The Cat Came Back

 

Apparently we stole a cat.  Or more accurately, seduced a cat.  It all started weeks ago when this fuzzy orange cat started hanging around the yard stalking chipmunks.  It was very friendly, coming over to say hello every time we ventured outside.  He’d plop himself down on the ground in front of us, rolling around, scratching his back until someone showed him a little affection.  Full disclosure here, I am not a fan of cats.  Highly allergic, actually.  If I spend any time in a house with cats, I’ll start making a wheezing sound and end up with a wicked migraine that lasts for days.  Cats kind of freak me out too, the way they stare at you with their creepy cat eyes, as if to say, die you stupid human.  (Yes, I have a vivid imagination.  For the record, I don’t like clowns either.)

That said, this cat won me over by the way he amused Sarah Beth.  Every time she saw him, she’d yell “Kitty Cat!” I taught her to gently “pat pat” him which she thought was great fun.  Soon, Kitty Cat was hanging out at our house morning, noon and night, and we began to wonder if he had a home or what.  Maybe someone abandoned him.  He seemed too friendly to be a stray.   So Kurt, a former cat owner, thought we should feed him.  I feared we’d be new cat owners if we started doing that, but I didn’t want the poor little furball to go hungry, nor did I want him eating our chipmunks, so we bought some cat food and before you knew it, Kitty Cat took up permanent residence on our front porch.

 

He was there first thing in the morning when we opened the blinds.  He sat on the porch all.day.long.  Staying for dinner  and he was still there when we went to sleep at night.  He sat on our windowsill, staring in at us.  Pawing at the screen as if to say, let me in!

It was starting to make me a little uncomfortable.  Have you ever dated someone knowing it would just be a fun short little fling, but the other person starts getting way too serious?  That's how I felt about Kitty Cat.  It was cute at first but it quickly got out of hand, coming over all the time unannounced, peeking in the windows, wanting to take it to the next level and I didn’t know how to cut him loose.  At least with a guy I could just send an “it’s over” text message.  Kitty Cat would be a little harder to break up with.

After a week of being stalked by Kitty Cat, we headed out of town for a long weekend, thinking, surely he’ll find some other suckers while we’re gone and the free buffet is closed.   After 4 days, we pulled in the driveway, and not 30 seconds later, Kitty Cat came bounding up the driveway to great us.  Our neighbor said Kitty Cat hung out at our house the whole time we were gone.  I started to wonder if you get a restraining order on a cat.

We started growing concerned because the temperature is dropping and soon Kitty Cat is going to be pretty freaking cold out there.  Sitting on our warm couch while Kitty Cat meows and pounds his little paws on the glass is unnerving to say the least.  Just when we thought we were going to have to do something, a strange car pulled in our driveway the other afternoon and a woman walked up to the door.

I opened the door and stepped out, careful not to let the cat in.  She said, hi, this is my cat.  I thought something had happened to him.  She lives around the corner and spotted him as she drove by.  Evidently, she gave Kitty Cat (whose real name is Tom) a new brand of food that he did not like, so he decided to move on to greener pastures.  Cats are so fickle.  I swear I could not lose my dog Moose if I tried.  (Well, unless someone had a more comfortable sofa for him to lounge on.)  Last time I accidentally left the gate open, he just wandered around to the front and sat on the porch.

Kitty Cat/Tom had been going home late at night and sleeping in his house, but the past week he hadn’t returned at all so his Mom was worried sick.  She said he’s very social and probably likes that we’re home all the time. 

I said I’d close down the food trough and leave him alone so he’d get the hint, and she went off to buy him his normal food, taking Tom with her.  About an hour later, he was back.

The next morning, there he was, sitting on our windowsill.  About a 30 minutes later, his Mom came to get him.  He was back within 20 minutes. 

The owner, while happy her cat was alive and well, seemed slightly miffed Tom had found another source of food and companionship.  I think she just gave up because he still hangs out at our house most of the day, even without the food trough.  We’ll be having breakfast and hear the telltale bang bang bang on the window or meowling at the door when he’s feeling bold. 

