More like "Lady of Chores."
No work in the in-box (Oh wait, is "in box" one word now? A brief digression says, No, it's hyphenated.) and I'm keeping busy by getting all the things done that I've let slide.
This is exhausting. I'll be glad when more work arrives and I can be a slacker again.
I have even more to do than I thought. When I called the Princess this week, she said she and her new husband would like to come down to Richmond sometime this month for a visit. Suddenly the mess that is my house became much more obviously messy. Things are cramped enough that they will have to stay at one of the B&Bs in the neighborhood, but I still need to be able to offer them a clean place to sit down and non-scary sanitary facilities.
(I think the point of the visit is so she can show him the house where she lived as a child, the community center pool where we had swim team, her schools and stomping grounds, etc. Seeing as how he's already done the same thing to her, it's time to get some of her own back.)
Pictures that have been leaning up against the wall need to be hung. A towel rod needs to be replaced. Things which have suffered feline depredations need to be de-depredated.
Ugh. (On the other hand, we do need to get things fixed up around here. So what if the incentive isn't because we live here and should make it nice for ourselves?)
At least I can stake the cats out for the buzzards and cut down on their damage. I got two new purple leads, a tie-out stake, and a new purple harness for Sparky who had outgrown his old one. Monte Alban still fits into his. The purple matches the violets which are in bloom right now. Years ago I used to tether the cats out in the yard years. I stopped because they picked up fleas from the grass and I was concerned about them interacting with the alley cats who came into the yard. But we have flea stuff and the alley cats don't come around so much anymore. Amazingly enough, the cats still accept the harnesses.
They are liking the yard. They stalk bugs, nibble on grass, and bask in the sun. Some things startle them, though. When I was weeding today, I moved one of the big black drainage pipes which have been lying on the grass and Sparky flipped. Literally. He did backflips at the end of his tether, hissed, and hid behind a flowerpot. A bit later I moved my bag of weeds at the same moment a bee buzzed over his head and—freak! He ran and hid behind another flowerpot. He is, by the way, rather bigger than those flowerpots.
Hmph. Ferocious jungle cats indeed!
It's supposed to snow tonight, with a few inches accumulation. I'm looking forward to putting them out in it tomorrow. Maybe they're really ferocious Arctic cats.
Yes, snow in April! It's been a long time since that happened. On Japanese news tonight, they had a piece about the weird weather they've been having lately, including April snow. I thought, Yes, when I was an exchange student in Tokyo, there was snow on the cherry blossoms. Yuki-zakura. Then today's newscaster observed that it had been 19 years since the last April snow. That was 1988, my year in Japan. Could it have been that long ago?
588 words | April 6, 2007 10:08 PM | Real true story