29 October, 2010

Let us have a kitten update!

Behold Emmett, the artist formerly known as Astute!
A young cat, grey tabby and white (mostly white from this angle) stretches across a green and white comforterand looks supremely comfortable.

His person tells me that he has remained a petite cat and still purrs like a very small, very hairy motorcycle. Also he gives kisses, and possibly because he spent some of his formative weeks hanging out with and being licked by Zille, Fetchydog Extraordinaire, he plays fetch. How adorable is that? Freakin adorable, I tell you what. And judging from the pictures he has plenty of sunbeams to nap in when he is not running laps of the house to keep in shape.

27 October, 2010

Still no rest for the wicked.

Well, mild rest, this week is light on school work. However it’s also heavy on me trying to ward off a sinus infection, so if this is less coherent than usual, I blame pollen.

Also, in the interests of lazy blogging, there is a post containing a picture of Jeremiah Swakhammer right over here. That would be Daniel’s blog, but lest you get all excited I feel obligated to warn you that he is an even lazier blogger than I am. Still, there is a turtle picture! Also a stick insect. Such riches!

In other news, the chicken house has shipped, and this weekend we shall put polyurethane sealer on the outside, and also pull down all the rusty wire off the chicken structure and install a door and shiny new welded wire fencing, and clean out all the trash that’s in it, and lay down some sort of Digging Discouragement System to keep the coons and possums and roving dogs and cats away from the chickens. Also, we have a much larger plastic bin which shall be converted to a winter home for whichever of the Manor Cats choose to use it. Still needed: another couple bigass plastic bins.

The garden progress has slowed as my best beloved has aggravated an old shoulder injury with all the digging and whatnot, and we’d prefer him not to be crippled so all the digging is on hiatus and the buying of fence posts and pounding them in as well. On the other hand, he is still spoiling me rotten so I cannot complain even a teeny bit except about the necessity of me having a job. Oh to win the lottery! But first I’d have to buy tickets.

This Friday is payday, then two days later is School Money Day, so I shall be buying the last odds and ends I need for soap and hopefully you can look forward to stories of successful soaping!

USCIS has received our application for Daniel’s green card, so cross your fingers for us that the bureaucracy moves quickly and is not nearly so annoying as the whole K-1 Visa process, as I would very much like to not have my brand-new husband deported.

And finally, I have started taking Chantix with an eye toward losing my nicotine habit. We shall see how it goes. The dreams thus far are, um, interesting and let me just say that the first one about chickens was definitely to be preferred.

25 October, 2010

I’m slacking again.

Yes, yes, I know. I have a kitten update for you on two of the Three Musketeers, and I really should get out there and get pics of the budding garden, and also we plan on ordering the chicken house here shortly and fixing up the coop (anyone want to show up for a Coop Rebuilding Party?) but I am a lazy blogger.

So instead I will merely tell you that Roo is on Twitter, as @roomanchu. Also you may send him fan mail at roomanchu@gmail.com.

He said all the other famous cats on the internets had Twitter and Gmail accounts, and who am I to make him feel like the weird left-out cat whose people won’t let him be all up to the minute and stuff with technology? It’s never good to be the Odd Cat Out. I do not guarantee that he will tweet anything particularly interesting, but there you go.

24 October, 2010

Squeaky toys are the bane of my existence.

Well, not exactly. But while here for the wedding, my dear friends Maggs and Chris gave Zillekins three noisy toys. Three. It is a measure of my deep and abiding love for Maggs and Chris that I did not murder them and bury their bodies on the back acre. They gave Zille a ladybug that makes a high-pitched squeak (and whose legs stick out when squeezed), a ball that does a medium-high squeak, and a knobbly purple heart thing that, well, quacks.

Previously when feeling bored in the mornings, Zille would go into her crate and play food bowl hockey, which involved a lot of banging around and had also chipped the tips of a couple of her canine teeth. Now when feeling bored on a Sunday morning, Zille goes and gets the knobbly purple heart thing that quacks (KPHTTQ) and throws that around instead. This is a game that involves lots of scufflings and thumpings and also, of course, quackings. Quack. Quack quack. Quack quack quack.

Zille finds this endlessly entertaining. Her human beings, on the other hand, tend to cringe when it happens because scufflequackthumpquackscufflequackquack is not necessarily what one wants to hear at 0600 on a Sunday morning when one is otherwise contemplating pancakes and laundry and a trip into town for the week’s supplies.

I love you, Maggs and Chris, but I’m totally frisking you and searching all your packages the next time you come to visit.

22 October, 2010

My friends are enablers.