I’m not sure about cat etiquette, being a dog person myself, but I think we stole a cat.

Folly Beach

 Finally!  Photos.  It took me awhile to get these ready.  But wasn't it worth the wait?  Don't be surprised if you see some of these on my photography blog soon (hence the watermarks.)  I love the way they turned out.

Our trip was wonderful, however it started off with a bang!  We rented a beach house for the week with my parents.  They beat us down there by an hour or so, and had wine ready by the time we arrived.   The house was on the second level as are all beach houses, with one set of stairs to an outside deck, and an elevator from the driveway area up into the living room area.  The deck had 4 sets of french doors.  It was lovely.  We noticed that the locks on the doors were on the doorknob, the kind where you just turn the lock from the inside and the door is locked.  As Sarah Beth, who loves doors, was running in and out repeatedly, we talked about how easy it would be to lock ourselves out.  Well, within seconds of us saying this, wouldn't you know it, SB ran inside the house and slammed the door shut.  Locking us all outside!  Holy crap.

Well, cool collected me ran over to open the door and as soon as I couldn't get it open, started freaking out.  SB, of course, thought it was soooo funny, laughing and pointing through the window.  Meanwhile, I started a Mommy meltdown.  My phone was inside along with the homeowner's phone number.  Awesome.  Kurt had just gone downstairs to get the dogs, so when he came back up, you can only imagine how thrilled he was to see his daughter locked in the house by herself.  I suppose there was no immediate danger, but when you can't get to your kid, you start to panic.  Thankfully Kurt had his iPhone in his pocket, so I was able to go into his email and find the owner's phone number.  Meanwhile, Kurt was in full rescue mode, trying to kick in the doors like Steven Seagal as my parents tried to remain calm.  Fortunately, the owner answered his phone (thank you Jesus) and had a spare key hidden outside (thank you again Jesus) so we were able to get in without breaking the doors down. Sarah Beth thought this whole episode was quite hilarious, and wanted to continue playing "slam the door" so we quickly decided to stash the key outside to avoid any further incidents.   Meanwhile, Mommy and Daddy lost about 7 years off their life spans. 

So that was the first 30 minutes of our vacation.  On Day 2 of our trip,  SB got a jellyfish sting after about 15 minutes at the beach.  Really?  We were afraid of what day 3 would hold, but we managed to sail through the rest of our vacation without incident.  We had a wonderful time actually.  The house was great (other than those pesky doors) and we loved the town of Folly Beach.  The beach itself was beautiful, and the restaurants were fantastic.  We highly recommend Taco Boy, Rita's, and Lost Dog Cafe if you ever visit.

Anyway, on to the good stuff. Photos!  Yes, I did manage to haul my butt up out of bed at 6AM on vacation to photograph the sunrise.  It was totally worth it.  Look how beautiful this place is!

 

 

We did some driving around the area and stopped to see the Angel Oak Tree.  It's a massive live oak tucked away off a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.  According to the website, it's the oldest thing in the U.S. east of the Rockies - estimated at 1500 years old.  SB was asleep in the car when we got there so I only snapped a few pictures, but it was one of those things that makes you feel pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things.  To think of all that this tree has lived through.  It has had some help in recent years.  There are metal piers and cables holding up some of the branches, and it is protected from stupid humans who would want to climb it or carve their initials in it.  It's well worth the stop if you're ever on the road from Charleston to Mount Pleasant.

Here's our bathing beauty in her Copacabana inspired swimsuit.  She loved building sandcastles.  We spent hours sitting in the surf, building impressive structures only to have the ocean wash them away.  And if the ocean didn't knock 'em down, Sarah Beth did.  Not sure what would trigger it, but at a given point in the building process she would get a gleam in her eye and yell "destroy!"  

The next set of photos are from the tip of the island facing the Morris Island Lighthouse. 

