Happy Caturday everyone. This week has been interesting. The furbutts are not yet integrated and suffered a mild setback of sorts. We had a bit of rain and we’re getting out for better walks thanks to Pepita.
Well about that furbutt integration setback… Miss Pepita was worn out from a long walk, so she was in her crate and minding her business. Tito decided he wanted to play and threw his paws around Titanescu in an attempt to wrestle. Did he smack Tito and tell him to fark off? Nope. The little tyrant wrenched free and marched over very calmly to Pepi’s crate and smacked her on the nose. He’s an a$$hole, after all. He didn’t use claws, but he upset her. The other two are getting closer and closer to her. This episode set them back a bit as she’s more nervous now.
We got a bit of rain this week. It wasn’t much, but it was so nice, we took the dog for a walk at Lime Ridge. It’s a hilly ridge that runs from the base of Mt. Diablo all the way out to where we are. It’s been too warm and sunny to walk there much. With the clouds and rain, it was great. The weather is starting to cool, so we’ll head out there more often. The walks are great as it lets Pepi use up a lot of energy and it gives the pointy eared people a break. It’s not hurting me either as I seem to be shrinking. It’s a combo of better food (more veggies and salad) and more exercise.
Latech and Pepita with Mt. Diablo in the background. Distances are deceiving. It’s only 5 miles to the road up the mountain.While not a real clear pic, we found a Great Blue Heron hunting bugs and gophers.This is the same trail the next day. The clouds were beautiful
Here are the pointy eared people. I managed to get some pics, but needed to tweak them a bit artistically to make them presentable. 🙂
Tito watching the birdsMiss Jenny keeping dad’s side of the bed warmTitanescu looking like his normal stink-eyed-tyranical self.Pepita with a stick on the Lime Ridge trail
Yes, today we have the kitties, the new doggie and yes, even a singing fish. LOL
Things are moving along in lives of cats and dogs. It will take a while, but I’m teaching Pepita to be nice to the kitties. It’s slow, but she’s learning. The kitties are showing less and less fear of her. Titanescu has already smacked her a couple of times. No claws as near as I can tell. She’s a tad skeered of him. We got a bit of rain this week. We didn’t get much here, but it rained on the fires which is good. Now we’re having another heatwave. Lastech is also adjusting to graveyard shift, so that’s a joy. I don’t mind the shift. It just takes a bit of adjustment is all.
Tito is still looking annoyed about his dietMiss Jenny being watchfulTitanescu having a snuggle with dad
And of course, the dog. The most amazing thing is that in the two weeks she has been here, she hasn’t peed or poopied inside the trailer…knock on wood. She also has a much better harness.
Tito is officially on a diet. He’s used to free feeding, so it won’t be easy. Now, I only put a wee bit of dry food in the dish. To be honest, we’re ALL on a diet with less sugar, fat, sodium, and more. In addition, we survived a week long heatwave. Today we woke up to drizzle and cooler temps. It’s humid as all heck, but I don’t mind that as much as the heat. Combined with the heat, I’ve also discovered the downside of bringing home lots of fruits and veggies from the produce market. FRUIT FLIES!. I made a trap with cider vinegar, sugar, and soap and it’s taking care of the problem nicely. When I have a couple more small jars, I’ll make a couple more traps.
My happier news of the week though, is finding out that our friend “B” in Puerto Rico survived hurricane Erika. He and his rescue animals are all safe. I hope they remain that way as the hurricane season isn’t over yet.
Now it’s time for the pointy eared people to shine
Diet? I think notJenny: WHAT! I’m eating here!Titanescu in a sunbeam
My apologies friends. We missed Caturday. It’s a wonder we haven’t had a meltdown. We’ve had a heckuva week. We dealt with dr. appointments and lab vampires with some good news and some not. The not-so-good news isn’t awful. It’s just a PITA and has to be dealt with. In other words, aging sucks. We’re also down to a deadline in regards to our car. The registration expires on the 15 and it won’t pass smog. We went to look at cars and came home with one rather unexpectedly as we weren’t planning to buy that day. In addition, I did NOT manage to get the stupid storage unit emptied. I’ll do that next week. Hopefully they’ll prorate the bill instead of making me pay for the whole month. At least we don’t have the insanity of the city to add to the mess. One good thing. We’ll have some blog posts coming up. 🙂
Soooooo here are the pointy eared people. Miss Jenny wasn’t very cooperative. Titanescu wasn’t either.
