Blog

A belated thank you to everyone who attended the first KC Tweetup on Friday. Despite spending most of my time encouraging people to eat and avoiding the heat of the roof garden, I had a great time and enjoyed meeting everyone.  Best of all, I gained a zillion (okay, maybe 20) new local  followers, which means I can now Twitter-spam you all each time my band plays. (Just kidding. But not.)

Since I made it home by 10 p.m., I managed to catch the "Lost" season finale with my husband before bedtime. Wow, talk about generating more questions than answers. I’m looking forward to January when the new season starts.

On Saturday, I started out the morning at yoga class. After that, I picked up two foster dogs and took them to The Animal Rescue Alliance tent at the Kansas City Gay Pride Festival. It was crazy hot, but I hung out until after 2, putting out brochures, walking dogs, etc. We had two adult cats and four kittens that were obviously uncomfortably hot even in the shade, so we’d take turns misting them with water or wiping them with damp paper towels. And yet, no one went for the obvious quip…

I put in more animal volunteer time on Sunday, working the cat recovery room at Spay & Neuter Kansas City. It’s kitten season, so it was quite busy. It’s also flea and tick season, and I felt rather crawly afterward.

Band practice on Sunday night went well and it looks like we’re on track to have 20-30 songs ready by our annual backyard party in mid-June. I hope we can start booking gigs by the end of June.

So that’s everything that’s happened to me in the last few days. I’m sorry I’ve been such a blogging slacker, but Twitter gets the bulk of my random daily observations these days and I always feel disinclined to repeat them on the blog, even though there’s only partial overlap between the audiences. I’ll do better, I promise!

So how was your weekend? Did you get to do anything fun?

As much as I enjoyed my four-day weekend, it’s put me a bit behind at work. Apparently my subconscious is very concerned about it, judging by the dreams I was having when I woke up, which included:

• Missing the school bus,
• Realizing I’d been inadvertently skipping a class in school, and
• Playing hooky at the lake during a school day and feeling guilty about it.

I’m thinking it would be a good idea for me to get into the office early today.

This weekend I’ve weeded, planted, mulched, lopped, pruned and hauled branches. Here’s some of the result:

Ahhh. That’s the sound of me looking forward to four full days to stay home and do whatever I want.

What I want includes:

• Spending my $100 gift certificate at a greenhouse
• Planting flowers (which will require careful scheduling around rainstorms)
• Other yard maintenance (removing volunteer trees, weeding, etc.)
• As many yoga classes as it takes to counter the yard butt I will surely develop
• Going to movies (after lunch today: "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull")
• Attending every social occasion I’m invited to
• Daily naps

You’ll notice that that’s a pretty short list. I’ll also be cooking meals, getting my hair cut and colored, catching up on my Bloglines feeds, doing a vocal practice with the band, etc., but I really like the idea of lazing about as much as possible between bursts of activity this weekend.

I’m up really early today, so I’m going to go to Coffee Morning and then to the plant nursery. What else do you think I should do with my free day?

Yesterday I decided it was time I had something done about our slow basement drain. It had gotten to the point where every load of laundry overflowed the drain and wetted the floor about three feet around.

RotoRooter came out and started doing their thing. In both directions they came up with mud.

This is a very bad thing because it means that, as I had long suspected, the "grey water" from our kitchen and basement really does drain to the creek and not to the septic system. It also means that the drain line has been breached somewhere, but I’m certainly not inclined to dig up the basement floor, our concrete patio, and many feet of yard to find out where.

Our option, as proposed by the RotoRooter plumber, is to install a pump that will take wastewater from the kitchen and washing machine and feed it into a drainpipe to our septic system. For two thousand dollars, thank you very much.

That would be all well and good, but my husband and I are not comfortable with the idea of suddenly introducing that much extra water into the septic system without clearing the idea with a expert (aside from the initial plumber, who said "it should be okay"). You can see how the costs start escalating.

Then there’s the issue of still needing a functioning drain for when the basement floods periodically. Or maybe the root problem there is trying to solve the flooding before it happens.

One way or another, the real drain is going to be on my savings account.

Today is the one-year anniversary of the day we brought Velvet home from the shelter. She’s the cat in the foreground, with tiny-headed Xena behind her.

Over the past year Velvet has morphed from a scruffy-looking cat who
had obviously had a rough life, to a sleek, shiny, well-fed girl. She’s
a beautiful cat with long legs, big eyes and a sweet face, who loves to
be petted and cuddled.

We liked her from the first moment we met her, even though she was wearing a red collar that indicated that she’d been known to bite (as if any of our cats don’t nip now and then!).

The shelter staff told us that she loved to chase and be chased by the younger cats, which was exactly what we were looking for in a playmate for Xena. What they didn’t mention is that she likes to start those games around bedtime. Fortunately, they don’t last long.

She has one other habit I’d wish she’d break. If I still believed in monsters
under the bed, I’d never sleep again thanks to her evening ritual of
scratching the slats that hold up our mattress.

Sometimes I catch her eyeing our aged cat, Velcro, as if she can’t wait for her to die so she can take her place on my lap. Velcro may be old and deaf, but she’s always quick to smack that idea out of Velvet’s head – literally. On the other hand, Velvet has taken to giving Xena long baths, which is so cute I almost can’t stand it.

I don’t know how to wrap this up except to say that shelters are definitely the way to go when you want a new pet (unless, like Schmutzie, you end up rescuing one directly). You want a cat now, don’t you? Admit it!