We did a little family shoot before dinner one night.  I love how Sarah Beth is gazing at her Grandpa in this first one.  She thinks he hung the moon.  At the beach house, she determined that a certain chair was Grandpa's chair and that no one else should sit in it.  She would kind of lean in the chair, saving it for him, and when he walked in she would say "Panga's chair!  Sit! Sit!"  So sweet.  She loves her Panga.  Where "Panga" came from is anyone's guess but that's her name for him.  Grandma, incidentally, is "Paga" which makes things a little confusing.

A family photo!  No one was hurt in the taking of this photo.  Using a timer to take photos sucks.  I need to replace the batteries on my remote clicker thingy.  This turned out pretty good though.  What a handsome bunch we are!

Color Wonder?

 Sarah Beth loves to draw.  More specifically, she likes to draw on the walls, furniture, and windows.  My bad.  I allowed her to draw on the sliding glass doors downstairs and once you let it off the paper, all is fair game.  Consequently, I find her artwork everywhere.  I have spent afternoons wiping off the “washable” crayon from kitchen cabinets, windowsills, and doors, while she follows behind me with a smuggled crayon, re-doing what I have destroyed.  Her drawings consistently follow the same pattern, a funky little circle with another little circle inside.  Kind of like a fried egg.  Or a sad boob.  Anyway, I started going a little cuckoo over seeing the circle drawings over and over, everywhere I turned.  I started to wonder if it really meant something.  Like in Close Encounters of the 3^rd Kind when Richard Dreyfuss keeps sculpting that mountain over and over in his mashed potatoes.

So as not to be driven crazy by my toddler’s prophetic hieroglyphics, I brilliantly thought to buy a Crayola “Color Wonder” set.  You know, those markers that “magically” only draw on special paper but don’t work on anything else.  So my options at Target were a Dora set (you all know my thoughts on Dora,)  a Toy Story 3 pack (haven’t seen 1, 2 or 3 so who cares) or the Disney Princess pack.  Perfect.  And it comes with glittery paper.  Fun.  Or so I thought.  We get home and I eagerly open the packet, almost as excited as Sarah Beth, who knows nothing except it’s something new and it’s for her, therefore it is awesome.  I rip open the package at the kitchen table and glitter explodes ev.er.y.where.  Apparently, my interpretation of “glittery paper” differed from Crayola’s design.  I thought it would merely be shimmery paper with the glitter ingrained into the paper itself.  Nope.  Glitter is loosely adhered and with just a few shakes, my house looks like Tinkerbell had a keg party.  Glitter is everywhere.  All over me, Sarah Beth, the table, floor, etc.  It is a fine illustration of how dirt and germs travel around the house, as there is now a sparkly trail going through every room.

I ask Crayola this:  if I am concerned enough about messes to buy the color wonder markers, why would I want an explosion of glitter upon opening the packet?  Seriously. 

To add insult to injury, Sarah Beth couldn't care less about drawing with the stupid markers.  She's rather take the caps off all of them and race them down the hallway or line them up on the table and take 'em out one by one with a karate chop.  The only one who colored in Cinderella today was me.  I did snicker silently as Sarah Beth tried to draw on the walls for a moment but nothing happened.  I'm sure she'll get me back by finding a black Sharpie and going to town on my orange kitchen walls, but tonight, I'll enjoy my tiny little victory as I pick Disney princess glitter out of my teeth.

Buggy Rice: To Eat or Not to Eat?

 The other day, I was preparing our weekly favorite, black beans and rice.  As I poured the rice into the saucepan, I noticed a bunch of black things floating on top of the water.  Doing the backstroke, more precisely.  Bugs!  Dangit!  I know that grains inherently are bug-infested and I normally keep opened bags in the freezer, but this was a brand new bag of Harris Teeter organic brown rice.  So as I do with everything in life, I ask almighty Google what to do about buggy rice.  The bottom line is, bugs float and rice sinks so just scoop out the drowned carcasses and continue cooking.  I'm sorry, but someone has mistaken me for Bear Grylls. I cannot knowingly eat something that has bugs in it.  If I am blissfully unaware, that's one thing, but I saw those little suckers swimming around in what would have been my dinner.  So...bye bye rice.  Back to the Teeter you will go.

