The Week

12 Nov 2016 Leave a comment

by alightningbug in Foodie, Games, Kitties, NaBloPoMo Tags: , , , , ,

It was a busy week. With the election on Tuesday, I got up early to vote. Then, like a lot of people, I didn’t get much sleep that night. I dozed, looked at incoming election results, then woke up. Then dozed a little more. It was very surreal.

Wednesday, I had a meeting at my daughter’s school. So there I was talking with her teachers, and so very tired. Though, I think we were all a little tired. The teachers had very nice things to say about my kiddo, and I’m very proud of her.

Thursday,  before work I took the cat to the vet to get his blood drawn. Then dropped him off at home before I went to the office.

My daughter had Robotics club after school, so I had to pick her up.

The school was having an International Night that evening. Since it started several minutes before I arrived at the school, my daughter was already in line to sample the many tasty foods, and I went inside to see what it was like.

I’m so glad we went in. International night was really cool. Our area has students from so many places. We got to taste foods from around the world.

One of the desserts was called, Casery (maybe also spelled Kesari). It was from India and flavored with cardamom. It was different but yummy!

Then we saw a video the students made and watched part of a talent show the students performed.

Then I had pinball league. I stayed awake enough to play a few good games. Yay!

I came home and tried to blog. I. Was. So. Tired.

I kept typing and falling asleep mid-sentence. And I kept typing the wrong thing. Finally, I managed a couple of tiny sentences and was done.  I had to count that as my NaBlogPoMo.

Friday’s blog post didn’t go much better. I was so tired. But I was a little peppier since we got good news about our little old kitty cat. He’s a lot better. That made me happy.

Today is catch-up day … for many things. Laundry. Groceries. Blogging and writing. Resting. But still driving my daughter to and from places. At least I’m getting a few of these done.

Wishing everyone a great weekend!

NaBloPoMo November 2016

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Snowzilla! And sleeping cats.

24 Jan 2016 4 Comments

by alightningbug in Beyond Uncategorized, Kitties, Mom Stuff Tags: , , , , , ,

Our little section of the country just had a blizzard, dubbed Snowzilla, that lasted 36 hours. We had hours and hours of snow and wind then sunshine enough today to make the snow glisten and look BEAUTIFUL. Digging out will take time.

It’s hard to tell exactly how much snow we got since the wind was a-blow’n and made some gargantuan snow drifts. (Is that a car or a snowdrift or both?) But as far as I can tell our area got 25 inches of snow. My mom’s town, an hour away, got 38 inches. That’s just crazy snow. I don’t think I’ve seen quite this much since I lived in a suburb of Chicago back when I was a kid. (I’ve seen close, but …)

No school for the kids tomorrow and no school on Tuesday either. The county rarely (if ever) announces two days, straight up, in a row. No announcement about Wednesday yet.

Metro (our subway and bus system) has been closed since Friday evening. That’s practically unheard of. They need to clean the subway/train tracks as well as more of the roads for the buses. I think they’re hoping to open again Monday, but I’m guessing full service won’t be back until Tuesday? Wednesday? Who knows.

In our humble abode we’re well stocked on food, but I wish I’d shopped for a shovel earlier last week. By the time I tried to buy one there were no shovels to be had. I would have looked sooner and harder if I didn’t think I had a garden shovel in storage. But when I went to fetch the shovel I realized the shovel wasn’t so much a shovel as a flat edger for trimming grass next to a sidewalk. Why do I even have that? It’s not going to move much snow. We’d do better with a large pot or even a cookie sheet.

I ended up using a piece of cardboard (folded slightly origami style) to shovel a section of balcony near our door. I didn’t want too much snow falling back into our home when we opened the door to go out. But I’d really like to shovel off more of the balcony as a whole because there’s a lot of snow. That’s going to melt, and it’s going to have to go somewhere.

This morning, after the snow had stopped, our cat Mojo for the first time EVER in his entire life climbed up onto my lap and went to sleep. He’s never ever done that before in our 15 years of being his family. So much for teaching old dogs (and cats) new tricks. He taught himself.

He climbed up while I had my legs stretched out under a blanket. First he tried to get comfortable on my shins. Then he shifted and found my lap more comfortable (it’s a lot softer). He curled up and finally went to sleep. A total first. I hated to have to move him.

He loves sitting next to us on the couch. But sitting on us has never been his thing. He was a feral cat before we adopted him from an animal rescue group. Terrified of people, we couldn’t even pick him up for YEARS after we got him. So maybe today he felt cold and wanted some extra warmth, but it’s not like it’s never been cold in here before. This was a landmark move for our skittish and brave boy. I’ll be curious to see if he does it again.

