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Average Jane and Her Husband Are…The Cat Whisperers

Well, the freakishly shy cat who hid for a solid week after she got to our house has been blossoming since we moved her up to the recording studio. Now Tinkerbell openly hangs out on the loveseat, plays vigorously with the Turbo Scratcher I got for her, races around all evening playing with toys, and will attack the feather wand toy until she's worn out.

My husband took the photo above and said she was like that for an extended period of time, so he had no problem getting out his camera for a shot. I assume he followed up with the belly woozling that she was obviously asking for.

She's still a little wary of me because I'm the evil woman who used to coax her in, cuddle her for extended periods of time and then betray her trust by poking a pointy antibiotic pill segment down her throat, over and over and over.

She's been done with her pills for more than a week, so I think she's starting to forget about all that.

Now I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that someone will adopt her while she's still at our house so she doesn't have to go back on display in a pet store. She really doesn't have the temperament for that.

If you're interested in her, click her name in the first paragraph and fill out an application!

December 14, 2012
Average Jane Celebrates

Happy eighteenth wedding anniversary to the guy who still makes me laugh every day!

Photo credit: Colby Lysne

December 9, 2012
Average Jane Plans Ahead

Christmas Eve is less than three weeks away, but I already have a solid menu plan in place for dinner despite the fact that I haven't even bothered to put up the tree yet (that's planned for this weekend).

Last year I went the non-traditional route and made enchiladas and Mexican rice. This year I asked my husband what he thought we should have and he hardly hesitated at all before he said, "Why don't you make that good fried chicken?"

At first I wasn't convinced, but then I started thinking about the whole meal and it actually sounded like it would be fun. I'll make a variety of dipping sauces for the chicken strips, roast some potatoes, make biscuits and coleslaw, and we can have pineapple upside down cake for dessert.

It's not going to be healthy, but it should be delicious. I even purchased a fryer so I wouldn't have to get one of my pans all sticky with oil.

Christmas Eve is generally a pretty small affair at my house, but as with Thanksgiving, I'm throwing it open to anyone in my area who doesn't have plans.

After that, we can all start working on those New Year's resolutions to eat more vegetables and get some walks in.

December 6, 2012
Average Jane Is Still Alive. Really.

I can't put my finger on why I've been so neglectful of the poor old blog lately. I'm still out there doing interesting things, but the will to write about them is sorely lacking.

Just to keep this from being a ghost ship, here are some photos I've taken over the past couple of months.

This is Tinkerbell, my foster kitty. I always swore I'd never foster, but I must have had a weak moment. Tinkerbell is the shyest non-feral cat I've ever met. She's really a sweetheart, but so skittish that she vanished for an entire week after she got to our house. We just moved her from the basement to the studio/office so she'd get more time to interact with us. I hope she finds a family that can be patient with her super-slow warmup process.

Speaking of animals, the bromance between Toby and Dr. Jones is still in full swing. The other night while we were watching TV, Jones had settled on the chair in the TV room and Toby was pacing back and forth trying to figure out where to settle. Finally he just jumped on the chair and spooned the cat, who was perfectly happy to let his buddy snuggle with him.

Ooh, pretty!

Ooh, pretty! Part II.

At Thanksgiving I made a lot of my own recipes and took photos of them so they're be more pinnable. Isn't Pomegranate Salsa lovely? I still have a lot of photoless recipes. Getting the rest of the photos may end up being a project for me between Christmas and New Year's Day while I'm off work. After all, we have to eat!

Finally, since today is National Cookie Day, here's a crazy video that my company did for our client Quiznos. It appeals to the hair band-loving teen who still lives in a dark corner of my brain:

Enjoy your day and have a cookie!

December 4, 2012
Average Jane and the Food Fight

One evening when I was probably in my teens, my mother brought home some cactus leaves from the grocery store and cooked them as a side dish for dinner. It was an attempt to be more adventurous with our cuisine, and we all took it in the proper spirit.

Unfortunately we lived in the pre-Internet world then, so it’s pretty safe to say that she didn’t have an actual recipe or instructions for cooking the cactus. I’m not sure if she steamed or boiled it, but what I do remember clearly is the result: slices of gooey vegetation that oozed pools of green slime.

As I said before, we were all game to try it. My mom, my sister and I each ate at least one bite but we all had to admit that it was pretty disgusting. Funny, but disgusting.

Then my mom threw a piece of slimy cactus at my sister. After the moment of surprise wore off, my sister threw one at me. We laughed and laughed while we emptied the pan and splattered the kitchen table and each other with strips of sticky green vegetable.

