Category: Cats

Man, did I have a fun weekend! As I mentioned in my last post, I started Saturday morning at my office, which is very dark after hours. I had to scan my finger a bazillion times before the door would open, but once I got in, I settled at my desk with my coffee and snacks and got a lot accomplished. I worked for four solid hours, finished my most pressing project and then I was free. FREE, I tell you!

After a quick stop at home to drop off my work laptop and another to get some cash from the ATM, I met a big group of my Twitter and blogging buddies at a restaurant in my neighborhood to kick off our third annual pub crawl.

Keep in mind that I live in a small bedroom community, so the bar scene in town is pretty limited. After our first round, we walked up the street past a bar that had gone out of business since last year and stopped by the sausage shop to fortify ourselves for the second bar.

The tavern in question is tiny and due to the truly silly liquor laws in Kansas, technically a private club. Fortunately one of our group was actually a member, so we all signed the very official spiral-bound guest notebook so we could have the priviledge of purchasing $2.00 PBR drafts (or in my case, $3.00 Boulevard Pilsner bottles).

We took our drinks to the "patio," which is pictured to the right. If you're thinking "tenement alleyway," no one would blame you. Note the handy proximity of the dumpster. My favorite Twitter quote of the day came from this stop: "It smells like Worlds of Fun here. You mean like asphalt and barf?"

Actually there were a lot of good quotes, all preserved for posterity under the hashtag #missiondrunj. That's a lie, really. We were all pretty incoherent.

Our fourth stop was a barbecue joint that not only serves interesting fare like alligator eggrolls and bison empanadas, but secretly has a very impressive beer selection. My table split a variety of appetizers and a couple of pitchers of beer.

We made several more stops after that, including a return to the bar with the classy back patio. I chose to sit inside the second time around because the sun and I don't get along very well. Two of us made our presence felt by spending $1.00 for three Lady Gaga songs in a row from the jukebox. It's a testament to the mellowness of our group that we were allowed to live. We kept trying another bar around the corner, but there was a wedding reception close by and it was more hassle than it was worth to try to get served.

The last pub stop was a gigantic, mostly empty bar with a lot of pool tables. After that, the remaining stragglers wound up at our hosts' house for a little chill time on their patio and some karaoke to cap off the day.

I slept in on Sunday (7:00 a.m., woohoo!) and went out to breakfast with my husband. After my volunteer shift with the adoptable cats at Petco, I made a grocery store run and returned home to bake blueberry scones and baked doughnut muffins for my 2:30 p.m. book club meeting.

When my guests arrived to discuss The Art of Racing in the Rain, I warned everyone to be sure to zip up their purses lest one of the cats decide to steal something. Xena is our usual thief, but Dr. Jones was acting very interested in everyone's stuff as well.

After everyone went home, my husband and I went out for pizza. When we came back, the first thing I saw when we walked in the door was a plastic-wrapped brownie that had been gnawed by one of the cats and left in the middle of the living room floor.

I knew immediately that Dr. Jones had weaseled it out of one of my guests' bags, hidden it, and then chewed it up as soon as he had some time to himself. As you can see, all of that plotting wore him right out.

An email to the group revealed the victim (and everyone else thought it was hilarious). I was careful to put the remaining scones and muffins out of Jones' reach on top of the refrigerator before I came upstairs to write this post.

So now all of the cats are crashed out from the excitement of the day, my husband and I are working in our respective offices, and it's about time for me to head to bed and read for a few minutes before I fall asleep.

It's not very often that I have almost two full days of nonstop fun, but this weekend certainly fit that description. I emerged relaxed, mostly unscathed (except for a bruised foot from an unexpectedly hard step off a curb) and ready to tackle another week of work.

How was your weekend?

I went into the vacant house to clean out the last of the items left behind, never suspecting that they would include two young kittens and an iguana, all of which were running around loose.

Fortunately, there were some animal carriers in one of the rooms, so I put the kittens in one of them. It was much harder to catch the iguana and it bit my hand as I was wrangling it into another pet carrier, but it only left indentations and didn't break the skin.

I took the kittens to my vet's office, which was very crowded. I knew I needed to get them combo tested before I could take them to my house and let my cats be exposed to them. My brain was racing trying to think of names for them and wondering how much it would cost to get them spayed and neutered. I was hoping that The Animal Rescue Alliance would help me find homes for them, but either way I knew I'd have to keep them at my house for a bit.

Once I got home, the iguana escaped from its carrier and hid somewhere in my house. Fearing another bite, I put on work gloves and began moving furniture to try to find it.

…and then I woke up.

When I realized I had been dreaming, I can't tell you how incredibly relieved I was that I wasn't really going to be responsible for finding new homes for two cats and a lizard.

I can guess where most of the dream came from. I do a lot of volunteering with the aforementioned rescue group and it's in my thoughts most of the time. I've also been getting a bit over-committed to various other volunteer projects, so my life and schedule are hectic right now. Finally, I recently watched "Sunshine Cleaning," which includes a scene where a woman cleaning out the house of someone who died finds a kitten.

So I take the dream as a sign that I need to slow down a bit. But at least I don't need to spend any part of my day calling around trying to find someone who wants an iguana.

Photo credit: RachelEllen

I grew up at the end of a quarter-mile-long driveway which itself was at the end of a long, dead-end road. We had a few blizzards like the one we're having now when I was a kid and I remember them well. For one thing, we were helpless to leave the house until a snowplow came and as you can imagine, we were low on their priority list.

My mother worked in advertising and I recall one big snowstorm that hit right when she had an entire crew booked for a car dealer's TV commercial. Also booked for the spot: a lion. Ever the professional, she saddled up her horse, put packages of raw meat in the saddlebags for the lion, and rode up to the main road to put her horse in a neighbor's barn and catch a ride to the shoot.

When I woke up this morning, the snow hadn't really gotten a foothold yet, but I stayed home and worked from my home office anyway because I well remembered those blizzards from my childhood. Those, and the snowstorm last week that caused my usual twelve-minute commute home to take more than two hours.

I get a lot done when I'm working from home because the distractions are very minimal, especially if I refrain from letting any cats come upstairs to "help" me.

My home office is set up so that my computer faces into the corner and I have a window on either side of me. I watched the snow fall all day long until it covered all the leaves in the yard and finally accumulated to an impressive degree, as you can see from the photo above. I was very glad I'd stocked up on groceries the previous two days.

Lunch today was a peanut butter and bacon sandwich. It turned out I didn't have any lettuce, but bok choy worked just fine as a substitute. Dinner was Zesty Roast Beef Sandwiches, which cooked in the Crock-Pot all day long.

Here's how Dr. Jones and Trillian spent their day (I presume):

That's the first video I've ever edited, so don't judge it too harshly. I'm hoping to start doing videos more often. I turned off the sound on purpose because all you could hear was dialogue from the BBC version of "Jane Eyre," which I was watching when I noticed how cute the cats were being.

Did it snow where you are? How did you spend your day?