Tito being lazyTitanescu (left) and Tito (right) hogging the sunbeamI managed to lure Miss Jenny out from under the couch with treats.
Since our week has been hectic, I felt that some peace would be nice. Here is a very beautiful short film by Erik Wernquist. All the places exist in our solar system. The words and voice are from Carl Sagan.
Yes, it appears that a major-big-huge Godzilla variety El Niño is coming. California needs the rain, I know. However, it appears to be feast or famine and we just don’t do anything halfway. So to get our rain probably means dealing with downpours and mudslides. With all the fires, the mudslides will be nastier than usual. On top of that, it may not even be enough rain to make up for the drought. Anything is better than nothing though.
Our heat is predicted to be in the triple digits this next week. Oh joy! Thank goodness for air conditioning. And on the unpacking front, I’ve won that battle. I have one small load left at the storage unit. Everything else is accounted for and many more things have been dumped. 🙂
Now it’s time for the pointy eared people to shine. They look like druggies this week
Tito looks like he had to much caffeineJenny: The snozzberries taste like snozzberriesTitanescu over did it on the vodka and couldn’t even make it to the sunbeam.
Caturday strikes again and I’m STILL unpacking. I’m also still getting rid of stuff. It’s getting to the point that to bring in one box means unloading and rearranging everything already stowed. I’ll get to the end of it eventually, but it’s a royal PITA. The storage unit will be empty by the end of the month though, or my scream may be audible all the way to Sydney, AU. 🙂
In the meantime, here are the pointy eared people. I decided that they needed to look like paintings this week.
Tito practicing the “dead bug” positionMiss Jenny in blueTitanescu in the window
Another Caturday rolls around and while late, I have a post. Our other replacement computer is here and I spent a couple of days wiping the hard drive on the old ones. I decided to go for more than a mere formatting and opted to wipe the drives by having the data overwritten with gibberish instead. It’s much more secure than reformatting or taking a hammer to it. Now they can go to the e-waste facility.
The kitties are still adjusting, but it’s going well. They have recently taken up the sport of fly trapping. We don’t get a lot of flies, but there are more here in the East Bay than in San Francisco. I’m hoping I can keep them out as much as possible though as the pointy eared people will destroy the trailer in their trapping endeavors.
Tito saw a flyTito missed the fly
Lucky for me, Tito caught the fly before the other two noticed.
Miss Jenny did something quite interesting…for her. In the evenings, I leave the front door open as there’s a screen door and the fresh air is nice. I was working on the budget when I heard a low growl that got louder and turned into quite a snarl. It was our Miss Jenny. She was in full fluffage mode and pissed off. There may have been a dog or raccoon out there. I didn’t see anything. The only thing she ever used to growl at was people in cherry pickers. Yeah, really. Go figure. Anyhow, she recovered and came over near me to chase her tail, ask for pettings, and purr a lot. No fly trapping for her.
Miss Jenny haz a happy
Titanescu was napping near me in the corner. He wasn’t interested in the fly or Miss Jenny’s antics.
Yes, we mithed Caturday thankth to a lithping computer. It was a much loved older laptop that was given to us by a friend. It was still running on Windows XP and couldn’t be upgraded, but it did the job nicely… until the other day when the S quit working. I thought maybe thomething was thtuck under the key, but alath, no. Then an hour later, it was followed by the 2, W, X and caps lock. Damn!
The lithp was cute, but it ceased being cute when the other keys up and quit in protest. We still need a bigger/faster laptop for working on photos, but we managed to get a little one that keep us going until we get the other one in a week or two. It’s an HP Stream 11 and it was less than $200.
It’s small and blue, but it works like a charm
Lastech here:
So this lil’ guy shall be (mostly) mine and I shall call it CASE. The more powerful one which we’re getting for Rudha-an we’ll call TARS.
Yeah. We really did like “Interstellar”. This past week has been a long one, with training on Tuesday which split my days off, before the warm up to the 4th of July celebrations at work and unexpected overtime. We’ve also experienced some internet connectivity issues which should be resolved by next week.