I should mention that I am not a big fan of bugs.  Ok, it's probably more like a borderline phobia.  In the grand hierarchy of bug hatred, cockroaches top the charts, followed by those creepy camel crickets, regular crickets, flying beetles, regular spiders, mosquitoes, and down the line to general creepy-crawlies.  [Butterflies, ladybugs, and bees are exempt from my irrational prejudice, as long as they don't land on me.]
In the grand scheme of things, these little rice buggers are at the bottom of my list but they are still bugs so I hate them.  Plus they are in my food so that bumps them up a notch.  Ick.  I feel all itchy now just thinking about them.


Am I overreacting?  What would you do?  Eat it or pitch it?

 

Alternative Uses for Training Potty.

Yesterday I bought Sarah Beth her very own potty.  While she shows no desire whatsoever to use the "big girl" potty, we thought it was time to introduce the subject.  She knows what the potty is in theory, as Mommy has not been to the bathroom by herself in recent memory, but she couldn't care less about sitting around in an icky diaper all day long.  Diaper changes interrupt her play time and are an inconvenience for her.  When you ask her if she pooped, she will say, "No no!" quite convincingly.  Sometimes she'll blame it on her best friend. "Elmo pooped."  We explain that it's ok and everyone poops.  So once we get her up on the changing table to clean things up, she goes through the whole list of everyone she knows.  "Mommy poops, Daddy poops, Savannah poops, Moose poops...and so on."  Very funny but I'm sure she'll soon start telling the cashier at the grocery store how "Mommy poops" and I'll be mortified.

To accompany the training potty, I got her some pull-up diapers.  The pampers brand.  I was annoyed that the only kind you could get were "Dora" branded pull-ups.  We hate Dora.  I know most kids love it, but I can't stand any cartoon where the characters yell at you and then yell "Say it LOUDER!"  Ugh, shut up Dora. So SB doesn't really know who Dora is and we'd like to keep it that way.  Unfortunately she is taking over the world, it seems.  Kurt would like her deported.

So back to the potty.  She knows you sit on it and you pee in it, in theory anyway.  But in practice, she has found better uses for it.

Alternative Uses for Training Potty. 
Don't be grossed out, she hasn't actually used the potty yet for its true purpose.

1. Drum.  She is musically inclined and drums on anything so this is no surprise.
2. Storage for legos.
3. Bomb shelter for her playmobile people.
4. Step stool to reach chocolate chips on kitchen counter while Mommy isn't looking.
5. Hiding place for contraband.  (crayons, stolen chocolate chips (see #4), lotion or other personal product she snuck out of the bathroom drawer.)
6. "Thinking Chair" - Watch Blue's Clues if you don't know what this is.
7. Water bowl for the dogs.  Her idea, not mine.
8. Train.  Anything that she can push down the hallway becomes a train in her mind.
9. Receptacle for baby wipes.  She loves to break into her changing table drawer and steal the wipes.  today she pulled out every single wipe and stashed them all in the potty.
10. Sink.  She "washed" her tea set today.  She loves to clean.

Based on the above list, I believe Potty Training is far off in the distance, but I'm not worried.  She'll get it eventually.  In the meantime, I applaud her creativity.

Hell Froze Over

Our next door neighbors finally got the Ginormous POS Totalled SUV towed out of their front yard.  (You may remember I wrote about its arrival in this post last November.) It may have something to do with that little call to the city that Kurt made and the subsequent visit from Code Enforcement, but after an entire YEAR of looking at this literal piece of junk from our kitchen window every day, I was delighted to see Mr. Tow Truck driver take it away this morning.

