supercheesegirl

Some other updates I forgot:

Fondue party: AWESOME. The cheese fondue was so terrific. I want to make it for all of you!!

Cat: Returned to foster mom. Sad, but sadness deflected by the tour of foster mom's cat-ridden house and introductions to all the cats and descriptions of their various disabilities. OMG. It takes a special person to do what this woman does. Also, sadness deflected by totally not having to clean the litter box! Planning to get a new cat after Missi's wedding, or maybe for my birthday.

Chai: Excellent.

Last night I got serious and cleaned the apartment. Vaccuumed the whole place, scrubbed the bathroom, mopped the kitchen and bathroom. And then put everything back where it's supposed to go. Then after that I got to feeling really really really sad, most of which was cat-related. For the record, talking to my mom about the cat is Not Helping. So I stared blankly at the TV and the internets for a while, then remembered that I still had Buffy comics to read. So I read them, and fell asleep happy.

This morning I was supposed to meet with a woman from the Chestnut Hill Historical Society to talk about me volunteering with them, but she canceled. After I was already awake and showered. But it was better that way, because I worked on a poem revision for over an hour. The Space Princess of Numbers is freakin' awesome now. I love it. I dropped a full stanza's worth of syllables, and it's much better for it. Thank you for all your suggestions, writer folks.

And, for the record, I wasn't in some conundrum crisis or anything when I asked what you guys do with line breaks and stanza breaks. I was more like taking a survey. It was really interesting to see what you all said, and I feel like I have more ammunition in my arsenal now. I do have my own methods for tackling line breaks, which I didn't get into in that post, but now I have more to think about. So, thanks again.

Fridays are great! I can sleep in tomorrow!

I just watched this week's Lost. ( Read more... )

Today I petted the cat for half an hour. He looked like he wanted to come down off the window sill. I also picked him up and held him for a minute. I put him back down as soon as he started to squirm. He didn't run away and let me pet him again right away. I think that's a good sign.

I think I will take a bubble bath tonight!

I'm really tired today. I wanted to go get a coffee, really really badly, but I decided not to--I don't want to have myself up and down on caffeine all day when I'm driving to Boston tonight. I will get coffee tonight on the road!

Last night I was out late because I did a volunteering thing with NARAL Pro-Choice PA. I volunteered with the Boston group when I lived there, so I was excited to learn that there's a Philly group too. And apparently there's a whole lot of work to do for choice in PA--all the nastiest laws on are on the books here. Not to mention the whole Supreme Court decision earlier this week--which the Court released just as the media was swarming over poor Virginia Tech, so there wasn't much coverage of the decision. Not to belittle what happened there--I'm just saying the Court used that horrible event for their own ends. In any case, I'm excited to get involved with NARAL here in Philly. They're talking about having a chocolate event here this fall, which I certainly know something about, and the other volunteers were really cool. Also, I got to meet Lois Murphy, who's run for office here in PA a few times, and she was just beautiful in person, and seemed quite lovely. So all in all, it was a really good evening--free food, steps towards Making New Friends, and supporting choice, all at once!

But I didn't get home until probably 9:15, and then had to pack for my Boston trip, so I was up late. And this morning didn't help much--sometime during the night, the cat found the bag of catnip I'd carelessly left lying out. There was catnip EVERYWHERE. All over the kitchen. The cat must've had a really, really great night. He's only getting his catnip in mouse toy form after this, I think. But the nice thing was that because I've been sleeping with my door closed to keep him out of the bedroom, I slept right through whatever he was doing with the catnip. Awesome.

In other cat news, he's been hiding behind the TV. I don't care because I can reach behind the TV. He's still skittish, but last night I was allowed to touch him. Ear and head scratching occurred, with some accompanying purr-like noises. He still meows at me like he's nervous, so I'm taking it slow, but I plan on touching him as much as possible to get him used to me. Hopefully leaving him alone for almost two days while I'm in Boston won't screw things up.

Even though I'm tired today, I have lots of things to be happy about. It's Friday, I'm going to Boston tonight, my cat doesn't hate me, and it's finally starting to act like spring. Hence the user icon for this post.

I'm tired today. I was up too late last night talking to F, and then I got woken up by the nightly 4:30am Cat Races. It was Stormy against Stormy with Stormy in the lead, running from the living room to the bedroom and back to the living room and back to the bedroom again. I was sleeping through it pretty well before last night, but for some reason he was just really loud this time. Also he found an empty Walmart bag in the living room and was rustling it around. I can't wait until we're friends and I can tire him out before I go to bed so he won't do this anymore.

It's rainy here. When's it going to start acting like spring?

