Yvette's Inner Geek Blog

This is one of the earliest photos we have of Phoebe, just a couple weeks after we brought her home. She decided right away that she and Loki would be pals, and we caught them cuddling. Well, Loki was sleeping and Phoebe just crawled into bed with him. He looks huuuuge here, but is really only about 20 pounds.

Photo from July 28. Note the Playstation 1 controller in the background, probably out because our friends’ kids were playing Smurf Racer.

P.S. If Loki were in the zoo, he’d be in the Big Cat House. 

Please pardon the pet banter that follows. It’s also a review of a pet door for cat use, for those who care.

I bought a PetSafe brand pet door around Christmas for the door to our storage room, which is also where the cats’ litter is and where food is dispensed. It’s been an interesting experiment for our three completely different cats.

Before the pet door, we kept the door to the storage room slightly open so they could go in an out, but the storage room is semi-open to the basement (i.e. holes in the wall) and it’s fairly cold in there. Having the storage room door closed allows heat to stay in the one finished area of the basement (which Ben insists on calling the Family Room, but I still think is permissable to call the basement). So a pet door is the perfect solution, even if it doesn’t have a tight seal.

Without having too much experience with pet doors, we were impressed with the overall quality of the model we brought home – medium size plastic-frame and vinyl flap with magnetic strips to keep it in place. Why a medium size frame that is made for dogs up to 55 pounds, when we only have cats? Oh, because Loki is a fatass who wouldn’t fit through a small-size frame if his life depended on it. To be fair, he’s also big-boned.

Ben got around to installing the pet door last week after adding a jigsaw to his collection of manly power tools. He did a nice job, and all cats respected the jigsaw by staying far, far away from it while it was cutting the hole in the door. We decided to let them get used to going through the hole before hanging the flap. None of them had any issues figuring out the new Way to Eating and Pooping, but Loki did give us some pathetic "I don’t like change" looks.

Well, then we put on the flap and quickly decided to remove the stong magnet strips for easier cat-nosing. I could coerce Isis through the flap with treats, and though she didn’t care for the flap, it was clear that she would handle it fine.

Once Pheobe learned how to nose her way through the flap, she started treating it like a toy. Her favorite game was to sit on one side of the door and beat Loki in the face while he sat dumbly on the other side.

And dumbly pretty much sums up how Loki has taken to the vinyl flap. I know that he watched Phoebe dart in and out of the door several times, and we encouraged him to go through as well. But he still stood up and started beating on the door near the handle (no claws, or he would have scratched) to let us know that he wanted to be let in the normal way.

Even with the magnets totally removed on the bottom, he apparently doesn’t like the way the vinyl feels on his face or body and decided that he’d rather starve himself and pee on the carpet in my office (which he’s never done before) than use the pet door. Consequently, there was some swearing and the vinyl flap came off with some colorful fanfare. I think we’re going to have to replace it with a lighter vinyl or, more likely, a heavy piece of fabric so that Loki will use it.

For now, there is at least less cold air coming in through the hole than there would be if the door were ajar. Phoebe seemed sad that her playtoy was removed. Isis didn’t really seem to care either way.

To make a long story short (too late), I think if Loki had been trained to use a pet door when he was younger, it wouldn’t have been an issue. I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly 9-month-old Phoebe took to it, and how easy it was to get Isis (who is very motivated by quality treats) to go through it. So I guess it depends on the individual cat.  Once we get around to rigging up another flap for the frame, I’ll write another update. I’ll try to keep it shorter than this post!

Pleez halp, I think I’m dying from internal laughter combustion!

The good words of the Holy Bible have come to my monitor, translated into LOLcat on LOLcatbible.com. I recommend starting with Genesis 1:

Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.

If you do die laughing, perhaps you will ascend to an afterlife in which maddeningly addictive cats and their mind-numbingly adorable interweb-speek are with you for eternity.  Yea, I can has eturnity?

On the topic of cats, but not really related to religion, here’s another photo of Phoebe, who somehow absorbed Loki’s body and all that’s left is Loki’s head poking out of Phoebe’s neck.

Phoebe (on the left) always finds Loki and cuddles up to him, which he doesn’t mind.

Think Loki looks funny? That’s because we had his teeth cleaned at the vet for the first time (his breath was getting really bad) and asked them to shave off his long-haired mats while he was there… hence a really interesting looking domestic cat with a fluffy mane, tail and paws and shorn everywhere else. 

