She's five already?

Then:

Now:

Happy birthday, Alison!

So where do they sleep?

You may remember that I carefully put Chloe's favorite cushion and her beloved bear in our closet so she'd have a nice place for her endless naps. But she doesn't sleep there. Neither do the other two cats.

If she slept there, we'd see fur on the cushion. 

Instead, here's where they all sleep:

Under the bed.

On the bathroom counter.

On a box. 

In a sunbeam. This also doubles as his bathtub.

Under the couch. 

And a late entry from this afternoon:

Getting out of the apartment requires
running an obstacle course.

Not yet

It’s been a long time since we’ve hung toilet paper from a proper toilet paper holder. As recently as two and a half years ago, I forgot to put away a roll (we store them in something like this) and Wally destroyed it. You can see photos of his destructive ways here.

He’s mellowed some as he's gotten older and he's even left the paper towel alone--he hasn’t fanged a roll since before the Great Flood so I wondered if maybe he’d lost interest in toilet paper also. Last night I hung a roll in the second bathroom as an experiment.

While he didn’t utterly destroy the roll, it’s clear he’s still quite interested in damaging it. So if you come to our house and you wonder where the toilet paper is, just look to the left of the toilet and you’ll see the storage canister holding the undamaged toilet paper. 

Slacker tomato plants

We have two tomato plants. I got heirlooms and planted them in mid-May, the same time I got the pepper plants. And they've grown; in fact, they've grown quite tall.

But that's all they've done. Here it is 2/3 of the way through July and we have seen no blossoms--until now and I'm not entirely convinced these things actually are blossoms:

Compare those puny results with our pepper plants:

Now go over and see what Freshhell's garden has produced (scroll down to the bottom of that entry). Seriously, tomatoes, you need to step up and produce or I'm gonna cut you down and use those stakes for the pepper plants.

Why do I buy cat toys?

Clearly I should just wait until something gets delivered and then let them play with the packaging.



Did you hear Chloe crying in the background throughout the entire video? She thought it was 5 PM and that she should be fed immediately. She was wrong.

Eddie thinks the box everything came in makes a perfect cat bed:

He's been working on shredding all the packing paper that came in the box, which will ruin his bed. Notice, too, the fang marks on the top right side of the box. Boxes have short lives in our house.

And right now he's on the top level of the cat perch, biting his toe nails. Cats are so weird.

I shot the sheriff

But I did not shoot the kitty cats.

Although I know it looks like I did.

Summertime

We had a short break from the upper 90s/low 100s temps so we could open the blinds a little bit. Here's what happened.

Work it

I’ve spent most of today working on a place we don’t even live in any more. But hey, if my efforts help speed up the selling process, I am more than happy to do these kinds of chores every month.

It’s shocking to me how much dirt has been tracked in over the last three or four weeks of showings. Fortunately we left a broom and dust pan here.

Mostly I’ve worked on the patio. It’s a brick patio so it has to be weeded—I know that sounds silly but if you don’t weed between the bricks, everything starts to look shabby and dilapidated. I also had to sweep the entire thing because all sorts of leaves, twigs and general yard crap get blown in and that also looks awful. There’s a large tree outside our patio which overhangs the patio just a bit, just enough to drip sap on the table and chairs. So I scrubbed them all with very soapy water and then rinsed thoroughly with the hose. I also watered everything because Boston is having a hot, dry summer too, just like the rest of the US. And I did laundry and cleaned inside.  

We have another open house scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. We’ve dropped the price already so between the large size, the gorgeous patio and the price, our place is a good deal. I hope someone else thinks so too.

There's a banana in my ear

I've been having some issues with my hearing in my left ear. Can't say as I'm entirely surprised. I was a musician for a long time, and I recall the Army bringing in some sort of OSHA folks to test the acoustics in our practice room and telling us we all needed to wear hearing protection. Well that just wasn't going to happen--you have to be able to hear the other musicians when you rehearse. And I've been to more than a couple of concerts where I spent all my time in the mosh pit. Plus my grandmother lost a lot of hearing, although no one really knows why.

So lately I've been more aware of people with hearing issues, I've noticed hearing aids a lot more and I've seen more articles about hearing loss. Tuesday I ran across this article and was completely surprised to learn that hearing aids aren't usually covered under insurance. What is up with that??

I guess I'll find out more after I see my new doctor next month. With any luck, my issue isn't permanent or serious. But if it is, it looks like any solution will be out of pocket. That just doesn't seem right.

Cats

Who can understand them? Especially where they choose to sleep.