Tonight: I want to do the dishes, do some yoga (I meant to do yoga last night, but I ended up having a nice long talk with Jorn instead), put away clothes, work on poems, and maybe watch Lost. My usual Friday-night-at-home got eaten this week--I'm going to a concert with my parents--so I will have to do all that tonight and on Saturday, because Sunday I'll be in Florida. And speaking of which, it suddenly struck me that a 9:30am flight, though it seems to be a reasonable time, actually means that I have to leave my house by 6:30am. Or earlier, I haven't figured out yet if I can take the train or if I'll have to drive--it should be 6:30 if I'm driving. Argh.

I love this album. Love this album. This album makes me love the world.

No interesting dreams this morning. No cat news to report, other than that he ate all his food like a good cat and used the litter box and I found his hair on the couch so he must've been in the living room. Otherwise, we are still largely ignoring each other. Hopefully cat/human relations will improve soon. I'm not looking for snuggly just yet, but saying hello and not running away from me would be nice. American Idol at Mom's tonight, though, so less chance of cat interaction.

New discovery: I can no longer get out of bed at 7:00 if I want to catch the 8:11 train, dry my hair, AND feed the cat. Another new discovery: my hair is long enough to go back in a braid just like it did all through college. Luckily, it's not nearly cold enough that I need to fold the wet braid under a woolly hat like I did all through college. It should actually be pretty nice out today.

I forgot to do yoga last night in my post-library-walk bliss. I don't have enough time to do yoga tonight or tomorrow, and I have plans all weekend and I want to go to the Low show on Monday so that's out too. I am really getting annoyed at the not having enough time to do yoga. I have to see how the Wednesday night volunteering thing goes--yoga is more important, so unless volunteering is really really awesome that might get cut. I'm thinking about cutting it and I haven't even started yet. Damn.

I should get back to uploading things. There's 200 chapters and I'm on chapter 20.

Wow, what a wealth of excellent litter box information from the last post! Thanks, everybody!

Cat is still under my bed, but apparently emerged during the day. Food was eaten, water was drunk, litter box was used, catnip mouse was moved. All good signs. Tomorrow, I'm going to move the food to the hallway while I'm at work; the next day, food will move further down the hall and litter will move into the hall. Gradually, things will end up where I want them to be and the cat will theoretically be using the entire apartment. And my floors will probably need a severe cleaning by then with the litter all over the place. Though I do have a rug under the box.

::edit:: Holy crap, the cat just came out from under the bed to eat some dinner! In broad lamp light, with me sitting right here! After he had a bite to eat, we regarded each other for a moment. I said hello. He went back under the bed again, but didn't seem in a big rush about it. Now he's out again. I think it helps to have my back turned. ::/edit::

Friday night, I started up with some yoga again. Seated postures, mostly, from Gene's numbered series of leg things. Very stiff, but not unworkable. After the seated work, I was warm and did my strength-building stuff: squats, pushups, camels, hero backbend, navasana, tabletop, bridge. I kept it mellow and didn't do as many of each thing as I had been doing before, but still challenged myself a bit. Yesterday I was a bit sore, but not too much. Today I did a standing routine--short, because my dad called and I needed to get out the door, but still. The standing work felt so good. Stuff was cracking and popping all over the place, too. I need to stick with this--I feel so much better, and get the hiccups less often, when I'm doing yoga regularly.

Plan for my evenings this week:
Monday: It's supposed to be really nice out, so I'm planning to take a nice walk around my neighborhood. Hopefully I will go join the library and stop by the spa where they supposedly offer hot room yoga. Also need to remember to catch up with Lost.
Tuesday: American Idol night. I might try to go to Walmart for some stuff on the way over, but I also might not. I'm not in a huge rush with the litter thing; the box and current system are functional.
Wednesday: Volunteering at the Historical Society of Philadelphia. It's a big library! Whee! No idea what I'll do for dinner that night.
Thursday: It is not supposed to be nice out, so I would like to try to go to a yoga class--either a hot room class at the spa, if that pans out, or drive out to the Twisters studio in Erdenheim (like 2 miles away). This place looks really good, honestly--they look really serious about their yoga, they offer a variety of classes, they have different levels of vinyasa flow (which is the kind I'm interested in / have experience with). Based on the website, it looks like a good place to deepen my practice, and that's really what I'm looking for (as opposed to just a general class at the YMCA or a gym somewhere). So I may try that. I would like it to be closer, but oh well.