While I’m preparing Thanksgiving dishes tomorrow, many with recipes from my mother and grandmother, I’ll be thinking of them and remembering my mom’s lesson that a cooking disaster can still be turned into something fun.

Happy Thanksgiving and don’t take anything too seriously!

November 21, 2012
Average Jane Says No To NaBloPoMo This Year

You probably figured that out based on my lack of a post yesterday.

Instead, here's a picture of a lovely piece of cake.

I'll make an effort to step things up in the blogging department this month, just not every day.

(And yes, I know that posts like this are awful and unnecessary and a blot on the good name of blogging. Yet I wrote it anyway.)

November 2, 2012
Average Jane’s Weekend of Animals, Games and Technology

This turned out to be a slightly more relaxed weekend than I'd anticipated, which was good because I needed a break from running around.

I started the day by baking two loaves of Italian bread. My plan was to turn one of the loaves into Stuffed Cheesy Bread on Crack for a game night that evening. The other would be left to complement the minestrone I made on Sunday.

To give you some insight into what I deal with every day, once my husband got up I said, "Did you enjoy the smell of fresh-baked bread when you woke up?"

His reply, "I didn't really notice."

You can forward applications to be my new husband to the email address listed on my "About" page.

So anyway, in the afternoon I helped judge a pet costume contest at one of the PETCO stores where my rescue group has cats on display. The winner was this American Bulldog dressed as The Incredible Hulk. Here she is meeting her fellow Avenger, Captain America.

He's holding his hand like that because he had just petted She-Hulk and realized that dog-safe spray paint and sweaty palms don't mix.

I stopped at the grocery store on my way home and was thrilled to discover that pomegranate season has begun, so I purchased some and made pomegranate salsa. I'll have to pick up some more of the secondary ingredients to make another batch soon. Yum!

That evening, I went to A Librarian's house to play Cards Against Humanity with a group of friends. Thanks to the magic of technology (specifically Facetime and an iPad on our end), one of those friends played from the comfort of her own home in another city.

It really worked amazingly well. The room lighting was a little problematic, but they'd done a practice run beforehand and worked out how the virtual gameplay was going to proceed, so it went so smoothly that we might as well have all been sitting at the table together.

However, only those who were physically in the room got to drink gummy bear martinis.

On Sunday, I put Toby's sweater on. He was less than thrilled.

My husband had a band in the studio and their cars blocked me in, so I cooked all three meals at home that day starting with waffles, proceeding to tuna sandwiches and finishing with the delicious minestrone. I had three bowls for dinner. It might be my favorite food in the world.

It was really nice to have more time to spend at home than usual. I didn't get in as much reading as I'd intended, but I'm sure the pets appreciated all of the extra snuggling (and probably the food smells as well, although they didn't get any of it).

October 29, 2012
Average Jane Purchases Halloween Candy

I go back and forth about even having the porch light on at Halloween. We have very few kids in the neighborhood and we live on a dimly-lit, dead-end street. I think the most trick-or-treaters we've ever had could be counted on both hands.

However, my schedule aligned so that it made sense for me to be home on Wednesday night next week, so I decided to buy some treats for the few kids who might stop by. Of course, I also wanted to do it with an eye toward leftovers that I would enjoy.

On a recent trip to Target, I noticed that they were selling a big box of individual-serving bags of Pirate's Booty. Considering that I can eat an entire big bag of the stuff by myself and it's also pretty healthy, I thought it might be a nice option to hand out this year. That is, until I discussed it with my husband.

Husband: What kind of Halloween candy are you going to get?

Me: I was thinking of getting a bunch of individual portions of Pirate's Booty.

Husband: That's more the kind of thing you like. How about some Almond Joy or Reese's Peanut Butter Cups?

Me: Yeah, but the Pirate's Booty is healthy…

Husband: When I was a kid, I hated getting an apple or raisins or any of that bullshit. Halloween is about candy!

And he is right, of course. Apparently I lost touch with my inner child for a moment.

So now we have a giant bag of mini Almond Joy, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Whoppers and Heath Bars.

Here's hoping for a more robust showing of trick-or-treaters than I'm used to.

Photo credit: vvvracer

October 27, 2012
Why Average Jane Has Not Been Writing Here

Last week I started Alice Bradley's The Practice of Writing class. She provides daily pep talks and prompts for 15-minute writing sessions. I've been sharing the fruits of these prompts with my fellow students, but many of them aren't really the kind of thing I generally write about on my blog or they're things I've written about before and don't want to repeat.

However, I hate to neglect this blog completely, so I'm going to share one of last week's pieces that happens to be the fruit of two prompts (write about the first story you ever heard and extend a piece of writing from earlier in the week) and also happens to be something I'm pretty sure I've written about before here.

