joy and shadows

YOU GUYS THERE ARE (AT LEAST) TWO TWIMOMS IN MY OFFICE

HOW DID I NOT KNOW THIS

I DON'T THINK THAT ONE OF THEM THOUGHT IT WAS HUMOROUS WHEN I SAID THAT WE BROUGHT RUM TO "TWILIGHT" AND TOOK A SHOT EVERY TIME SOMEONE SPARKLED

Dear Twitter,

I am officially sick of you. Die.

--me

Hopefully today's post will be 100% fap-free. :P

The garden is coming along very nicely this year, except for the daffodils. (Should have fed them in the fall. Oh well.) The nice thing about planting perennials is that they take care of themselves if they're happy, and you don't have to buy new ones every year. This year I decided to move some stuff around, and everything appears to have taken well to their new locations. The catmint in particular is happy as can be, and it's already much larger this year than it was at the end of the summer last year. My husband moved our enormous Russian sage out to the mailbox, and I'm hoping it will take. It was too big for its spot, but it has some room to grow in the new location.

Most of my plants came back except for the rosemary, which was a goner due to the cold winter. The lemon balm is mounding up beautifully, and I'll probably have to give it a haircut a couple times this summer. Better find some uses for it! My MIL was overjoyed to have someone to give her excess plantings to, and now there I have a big pile of irises, lilies, sweet woodruff, and creeping geranium that all have to be planted.

The constant deer raiding forced me to stop filling the bird feeder for the winter, but now that there's forage for the deer, the birds have come back. We have a boy and girl cardinal who have claimed our back yard, and there are goldfinches everywhere. They're so pretty with their bright yellow plumage and little black caps, and we hear them chittering away all the time. Last year I had a finch feeder hanging on one of our cherry trees, but I put the regular feeder too close to it and the finches stopped coming. This year, I put the finch feeder near the living room window in hopes that watching the birdies could be Biscuit Entertainment. She hasn't noticed. Dumb cat.

In our rail boxes and hanging baskets, I decided on lantana, because it's drought-tolerant and likes heat. It gets damn hot out there in the summer. The boxes have orange lantana, silver dusty miller, and purple sweet potato vine for contrast, and I'm excited to see how they will look once they really start growing. In the back, I bought two huuuuuuge new planters and put bacopa and snapdragons in them. Now we have to throw out the crummy old foam planters that Betty left. They're looking pretty sad after a few winters.

Never thought I'd be the gardening type, but it's pleasant to have a back yard full of greenery. Once we get our fence up, it will be very pleasant indeed.

We're watching Obama's press conference, and I'm just loving that we have a commander-in-chief who does not make me wince every time he opens his mouth. And the question he had to write down? PRICELESS.

Somewhere, my father's head is exploding.

Biscuit is a teenaged kitten, and she's got to have her paws in everything. Anything remotely edible will be sampled. So far, Biscuit has eaten just about everything she could get her teeth on, including pasta, asparagus, the mini-cakes I made for dessert, and the tulips someone brought us for Easter. Anything you don't want to have Cat Scanned, you'd better put on a high shelf or in a cabinet.

On Saturday, husband called me on the cell while I was out:

Him: Guess what your cat did. (when she's bad, she's my cat.)

Me: What?

Him: She ruined two pounds of tomatoes. She clawed them, she bit them, she shredded them. Now I have to go out and get more.

Biscuit has also taken to biting toes to get attention, and dashing across a room to wrap herself around a leg. We play with her often, but obviously it's more fun to ninja on our feet. If she wasn't so cute, I think we'd have kicked her out by now.

Watching "Stardust" on Showtime tonight.

Cross-dressing Robert DeNiro doing the can-can? LOL.

And after all that srs biz, I want to announce that I've finally finished watching Paradise Kiss. It's only taken me three or so years!

Me: Hm, I think I'll check my email.

Biscuit: YOU ARE GOING ON INTERNETS AGAIN. LET ME HELP YOU! INTERNETS ARE MY FAVORITE!

Me: Oh Biscuit, you're right in front of the screen.

Biscuit: THINGS ARE APPEARING! WHAT CAN THIS BE? I POUNCE NOW ON ANDERSON COOPER!

Me: *tries to look around cat butt*

Biscuit: WHAT IS LITTLE ARROW THINGY? IT RUNS AWAY, LIKE THE ELUSIVE RED DOT! WHY CAN'T I CATCH IT? *paws all over screen*

Me: CAT. Stop it.

Biscuit: *sneeze* YOUR MONITOR IS NOW BLESSED!

Me: Caaaaaaaat. *cleans screen with Windex*

Biscuit: NOW I WILL CHEW ON YOUR SPIDER PLANT.

For the first time in probably ten years, our site had a snow day! Yeeha!

First, we had a delayed opening until 10 AM, and I sadly put on my hat and coat and got in the car so husband could drive me to work. (He always has snow days when there's one flake of snow... so nice to work for a nonprofit!!) He was very sympathetic, saying that it felt like he was taking me to the executioner. We got to work, which is only about 5 min away, and a woman out in front of the building who was cleaning snow off her car said that the message had just been changed to state that only essential personnel needed to be in. And I'm non-essential! I let out a whoop you could hear all across the parking lot, and husband took me home, and there was great rejoicing.

We stopped at the market on the way home, and when I got back in the car, I saw a perfect little six-sided snow star sitting on my coat sleeve. It was like a tiny bit of candy. So, the first thing I've done with my snow day was to grab my loupe and my Field Guide to Snowflakes and take a look at what was falling. I found stellar plates, branched stellar plates, and dendrites, many of which were covered with rime. So pretty! Now it's time to turn the heat up and maybe do a little quilting.

It's bad enough that we can't leave food unattended in the kitchen for longer than fifteen seconds. Now it turns out nothing is safe.

In the mornings, I go down to the kitchen while my husband is having a shower to put out the cereal bowls for breakfast and pack lunches. This morning, we didn't pack lunches, so I tucked a dishtowel all around the food and went to watch TV for a while. We also take multivitamins in the morning, so I left them on the counter near the food.

When husband came downstairs, we quickly discovered that the multivitamins were gone, and one of the three pills (the supplement I take for my eyes) had been horked up on the floor. The other two Centrum-like tabs were nowhere to be found - not under the fridge or oven, not on the floor, not anywhere we looked. We could only deduce that Biscuit had eaten them.

I don't understand how she could have managed the two horse pills, never mind that they taste terrible, but since we couldn't find the vitamins anywhere, we had to assume that they were in her stomach. One call to Animal Poison Control and $60 later, we were assured that she might have some tummy trouble but would otherwise be OK. She got to spend the day in the basement so that if she did puke, she wouldn't do it on something like my husband's prized leather lounge chair.

It's like having a baby. Biscuit wakes us up at 4 AM because she wants to be fed, she cries all the time, and she's a total pest. Last night she was "helping" me quilt, and I was terrified that she was going to put her nose on the iron. Now we've had to call Poison Control (according to my MIL, she had that number memorized, because my husband and his brother had a taste for stuff like Pine-Sol.)

But she's a cutie pie. :3