He's baaaaaaaack

This is what I like to call his "WTF?!" face. I'm on the receiving end of it several times a day, but I rarely have a camera in my hand when it happens.



The Mass Consumer of Financial Resources returned from his trip to Disneyworld yesterday. Hysteria and chaos have been restored to the house, the gray cat has started shedding copious amounts of fur due to the rapid and unpredictable movements of the small human, and Tom and I had to scramble to restock the pantry and refrigerator for Nicholas' requisite 10-12 meals daily.

Last night he asked to watch Indiana Jones: The Last Crusades again (I'm so proud) and then proceeded to curl up next to me under a big quilt for the entire movie - no doubt trying to regulate his body temperature after the abrupt climate shock. I wasn't about to question it because I can't remember the last time he sat completely still through an entire movie that he wasn't on Benadryl for a head cold. Back when he didn't have a "WTF?!" face. Like back when he was 3, and had all his teeth, and wore cute hats all the time that coordinated with his clothes. Clothes that I picked out, and he didn't complain about.

I think it was back in 2006 when I first started seeing the "WTF?!" face on a regular basis. He was right between preschool and kindergarten, we had moved back closer to our entire extended family, and he started to realize that I was NOT as awesome as he had once thought. In fact, I believe that he decided I was actually a major annoyance in his life - with my photo snapping and persistent reminders to get his hands OUT OF HIS PANTS FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.

But it's back now. Back to remind me that, before I address him directly, I should put some serious thought into exactly what I'm going to say/ask/demand. Because chances are? It's totally lame.

My cat is more tech savvy than your cat

This picture narrowly escaped being one of my daily pictures because I get a little "cat heavy" at times. At least with the orange one. The thing is, he's ALWAYS around. The gray cat is like the wind, he's harder to nail down. Not that we do that. Anymore.

Tom went back to school this semester, and it makes for long days. Class until noon, followed by 8 hours at work. Some projects can be accomplished from home, but work is still work, and 10 o'clock is still 10 o'clock. And if anyone understands the need to rest after a long day of work, it's Mo. He's there for you. He understands what you're going through, because that walk from the bed to his food bowl in the kitchen is a long one, my friend. And sometimes after that 40 foot trek across the domicile? You need to take a 10 hour nap. And that's okay!

Hair-brained ideas

I got it in my head tonight that I wanted to install a script to manage my photos for the 365 Project and after configuring the PHP file and uploading everything to my webspace I found that I ... uhhh .. have a Windows hosting plan, which won't support PHP. So I had to request that my plan be switched to Linux, but I'm not entirely sure how long the account change will take. Up to 72 hours, I guess. The only thing the switchover seems to be affecting right now is my image directory.

I can still post a

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

to Tom's dad today. I think I'm just barely making it in under the wire at 11:50 EST, but it still counts! Normally I'd post a picture of some sort, but since my images are down right now it wouldn't make much sense.

In honor of the release of the new Indiana Jones LEGO sets, we're watching Temple of Doom tonight with Nicholas. Tom and I both remember this movie as being very cutting edge back when we were kids. When we watch it now it's lost a bit of its magic, but now Nicholas finally knows why we think we're so funny when he asks what's for supper and we both say "Chilled Monkey Brains".

2008 Resolutions, Project 365, and the OCD kid's closet

Historically I've never been much of a resolution maker, but for some reason in the past couple of years I've given it a half-hearted effort every year. For 2008 it seemed like I had my resolutions all mapped out before the leaves changed colors. Which leads me to believe that I was prone to pissing myself off in 2007. Tom has his own take on resolutions:

"I think it’s a silly day to set goals on. Goals can be set and achieved any day with my new system: Tom’s Goalsetting, the not gay New Year’s way!"

I'm not going to rattle off my whole list of New Year's Resolutions here, it makes my eyelids a little heavy just thinking about how uninteresting the entire topic would be. I will share that one of my goals this year is to give Project 365 a try, because I have a lovely D50 that hasn't been fulfilling its photographic destiny for over a year now. Tom was the one who turned me on to the idea of tackling this project, and I'm intrigued by the idea of being able to see an entire year of my life through the photographs I took. I feel as though I have a love/hate relationship with my camera which could be alleviated somewhat (if not totally) by using it on a routine basis, so that would be a definite benefit to trying to keep this resolution. I warned Tom last night that it means everyone will have to get used to the sight of my heinously large camera bag around the house. I'm a routine victim of the "out of sight, out of mind" phenomenon. At some point I will have to pick up a smaller SLR case but it's not real high on my list right now.

At the house:

We spent the weekend painting my son's bedroom (finally) but it's not entirely done. So I don't have any "entirely done" photos of it. But I do have photos of how we repurposed his closet a few months ago. To start I stripped all of this lovely wallpaper from his closet.



