How many cats before I become the crazy cat lady?

Do you remember that routine Rodney Dangerfield used to do about not getting any respect? My cats give me no respect what-so-ever! They wait until I am done cleaning out their box before they use it and then, they don’t have the decency to cover up their messes, as “the help” is there to do it for them.

And if four weren’t enough, we’ve gone and added a fifth to the family!

Tabitha at 3 weeks

Meet Tabitha Stanley (we’re still not 100% sure if she’s a male or a female yet, but we’re going with female for now). She was abandoned by her mother in the garden and we heard her screaming in the rain. She’s had a healthy set of lungs on her since the moment we met her.

Tabitha at 4 weeks

Since we had to bottle feed her, she has been spending days at the store with us. Not surprisingly, she has collected quite a following, especially with the people who work in the stores around us.

Tabitha at 4 weeks

We have daily visitors who open the door, inform us that they are not here to buy anything, and then ask whether the queen is receiving.

Tabitha at 5 weeks

She is now on kitten food and has been proclaimed healthy by the vet. She will have her tests for Feline Aids & Feline Leukemia done at 12 weeks, however everything else is going splendidly!

Tabitha at 6 weeks

The dogs love her and act as her knight errants, coming to get us if she starts crying. Very often, she will lose us and meow. Once she catches sight of us, she comes running and pats our feet to make sure we know where she is.

Tabitha at 7 weeks

Andrew & Dudley (2 of the other cats) are so good with her, playing and teaching her all manner of things. George puts up with her like the crusty old gentleman he is. And Gretel wants nothing to do with her. She was the same way with Dudley when he was that age. It’s almost as if she’s letting us know that when we had her spayed, we took out the maternal instinct as well.

Tabitha at 8 weeks

Tabitha is now 8 weeks old and she loves to play among the stuffed animals in the store. When she gets really tired, she will crash behind them and it’s always fun to see how terrified we can get before we find her.

Right now, she is trading pats for little bites of chicken. She will pat Helen’s hand, ever so gently, and then wait for Helen to share her salad.

Tabitha now

She is an absolute love and perfect for our store!

It takes all kinds, I guess.

A patron and her friend come into the store, pushing  infants in  strollers, comparing their children’s diseases. Evidently, if your child is completely healthy, you did it wrong. Nothing says chic & “in-the-now” more than a hard to pronounce, even harder to understand illness. And if your doctor can’t figure out what’s wrong with your child, then you’ve really made it.

Anyway, this woman comes in and says “Tell me what I’m looking at!”

Me: Ha Ha … oh wait – you’re serious.

Customer: What’s your gimmick? Your catch? And I mean that in the  best way.

Me: Of course you do.

So I explained about our stuffed animals, the organic lines and the non-organic ones, the jewelry and ceramics, etc. She nodded knowingly, and left without buying anything.

Helen says I should have told her that they were all sleeping and we had to be very careful not to wake them because you DO NOT want to mess with a cranky stuffed animal. I just wanted to ban them for stupidity.

 

What’s new with you?

A lot has happened here since I last posted.  I quit my boring but steady office job for the uncertain life of self-employment. My sister Helen and I made the decision to open a retail store, found and rejected several locations before settling on the right one, and then did all the work (mostly painting) getting it ready to open without hiring any outside help. Oh, and we opened the doors two weeks after we quit our jobs. We could never have done it so quickly without the help of my parents and my brothers, especially my mother who was there with us until 11:00 the night before we opened, getting everything on the shelves. You can see before and after pictures at our store blog. As a matter of fact, since my life now mostly revolves around Fragile Earth Stuffed Animals, I will be spending the majority of my time writing there. Please check in and see what we are doing. It won’t only be about inventory, etc. Why, today alone, I recount the exciting tale of an intrepid computer, a bottle of diet coke, and a flailing elbow. I assure you, while there are twists and turns, it ends well.

