Blogging like I’m famous.
Watching Satine and Frodo interact is like watching an old sci-fi movie you’ve never seen before, with the sound turned off. You can MST3K it all you want, but you still don’t know what is going on.
“And now I raise my paw to say ‘Have at you!’ No, I have changed my mind. I will flop here on the rug in submission. Or is it?”
“Hazzah! I will dance away from you - no! I will drop to the floor and beseech you. ‘May I sniff your tail?’”
It is making the humans weary.
Some of you may recall that I was looking for an old college mate, Nate.
Last Friday, I got this e-mail:
Hello,
This may seem really weird, but I was googling Nate
Penland (just for fun, I know where he is already) and
I found your blog at lauracatoe.com. It was odd
seeing that someone was looking for him, so I thought
I’d update you about him. I married Nate in 2001 and
in 2004 we moved to Sydney, Australia.
-Lori
Since then, I’ve been mailing back and forth with them. If I hadn’t blogged about my quest, and if she hadn’t Googled… just awesome, man. A response from around the world!
Say prayers for Nate’s mom, Jan. She lives in New Orleans. While you’re at it, toss one up for Jaimie’s friends the Faiths (residents of Slidell) and my Aunt Allison’s posse from Metairie.
Frodo went to the vet for his shots today. I thought I was going to need to take the afternoon off to help Kris wrestle both cats into the car, but it turns out Satine isn’t due for her shots until October.
We had First Blood over the weekend; Satine nicked Frodo on the nose. They are now doing this dance routine where they try to follow each other around without the other one noticing. Frodo is pretty stealthy in the sense that he makes almost no noise since he’s so tiny, but he’s also A-D-D so he lacks the patience for a good stalking.
In other news, my Cinema 1975 art made it into an FPC package. So now you can see the “real” version, as opposed to the not-totally-1975 version that was July’s Illustration of the Month.
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My cell phone rang last night as I walked down the driveway to retrieve our trash can. Caller ID comes up Jaimie.
Me: “Helllllllooooo?”
Jaimie: “Tell me I don’t need a dog.”
M: “What happened? Oh, no, did you go to the Humane Society?”
J: “No, but Dad did. There’s this border collie…”
M: “You Pickles and your border collies. Is it retarded?”
J: “No, this one actually went through the training program at the jail.”
M: “Wait, I’m supposed to be telling you that you don’t need a dog.”
J: “Right.”
M: “Have you seen it yet?”
J: “I’m going tomorrow.”
M: “Jaimie’s getting a daaaahhh-ogggg!”
J: “Shut up.”
* * * * *
My phone rings at work this morning. Caller ID reads Pickle, Jaimie.
Me: “Hey, I dreamt you got a dog.”
Jaimie: “Shut UP. Hey, now my dad is telling me a lady at the Holy House will pay me $50 a month to keep her dog. He says it can play with my dog. I don’t even have a dog yet!”
M: “Jaimie’s getting TWO dogs!”
* * * * *
My phone rings at work this afternoon. Caller ID reads Pickle, Jaimie.
Jaimie: “I got a dog.”
Me: “Awww, when can we come meet him?”
J: “It’s a her. I didn’t get the border collie. I got Roxy.”
M: “Roxy!”
Everybody say hi to foxy Roxy! (Pic courtesy the Humane Society website.)
Liz wanted me to post a picture showing how very small Frodo is: 
That’s him sitting on the scales, if you need a size reference.
Quilla assures me that this standoff stage won’t last. She says her cats (Teq and Chloe) hated each other for months. Can I fast-forward to when they’re friends? Cause Satine is making mean tiger noises at Frodo right now and it’s unsettling.
Can’t we all just get along?
In September, the Times will publish the yearly special section on Cherokee County. I finished the map today, and so I present to you all the funny sounding municipalities that didn’t make the cut (and wow, is Cherokee full of ‘em):
Bauxite, Exie, Gnatville, Loop, Blanche, Broomtown, Bomar, Key, Plano and Moshat. (Mo did what?)
There are some ironic names: Ball Flat and Rock Run
There are some descriptive names: Blue Pond, Round Mountain and Yellow Creek Falls (don’t drink!). Oh, and Piney and Grassland.
