A minute or two later, I heard a faint “SHHHHHHH” sound in the kitchen.

Oops.

The spaghetti slid out of the box, onto the floor. Yes, my house is THAT crooked. It’s *only* 160 years old, thank you.

So the noodles were all over the floor. I picked most of them up. Livvy, sensing unusual sounds (that is, me grunting from crawling all over the floor), raced into the kitchen, and stopped dead in her tracks.

WHAT IS THIS MONSTROSITY ALL OVER THE FLOOR??? You could almost hear her think. WHAT COULD THEY BE?!

Toys, of course!

Hey. Over here, Sherlock.

She had fun and entertained me for a good three minutes.

Game over. Back to naps.

Oh well, next year will roll around before ya know it, right? :cwy:

Well, at least it’s Friday…. which, actually, doesn’t matter to me because I work at home all day Saturday, anyway! It’s a good thing I love what I do!

This week, I am participating in Hilary’s Friday Fill In meme. I thunk this is the second time in a row that I have remembered to do this on a Friday! It must be some kind of record!

This week’s statements:

1. ________ is not my strongest virtue.

Hm… I seem to have a lot of these, lol. I have to choose just one?! I guess if I did, I would choose “optimism.” I’m not exactly a pessimist, but I was taught that I should be prepared for bad things in life and that in life there are a lot of bad things. I think maybe this kind of thinking has a lot to do with being raised by a Russian Jewish/Italian Catholic parent. He had a very hard life and didn’t want us kids to waltz through life thinking life owed us anything. So I sometimes find it difficult to always find the positive in things. But I am getting better, even since I became a Christian and Jesus changed my way of thinking. Old habits can be hard to break but I’m SO much better than I used to be!

2. _________ is my favorite meal of the day.

Probably lunch. Too bad I rarely eat it. My breakfast usually consists of three cups of coffee. I usually skip lunch because I am so busy and then I wolf down dinner because… well, because I am still busy. I have terrible eating habits, I know! Sometimes I eat a quick lunch. I especially like to eat out for lunch. I eat healthier foods then, too.

3. ___________ is my ____________.

The cat is my favorite pet. This is my baby, Livvy. She’s a half-Siamese kitty. I love her dearly. She’s the best cat I have ever owned.

4. Whenever ____________ happens, I always _____________.
Whenever disco music happens, I always start boogeying. Yeah, baby.

I am listening to The Newsboys album “Go Remixed” right now. My son got me hooked on the Newsboys (he has excellent taste in music- everything he listens to I absolutely love). The Newsboys did a “typical” album and then they redid the entire album with funky drums and reggae-like styling. I love it! I know, I know, I’m nutty for liking disco music! Do you still want to be my friend?

Hey, thanks for reading my goofy meme! How would you answer these questions? Have a great weekend!

(Nothing like a bit o’ sarcasm to start off the Monday, eh? Can be a better jolt than coffee, sometimes).

OK OK I’ll get started. Here are this week’s questions.

1. My favorite kind of animal is _______?
The Felis catus, or “cat.” I’ve always loved cats. I happen to be blessed with one of the sweetest, cutest cats EVER. How I got hit this with whopper blessing, I don’t know, God is good. Meet Livvy.

She was an orphan, part of a litter of a Siamese and tabby mix. She’s darkened a lot since she’s gotten older, but she still gets stares and acclamation wherever we go (I take her with us on our family trips). She not so much a “cat” as she is a part of the family. When I am away, running errands for example, she waits by the door until I return. Then, when I sit down, she sits at my feet and clings to my foot so I can’t leave again. LOL.

2. Do you like your handwriting?
Not anymore. I’ve been typing for so long, it’s lost it’s beauty.

When I first started writing letters as a little kid, my teacher told my mother that she had never seen such terrible handwriting in her 25 years of teaching. So my mother was given “homework”– teach me to write my letters properly. Looking back, I think my poor penmanship may have been a result of poor eyesight (couldn’t see the letters clearly). Anyway, I grew up to have gorgeous writing, it was like calligraphy. But after using the computer for 10+ years now, and only writing when I *must,* my handwriting is much messier.

3. What is the last movie you saw?
Pilgrim’s Progress: A Journey to Heaven. And it was AMAZING. I’m surprised how good it was. My thoughts are still full from the story. I’ve seen a couple Pilgrim’s Progress movies (including one with Liam Neeson as a new actor) and none were very good. This new one was terrific. I’ll review it very soon.