In other sinking-money-into-the-vet news, Isis finally had her hernia repaired on Monday. She was very gaunt where she had her tummy tuck (she’s skinny anyway) but she’s eating okay now. We just have to keep an eye on her for a little while and take her back next week to have her stitches removed. She’s pretty good at the vet. 

Loki’s usually sweet Dr. Jekyll demeanor turns into a nasty Mr. Hyde when he goes to the vet, and it has ever since his first trip when he was 8 weeks old.  We’re not sure why… he never had a bad experience to make him freak out in the first place. But the vet he went to for the first five years recommended that all four of his paws be declawed, which we did. He now hovers between 19-21 pounds, no matter what diet we put him on, and even with no claws he’s still a monster of a cat to control while at the vet. So we’ll be enjoying his mat-free existence for the next several months until it grows back in.

Here’s a rare photo of Mr. Hyde revealing himself for a split second:

Thanks, Loki. That’s encouraging for me. (That’s an old photo from our apartment in Cincinnati… Loki still loves plastic bags to the point of our concern.) 

I wrote 33 words more than the goal last night, even though it was technically on November 2, not November 1 that I recorded my word goals on NaNoWriMo.org (which is still not showing up correctly on the widget over there in the sidebar, but hopefully they’ll fix that today).

And it wasn’t so hard.

True, I stayed up past my bedtime to write and am certainly feeling it this morning. More coffee is helping. I wonder how anyone could get through this challenge without drinking (or partaking in any other way) any caffeine.  

The hardest part for me about writing 1,669 words last night was to simply write the ideas that were coming into my head with very little self-editing. One of my biggest struggles, that probably plagues a host of other writers out there, is second guessing every sentence and tweaking the flow of individual sentences and word combinations. In college, I had a tough time deleting sections of stories or papers I wrote because I didn’t want to just throw them away. But after being in the position of writer and editor at work for nearly two years, working on stuff in which I take pride but don’t have an extraordinarily personal investment or attachment, it’s easier to write a little more stream-of-consciousness because I’m confident that when I write stuff that sucks, I’ll have the puzzle-piecing ability of a more seasoned editor to go back to junk and re-write as much as needed. 

Most of what I wrote last night will probably find itself on the "cutting room floor," to pull in an analogy from old time filmmaking.  But who knows. Maybe some of the scenes I write will be offshoots for future stories.

Last night’s musical selection while writing: Canadian Brass, then the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra playing Copland.

I didn’t actually start writing until about 11:00 last night. I was too nervous in the morning and didn’t quite know how to start. I think they key is not to end a scene at the end of the night. It’s to keep writing until you get to a point where you’re not quite sure what is going to happen, but you’ve set yourself up for some nice action or dialogue. Then you read the tail end of what you already wrote when you return to writing, and you’ll find yourself in the same spot with even more fresh ideas than the day before. Yeah, hopefully that’s where I’ll be when I start writing again this morning. Except it’s getting to the time where I need to go to work and I’m procrastinating by writing the blog. But I think it’s important to document how things are going so that I know how the hell I did it by the end of the month when I’m in a permanent caffeine-induced fog and only thinking about word count.

Last night, I nearly stopped at 600 or so. Then I pushed myself to continue the scene and found myself at 800, then 1200. I brushed my teeth at 1400, then came back and wrote up to 1656. "Ten away from the goal? Damn, I think I can write one more sentence before going to bed." And so I wrote a tiny bit more and made it to 1699. 

It’s a lot easier to write blog entries about what I did last night than it is to write a compelling story. But hey, I remember from my college writing courses that it’s about getting in the habit of writing. And I think I’m there as far as blogging goes. Now if I can just transition into writing fiction every day as well… 

Well, I could have started writing my novel for National Novel Writing Month at 12:00am this morning, but I decided to go to sleep around 11:30 so that I could get an early start this morning. Have I written anything yet? No.