As one can tell from my rather lengthy list of hobbies[1], I’m something of a magpie when it comes to learning new skills. Generally I watch myself pretty carefully lest I accidentally pick up a new one, and I’ve been doing quite well since last spring when I took up letterpress printing, sticking to practicing the skills that I already know in order to hone my proficiency.

And then, there was the wedding. And my dear friend Kate of Om Shanti Handcrafts traveled over the mountains and through the woods to attend, which would have been way more than enough present, but at rehearsal she handed me a Mysterious Box. “That is a shower present,” she said. “You should open it now.” Having learned from the military not to refuse a direct order, I opened it.

She got me lye. She is an enabler.

Lye is sort of scary. But you can do many things with lye. One thing you can do is use it to reduce indigo, so you no longer have to buy pre-reduced indigo for turning things pretty blue. You can also use it to make soap.

So here I am with my little bucket of lye, safely stored out of the way of wayward dogs and cats and husbands, and pondering cold-processed soap recipes. Also, I am searching the intertubes for a good source of oils to make soap from, and consult with a soap-making friend halfway across the globe on the best way to not explode the kitchen while I do it, because my best beloved gets a sort of twitch when people make his kitchen explode. Hey, when the zombie apocalypse comes and civilization as we know it collapses, it would be nice to still be clean, right? And sooner or later, I will need to know how to make soap.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

[1] KNITTING, SPINNING YARN, DYEING THINGS WITH VARIOUS DYES, MAKING PAPER, LETTERPRESS PRINTING, CREATING RANDOM PRETTY PAPER OBJECTS, LIGHT SEWING

18 October, 2010

Life goes on.

Things are finally settling down here at the Manor after all the wedding excitement. Daniel’s father headed out on Saturday and my parents wandered off home to Roanoke today. We got our usual grocery-shopping trip in, I got a final exam done and a couple midterms, with one more to go on Monday. Today I’ve even managed to fit in some spinning, I’m nearly to the bottom of the bag of heathered purple wool that my Mom got me some time ago, and as I practice predictably the spinning is getting better. We’ve also managed to pull together the packet for Daniel’s adjustment of status so he can stay in the country, and got to work on the woefully late thank you notes for the wedding.

Briar Rose and Noodlehead are the only two cats we see outside, and I still have no clue what happened to Briar Rose’s kittens. Grace is buried on the back acre, at the foot of a little clump of sassafras trees, which I felt was appropriate. When land is clear-cut, sassafras is the first thing to spring up on it, growing off its tap roots like weeds. Since the flavoring extract from the roots was banned due to an association with liver cancer, the trees have no great value, and since they die off quickly when overtopped by other trees, people tend to disregard them as, more or less, worthless weeds that will go away if you ignore them hard enough. They are not unlike my Manor cats in this. But I cherish my little sassafras trees, who are for the blighted back acre valuable agents of resurrection: they supply dead leaves to rebuild the topsoil and their tough roots help break up the rock-hard clay dirt. And I cherish the Manor cats, adorable little personalities that they are.

Grace was not a terribly social cat with most humans, but with me and with other cats she was pure love, head-bumping us all in the excitement of feeding time, rubbing on my legs and the heads of other cats with nothing but pure joy that once again the thumb monkey was here with the good stuff. She was getting nicely round, putting on a thick winter coat and a bit of a layer of winter fat, as well. She had a name, she was known, she was loved, and I miss her.

15 October, 2010

Random news

1) I’m just about all caught up with life after all the wedding festivities. The wedding festivities happened in the run-up to midterm exams at school, so just imagine my busy-ness, if you will!

2) It wasn’t Briar Rose who died on the road, it was Grace. They were difficult to tell apart and I didn’t get too close to the body (Daniel, beloved sweetheart that he is, got her off the road for me and put her in a box), but this morning Briar Rose showed up for breakfast. Furthermore, she is no longer nursing kittens. I still don’t know what happened to them, the goober never brought them here.

3) Daniel got great pics of Jeremiah Swakhammer, but I haven’t uploaded them yet so you will have to wait and suffer, Gentle Reader.

12 October, 2010

Let us have a happy post or, This is the kind of thing that only happens to me: wedding edition.

So! There was a wedding! But first there was a rehearsal.
(more…)

11 October, 2010

Earth, receive an honored guest.

Briar Rose is dead, hit by a car on her way to the Manor last night. I don’t know what will happen to her kittens, she never brought them to me. I have a doctor’s appointment this morning, and afterward we will bury her on the back acre.

9 October, 2010

Holy crap, y’all.

A wedding happened! And sometime when I am not about to die of tired, I will tell you about it. There are pictures. And a surprise puppy. And now, there is going to be a nap.

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