4. Do you buy things on eBay?
You bet. Yesterday I bought in-ear earbuds for my iPhone. I wanted a set with a volume control and microphone to use while shopping at Walmart. It seems the family always calls me while I am there and, even though I have my volume all the way up, I never hear the phone ring in that blasted cavern of a store. Usually, the earbuds are $80 at the Apple store. EIGHTY DOLLARS!!!!!!!!!! It’s insane. I got a generic lookalike for $5, and that includes shipping.

5. What did you have for lunch yesterday?
On Sundays, sometimes I skip lunch or sometimes I take my daughter out for a hamburger. Yesterday, we went through the McDonald’s drive thru and got their Angus Burger. Yikes, those things are huge but they are very good (the lettuce is always fresh, I like that). I also got a big tank of coffee. :D

2. You spent half of the plane trip with the laptop on your lap… and your child in the overhead compartment.

3. You start using smiles in your snail mail. I thought everyone did this??

4. Your cat has its own home page. :whistle: OK OK Well, she doesn’t have her own HOME page but she is a frequent contributor on my home blog!

5. You wake up at 3am to go to the bathroom and stop to check your email on the way back to bed.

6. You decide to stay in college for an additional year or two just for the free Internet access. Meh, this was not so funny. Doesn’t college cost upwards of $20,000 a year? Ditch the college and get a T1 line for $10,000 a year.

7. You check your mail. It says “No new messages.” So you check again. I am proud to say that I am OVER THAT. No longer do I check for email right away again. I now wait a good 15 minutes!

8. You name your kids “Dotcom,” “Modem,” and “Emoticon.” Well, I haven’t gone THAT far…

9. You laugh at people with dial-up. *snicker*

10. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. :jittery: You mean you don’t do that?

How’d you rate? My favorite is probably #2 and #9. I used to have dial up and I remember those painful days of agony….

There are four seasons to a year. You’d think that every season should last 3 months, right? I can’t think of any place on this earth where that happens. Here in Upstate New York, we have 5-6 months of winter, 1 month of spring, 4 months of summer, and 1 month of fall. That’s going by temperatures and weather patterns, not the position of the sun and the equinox thingy and all of that. I like fall best, so 1 month is just not enough. If in heaven I am given my choice of preferred seasons, I’m going for 7-8 months of fall, 2 months of winter, 1 month of spring and 1 month of summer. Oh, and NO flies and mosquitoes, please.

I think I could tolerate this kind of weather for most of the year. :D

I’ve noticed that lots of bloggers have been experiencing “blogger burnout” or have been going through the “end of summer exhaustion.” I don’t have burnout or exhaustion right now, but I have suffered through it before. Blogging is tough. When you first start out, you always have SO MUCH to write— it’s sheer joy to have a place to share your experiences or stories. The blog may even build up into a small community of friends, who “meet” once a day and chit chat about things. After a while, you may need a break…. life happens, ya know? And stories and things to share get fewer and fewer (especially if you lead a mundane life like yours truly). I greatly dislike the pressure of blogging. Blogging should be somewhat spontaneous, should still be a joy to do. Me, I sometimes have sponsored posts and links and all…. so sometimes there is a great deal of pressure because blogging is also something I do professionally. I don’t want to make my blogs into billboards, so I have to work hard at making the posts extra creative, to offset the other stuff. Not easy. But it’s WAY better than working at McDonald’s….

My kitty likes to crawl all over my desk, nuzzling my face and trying to get my attention. It’s so sweet when she does that. She looks at me with her cute eyes and meows and rubs my face. Sometimes she does it because she’s hungry. She’s so cute that I can’t resist, so I get up to go to the kitchen, to give her a spoonful of canned food in her dish.

Who can resist that adorable face?!

I look around, and she is not in the kitchen. When I return to my desk, she’s stolen my chair!!! She’s good, I tell ya. :-?

HEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Have you been plagued with mold and mildew this year? It’s been impossible to keep up with it– destroying it, that is. It’s everywhere. The stuff exploded from a very soggy spring compounded with a hot and humid summer. I hate mildew, it’s my enemy. I’m sensitive to the smell of it and I just hate it. It seems to know that I hate it so much, and reproduces profligately just to irk me. I was beginning to wonder if it was “just me,” but when we visited an historic site in Hudson, NY, the tour guide there mentioned that they’ve had a terrible time battling the mildew this year.