Still, here it is:

When I was a little girl, I would lie on the bathroom
counter while my mother washed my hair in the sink. She would tell me
"Tiny stories," which were about a little girl named Tiny who had a
younger brother named Biggie and a baby sister named Minnie.

Tiny had lots of adventures because there were fairies
living in her garden who liked to take her to magical places. She went to
Candyland, visited the North Pole, met the Easter Bunny, etc. There was one
story about a "zoo" where mythical creatures had been enslaved that
I'm pretty sure borrowed heavily from an episode of Star Trek. But obviously I
didn't know that at the time.

My mother's rather twisted imagination and dark humor got
the best of her sometimes and I vividly remember her telling me a story that
involved the fairies getting their heads bitten off so they were forced to talk
through their necks. I’m pretty sure this story came about because she was
tired of me asking for “one more story!”

Her ploy to shock me into not asking anymore backfired
because I was steeped in the lore of Oz by then. In Oz, no one can age or die,
so the stories are full of ghastly details about people being cut or torn to
pieces or trapped at the bottom of the ocean, still alive and apparently only
mildly inconvenienced by their circumstances. Then there was Princess
Languidere, who had kept a collection of beautiful women’s heads that she
removed from their original owners so she could change her appearance by
wearing different ones on a whim.

So since I had Oz as a basis for comparison, I knew Tiny’s
fairy friends would figure out a way to get their heads back, so I wasn't
alarmed for them in the least. Mostly I was just curious about how they were
going to eat.

When I was in sixth grade, I wrote and illustrated a version
of Tiny's visit to Candyland. I still have the booklet in my files somewhere
and one of these days I need to scan it before the paper degrades.

In the story, I drew Tiny and her siblings’ trip to Candyland
in neon magic marker detail with sherbet snowmen and lollipop trees aplenty.
They meet the Gumdrop Dragon, who is rather Cowardly Lionesque in that his
initial bluster turns to fear of the human children when he realizes they could
eat him. I can’t remember the rest of the Candyland storyline, but of course
all of the kids make it home safely except that they aren’t hungry for dinner
and Biggie’s stomach aches from eating so much candy.

I really wish I had written down more of the Tiny stories
because they were such a big part of my childhood and I would love to have been
able to share them with my niece and nephew. Perhaps one day I’ll make up some
of my own.

Photo credit: dixieroadrash

October 24, 2012
Average Jane’s Defective Kitty

I knew there was a problem on Sunday morning when Dr. Jones jumped into the broken side of our double sink in the bathroom and assumed a very familiar position with an intent look on his face. Yes, the cat peed—just a little bit—right in front of me. I took it as a sign that he was going to need a trip to the vet on Monday.

I had friends over to play A Game of Thrones that day, so I was busy most of the morning and early afternoon making food and tidying up. Jones didn't enter into the picture again until my friend Tara set her purse on the floor and I caught the cat trying to pee in/on it.

He just got worse throughout the day. I had to shoo him out of the game box and by the evening he was simply standing in the middle of the kitchen floor straining and peeing where he stood.

When I looked up his symptoms online, I realized that if he had a true blockage we could have an emergency on our hands. So rather than wait until my vet opened on Monday ($$), I went ahead and took him to the emergency vet clinic. ($$$$)

There he received a diagnosis of feline lower urinary tract disease (FLUTD), which is kind of a catch-all description but boils down to a lifetime of special dietary needs to prevent crystals and stones in the cat's urine. The vet told me that it is very common in neutered male cats but also in human women, so there's a good deal of research being conducted on it.

While I sat in the waiting room, the vet emptied Jones' bladder and gave him some pain medication that zombified him pretty thoroughly. I put him in a kennel overnight with water and a litterbox and I'm pretty sure he spent most of the night standing and staring blankly through the bars.

The next morning he was doing much better. He doesn't mind the kennel, so it's a good place to put him when I feed him his special canned food. I got a big bag of the dry form of the prescription food and switched all the cats over immediately. The vet warned me that I'd have to limit the portions to keep the cats from getting fat, but it's better to have them all eating the same thing than to have to worry about Jones getting into some food that will make his symptoms return.

So now Dr. Jones is on an anti-spasmodic twice a day for a week, the special food forever, and I have more pain medicine that he doesn't seem to need. He seems to be back to his old self already, which is a huge relief.

I asked my friend who'd given me Jones as a kitten if there was any chance he was still under warranty since he doesn't turn two until this Friday. Nope. No refunds, no returns. I guess I'll have to get him to pay me back in purrs and snuggles. I wonder if he'd be willing to take on a part-time job?

October 15, 2012