Our totally laid back cat Fletcher slept by my feet the entire time. It was kitty heaven.

So today we all watched Interstellar. We haven’t sat as a family and watched a movie often enough recently (except Star Wars but that’s Star Wars so …). Dave had seen Interstellar before, but Sara and I had not. It’s a long movie. But by the end we were all in tears. Then Dave was laughing at all of us for getting so emotional over a movie. But MOVIE! We liked it and would like to watch it again because it glossed over some details that we’d like to catch next time around. It really had to gloss over some of the details because otherwise it would have been, like, a five-hour move. But we liked it. We were all warm on the inside with all the beautiful sparkling snow on the outside. It was nice.

 

Cat Soup and Towels, An Odd Trio, But Only for Some

06 Jul 2014 2 Comments

by alightningbug in Mom Stuff, The Daily Prompt, Writing Tags: ,

The Daily Post’s prompt for July 5 is, An Odd Trio

Today, you can write about whatever you what — but your post must include, in whatever role you see fit, a cat, a bowl of soup, and a beach towel.

I’m happy to have these daily posts and how exactly I’ll work a cat, a bowl of soup, and a beach towel into these post remains to be seen as I type.

Looking around our home, it’s not that hard to see these three things. I don’t even need much in the way of imagination for these seemingly unconnected items.

I suppose that by owning two cats, it gives me a bit of a head start on cat-less bloggers. I like our cats. I like dogs too, but I don’t really know how dog owners manage without a larger home and a yard. Yet, we have neighbors who somehow manage just that.

We like soup and it can be quick and easy for humans with a busy schedule. It’s a light meal by itself, but pair it with a quick sandwich and you’ve got yourself a full-fledge meal. Yum! Our soup often awaits mealtime in a cupboard sitting in cans, not bowls until we’re actually eating it. By coincidence our cats await mealtime by the same cupboard when they’re not staring at us or yelping at us to feed them.

The cats are like clocks as far as mealtime goes. Even with hardly any daylight coming inside, the cats somehow still manage to tell time.

In the soup category. Get it, CAT-egory? We also like Ramen. To be fair, it’s not the healthiest option, but quick, easy, inexpensive. And we can doctor it up for added nutrition by adding frozen veggies and egg. If you don’t add the full seasoning packet, you’ll cut back on the amount of salt. There are lots of other ways to add flavor — garlic power, hot peppers, herbs.

Sometimes I even make homemade soup and freeze it. We have a Crock-pot type of slow cooker that makes fantastic broth. There’s something to be said for the benefits of slow cooking. Put it on in the morning before I leave for work, and there’s a meal when I get home.

I did not forget about that beach towel. While we don’t have a beach nearby we’ve actually managed a pool membership this year. Finally! And with the dark interior of our home, it could not have come at a better time. We enjoy our sunshine. And we’re making full use of all our beach towels. So I feel like the washing machine is going close to 24/7 keeping up with washing and drying ’em. OK, maybe not really 24/7, more like 3/3. Three hours, three days a week. Maybe four depending on our schedule.

The cats rather like the beach towels too. Without fail if I leave out a freshly laundered beach towel, there’s sure to be a cat on it soon unless I quickly move it out of harms way. They’re happy to add to the fluffy softness and warm ’em up for us when they’re done licking our soup bowls.

Hey, we had an earthquake. I mean, “HEY, EARTHQUAKE!”

17 Jul 2010 Leave a comment

by alightningbug in Uncategorized Tags: ,

Just making a note of it. It was 07-16-10 and registered a 3.6.

We had one here several years ago. Both times I was sitting on the couch when it hit and both times I thought the cats were doing something like scratching their claws or generally attacking, causing the couch to shake. Our couch is actually a slightly rickety futon and our cats are fairly hefty, so something like this isn’t hard for the cats to do. The difference being, when I got up off the couch to scramble the offending cat (or cats), they were both completely clear of the couch and just looked at me as if to say, “hey, what the heck are you doing oh mighty provider of food?” At which point I just shrugged. It only occurred to me later that, “hey, it’s kind of strange that the couch was shaking itself.” One might have assumed we were haunted or had an earthquake or something.

Clearly, my brain does not readily register earthquakes as the most logical answer to a shaking couch. I was only able to put two and two together a couple of hours later when I read that we’d had an earthquake. I’m partly going to blame this on the fact that it happened really early in the morning and I was not entirely awake yet. Yeah. But it’s also because we just don’t have many earthquakes ’round these parts and there are any number of other things which may cause similar shaking. I feel a little bad for blaming the cats, though. They were probably much more puzzled than I was.