So yeah, no entry on Friday. Sorry ‘bout that (except, not really). I wasn’t in the mood for writing, and I wasn’t in the mood for driving to Madison to upload said entry even if I’d been in the mood for writing (the traffic on the Friday before a holiday weekend is a nightmare), so no entry.
I don’t remember what I actually did do on Friday, though because it’s a day that ends in “y”, it involved vacuuming the entire house at some point. In the afternoon, after Fred showed up from work, I dug up all the tomato plants (they were in peat plots, so when we planted them, we planted them pot and all, which conveniently made it easier to dig them back up) and put them in the garage.
It was due to get very cold over the weekend and tomato plants are sensitive, so they needed to either be covered or in some way protected. Thus, the garage. When it warms up again, I’ll be replanting them. I’m thrilled at the idea, believe you me.
Since the only other plants we had in the vegetable garden were peppers and they were going to be more difficult to dig up, I opted to bring leaves from the leave pile in the back yard (a pile I made sometime last Fall with the intention of burning them, which I never got around to doing) and put a pile of leaves atop each pepper plant.
The entire time I was doing that, Fred was working on the chicken coop, and Maxi followed me around. She cracks me up, that cat – anytime I’d stop to do something, she’d stop as well and flop on her back on the ground and flail around, her little legs sticking straight up in the air. I’ve never seen a cat who so loves to get dirty and dusty and stay that way.
Saturday, Fred finished building the chicken coop while I helped a little (a VERY little) bit. I puttered around the house, did some stuff on my computer (the desktop, as opposed to the laptop – the funny thing is that I’ve been on my desktop maybe four times since I moved in, which makes it kind of humorous that the first thing I wanted Fred to do when I moved in is hook up my computer), did some reading, took a nap, and vacuumed the entire house.
We stopped at Ruby Tuesday for dinner, then hung out at the house. I got in a couple of hours of surfing the internet while Fred did the same and then took a bath, then we watched Rocky Balboa (not a bad movie) and I headed home to Crooked Acres.
Saturday was not a good night for me. I was about asleep when Sugarbutt started racing through the house like his tail was afire, so I sat up and yelled at him. He ignored me, raced around a while longer, then went to sleep, which allowed me to do the same. I was awakened a couple more times by rambunctious cats, and then at 2:30 I woke to find that I was racing, buck nekkid, toward the bedroom door, frantically digging earplugs from my ears. A quick scan of my memory and I realized an extremely loud crash had woken me up, so I paused by the bedroom door and listened.
The cats were a tad freaked, but not person-in-the-house freaked (“person-in-the-house freaked” = you don’t see a cat anywhere, because they’re all hiding), so I listened for a moment longer, then started going through the house room by room to figure out what had happened.
“What did you DO?” I accused Sugarbutt, who looked up at me with the most innocent face in existence.
I found no large pieces of furniture knocked over, no windows or doors broken, and was starting to wonder if I’d imagined the whole thing, when I went into the bathroom.
Our medicine cabinet in the bathroom is all mirrored glass – it’s mirrored on the front and on both sides. I never thought to wonder exactly how the panels on the side were held on (I guess I assumed they were attached somehow with screws or held in place with brackets or something – I just never really looked all that closely, obviously), and so it was with dismay that I found that they side panels were held on with double-sided tape. How did I discover this? Why, because the double-sided tape on one of the side panels had let go, then it flipped down into the sink and shattered.
I tried as hard as I could, but I couldn’t come up with a way to blame that one on the cats.
On the good side, the majority of the glass had landed in the sink, thereby containing it, so I only had to scoop the glass out of the sink into a trash can, sweep the floor of the bathroom to be sure there were no shards that could slice up cat paws, and then I went back to bed.
Between 2:45 and 7, I was awakened approximately 1,000 times by each and every cat in the house. They all either wanted to knead on my arm for six hours, purring and giving me the Love Eyes (Miz Poo and Sugarbutt), stand on the pillow upon which my head rested, kneading for six hours and giving me the Love Eyes while simultaneously trying to figure out how to get me to move my head off the pillow so they could have it for themselves (Tommy), rest their entire 600 pounds of body weight against my legs and then complain if I dared to move my legs in the slightest (Mister Boogers), stand next to me and stare creepily at me as if they were considering the best way to kill me (Spot), or just wander dreamily through the house, pausing every three feet to howl mournfully (Spanky).