Today, I sent the kids on an investigative mission– the house smells like mildew when you first walk in the back door. Very putrid. I told two kids to check under the washing machine, the dryer, the shoes– everything– to find the source of it. The stench was so pungent that I thought perhaps my washer had sprung a leak. They spent quite a bit of time looking in the small corners and crevices, to no avail. They returned to me, saying they could not find any leak. I sent them back, telling them to sniff around for the mildew smell. Almost immediately they returned, holding a pair of work gloves. My son said he’d gotten them wet and *forgot* to wash them, and just left them on the dryer (where they got wedged behind a basket). WHOA those things smelled awful. My throat still burns from smelling them. It’s hard to believe something so small smelled up the entire laundry room and back kitchen area, but I guess they did. *sigh* Mildew and kids…

10. Cats don’t bite and slobber all over you.
I tell my kids that “any provoked animal will bite,” but cats don’t bite as a first means of defense. Yeah, they scratch but dogs scratch AND bite. And dogs drool and slobber. Yuk!

I have never had a “slobbery” dog (I think it’s the big dogs that do that, mostly) but I’ve handled enough slimy tennis balls and squeaky toys from the neighbor dogs to be scarred for the rest of my life.

9. Cats don’t yelp, bark, howl, or growl.
Cats make the cutest little meows. They purr. Sometimes they may growl when threatened, but cats are almost always quiet.

We once adopted a cute little beagle, Daisy, and she was so cute. But beagles bark. A LOT. Poor Daisy couldn’t bark, although she tried like no tomorrow. The previous owner had her voice box removed! It was weird to see Daisy try to bark and bark and nothing would come out. The UPS man, who liked her a lot and would toss her a biscuit every time he delivered a package to the door, once said of Daisy, “I know she’s trying to tell me something, but I can’t figure out what it is!” As sad as Daisy’s predicament was, deep down I was glad she didn’t bark loudly. My neighbors would have had fits.

8. Cats use a litter box. Dogs dump it anywhere.
Cats can even be toilet trained. For all the training a dog must go through, someone please tell me why no one has even been able to train a dog to use the toilet. Or to AT LEAST not go all over the carpet. Yeah, yeah, a dog can roll over or get a stick, big whoop. How about controlling that bladder, huh?

I once had a dog who I brought indoors, thinking I could train her to be a polite and clean little indoor dog. She promptly puked all over my carpet and sat down to scrape her butt across the floor. She was outside the next day.

We went to PetSmart the other day, and in the parking lot my poor son stepped into a mound of dog doo. It was a honking big mound, and I scolded him for not watching his step. But then I gazed around the parking lot and saw a vast minefield of the stuff everywhere. How could we NOT miss it? Disgusting. Cats don’t do that!

7. Cats cost less than dogs.
Vet bills are lower (and visits are easier). Cat food is less expensive and cats eat less than dogs. Dogs need licenses and shots– and why? Because dogs are more dangerous that cats, since they are more easily provoked and more aggressive.

6. Cats don’t assault your house guests.
We all know what dogs do with new people.

5. Cats don’t stink. And they WASH.
Cats have the cutest little pink tongues. Who doesn’t like to have a cat come up and give them an affectionate little kiss on the hand or face? But do you want a St. Bernard or German Shepherd to come up and lick your face?

I’ve heard that the reason dogs smell is because of their oil glands. Well, just like toilet training, WHY the heck hasn’t this been resolved? If some knucklehead can remove my beagle’s voice box, why can’t we remove– or at least BREED out— the stinkiness of oil glands? What’s the purpose of, for example, sending a man to the moon while leaving us earthlings to suffer untold olfactory agony by dog stink? Something’s wrong here….

4. Cats are low maintenance.
It tickles me that men, in general, like their women “low” maintenance and yet get dogs that are “high” maintenance. Dogs need to be walked, they need frequent baths (see #5), they need collars and muzzles and leashes and carriers and brushings and good heavens I’m exhausted already!

Additionally, if you go away for the weekend, you can leave your cat and expect the house to be in one piece when you return. But would you leave a dog alone?

3. Cats are funnier.
When was the last time you rolled on the floor laughing over a “LOLDog” caption? Wait– what? You don’t know about LOLDogs? Gee, I wonder why!

This is funny??? And why are most LOLdog jokes about defecation or urination? Not funny.

I Can Haz Cheeseburger ROCKS. “LOLCats” has become a part of our vernacular. LOLCats are hilarious! LOLDogs are… not.

2. Cats get rid of vermin.
Mice, chipmunks, and house flies quake in fear when a cat resides in a home.

When we bought our house, the place had been vacant and in disrepair for a while. The wild critters had begun to invade. My husband and I would be sipping coffee in the evenings, talking, when we’d see mice boldly scamper across the floor. As soon as I got a cat, the mice problem was resolved. Our orange tabby, Milo, would sometimes let us know that he’d had a successful night by bestowing gifts to the man of the house. (Quick question: now how do cats know which human is the man of the house??? Anyway…). One morning, the husband rolled over in bed and discovered a slightly bloody little mouse lying on the mattress next to him. Purring with pride by the bedside was Milo. While the situation was disgusting, he actually single-pawedly got rid of the mouse problem. Good kitty.