Today I went with my mom to Famous Footwear, where we found nothing at all that fit, and to Ross Dress for Less, where holy crap I found so much good stuff. It was like they were having the Sarah Farbo's Closet Sale. I got four supercute tops and a cute dress, total: $48. Not bad at all! Farbs, if you have a Ross near you, you should totally check out their spring stuff. It was really kind of weird, because I haven't even been to a Ross in years because it had been years before that since I'd found anything good there. But suddenly, awesome clothes. And, further reinforcement of the fact that my summer wardrobe is totally awesome and cute and my winter wardrobe makes me look like a snowman. Summer clothes are just awesomer.

I went out for dinner with Sarah B and her Jay last night, and when we got back, Stormy had moved from his hiding spot behind the board games to underneath my bed. He spent the entire evening there while we watched TV, so I moved the litter box into my bedroom and put his food under the bed, tossed a catnip mouse under there, then went about my business. I checked before I went to bed, and he had had some of the canned food and had obviously at least scratched about in the litter box, so I was pleased. In the middle of the night, around 3:30 maybe, I heard him scratching in the litter box. He would stop every time I moved around at all, and then once I was settled for a minute he'd start again. Then I could smell that he had used the litter box. Good news. Later on I heard him pee, and indeed, there was an impressive amount of clumped up cat pee to be scooped this morning. Good news again. And he did wander around a bit and play with his catnip mouse--I heard him moving around, and this morning the mouse was on the carpet, when I had tossed it to him all the way under the bed last night. Also, I heard him eating some tiem in the night, and this morning every bit of the food was gone, dry and canned, and the bowl was completely licked clean. I have already slid fresh food and water under the bed to him, and the litter box is clean for him for later. Once he gets more used to moving around the apartment, I'll move food and litter back to where they should be, but this is fine for now. I'm also trying to talk to him and even on the phone near him as much as possible so he can get used to my voice.

Here's Stormy's story: I got him from a cat rescue organization called Stray Cat Blues (the local Petsmart store donates space to them for keeping cats and doing adoptions). He had belonged to a person who volunteered with SCB, but this woman had apparently collected over 40 cats of her own, not counting a few that she was fostering for the organization. So SCB was trying to phase her out as a volunteer because she was just way over the top, because you can't care for 40 cats the way you can care for 1 or 2 or 10 cats. And then she died unexpectedly. Her son had no idea what to do with all these cats, was considering just opening the windows and doors and letting them all walk out, but he called SCB before he did that, and they came and got them all. They had a really hard time with all these cats, in sheer quantity, and also because a lot of them were injured or malnourished or had ear mites and who knows when they'd had their shots. Stormy in particular refused to eat and was very lethargic; they had to put him on special vitamins to stimulate his appetite. Apparently it had stopped being worth it for him to fight the other cats to get food. This is clearly not a problem for him anymore (hence the watching him eat like a hungry hungry cat in the store yesterday, and the licked-clean bowl this morning), but even now he is very thin--he has a normal-sized cat head on a very skinny body. He needs fattening up. I think my problem with him will not be getting him to eat, but in getting him to stop eating--to trust that this food will be sitting here all day and he doesn't have to eat it all right now before someone else comes along. In any case, SCB has found good homes for all but 7 of the 40 cats--all but 6 now. They have been finding that these cats, even though they're used to having lots of other cats around, are adjusting incredibly well to being only cats in a home--they get all the attention, all the food, don't have to fight with anyone, etc. So that's what I'm hoping will happen with Stormy. He's probably around four years old, so hopefully he's old and mellow enough to hang out and sit in the windows and stuff during the day and be cool about the fact that I'm not around, and then when I'm home I hope that he'll like having my undivided attention and loving. At least, once he comes out from under the bed. :)

People have asked for pictures, which would obviously be difficult to provide right now. :) Once he comes out and starts being the love fest cat I met at the store, then there will be pictures.

Today my dad put together my new (and hopefully last) set of bookshelves. So I got to unpack all my boxes of unread books! Now all the books are unpacked. Every book I own!

There were three full boxes of books I haven't read. (Some of them, I've read *part* of, but I haven't finished any of them.) I counted: 109 books, ranging from Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh to the collected works of D.H. Lawrence (which I counted as one book, but if I actually ever read it I'll count the novels individually--that 'if' being fairly slim at the moment). Plus 18 literary journals, both that I picked up this weekend and apparently a bunch that I picked up at AWP in Chicago in 2004. So if I read nothing but books I already own, and kept to my 2006 reading rate, I would still not finish off these shelves for over a year. That's kind of depressing, especially considering how I've been lugging around a lot of these particular books for several years and still haven't read them (Hi, D.H. Lawrence!). I mean, there's kind of a *reason* why I haven't read them yet. For some reason, they're not piquing my interest even though they are books I should read or books that looked really interesting in the store. We'll see. I am kind of broke until I pay off some moving debt, so I shouldn't be buying new books anyway. And a lot of these really do look good.

