many cars as possible. Now, 99% of the video games out there, Dave could easily kick my ass, because I’m just not a hardcore video game chick. But if the game is to figure out who between the two of us is the worst driver, I am SO winning that one. Out of 8 games, I won 6 and Dave won 2. Yeah, baby! That was fun.

living in an experiment gone awry

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Ok, the story of my morning: alarm goes off at 8:30. I hit snooze. (I’m working from home for the next few weeks, so I don’t really have to keep set hours.) Teenie jumps down and promptly hurls up a big hairball right next to the bed. She has been barfing constantly for the past few days. I’ve upped how frequently I give her her hairball medicine, but it doesn’t seem to be helping. Ten minutes later (around the time the snooze went off), she barfed again. On the other side of the room. Spacing it out so I have to clean 2 little spots instead of a single big one, how considerate. Regardless, this isn’t enough to make me get out of bed, I just figure I’ll clean it later. The part that makes me feel bad is that she always acts ashamed of the barf and runs away when I’m cleaning it, like she thinks she’s done something wrong. So then I feel like a bad pet-owner, as though I’ve done something to make her feel shame for a function she has no control over.

Meanwhile, back in bed, I hit snooze a couple more times. Then my cell phone rings. It’s my mom, calling me from her cell phone, not home. That’s unusual because my mom almost never uses her cell, and she would never call me at 9 a.m. unless it was an emergency. My parents are moving this week, so I thought maybe the phone line in the house got disconnected early or something. I answer the phone, and I can hear both of my parents talking, but it’s in the background, they obviously aren’t on the phone. I yell “hello” a couple of times and get no response. I hang up & call the house. Mom answers on the first ring.

Me: “Why did you just call me from your cell?”
Mom: “What?”
Me: “You just called me from your cell phone, did you bump it or something? Maybe it dialed me by accident.”
Mom: (yells, even though my dad is probably standing 5 feet away) “Sam, bring me the damn cell phone!” (to me) “Sorry, I’ll try to remember to turn the key lock on.”

Ok fine, now I’m awake. I get up, grab My Morning Giant Glass O’ Water (part of my effort to drink 64 ounces a day) and sit down at my laptop. Teenie promptly settles herself in on my lap. A few minutes later, there is an eardrum-piercing screech that is so loud I jumped out of my chair. I’m not sure how fast Teenie’s reaction time is, if I knocked her off my lap or if she jumped when she heard the noise too, but either way, she beat a hasty retreat under the bed. About 5 seconds later, the screech stopped. I checked both of my smoke alarms, they were fine. Thirty seconds later, the screech happened again. And again. I put on my shoes, hiked downstairs to the office and asked the child-abusing apartment manager what was going on. She said that the fire department was here and that they’re testing the fire alarm system in the building, it’s just a routine maintenance thing they have to do every now & then. Ok, how long is this going to go on? (Keep in mind, it was 9:30 a.m. at the time.) She says until 1:00 p.m. Great.

I go back to my apartment, find the fire alarm speakers in my apartment (not difficult, there’s one in the living room & one in the bedroom) and cover them with duct tape so the sound is somewhat muffled. It’s still loud & annoying as hell, but it keeps me from having to stop what I’m doing to plug my ears every few seconds. Teenie, however, is still spooked and staying under the bed. I know cats have more sensitive hearing than humans, so even with the duct tape, it’s probably still painfully loud for her. I should get her some kitty ear plugs, poor thing.

So now it’s 3 hours later, and the screeching still hasn’t stopped. It’ll stop for a while, then it starts again. I am slowly going insane. Forget work, there’s no way I can concentrate on anything in these conditions. Maybe I’ll go clean cat barf to take my mind off of it. Yeesh.

cozy

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This is the reason I love working from home (this too). I just took these & had to share. Cute, no? You can see the spots on her tummy & legs from where she’s been licking herself bald, which is a stress reaction that she has periodically – usually it happens when we move, but this time it was probably brought on by my being gone so much lately. Poor kitty.

wherever I lay my hat…

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This weekend was awesome. I spent pretty much every waking moment with Dave. I left his house yesterday so I had just enough time to dash to my apartment, unpack, re-pack, and head to the airport. That was the first time I’ve set foot in my apartment in over a week – I haven’t slept there since the 4th of July. I kind of miss it, but I like being at Dave’s house too, so it’s a tough call. My plants are pretty much all but dead, though. I watered them (not sure if it’s a lost cause at this point) and felt slightly guilty, then I took off. 
 