We tried to convince Nicholas to accept the wallpaper. We told him all about little boys who would KILL to have pink and blue flower wallpaper in their closets but ever since he started school he falls for these tricks less and less. The wallpaper came off about as well as the wallpaper in our closet did, which means "not very well at all". It came off in little shreds of paper and required constant reapplication of wallpaper remover because it sucked it up like a sponge then dried out almost instantly. If I ever experience a moisture problem in my basement I'm going to want to get my hands on some of this magic, moisture absorbing wallpaper that they put in the upstairs closets. If our roof were to start leaking I'd install this stuff on every ceiling in the house.

Since we knew we'd be painting the bedroom a dark shade of blue EVENTUALLY, I wound up painting the inside of the closet a color that looked like light khaki at the store - but in reality it wound up being more of a pale butter yellow. I wasn't a huge fan of it in the end, but it's a closet.

Then Tom tackled the frustrating task of installing the shelving system I wanted in half of the closet. It's a fairly straightforward bracket and standard system, but I never really thought about the fact that we'd have to screw the brackets into the shelf boards. The one other time I had used these particular shelves it was a more utilitarian application where I had bare metal shelf brackets with a lip at the end to keep the shelves from sliding forward. In Nicholas' closet we bought some more aesthetically pleasing white brackets with no safety lip on them. It wasn't rocket science or anything, but there wasn't any wiggle room as far as installing the brackets went because once attached to the shelves they still had to match up perfectly with the notches on the standards. This required MATH. Which is a recipe for disaster for me, but Tom makes up for what I lack in the book learnin' department and it all went up securely - and LEVEL. Imagine that!





The shelves are for Lego storage sorted into plastic bins based on the size requirements of each kit. This is most definitely ME imposing my neurosis on HIM, because Nicholas would be fine stuffing them all in a paper sack. The colorful open-bin storage rack is your basic Target special that he's had since he was a toddler. As his toys become smaller and more intricate, this open-bin system becomes less and less practical for toy storage. For now it still serves its purpose for Transformers and various little boy "weaponry" of the Power Rangers and Star Wars variety. Because I recognize his need to be able to grab his lightsaber on the fly. There's no time to search for these things. I'm a cool mom that way.

His actual clothing storage needs are minimal, so in every house we've lived in I have modified his closet for toy storage in a similar way. I wanted the option to hang his winter shirts and sweatshirts and that's about it. He has a giant dresser to hold everything else. In the wasted corner space we installed some double coat hooks to hang backpacks, robes and crime fighting costumes on. This keeps all that stuff up off the floor. The closet doors are down in the basement being painted. Leaving the closet open like this would cause Tom and I to hyperventilate every time we were in the room, although I'm sure Nicholas would appreciate the easy access. Because opening and closing those closet doors is just one more annoyance in his everyday life, and he's all about streamlining his playing experience.

Once we get the closet doors up and the blinds hung I'll post them. And since I have to find things to photograph every day, the chances are very good that I'll actually follow through with it.

Why you should never put me on speakerphone in a public place

"Wait! You're in a store right now?"

"Yes"

"And you have me on speaker phone?"

"Yes"

"So .... this entire time I was talking to you, I was on speaker phone?"

"Yes. So don't say any swear words."

"Hey, did that rash ever clear up?"

"Don't talk about rashes while I'm trying on clothes!"

"When is your court date for those shoplifting charges?"

"You're so funny."

"Do you still have that 'peeing in clothes you don't own' fetish?"

Their Royal Highnesses

I posted back at the end of July about one of our cats (Mo) who was going in to be declawed at the ripe age of 2 (and the ripe weight of 12 pounds). I won't go over my mixed emotions all over again because it's moot now, the claws are gone and he's back to acting like royalty around the house again. As a matter of fact we've renamed both the cats in the past week - Mo is now "Princess" and Chivus is "Duchess" - because the two of them have been laying about the house as though they're on direct orders from the Queen Mother.

The veterinarian kept Mo for two days because with him weighing as much as he does they wanted to keep him off his feet as long as possible. I laughed hard when I hung up the phone because anyone who knows Mo would know that keeping him off his feet isn't exactly a problem. Getting him ON his feet is more of problem. Neither of the cats is much for this thing they call "exercise". Every once in a while one of them will get up and walk to the other side of the room, but then the physical exertion required to walk across the room dictates that they take a minimum 2 hour nap before moving again. But they kept him until Sunday evening and then I was allowed to bring him home - and I had him on pain meds, which he was surprisingly willing to take. (When I got him from a shelter in Indianapolis as a kitten he had an exceptionally vicious upper respiratory infection that required he take antibiotics a couple times a day and I almost lost both of my arms and possibly an eye in the battle).