CHALLENGER EXPLOSION

I had something else planned for today’s post but then I saw the headline about the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster. 73 seconds after takeoff, the Challenger exploded and seven lives were taken away. I was off at college and I remember calling home and just bursting into tears when my mother answered the phone. I have no idea why it affected me so strongly, and still does, but I cannot make it through Kenny G’s Auld Lang Syne (Millennium Mix)  without tearing up all over again. Even now, just writing this post, I’m wiping my eyes and trying to come up with a reason for bawling at work in a mach0-infested office.

“We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of Earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’” Ronald Reagan

Do you remember where you were for this tragedy or have you just read about it?

I wonder, is this my Kennedy assasination?

Last night, we got another foot of snow dumped on us. Have I mentioned recently how much I HATE snow? and winter? Really, I’m much MUCH happier with warm balmy temperatures and green leaves all around! But winter does provide the opportunity for a good picture or two. This is the river in back of our house, completely frozen over, with one lone goose standing in the middle of the ice. See, it’s that little black speck. I’ll show you …

Let me get a little closer so you can really SEE him.

All right! Now we’re getting down right intrusive!

Let me just say, he was way over yonder which is technical speak for I was standing inside the house (did I mention I hate cold) and I didn’t have the zoom lens on the camera. But you can definitely tell it’s a goose, right?

Newest Exercise Equipment – Dogs

Tired of your boring old weights? Not have time to go to the gym? But still want to work out those arm muscles? Follow my lead and start using the dog who has been hanging around, not carrying his weight. This past weekend I played tug of war with the dogs. I started out playing with one dog but the other quickly joined in and believe me, whatever tension you have going on your weight machine is nothing compared to a dog who is bound and determined NOT TO LET YOU HAVE THE TOY! Turn your palms up and curl for the biceps, straighten the arms and pull backwards and up for the triceps. Believe me, you will get a full arm workout!

They're my toys - mine, all mine!

Of course, Spike is a little (35 pounds) bigger now but what is the point of posting without cute puppy pictures?

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton

My sister got The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton for Christmas. Since I’ve already read all my Christmas books, I snagged hers because she’s in the middle of another book and won’t get to this one for a while. I had read about this on a blog (I’m sorry, I would link but I’ve forgotten which blog it was) and thought the story sounded interesting. Having read The Secret Garden at an impressionable age, I have an affinity for walled in gardens.

The premise of the story is that a four year old girl is put on a ship traveling from England to Australia in 1913, and told to hide by her traveling companion, The Authoress, until the woman gets back. The little girl waits and waits, but the lady doesn’t return and she is forced to travel to Australia by herself. She plays with the other children on the boat, below-decks, and everyone thinks she belongs to one of the families in steerage. Until they arrive the their destination, that is, and there is no one to claim her. The harbor master finds her after everyone else has left, just sitting on the dock, waiting. He takes her home and eventually raises her as his own.

The little girl doesn’t remember her name so the harbor master and his wife call her Nell. But who is she? And why did she have to make the voyage by herself? Criss-crossing through time and countries, Kate Morton tells the tale of  a well-to-do English family and the secrets they are hiding. There is a mystery involved but it’s not the who-dunnit kind. It’s more trying to figure out why one person did this which caused another to do that.

I love this book! Kate Morton’s style is rich and full, and her characters are so real that you can imagine yourself in the book at any point. I am at the most delicious part – almost to the end – where everything is starting to make sense. Some things I guessed and others caught me by surprise. I am intrigued to find out how it all winds up in the end. This is the part of the book where time is not on my side. I am like an addict sneaking away to get my fix when I should be doing other things (like getting to work) and yet I can’t help myself. I NEED to know what happens next.

Has anyone else read this book? What did you think?