Take Chloe for example. She was obsessed with her bear—had to sleep on it and ended up smooshing it flat. Then after we replaced the cushions on our Poang chair from Ikea, we kept the cushions because she loved them so much. No matter where I put those cushions, she’d find them and sleep on them. I sort of preferred that because it’s easy to vacuum the cushions and keep the cat hair under control.

She’s also always liked sleeping on the large soft gray blanket we have. We use it in the winter on top of our bedspread and fold it during the day. Actually all the cats like that one, but its summer now so it’s not on the bed. I’d thrown it in a folded heap in our closet and that’s where she’s been sleeping ever since.

That’s not where I want to store a winter blanket, so this weekend I washed it and put it away properly. I also moved the Poang cushions into the closet along with her bear. I thought she’d like that a lot.

Nope. She hasn’t been spotted there yet. Cats. 

Teepee, wigwam

Have you heard that one before? Kent says this one to me as he rubs one shoulder and then the other. Then he says “two tents.” Get it?

Yeah I know, it’s pretty lame. But that’s us right now, too tense. Some of it is residual from all the arbitration and lawsuit stuff at our Boston place. Some of it is due to trying to sell that place, and a lot of it is how nervous we both are that something will happen to our Boston apartment while we live here in Kansas and can’t do anything about it, or at least not quickly.

You know that’s the worst part of trying to sell a house. It’s the not knowing if or when things will be done. You just have to keep moving on, with that specter of not selling just hanging there. Blah.

Plus we are both still settling into our new jobs. Even though Kent is still with the same company, he’s managing a lot of stuff now and in a very different way. And I’m learning to do what I already know how to do and have done—only in a very different way. So yeah we are both super tense.

Fortunately we don’t turn on each other. I am deeply grateful for that. What we do instead is hunker down, sleep a lot, have no energy and eat out too often. Well now we do that, during our Boston days with the employment fluctuations we couldn’t do that (plus everything is more expensive in Boston). But we have been here and it’s not really how we like to live. Partly it’s because we are food snobs and believe what we make is far better than most of what we can get in a restaurant. Partly it’s because restaurant portions in the Midwest are super-sized—and yes we can and do take home leftovers but let’s face it, gourmet burgers are best eaten fresh, not as leftovers, amirite?

Anyway. I head to Boston Friday to take care of a few things around the apartment. This will be a quick trip and I’ll be back Sunday afternoon. We just feel like we need to stay on top of things there and maintain a presence especially given the nastiness of some of our neighbors. 

Red, white and purr

It's a lazy day and I am imitating the cats. I hope you have a relaxing holiday, too.

Cat scratch fever

I’ve got all these bits and pieces zipping around in my brain; not a one of them adds up to much of anything but I think need to do a brain purge so they get out of my head.

First up, I don’t think our tomatoes will produce anything. They’re really long and leggy looking, and I don’t see any signs of forming buds. The peppers, on the other hand, are going crazy. We have probably half a dozen tiny little peppers growing like crazy with lots more blossoms.

Show me the tomatoes.

Go, go peppers!

The basil plant is loving our heat wave. I used some today to make a tortellini salad except my unopened jar of roasted red peppers had a bad seal. So I need to pick up another jar on the way home from work tomorrow. Yes, I could make the roasted peppers only my peppers aren't ready yet. This salad is a great summertime dish and takes minimal cooking. That’s a plus even with air conditioning.

I’ve taken a deep stretch class at a nearby yoga studio two Saturdays now. I love this class. It’s a 90 minute class of stretches that we hold for quite a while—three to seven minutes, depending on the stretch. I am quite inflexible through my shoulders so I'll take all the help I can get. Last Saturday, we worked on shoulders and back and I already noticed some improvement yesterday. We were flat on our backs with our legs and butts up against the wall (yesterday was all about the back and legs). I stretched my arms out to either side and then bent my elbows to form right angles with my palms facing the ceiling. Normally my hands just sort of float in the air because my shoulders are so tight. That’s how it was at first but within a couple of minutes, I realized the backs of my hands were touching the floor. That’s real progress for me.

Friday, I took poor Wally to the vet and it was horrible (not the vet, Wally’s behavior). First he hissed and growled when I tried to put him in the carrier. He fought the carrier so much that I had to get Kent to help me. Then Wally growled and hissed the entire drive to the vet's. Once we got into the exam room, things  went from bad to much, much worse. Long story not quite so long, he screamed, hissed, tried to bite and was so scared and angry he had to be sedated to be examined. He’s over it now and I’m glad his shots are three year shots. Maybe in three years, he’ll have forgotten how much he hated being in the carrier.

What’s new with you?