There are some porn names: Sandy Springs, Adams Ferry, Pleasant Gap
There are some former presidents: Taft, Grover
Religious: Noah, Pope, Antioch
Some that should be in fantasy novels for kids: Frog Mountain, Hopewell
Some that belong on other continents: Congo, Waterloo
There are a lot of names that end in -ey: Forney, Hurley, Dewey, Mackey
And just because I didn’t want to leave him out: there’s a Leonard, too.
Chris is a full time City employee! Yay, insurance! I am sure this means Liz will be having a baby next year.
Kris can pick up his car tomorrow. Yay, no more bumming rides off best friends and dads and neighbors and reporters!
Satine managed to chill out enough to play and nap while Frodo was in the same room. Yay, um, less hissing?
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We called Matt on Saturday to see how the kittens were coming along and found out that we could go ahead and claim ours. He handled the car ride well, and we stopped on the way home to get him his own supplies (litter box, food bowl, etc.) as he is to be sequestered in the “man room” until he and Satine learn to co-exist.
He had fleas and the lady at Timberlake said he’s too small for any conventional flea fighting. “Here’s what you do,” she told us.
Bathe him in Dawn (dishwashing liquid). Do not wet him first, as that will cause all the fleas to head for his face. You don’t want to wash his face cause you don’t want the Dawn getting in his eyes and other orifices. The Dawn kills the fleas and then you wash him off.
This totally worked.
Bathing the poor thing didn’t seem to traumatize him nearly as much as when we let Satine get too close to him. All the websites say give them time; put the new cat in a Safe Room for a day or so. We are not patient people and we let the Alpha Cat into the Safe Room. Oops.
We got the kitten so that Satine would have a pal during the day, and so far? She haaaaates him. She’s been a hissy-fitting, “rrrrrrr”-ing, flattened ear ol’ biddy about the wee, palm-sized, defenseless addition to “her space.” It’s gonna take patience and time. (To do it, to do it, to do it, to do it riiiight… I’ve got my mind set on youuuu…)
In other news, Brad turned 25 this weekend. Oldster!
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I am glad that:
• Laney Moss totally loved the photo I dropped off for her yesterday. It was of her warehouse back before she made it all super-cool.
• Both of the Harry Potter fonts are available for free download on the web. Lumos!
• The downstairs is dusted and vacuumed for our home group tonight.
• My eds. approved of the funky layout I did for Sunday’s Life & Times package.
• The wee kitten that we plan to adopt is a week closer to being weaned.
Kris and I are not linear home project tacklers. Maybe if we had surplus cash, free time and sunshiney days, we would be. Since we don’t, we approach projects on a whim and need-be basis. Sure would look better to get the doors on the other side of the barn. Yep, but Brad and Cindy are outta town; let’s paint their porch. Be nice to paint our porch, too, now. Yeah, but it’s raining and we have our first home group this Friday; let’s paint the bathroom.
Sometimes we choose projects just so we can mark something off the 2005 Master List. The problem with the Master List is stuff that we re-do (say, painting the bathroom three times) can only be marked off once, and some things that we do aren’t on the list at all. “What? Adding security lights to the back doors wasn’t on the list? Poo poo!”
Saturday’s project that was not on the list was adding a fart fan to the bathroom. We know the walls sweat pretty bad when we take showers, but it was while we were painting the bathroom to match our new shower curtain that we saw how the steam had already ruined the yellow satin paint, which means the new flat finish bone white would streak in no time. “Kris, would you call your dad and ask him if it’d be possible to add an exhaust fan in here?”
We’d read that an exhaust fan must always vent outside and that was not an option in our case. Luckily, the verdict from Kris’ pa was that since we were only talking two showers a day and the moist air dumping into the attic would have the whole attic to dissipate, we should be fine. We were even luckier to discover that the metal vents in the roof (turbine? whirlybird?) are directly over the bathrooms. Awesome. (Fart fan for unit 204A will probably be on the 2006 Master List.)
I took a Blogger survey this week. When it asked for “hobbies” that I liked to blog about, I listed graphic design and home improvements. Sometimes, they even intersect. Yesterday I made a graphic for the paper about minimum design standards for mobile/manufactured homes. I found this piece of clip-art that I thought would be perfect:
Then my editor noticed that the porch didn’t have a roof on it, which was one of the design standards. Hmm. Okay. Why didn’t I pay more attention when Mr. Gee was teaching us about drawing in perspective? I had no idea how the shadows would be altered. But pretty quickly, the house became this:
Close enough for government work.
