All posts by Iris

Housekeeping

Me and My Life

I normally keep a decently neat house. This is partly because I like a neat house and partly because there’s not all that much stuff in the house to keep neat. I haven’t accumulated all the knick-knacks that come with long residence in a house, nor do I have older or seasonal items stored in the garage or closets. And I like it this way.

But some days, I take pleasure in NOT keeping house. Take today, for example. Every time I walked through the kitchen and saw my breakfast dishes in the sink or the detritus of coffee making on the counter, every time I wandered down the hall and saw the unmade bed, and every time I snuggled back into my indentation in the couch, I was reminded that today was my day off from everything. Every unwashed dish represented a few minutes of guiltless indolence. Every wrinkled blanket attested to a morning spent doing as much as possible of nothing at all.

Tomorrow, life will start up again with all the chores and errands of housekeeping, prepping for work, and leading the choir, baking, plus the necessary preparations for a Christmas that is coming so much more quickly than I could have imagined possible. But for today, vacation reigns supreme in this household. Everyone’s done more sitting, sleeping, and lying around than anything else, secure in the knowledge that the dishes will keep until tomorrow.

Friday Nights

Me and My Life

Drag self home from work (who thought working out after work on a Friday was a good idea?), say “hi” to inhabitants of apartment, plop self down on couch, check blog feeds, read a little, check blog feeds, write a little, check blog feeds, watch a movie (checking blog feeds during commercials), read some more, one last check of blog feeds (why isn’t anyone updating blogs? Don’t they know I’m waiting for them to click that little “update blog” button? You’d think with over a hundred blogs to follow ONE of them would have the courtesy to update)… and there you have it. I’d try to be a little more exciting, but that sounds like work.

Of Cats, Christmas, and Plastic Food

Living with Cats

I know, I know… two posts in a row about cats… But it takes a certain amount of energy to notice things that happen outside the home, and I haven’t had that kind of energy lately. I’ve begun to feel like a bear, all tucked up and ready to hibernate through the winter, if only I could come up with a good way to get paid for hibernating.

This last weekend, though, I set up the Christmas tree. This is the first time I’ve put together a fake tree, but it wasn’t hard, and the result isn’t so bad. It’s sort of like those plastic renditions of meals that Japanese restaurants put out to entice saliva into action before you even sit down. As long as you don’t get to close, try to smell it, or (heaven forbid) try to eat it, it’s quite beautiful. My tree even has built in flaws in the form of some browning needles, carefully placed to stave off the creepy feeling that the tree might be a little bit too perfect to be wholesome.

Well, dear Pippin decided to put the tree to the taste test (though he’s done nothing like these crazy cats). He just won’t stay away from it, and I’m enough of a worrier that I have visions of walking out of the room and returning to find that he’s chewed through a cord and electrocuted himself, or to plug the tree in at night only to find that he chewed through a cord during the day and now the two frayed ends of cord are just waiting for a current to induce them to shower the room with sparks, set the place on fire, and require that I rig up some ingenious rope system to get people, cat, and social security cards safely out of a third-floor window.

My solution? Each night I unplug the tree before bed and then shroud it in a sheet, carefully tucking in the edges so that Pippin won’t find a glorious tree cave where he can sit and gnaw through the night without fear of discovery.

This seems to work quite well, but it does leave me with the prospect of waking up to a hulking, colorless, smell-less form in my living room each morning, and passing by it’s rustling formlessness at night, in the dark, after checking on the state of the front door lock.

So my shrouded tree hulks in the corner through the night and the day while nobody is home. It only gets released for those few hours of blessed freedom in the evenings while watchful eyes and trigger fingers on squirt bottles can keep Pippin from gorging himself on those perfect plastic boughs.

On the Subbornness of Cats

Living with Cats

There haven’t been any posts recently because I was having a wonderful time visiting my parents. ( It’s amazing how much you can knit, sew, and do in general when you don’t have to go to work. I wish I could make a living without working…) And this time the dog and cat seemed to have sorted things out between them. They still aren’t playing together or curling up together for a nice mid-afternoon nap, but they will happily watch the other play or nap, which is a major improvement.

Unfortunately, my cat’s bladder doesn’t understand that visiting isn’t too stressful anymore. Poor stupid, stubborn Pippin refuses to pee for days on end (two days, to be precise) every time we travel. This freaks me out because boy cats can develop nasty bladder issues if they don’t pee. But Pippin’s bladder isn’t interested in prophylactic measures like peeing, even if such simple measures could save Pippin’s life.

What’s even more puzzling is that Pippin does everything else normally. He plays, eats, drinks, purrs… everything but pee.

Last night it came to a head (or a tail, as the case may be). He was crouching rather than sitting, to avoid pressing on his bladder, and I was trying every trick in the book to make him think with fondness of his litter box. I added quite a lot of water to his favorite canned food, I placed great vats of water in strategic locations throughout the house (he loves playing in vats of water), and I even tried running a trickle of water in the sink for an hour or so, all to no avail. Just before bed I doused his rear in water so that he’d not only have to take in water in order to clean himself off, but he’d also have to lick his poor round bladder and hopefully remind it of its proper function. Yes, I’m devious, and I was desperate.

He finally succumbed in the wee hours this morning (sorry… I couldn’t resist). But I called the vet anyway and found out that he probably doesn’t drink enough while he’s stressed, so I should “do whatever I can to encourage him to take in fluids.” Check. And I should only become really worried if he tries to go and can’t. That’s when he’s actually sick. When he just doesn’t even try to go it’s because he’s not taking in enough to need to pee in the first place.

So the next time I travel, I’ll feed him canned food with added water, give him chicken broth to drink, and even resort to getting him wet if I have to. No matter what his bladder thinks about the issue, I WILL get him to pee.

Turkey Day

Portraits of People and Places

The centerpiece of the town I live in is a cereal factory. Every day, thousands of pounds of cereal poor out of our town and into boxes that will grace breakfast tables around the nation. The only real downside of having such a factory in a small town is that the trains that roll through here day in and day out are longer than our town, and when they stop to drop off and pick up cereal, all traffic across town stops too.

But aside from the trains, it can be nice to wake up to the smell of crisping wheat on the wheat cereal days, or toasted rice on the rice cereal days. The chocolate cereal days remind me of baking cookies. It’s for all the world as if our town is your favorite grandma’s kitchen, and your grandma is a good baker.

But this morning the wind was coming from a new direction – the direction of the turkey farm. On turkey days I wish I were a fish, or anything that can breath something other than air. This does not smell like grandma’s kitchen. Nor, ironically, does it smell like turkey.