Teenie, however, is faring pretty well at Dave’s. There are still some stand-offs with the other kitties, but they aren’t fighting as much. I let her play outside while I was there, which is slightly worrying since she has no claws to defend herself if necessary, but she seemed to be having so much fun exploring Dave’s backyard, I didn’t have the heart to make her come in. And anyway, it seems to be helping her make peace with the other cats. Outside is sort of no man’s land as far as kitty territory goes, so they can sort things out and maybe start to get friendly with each other. It’s like U.N. negotiations for cats.
 
So, lots of lazy time this weekend. The big highlight was the trip to Home Depot which ended with Dave buying an air-conditioner. I helped him install it in his bedroom. Sooooooo lovely not to be sleeping in the heat with the window open and god knows what bugs flying in & out of the room. Happy sigh. I may not sleep in my apartment again until fall, who knows. (Or until Dave kicks me out, whichever comes first.) Oh, and he got a new shower head, at my insistence. This one won’t fall & bonk you in the head while you’re showering. Hooray!
 
Anyway, I took the same flight this week that I did last week – it leaves at 7:30 p.m., which is easy because the airport is pretty dead on Sunday nights. I got here around 10:30, took a cab to the hotel, checked in, showered, got ready for bed, and got maybe 4 hours of sleep when it was all said & done. Good lord, but I am tired. Today is a coffee day, for sure.
 
Oh, the tattoo has now officially entered the Itchy Phase of healing. Oh god, it itches. I can’t put a damn thing on it, and I’m not supposed to scratch it. Aaahh! The agony!

happy 4th

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I made an attempt at throwing a party last night for the 4th. The roof of my building has an amazing view of the fireworks over Puget Sound, so I thought I would take advantage of that and have a few folks over to take in the sights with me. It turned out to be a pretty low-key event – just me, Dave, Carl, and Krissy (who was so well-behaved that I almost didn’t recognize her) – but I think everyone had a reasonably good time. I personally had a lot of fun, it’s nice to just sit and talk about nothing in particular for hours. And I’ve never watched fireworks with a boyfriend before, I was surprised at just how romantic it is. (Who knew?) I also drank waaaaay beyond my limit, which I suppose is fine since I was at home, and if you can’t get sloppy drunk in the comfort of your own surroundings, where can you? Surprisingly, I feel fine today, which is probably due to all of the water and vitamins I downed before I fell asleep last night. I’m a bit sleepy, but no nausea or headache or anything. So that’s cool. I guess I’m a pretty efficient lush after all. (Ha!)

This afternoon, I’m heading out to Duvall with Teenie to get her settled in for another week at Dave’s house while I’m in California. I think she’s starting to like it there, she has much more space to run around than she does here. She seems to have a bit of cabin fever in this tiny apartment, there’s been lots of pacing and meowing over the weekend. Now if we can just get her to stop bitchslapping Dave’s cats whenever they come within 10 feet of her…

grrr…

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Ok, so Blogger sucks. I emailed them about my nuked template, and this is what they sent back to me:

“Hello Cindy,

I’m afraid you’ve fallen victim to a bug in our system which occasionally loses template data. Your posts are still safe, but unfortunately we were not able to recover your template for you. To use one of our default templates, you can click the Choose New Template tab on the Template page. This will let you publish your blog again while you recreate your old template. We apologize for the inconvenience and we are working on getting this problem fixed. However, it is always a good idea to save your own copy of a template if you make extensive customizations.

Sincerely, Steve
Blogger Support Team”

Needless to say, from here on out I will make sure to ALWAYS have a recent copy of my blog template saved somewhere. Silly me, I thought they might actually be able to recover data that’s hosted on their own damn servers.

Also, BlogBack – which used to provide my comments – doesn’t seem to work anymore, and I can’t log in to their web site to get the script again. I keep getting some kind of “invalid query” error. So I set up HaloScan (thanks, Carl!), and hopefully that’ll solve that. But that means that all of my old comments are gone, which makes me sad. Oh well.

Also, it looks like I get to leave CA on Thursday night this week, instead of Friday afternoon. Which would make me very happy, except that the only reason we’re getting an extra day off is because we’re going to have to work the weekend of the 17th. Which makes me very sad. Again.

Oh, and my sister’s kitty just had to have her leg amputated because she had a malignant tumor on it and they were afraid that the cancer had spread. That’s another thing to add to the list of sadness.

So there you have it. It’s just been a total crap day all the way around.