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
Part of the planning that went into moving into a travel trailer involved a choice of vehicles. Being a borderline gear-head, that excited me. Not a lot mind, because that’d mean dealing with car salesmen but still… Our current set of wheels is not much longer for this world, thanks to San Francisco traffic and drivers who can’t park without hitting other cars, and hard. I’d been going back and forth between a car or a truck, maybe even an SUV.
At one point I had a kind of epiphany and figured a small station wagon would do us fine, and it would be a good vehicle for Rudha-an to practice driving again. I looked at second generation Saturn wagons because of price, availability, reliability, size and cargo capacity as well as fuel economy. I figured I needed something that could get up to 35 miles per gallon on the highway to keep expenses down. Quickly enough, I found one on Craigslist, on a dealer’s lot in Fremont and so, hi-ho on the way we went.
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. 🙂
Rudha an: The post below was written by Lastech and I’m adding my bit up here. Yesterday was nothing short of amazing to me. Love certainly ruled the day. I spent the day watching my Facebook and Twitter feed and sniffling with happiness. Finally! It’s now just marriage. It’s not “same sex marriage” or “gay marriage”. It’s just marriage for all. Hooray! This is Pride weekend here and it has taken on a whole new meaning.
In addition, thanks to the confusion of our move, we neglected a very important celebration. On May 14th of last year, our friend Catgirl married the love of her life, Carolyn. We want to wish them all the happiness they can handle. Catgirl writes great reviews of horror films from around the world for her delightful blog,Nekoneko’s Movie Litterbox.
Lastech: As it turns out, living in a trailer with cats is like traveling through space with Klingons. They play, they fight while singing the songs of heir people and romp all over us , not so much at high speed for lack of room, but take flying leaps. By the way, this is how they demand to be fed. No tact.
The fabric covering the furniture seems pretty sturdy considering how often and how violently they claw at it. The window blinds are not so resilient. No matter, eventually they’ll have destroyed all of that and we’ll have to replace it.
They do enjoy watching the world outside the windows or the screen door, especially when there’s a ray of sunshine to lay upon. They are excited by the wind stirring through the leaves outside and lust for bloody murder as robins fly by on their way to the bird feeder. Speaking of birds, these flying piglets go through birdseed like there’s no tomorrow.
And if the catonauts had their way, there would be no tomorrow, just half digested feathers in the litter box… The best Tito could do yesterday was to pull a Renfield and gobble up a fly before we had time to get up and yell “gross!”
He did groom himself after that….
Tito staking out a spot by the windowMiss Jenny making love to Rudha an’s sandalsTitanescu being lazy in the bunkBird watching. They love it when the weather is cool enough to keep the door open.
Now for a little music showing how we feel this week. 🙂
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!
We completed docking procedures the other morning by connecting the Endurance’s black water tank to the sewage inlet pipe, using what is affectionately called a stinky slinky… Last week, power and water were enabled by our good friend D.
As to the pointy eared crew, Jenny’s set up shop under the sofa, though she’s emerging more often now. The first few nights, she’d barely venture out to eat and drink before dashing back into hiding. We’re having to remove the blinds as she would effectively destroy them, trying to reach the little birds chirping happily right outside the Endurance’s bays. On our second night, she made several passes at the head of the bed, rubbing against our heads and farting.
Tito does better overall but digs furiously at the blankets, trying to hide under our knees when something makes him nervous. He seems to take rather well to our new surroundings, though, occasionally laying down on the floor, looking up at us for pettings.
All three catonauts are eating and drinking normally, something we have been keeping a very close eye on.
Titanescu’s sense of comfort is pretty basic. He just needs a human arm to curl up against, with the occasional foray under the blankets. He enjoys looking outside, laying in front of the screen door and his body language is already more relaxed that it has been since the mission began.
The cross airflow moving through the Endurance’s bays and roof vents are very welcome relief from our previous accommodations, as is the immediately available hot water. Environmental controls perform flawlessly. The three days spent at a hotel before the move were not so much fun for any of us, but Miss Jenny in particular completely freaked when we corralled her into her carrier for transport. We’ve got the scars to prove it. I think Titanescu may have feared either a trip to the vet or worse, being returned to the shelter.
Awning deployed and a BBQ/smoker that was a wonderful housewarming gift. 🙂
The really awesome thing about all three cats is that despite their quirks, they managed to comfort each other during each phase of the whole operation. Even Titan reached out to Jenny, stretching to touch her and grooming her when she was in hiding.
Edit: The catonauts have their own bunk. All of their blankets, toys and even the little orange “hut” came with us. Thank you for the toys and hut Auntie Grace. The pointy eared people still love it.
This is the lower bunk. Soon, they will have access to (and move to) the upper bunk.