I dropped Mr. Sam off back at my mom's yesterday. Last night, Mom caught Timmy licking Sam, just like he always did before, and this morning Sam was apparently back to his usual reading-the-newspaper-with-you routine. I think I made the right decision and that Sammy is where he belongs. So now I'm looking for a new friend. Stray Cat Blues is a local cat saving organization, and they have a lot of kitties up on petfinder. Hopefully I'll find somebody nice and affectionate who will be happy in a single-cat household.

Today my mom and I went to the ballet. We took the train downtown. As we came aboveground, I saw all these people and traffic and lights--and suddenly realized we were emerging into the Philadelphia St. Patrick's Day parade. I turned to Mom and said, Holy crap! She of course only saw the flashing lights (a fire truck was going by) and assumed there'd been a murder or something. So the parade was a pleasant surprise all the way around. It was a beautiful day, and we got to walk the parade route all the way to the theater. Fun!

The ballet was Carmina Burana. This is its world premiere run, which is why I'd never heard of it before. And it was so. Fantastic. Really. I absolutely love Carmina anyway, know most of the words, and it was so amazing to see it danced. It was a very modern sort of interpretation--Mom was reminded of Cirque de Soileil. And when you think about it, yeah, professional ballet dancers probably can do most of the stuff the Cirque people do. It was really beautiful, and very well done, and the music was amazing and the costumes were striking. My favorites were these stretchy gauzy things that they were wearing during the Floret Silva and other happy songs; they did some really cool stuff with those. For the dancing, my favorite parts were probably the Fortune Plango, right at the beginning, and also the last two pieces; musically my favorite parts were the baritone solos, the Veni Veni Venias, and Tempus Est Iocundum. And Ave Formosissima made me tear up--the "Blanziflor et Helena" part is so beautiful. That and the finale O Fortuna sounded and looked amazing. The dancers were wearing nude-colored bodysuits so they all looked naked, and it just was really neat looking. Overall, absolutely amazing. I was so impressed and pleased and it was just a wonderful day. And Mom and I are planning to go to their production of Dracula this fall. Yay!

Today I:

- slept in.
- did my yoga.
- purchased curtains and curtain rods for the kitchen and bedroom and hung them.
- purchased a lamp shade and put it on the lamp.
- purchased everything I need for my cat except for dry food (asked Mom: he eats Meow Mix seafood mittles), a food dish (everything tastes better out of a purple bowl, so I must find a purple one), and some sort of mat for the bathroom floor to put the litter box on. Oh, and a scratching apparatus. But I got the catnip mice.
- put vases away under the sink, washed fancy serving bowls and put them away, unpacked my paltry supply of liquor (two bottles of passoa, one of chai liqueur, and half a bottle of malibu), began hanging photographs in the kitchen.
- unpacked... a lot of boxes. Stacked the remaining kitchen boxes against one wall, pulled out the table, put up the leaves and placed chairs around it. The kitchen looks like a kitchen now instead of a storage repository.
- stripped sheets off my bed, put on the new mattress pad and clean sheets, washed the previous sheets.
- compiled another bag of clothes for Goodwill, as well as a box of unused knicknacks and electronics and windchimes, and put the box in the basement, along with some more empties.
- cleaned out the hall closet, stacking board games in the living room in preparation for the new something I'm planning to get to put them on. Refilled hall closet with blankets, towels, kitchen towels, craft supplies.
- found my peacock tapestry!
- cleaned out my jewelry box!
- discovered that there are more stuffed animals in my apartment than there are at Toys R' Us. For serious. I opened that box and immediately closed it again. Not ready to deal with the furry friends yet.

I can't remember what else I did. The best thing I did, though, was discovering that the drain stopper thing I purchased so I can run a bath in the tub actually works. Best $1.99 I have ever spent. There's just something about a nice hot bath that makes my eyes roll back in my head. I could get addicted to this.

I still need a bunch of things for the apartment, but other than living room curtains, some sort of table/shelves for the living room, a cd rack, and the aforementioned cat products, the things I still need are in the realm of gifts. I'm going to ask my parents for a nice microwave cart or bakers rack for my birthday; I don't own any wine glasses or much wine or liquor; I'd really like some new bubble bath and a short sexy bathrobe. (Well, that last one's not really crucial for the apartment.) The whole place is in such good shape! It's almost ready for Mr. Sam to move and be comfortable here. I hope he likes it here. He's the last really important thing I need. I'm going to bring him home with me next Tuesday.

Tomorrow: hanging the rest of the photos in the kitchen; ironing bed curtains and tapestry; cleaning the kitchen and hopefully mopping the floor, or maybe going to Walmart for some of the last few things I need if it's not snowing.