At 6:30, Sugarbutt started digging at the blinds in the bedroom, wanting them opened so he could sit and watch the birds hop around on the lawn (never mind that I leave the blinds on one of the computer room doors pulled up at the bottom so he can do that very thing), Tommy and Mister Boogers started a quarrel that culminated in Mister Boogers bouncing across my stomach, followed by Tommy (who is gunning for the “Fattest And3rson Cat” title previously held by Tubby) doing the same, and then Spot started up with his godawful otherworldly squeaking, and finally I picked up my cell phone and called Fred.
“I want you to come over here and kill these cats and then nail wood over the bathroom door and close off that room forever, and then I want YOU to live here with the cats so I can live there with NO small animals to torture me all night long.”
He laughed unsympathetically and said what he always says when I complain about how I don’t have internet at the house (UGH) or how the cats have kept me tossing and turning all night or the fact that I have to wash my hair in the kitchen sink and then take a bath because of the BATHROOM ISSUES, or whatever I’m complaining about. “I tried to tell you I should stay out there and you could stay here!”
Never mind that I made that suggestion only because Madison is closer to his office than Crooked Acres, and I only suggested that I stay in Crooked Acres instead so he wouldn’t have to drive half an hour, as opposed to thirty (proofreading is your friend, Robyn) ten minutes. Never mind that for the past three Saturdays I’ve suggested that he sleep at Crooked Acres so I could sleep in a bed that does NOT contain four cats at any given time during the night. He always pretends he can’t hear me when I suggest we switch houses for the night, because he is a mean, uncaring sadist.
So Sunday, I stayed in bed until late, reading, and then I read some more and then… I slacked off for the majority of the day, except for a trip to Lowe’s with Fred to pick up fence stuff.
And let me take a moment here to say that he will mock anything he’s built, whether it’s the cat house, the wood shed or the chicken coop, but with every new thing he builds, he does it better and better, and I honestly think that chicken coop would easily withstand a tornado. We’ve got twelve chickens who don’t have any idea how lucky they are. Those are going to be some spoiled rotten chickens, in their little chicken mansion with their spacious yard. And they won’t even be grateful because they are CHICKENS.
Speaking of the chickens, who we refer to collectively as “the girls” (we always refer to the cats collectively as “the boys”), I was making myself an omelet for breakfast Saturday, and Fred suggested that I boil a couple of eggs for them. I did, then peeled and chopped them, and when they were cool we brought them upstairs and offered them to the girls.
“I feel like this is a little cannibalistic,” Fred said, just before we walked into the room where we’re keeping the chickens.
(On a side note, a couple of weeks ago I said that the chickens don’t stink. Well, that was then and this is now – much in the same way humans start to get stinky when they hit adolescence, chickens do too. I cannot wait to get them out of the house and into the chicken coop so they can stop stinking up my house.)
The girls and Fricasee are apparently great fans of boiled eggs. Fricasee, especially, could not contain his excitement. He grabbed up a piece of egg white and started running around the pool, chirping excitedly. Naturally the other chickens wanted to know what he had, so they chased him around, and eventually one of them grabbed the egg white away from him. I don’t know how many times he repeated the same act, running like mad, jumping over anyone who was in his way. It was seriously funny to watch.
“How YOU doin’?”
Later, we learned that they don’t care for tomatoes at all, and baby oatmeal cereal is like crack to them.
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Sunday, early afternoon, I glanced out the kitchen to see an orange cat walking across the lawn belonging to the man next door, headed for our front porch.
“Huh,” I thought. “Newt looks different.” I regarded him for a few more minutes, then wandered off and thought no more of it.
A while later, I was sitting on the couch NOT playing Snood (okay, just one game! Just one!) when I got up to do something. I noticed that Sugarbutt was looking intently out the window directly in front of the cat tree. I went over to see what he was looking at, and saw Newt eating out of the food bowl next to the cat house. And then I saw Newt sitting to the side.
I snapped a picture of the Newtalike, then went out on the porch to see if he’d let me pet him. Before I even got the door open all the way, the Newtalike had vamoosed, and though I looked all over the place, I couldn’t figure out where he’d gone.
Later, when we were walking around the back forty – something we do almost every day – we saw him laying in the middle of the field. Though we called to him in friendly we-are-nice-people-who-only-want-to-feed-you, he wanted nothing to do with us, and when we got too close he ran off into the woods surrounding the back part of the property.
I seriously think we need to have a webcam on the front porch. Maybe if I let Fred have his ChickenCam, he’ll agree to a CatCam.
The Newtalike. Yes, he has a tail – it’s tucked over to the side.
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“Behind you! A serial killer! Oh, wait. There’s nothing there. My bad.”
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Previously
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.