But it has been a productive morning and I’m jittery with ideas and the anxiety of possibly failing for the 5th time. By failing, I mean writing less than 50,000 words in 30 days. That’s approximately 1,667 words a day, which doesn’t seem like too much, especially if you break it down into two sessions of 833.5 words each. And there are still fifteen and a half hours left in my day, minus eight or nine that will be spent at work (where I probably won’t write). Here’s what I’ve done so far:

Made coffee and drank it in my NaNoWriMo mug from last year. Put away the dishes. Pulled Phoebe out of the dishwasher after she snuck in. Ate instant oatmeal. Took a photo of my mug. Read a few blogs. Opened up and cropped a few other photos I’d like to blog about soon. Threw Phoebe off my desk, away from my line of sight to the computer screen, multiple times. Started writing this blog entry.

And there you have 210 words that do not count for my word count. I have iTunes set to play randomly from my list of favorite alt rock songs, so I better freakin’ get started. I might have to change the music to classical or Radiohead so that I can concentrate better, though. Marcy’s Playground just turned into Nirvana that just turned into Alanis, and I sing along in my head too much to be able to write at the same time. Even though I apparently can do it while writing blogs. Huh.
 

This is my adorable little Phoebe, who’s now about six months old. She’s growing too big for the basket in this photo, but loves to sleep in it while I’m sitting at the computer. That is, of course, if she’s not being an annoying little shit like right now and standing in front of my monitor… playing with a loose emery board, drinking from my water glass or pulling thumbtacks out of my newly hung corkboard.

I put a loose Spiderman 3 action figure in her bed one day and took a bunch of photos. He had been hanging from a plastic web that was suction-cupped to my filing cabinet. I left him on the desk because it was the lazy thing to do, and the next day, and the next, Phoebe wanted to play with him like she loves to play with her little colored toy mice (she’s kind of racist… she prefers the blue, orange and pink mice to the black, white or rattly ones). I afeared she might damage Spidey, but was also incredibly amused. He’s tucked away now until I put the camera on video or I desperately need her to get out of my hair.

She must have sensed that I was getting annoyed, because now she’s tucked herself into bed again. How fucking adorable can you get. It makes me sick with love.

I didn’t realize how much I could fall in love with this little kitten when I brought her home a few months ago. She squeaks, really, instead of meowing. She purrs almost any time I pick her up. She cuddles up with my bare ankles and my slippers every morning when I stand at the counter making coffee. She made fast friends with Loki, our middle-aged fatty, with whom she plays/plagues and who seems to enjoy the attention rather than be annoyed with it. She lies down next to him, literally right up against him, quite often. See the Lazr Kitteh photo below.

Of course Loki just lays on top of her to let her know that he’s done playing. Our other cat Isis now tolerates Phoebe much better, and we’ve even caught her playing with her little nemesis a few times. Mostly Isis still looks with disdain upon us giving Phoebe attention. We try to hold Isis, but she still has all of her claws and has never been much of a snuggler unless she initiates the attention.

I’m blabbering on like a crazy cat lady. I don’t have kids yet, so I guess all of that mothering love is being poured into my cats right now.  Look at these photos and tell me how I could not!

 

 

Doing a little each day can actually make a difference. This is not a new concept, but one that I am actualizing for the first time in a while (unless you count playing Super Paper Mario in doses… then again, maybe that was the practice I needed to remember that it all adds up in the end).

I went on two business trips in the course of a month, which is a lot more than I’m used to. The main area of our house is cleaner than usual, thanks to a weekend dedicated to cleaning and organizing back in September. Hopefully we can keep it that way. It’s at least in a condition that can be fairly quickly tidied up in case we have company. It helps that we’re not cleaning up any "presents" from a sick cat anymore… that was exhausting, especially when you consider the mental exhaustion associated with trips to vet that cost more than we were expecting. But all the cats are healthy now and we can sleep through the night.

We did run very low on food for a little while and definitely ate out more often this past month. Ben is happy to make dinner for us, but he usually needs me to decide what to make… so I’m the main grocery shopper. Clearly, that one’s a difficult job while you’re out of town. I did some basic grocery shopping on Sunday (there are a couple grocery stores that aren’t open on Sunday, but Albertson’s is open) and went to Sam’s Club last night to bulk up on the necessities: a huge box of brownie mix, canned fruit, pumpkin puree, toilet paper, detergent, etc. I also bought a huge bag of Halloween candy that Ben offered to hide in a special place (his tummy), but I told him was for trick-or-treaters and he could eat the leftovers on November 1. Yeah, we’ll see how that goes.   