That Sunday night that he first came back home we were watching television and when it came time to go to bed I reached down to pick him up off the floor to bring him to bed with us - because heaven forbid he would have had to walk in there himself - and he was down there chewing on his left paw and a big (for a cat) circle of bright red blood was soaking into the carpet underneath him. Since it was 11pm on a Sunday night we didn't have a whole lot of options available to us, so I crafted a make-shift bandage that consisted of a cut up rag, a 6-inch section from an Ace bandage and two ponytail holders that were tight enough to keep him from getting the whole thing off, but loose enough that he wouldn't need an amputation the next day. I'm the MacGyver of animal-care. We had to keep him in the bathroom that night with a litter box and his food and water dish until I could get him into the vet in the morning. And despite his best efforts, he never did manage to get that bandage chewed all the way off - which turned out to be a good thing, according to the vet, because it allowed it to clot enough that he didn't require stitches.

From what they could tell, and Mo wasn't giving up ANY information, some surgical glue had run down in-between two of the pads on his paw and it was probably bugging him to have those two pads stuck together. Since it was hard to get down in there to chew the glue out he basically just mangled the paw of his foot trying.

BUT - since the surgical glue was still down in there, and since now it was going to be all bothersome because of the injury, they needed to keep him away from the paw so he didn't open it up again and/or give himself a raging infection from messing with it. So he had to rock this look for a week:




It didn't interfere with his couch-laying schedule or his bird-watching schedule, but it sure freaked the other cat out.

And speaking of the other cat, Mo tends to be a camera hog because, in general, he has more personality and is the lead character in more funny stories. In the interest of fairness, though, here's a glamour shot of Chivus (aka "The Duchess") from this past weekend.




Mo is no longer wearing the collar. I actually didn't even keep it on him for the full week because I checked his paw every morning and after about 5 days that surgical glue had finally worked its way out. Plus they can't groom themselves with the big bell collar on, and Chivus basically ran screaming from the room every time Mo entered - so HE wasn't going to help. So after five days in the collar Mo was starting to smell a little ripe. After the collar came off he must have sat and worked on his hygiene for a solid hour, which is more energy than he usually expends in a day.

Every once in a while he'll stand next to the corner of the loveseat, where the tell-tale signs of the good old days still remain, but all-in-all he's no worse for the wear. Neither is our furniture.

This is somewhat disturbing

Every once in a while I check my site stats just to see where traffic is coming from - and also to see if anyone still reads this nonsense. A couple of weeks ago Houseblogs.net picked our site up and added it to their feed so our site traffic took a little bit of a spike there and now they steadily move up the list of referring sites every time I check it. Which is very nice.

My favorite part of site stats, though, is the search query report. The majority of folks get to the site by directly entering the URL or because they subscribe to our Atom feed. Of those people, I'd say a generous majority of them are people who are either related to us or know us personally, and are therefore required to read our blog on a regular basis. Otherwise every time they ask us "Did you do anything at the house this week?" we act very hurt and reply "Didn't you read the blog?!?" and the shame and humiliation is too much for them to bear. The exception to this rule being my mom, who skims through the blog on a sporadic basis and then when I say "Well I didn't hear you laugh or anything" she'll simply reply "It was cute." Then she goes and has some popcorn and an apple. My mom hasn't eaten a french fry in over a year, by the way, and that has nothing to do with anything except that I sometimes wonder if she ate a few french fries she might find me a little more amusing. Just an idea.

For some unfortunate souls, though, my site comes up in their legitimate search queries for legitimate problems/issues/concerns they're trying to find legitimate solutions for. I apologize to those people who think they might find actual answers to how to get the dead animal smell out of their dishwasher (an alarmingly large population) and, instead, just find my wise-ass quips about sawing through countertops and why people should seriously consider HOUSETRAINING THEIR DOGS! I really don't offer any tips on how to accomplish these things, I just bring the topics up. Discuss amongst yourselves, your guess is as good as mine. Truth be told whenever I find Tom staring at a project with a puzzled look on his face the first solution I offer is always "Did you try hitting it with a hammer?" In my mind this solution is always worth a try whether we're talking about a home improvement project, a disobedient piece of office equipment or one of our cats.

What I found alarming today, though, was that the search query report had a disturbingly large volume of "human urine removal" search hits. There must not be a whole lot of us out there talking about this problem either, because I got a lot of site traffic over that one little tidbit of information from our living room carpet removal adventure. Also we've apparently stumbled onto another untapped market, the "human urine smell in chair" sector of society.

Now .. if you have a urine soaked piece of furniture I know I'm probably already late to the game. Once you're hitting Google up for remedies then you've already moved well past the only advice I have to offer on the topic - which is "Don't let people pee on your furniture". I do have to say, though, that if someone has urinated ON your furniture, that's the sort of news you need to be spreading around. Don't keep it to yourself. I'd take out an ad in the newspaper if someone peed on my chair. No lie. I can't help you with the actual chair, but I can tell you this most assuredly: If I had even third-hand knowledge that someone may or may not be in the habit of peeing on someone's furniture, then they're not going to be invited to my dinner party, you know? There's info you keep to yourself, and info you share. THIS IS THE SORT OF INFO YOU SHARE.