1. Cats don’t eat poop.
‘Nuff said.

And there, my dear reader, are merely ten reasons why cats rule. I can think of many, many more. Can you?

Disclaimer: For you tender-hearted, dog-loving, misguided people out there– this was a post IN JEST. I mean no offense to folks who love dogs more than cats, despite my bewilderment about your dire predicament. I hope my post offers you some good reasons and will, in some humble way, contribute to your recovery.

Most people look forward to holidays and weekends, but not me. It’s one of the advantages (or perhaps disadvantage?) to working at home. Every day seems the same. I really like working at home. I don’t need to dress up, I don’t need to be on my feet all day, I don’t need to endure employers or employees temper tantrums, and I get my daily socialization requirements from you guys.

***

I’ve also been taking a little more time off from work, too. Which is WEIRD. I’m not used to lounging outside after dinner! I’m always “work work work!” But after getting a case of burnout over the winter, I realize I have to take a little time off just to rest. I’m pretty busy with work, too. Looks like the Internet is in dire need of articles on the history of portland cement and the state animal of Georgia (do you know what it is, by the way?).

***

Last night, while setting up some tiki torches (I found some on sale for $2.50 each!!!!), the resident deer meandered down from the woods to sup in my weed-filled garden. We were blown away at how fearless he was by us and all the traffic roaring down the street.

He let me walk right up to him.

Yikes. I don’t think I like a male deer staking out my backyard as his territory. Are there so many deer in Upstate New York and so little forest that the deer now claim our backyards as their territory??

Livvy peevishly watched the activity from the kitchen window. She wanted to come outside but I didn’t feel like babysitting a maniac last night. :-p When she’s outside, she races around from bush to bush, invincibly skulking beneath bushes and investigating common skunk paths. She’ll watch us from inside.

***

After dinner, I’m trying to spend quiet time with the kids. We may sit outside in the screened gazebo (another spectacular deal!!!) and enjoy the cool nights (even though they are peeper-less this summer). Currently, we are reading “Heart to Heart” by Kathryn Kuhlman (an outstanding but short book that is a compilation of her radio broadcasts and sermons) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving. It’s the first Irving book I’ve read, and I’m madly in love with his prose. The man was brilliant with words, simply brilliant. I like him better than Mark Twain! I’m looking forward to reading Irving’s book on the history of New York, that ought to be a hoot.

***

My thoughts are turning toward renovation again. There are many undone projects from last year that need finishing and the upstairs needs to be gutted and renovated yet. Also, I’d like to convert the garage into a family/music room since I took over the living room as my office. It’s a miracle that I’m even THINKING about renovation. Last year, I spent from May to October intensely working on the house. As soon as winter hit, I practically collapsed and didn’t even want to consider any more projects. I work full time now, so my energies are very limited and I’ve put off those small projects (so far). I’m not planning on doing anything big this year, but am thinking about doing something next year, Lord willing. We’ll see. I think the hardest part is over– the kitchen. We redid the electric, the plumbing, the heating system as well as renovated the kitchen and dining room. All that’s left is gutting the upstairs walls, adding more electric, insulating the walls, and fixing up the bathroom fixtures. Easy peasy. lol

Happy Friday, friends!

How do you drive your cat crazy who is driving you crazy?

Play bird calls on the computer!! Bird Radio!

*rubs hands and cackles*

My kitty, Livvy, has acquired THE most annoying habit– sitting in front of my computer monitor while I try to work. Grrrr!!! She may even lick the screen or scratch it with her paw. I am not often frustrated with my darling feline, but this nasty new habit makes me quite peevish. I keep moving her, but she insists on sitting there ALL. DAY. LONG.

In case you're wondering, YES, my keyboard and mouse ARE gunked up with cat hair. :-p

SO I found a website that plays bird calls… and LO and BEHOLD, she goes STRAIGHT toward the windows, back and forth, back and forth, and then BEHIND the computer monitor (where the speakers are). Look at that puzzled face!!
MUAHUAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!

"Which way did he go, which way did he go, George?" MUAHAHAH!

If you have a cat and want to drive him bananas, go to BirdJam and play some Bird Radio for the cat. It’s pretty entertaining to watch them go crazy, looking out the windows for birds. Hah hah!

The bird songs are so soothing, too. :D