To Do List – follow up

Yesterday, I posted my list of things I wanted to get done. Some of it was very easy, like the Christmas tree, which Helen did as I typed my post. However, I paid my penance by tackling the dogs’ dens on my own:) Here’s how the list looked by the end of the day:

1. Take down the Christmas Tree – as I quickly wrote my post, Helen got everything down off the tree and put away. She then took the tree out and to the curb. Meanwhile, I vacuumed up all the stray needles. The upside to taking out the tree? Our vacuum will smell like Christmas for the next few weeks.
2. Clean the dogs’ dens – the pile that I amassed by the time I was done sweeping the kitchen alone was monumental! I will not go so far as to say we sweep every day but we get to it 4 or 5 times a week. What I got was just from a day and a half.
3. Make blankets – This required figuring out my new serger before starting. Threading it took easily half an hour, complete with a minor meltdown when the thread broke for the fourth time in a row. However, once I got the damn thing going, it works like magic! As I was threading, Helen got the first two sides pinned on one blanket. All together, we got one blanket finished and another started.
4. Organize and put away fabric – This is on hold for next weekend. We have a set of deep rolling drawers that we want to hide under the tables to hold the fabric but we have to do something with the current contents first.
5. Read – We did steal half an hour to sit on the floor with our books and our dogs. I imagined quiet time with a dog stretched out beside me. Drusilla imagined a lively game of keep-away with my book being the object of desire. Actually, she quieted down pretty quickly and was happy as long as at least one of my hands was petting her at all times. The minute I stopped to turn a page, she started butting my book with her nose. Spike, our special, special boy, barked at shadows and reflections for much of the time.
6. Sit with the guys – see above
7. Start a blog for Fragile Earth Stuffed Animals – did not get to this. Maybe during my free time this we…. – sorry, had to laugh!
8. Take pictures and list new stock in our store - Done! I think that this bear may be one of my favorite things we’ve ever carried.  And this penguin? Love his smart-alec look!

All in all, it was quite a productive day. So, how was your weekend?

To Do List:

It is a cold, grey Sunday in January which is perfect weather for getting things done! Here’s what I hope to accomplish today:

1. Take down the Christmas tree. We put it up exactly one month ago for Helen’s birthday and it has now outstayed its welcome. However, at night, in the dark, with just the colored lights from the tree, it’s magical and I hate taking that away.
2. Clean the dogs’ den (kitchen and dining room) which they have trashed yet again. Fluff and hair and parts of a magazine they “read” are all over the floor and need to be swept up.
3. Make blankets. We made huge – 108″ x 72″- blankets for my brother and my sister’s fiancée for Christmas. L’s was in Green Bay colors and M’s was in the blue and silver of Dallas. Everyone was really intrigued that we had made them and a little envious that they didn’t get one as well. We foolishly mentioned that the original  plan had been to make one for everyone but we ran out of time. When we met again for New Years, several of the family asked how their blankets were coming along. So now, we have yards and yards of fleece and two sewing machines and a serger waiting to go to work.
4. Organize and put away the fabric we bought yesterday from Fabricland. We went there on a whim yesterday and came away with some really nice material. As we get more and more into sewing, we need to keep things in order as we have a tendency to go crazy and spend lots of money and buy things we already have, because we don’t know where they are or we forget we had them in the first place. Order is needed!
5. Read. I have started The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton and I am just loving it! Her style and way with words are wonderful and the story is really interesting too. Even though she jumps from England in 1900 to Australia in 1975 to Australia in 1913 to England in 2005, it doesn’t matter. I have no problem following her or the story.
6. Sit with these guys.
   

   After the bath

   We’ve taken to sitting with them every night just before we go to bed and giving them a rub down. It calms everyone down before we head upstairs. We promised them we would try to do a little more of that this weekend, so I plan to combine this with a little reading.

7. Start another blog for the store, Fragile Earth Stuffed Animals and More. In the hectic-ness of the summer and fall, our old blog got lost and then we didn’t renew the domain name so I need to start anew. There’s been a lot happening with the store and I want to get it down on paper – as it were.
8. Take pictures and list our new stock. It is unlike anything else we’ve had so far and I am so excited about it. Check back in a few days (www.feplush.com) and you’ll see what I mean!

That should be enough to get me started. What do you have planned for today?

Wordless Wednesday – Tired

Drusilla reclining

Dru collapsed on dog, one of their most favored toys!

Spike reclining

Meanwhile, Spike just collapsed!