Now, this Caturday, I ought to talk about sharing quarters in the Endurance with the three Catonauts. That means discussing litterboxes, theirs and ours, and the struggle for breathable air.  If it weren’t for potential copyright issues, I might have renamed the Endurance “Cat Shit One”. Every time I have to reach for stuff in storage on the lower bunk, which is danger-close to the cats’ port-a-potty, the smell badgers me like a used car salesman from Fremont (I’ll explain later).  Shallow breaths only help so much before fireflies dance in front of you. Then you’re light headed and the cat crap is still harping on about “hey man, I’m in your nose trying to find your lungs and all, mind if I stop in the back of your throat, just long enough so you can taste it? ”
Meanwhile, your tongue is like a drunken mechanic in the backseat feeling suicidal, thinking he could just open that door and ooze out into 50 miles an hour traffic (again, I’ll explain later).
Well. That’s bad enough, but we have our own septic issues to manage.
See, on a trailer, what they call the black tank is essentially an on board septic tank. And you know, nature’s way of telling you to empty that tank is through what scientists call olfactory assault. Your sinuses texting your brain furiously to point out that if they’re expected to block the stink, the brain best send a hand with tweezers to pluck some nose hairs and stop the nostrils with mucus. The brain, who’s had enough, texting back that he’s already had to deal with the cats’ litter box which is exactly three feet from the humans’ bathroom, and that the stomach is no help whatsoever. None,
I digress. There are enzymes you drop in the black tank to neutralize the oh-dears.There’s also the “trick” of pouring a little diluted bleach down the hatch. So, you know, we can cope. It’s just that when the weather’s hot and you had the half-pounder at Fuddrucker’s, timing becomes critical is all…
Now, time for the mission specialists to shine…
Tito doing “the sexy”Jenny: Are the fireworks over?Titanescu watching from the tower.
This is good advice from Jackson Galaxy (My Cat From Hell). Without cable, we don’t watch his show on the tv. We do follow him on FB and stream some of his shows via Netflix. This one fits our topic of cat poop rather well. 🙂
Yes, the furballs are hiding, at least during the day. I spend several days a week trying to unpack boxes and the furballs are NOT amused. I only do a few boxes at a time and I try to avoid sudden moves. Sadly, I keep having to reorganize constantly. Going from an apartment to a trailer is a challenge. There is plenty of storage here, but not all of it is easy to access. Figuring out what we need easy access to vs. what we can stash away is the tricky part. The poor pointy eared people are getting tired of it already. They remain in hiding until I quit for the day. I do try to work for a couple of hours and then break for a while, so they can feel comfortable using the litterbox and getting a stretch. We avoid doing much unpacking at all on Lastech’s days off. It gives us all a break.
In other news, I’m happy as a pig in erm… stuff! The produce market is just wonderful. It’s too hot to cook indoors, so we eat a lot of salad and cold veggies. The fruit selection is stellar too. While they don’t have beef or pork, they do carry a good selection of fish. We use the grill on Lastech’s days off, so we tried the Mahi Mahi. Yummy!
Now it’s time for the pointy eared people to shine. As they’ve been hiding, getting pics has been awkward. Only Titanescu hangs out with me during the day. He spent so much time in the gulag, he’s not scared of much.
Tito: She’s watching, isn’t she?Titanescu: Da! She’s watchingJenny: Why you do this to me Dimmy? Why?
Yahoo! It’s Caturday yet again and yes, we’re having a heat wave. Of course, this is normal for Concord, but not for us, we’re having to adjust to temps that are 30 degrees warmer than what we’re used to dealing with. Thank Cthulu for air conditioning.
Life in The Endurance is coming along nicely. We are slowly emptying out the storage unit and getting things stowed away. The pointy eared people are adjusting and OMG! there’s parking in Concord!
The Safeway parking lot.
Sorry about that. When one is used to hunting for parking and then making highly technical maneuvers in order to use it, open spaces like that are a wonder. Saving time and gas enables us to accomplish more each day. When we find a way to power The Endurance’s environmental controls with tiny cat farts, we will have it made.
Yes, it’s now time for the pointy eared people.
Tito staking out territory on my pillowTitanescu checking out the new cat tower. Their lair has been moved to the top bunk.Miss Jenny: My God! It’s full of stars!