Before Sam’s Club (Costco is too far away, otherwise I’d have a membership there), I stopped into JoAnn’s to buy a bigger basket bed for Phoebe. Her body still fits in the little one that she’s used for the last three months, but her head has to be tucked in a way that can’t be comfortable if it is to stay in the basket. Well, they didn’t have any baskets I liked and I was talking to Liz on the phone and she told me not to buy one that I didn’t like, so I didn’t. I bought a "fall wreath" for my front door instead, which probably won’t provide the necessary distraction from our woefully neglected front garden. Colorful dead leaves on the door are better than really dead leaves and plants, right?

I also picked up a pair of devil horn barrettes. What the hell are those, you ask? They’re an ingenious way to wear devil horns that don’t require a stupid headband!

This image is basically what they look like… just bits of stuffed fabric that are sewn onto basic red snap barrettes. Craftzine.com blogged about someone named Cat Morley who wrote a tutorial on how to make the cute devil horn barrettes, but the link isn’t working. So just go to JoAnn’s (or probably Target, Michael’s, etc.) and buy them for a couple bucks. I don’t really know how I’m going to dress up for Halloween, but I’m going to start wearing my horns to work before then.

On a somewhat related note, I watched an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess last night that involved Xena traveling to the Underworld (what wasn’t much spookier than Super Paper Mario level 7-1) and fixing corruption that led to the evildoers taking over the Elysian Fields and the innocents and good people being forced into Tartarus. This resulted in some weird dreams last night about the Greek Underworld, Hades, etc. When I first learned about Tartarus, I was grossed out because I related the word to the tartar that can collect on teeth. That was the ultimate sin in my household, with my mom as my dentist!  

Okay, rather than forward this email on to all of my friends, I’ll just post it here. I’d love to give credit to someone, but no name was attached.

*** 

I have 2 large dogs.  Recently, I was buying a large bag of Purina dog food at Wal-Mart and was in line to check out.  The woman behind me asked if I have a dog.  Duh!!  On impulse, I told her "No, I am starting on the Purina Diet again.  Although I probably shouldn’t because I ended up in the hospital the last time.  I’d lost 50 lbs. before I woke up in the intensive care ward with tubes coming out of me and an IV in both arms." 

I went on to tell her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way it works is to load your pants pockets with Purina nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry.  The food is nutritionally complete, so I was going to try it again.  (By now, practically everyone in line was enthralled with my story, particularly a tall guy who was standing behind the woman.)

Horrified, she asked if I ended up in intensive care because the dog food poisoned me.  I told her, "No, I was sitting in the street licking my butt when a car hit me."  I thought the guy behind her was going to need help as he staggered to the door laughing.

***

Incidentally, I was just at Petsmart yesterday to buy some more cat food for our cats. Loki had been having some issues that are probably related to a sensitive digestive system (I’ll spare you the details) and the vet shoved some Hill’s Prescription Diet I/D on us… which seemed to help. But because this new vet that we’ve gone to a couple times seems to be sponsored by Science Diet, I did some internet research (yay!) and was given the obvious advice to look at the ingredients on the bags of food before I buy.

It turns out that the more expensive stuff, like Science Diet, has mostly corn meal and chicken by-product and pork by-product in it. Also, that stuff called "powdered cellulose?" Sawdust!  Always good for fiber.

The cheaper (though not the cheapest) Purina One cat food seemed to be the better bet, because it actually listed chicken by itself as an ingredient. And brewer’s rice had a higher billing on the  Purina ingredients list than it did on the comparable Science Diet mixes (I was specifically looking for mixes that are good for urinary tract health and sensitive stomachs/hairball control).  Rice is one of those binding foods that I eat when I’m a little… um… loose in the intestines. So rice makes sense in a cat food for a cat with a sensitive stomach.

Here is a photo from last Thanksgiving of Loki happily splayed out on my sister’s lap. Also, it’s an adorable shot of Monique!  She’s much more photogenic than I am.

I’m also posting this because I miss her… and she’s at the tail end of a tiring trip to Europe. Boo hoo, right? Well, she had some brainy conference to attend in Germany last week and spent the past couple days making her way (via Eurail and hostels) through Milan and Venice. She reported this afternoon that Italy is terrifyingly devoid of the internets. I was happy to hear from her after several days of not even an email… which is quite unusual for her, and I was starting to worry. But now I know that everything is fine so I feel better.