You can't fully appreciate the horror of this thing with this iPhone snapshot.  Suffice it to say it made our neighborhood look like trash.  Last October (yes, that would be a year ago) I sat having breakfast on a Sunday morning with my Mom who was visiting while Kurt was out of town.  We heard this rumbling noise, and I looked out the window to see the neighbors' adult son DRIVE this thing into their driveway and park it on the front lawn.  That's right, he drove it.  How, do you ask?  The roof is completely caved into the driver's seat.  I still don't know how it was possible to drive it on the road or how far it came from, but I saw him do it with my own eyes.  Then, they proceeded to cover it up halfway with a tarp  (there.  nobody will notice.) and left it to rot for the past 12 months.  I'll admit the lovely canvas tarp made it a little less noticeable, but still.  You have a JUNK CAR in your front yard, people!

A month ago, the tarp blew off in a terrible rainstorm and they never bothered to cover it up, so Kurt finally had enough, called 311 and not a week later, code enforcement left a big orange "move it or lose it" sticker on the back, along with all the hunting and ammo bumper stickers that already littered the rear window.

Also noted on the picture above is the fine job they did painting their trimwork.  They hired some local neighborhood criminal to paint the trim.  He painted the front of the house, (well, parts of it) and then painted about a foot up the side of the house, leaving the rest to continue peeling and rotting away for our viewing pleasure. When we put our house on the market we are going to have to sneak over there and paint it ourselves or no one will want to move here.  They would never notice.  They only venture outside to sit in their carport and smoke, unless there's some neighborhood ruckus in which case Ms. Gloria will shuffle out in her housecoat and slippers to see what's going on.  The thing that drives me crazy is, these people are not that old.  In their early seventies, I'm guessing. 

I assume that the city had to arrange for the tow truck.  Initiative is not their strong suit.  These are the same people that STILL have their Christmas tree up from last year.  It's in their front picture window.  They don't light it of course, guess they save that to make it special for the holidays.  The rest of the year it's just the dusty tree in the living room.  Or maybe they decorate it for every season...throw a few flags on for 4th of July, hang gourds from it for Halloween and Thanksgiving.... doubt it.  I suppose once they hit the 6 month mark they considered themselves early for next year.

For now, I'm just happy that the heap of twisted metal is out of sight.  I can only imagine what will take its place now that there's space freed up in their yard - broken 4 wheeler?  Old bathtub?  Place your bets!

I know, I know.

My mother not-so-subtly reminded me that it has been one month since my last post.  (Wow I felt like I was in a confessional for a second there.  Whew.)

Problem is I have so much to write about I don't know where to start.  We had a fantastic beach adventure this month.  I am still going through the pictures so I haven't written about it yet.  It got bumped in priority so I could do a post about our Farm Tour last weekend.  If you haven't read it on my New Shoe blog, check it out now.

It's all about our visits to some area farms last weekend.  We had such a great time I wanted to get those pics done so I could share them with the organizers of the event.  Sarah Beth had a great time and has been talking about cows and chickens ever since.

In other Sarah Beth news...she is either going to be an artist or a criminal.  She has gotten in the habit of drawing in crayon (washable, thank goodness) all over our house.  Walls, cabinets, windows, furniture.  They are all mere canvases on which she can express herself.  I am constantly saying "you cannot draw on the table, you cannot draw on the chair you cannot draw on the wall you cannot draw on the dishwasher..."  I feel a little Dr. Seuss-ish.  "Would you like them on a boat?  Would you like them with a goat?"   I am perpetually wiping down walls.  Sarah Beth also has a fondness for cleaning, so "forcing" her to clean up her mess isn't really a punishment, it just encourages her to make more messes. 

For whatever reason, Sarah Beth's new catchphrase is "Bacon Cheese!" She marches around the house chanting it over and over.  Whether or not bacon and cheese is on the menu for the day does not matter.  I agree that both bacon and cheese are cause for celebration, but I'm not sure what brought that on.  She is also known as the bacon bandit.  She will steal bacon from any unsuspecting person's plate. A girl after my own heart.

Working on our beach photos now...SB fell asleep on the couch - Blue's Clues overload I guess, so I've gotten a few extra moments on the computer today.  New post coming soon!