Birthday Boy cake by Gramma:
Mosquito swarms are no obstacle. And yes, we're still having mosquito swarms, even with fifty degree mornings and a good stiff breeze. Like Sarah said "unfall," and its just hateful. Ugh. Anyway, when he's all done doing that, this is a nice way to relax:
Being inside a moving object, behind a net, helps with the bugs. Mommy just gets them in her teeth. Also, here is Reeses with the kitten that we kept, who has been named Pickle in honor of Miss Pickles who lives in Tennessee. Miss Pickles is 20 years old, and (no disrespect intended) is probably not much longer for the people world. However, my Pickle looks JUST LIKE HER (at least from the back) and we got permission from my mom to call the kitten after the ancient and cranky old lady cat:
Reeses like him--they sleep together in the crib when no one is in there to bother them. She lets him cuddle and play with her tail. When he gets annoying, she puts a foot on his head and pins him to the floor. Hysterically funny. One day I'll get video of it and put that up for everyone to see.
Toothless appeared on Wednesday in my garage—not sure how long she’d been stuck in there but my sister found her in the afternoon. She had the fourth kitten with her! Sooooooooo we caught the baby and sent him to a new home, and animal control came for Toothless this morning. A happy ending, mostly, but a little sad for poor mommy cat. After all, she’s basically a wild animal and being caught wasn’t her cup of tea. Good news is, she isn’t a rational animal so I don’t really have to worry about things like hurting her feelings or betraying her or anything like that. Four kittens with homes, mommy not out there in the wild making more babies, etc etc etc.
But it’s still a little sad.
IN other news, I have LOTS of pictures from birthday parties and visits and other such fun to share with everyone, but I have to get everyone’s gear and life and schedule and laundry back in order first. Stay tuned.
This is me one year ago today. Shows how much I love you guys, that I'm even sharing this picture. This is what it looks like when you let them induce you and you've been in labor for 24 hours with no apparent progress (oh, except for successfully absorbing 11 bags of fluid). The only reason I'm smiling is because I don't know that it'll be ANOTHER 24 hours before the baby shows up.
Seriously, am I writing for myself here? Who visits my blog but doesn’t comment?
:(
Just one bloggy friend (who also emails and etsys, so like she’s DONE her part, people) doesn’t feel like enough.
And part of it has other pictures. (I made this one small on purpose. No "save image as" for you. I'm the only one who does that to my bud's pics. Do as I say, not as a do.) They were taken by Betsy, the sick-in-Virginia friend who I blogstalk and talk about all the time when she isn't looking. She makes really beautiful things with her photographs, like the things I just bought. She sells them here: SomethingBetsy on Etsy and I seriously recommend going to her site and checking out the wares. I'm rockin' Christmas gifts this year from her shop, because I think the art is pretty and I like what she does with it. Oh, and also it doesn't require me going further than the mailbox to get it. No stores, lines, gas money, traffic, or people saying "Happy Holidays" because they aren't allowed to say Christmas. I love it. Just be careful, because if you get started looking at ALL the shops on etsy, you'll end up broke. And you'll need a bigger house to hold everything you bought.
First, I’m peeved with our unit M.O. (medical officer) who can’t seem to get all his proverbial stuff together. I mean, maybe I’m getting an unfairly filtered picture of the guy (dear lord, I hope his wife and I don’t have mutual friends…does he even have a wife? I don’t even know his name. Maybe that makes all this ok. I am angry with a faceless officer of the United States Navy.), but it just seems like one thing after another through all this. He’s primarily there to make sure no one dies, I suppose, but ideally he’s contribute to morale, right? Like those dudes on MASH. They’re medical, they’re officers, and they’re stinkin’ hilarious. This guy isn’t funny at all.
First, he sets it up for all the guys to get their smallpox vaccine a mere five days before returning home from EMV back in July. Not at the beginning, in case something went wrong, not at the beginning, since they’d all be out there together with fellow vaccinnees and the incubation period wouldn’t matter. This means—ta da!—no close contact with wife and baby for at least two weeks, because you can get smallpox from the injection site. Nice. What a great way to come home after a month. Joe’s vaccine “didn’t take” so we were actually spared all the fun of that inconvenience. They said the guys who needed to be redone would be done right after they leave, sometime in the admin period before they get too far out in the boonies of you-know-where.
NOW the nutball has it all nicely arranged so that the guys whose original vaccines “didn’t take” (technical medical term, I have no idea what it means) can get their vaccine redone on Monday. MONDAY. Less than two weeks before they leave. Last two weeks before a deployment, and no one can touch Joe, or his laundry. And he can’t touch us. No playing with baby, no hugging his mom goodbye (she’s coming on Monday to visit for a week), no chillin’ with all the nieces and nephews that are coming in next week for V’s birthday party. Idiot medical officer.
Oh, also they’re getting a flu shot on Monday. Nice. Oh, and also he didn’t evidently feel like it was key to let everyone know at our pre-deployment brief (you know, the one in which they told us what to expect in these final weeks and then through the course of the deployment?) that these vaccinations would be coming up, as well as MALARIA PILLS. Malaria pills which give you intense nightmares. Very helpful. Good to have these things on my list of “things aware of and prepared for.” Nice to not have to stress or be concerned about them.
No, not a human baby. A feline baby. Three of them, in fact, and they’re all sleeping now, crammed in a little pile between the head of my mattress and the wall. Aw. How sweet.
See, it is like this. The cat that lives in the woods behind my house [Toothless] is a girl cat, and she is not alone in the woods but lives out there with a number of other cats of undetermined gender [Beef, Smith, Wesson, Captain Morgan, Widowmaker, and Fluff]. We know that Toothless is a girl because, in the spring, she brought three little kittens to our yard. (In an really interesting corollary, this also established that at least one tabby and one orange cat from the undetermined group is a boy cat. But it still didn’t narrow the field enough to make legally binding accusations about anyone.) That was the point, in fact, in which I became a really hard core Cat Enabler and started feeding her every day. She had babies, everyone was hungry, I felt bad…you get the picture. Anyway, long story short the kittens eventually all disappeared and Toothless went back to being a pretty cat who came alone to my back porch every morning to eat.
The summer passed in this predictable and day-to-day fashion. In the meantime, Widowmaker was rehomed to Mike’s Farm, and the other cats appeared almost never, except for Captain Morgan. Who walks with his head on one side and always moves slightly to the left (instead of going in a straight line). That’s why I named him Captain Morgan. I do not know if he is a boy. But I couldn’t think of a unisex alcohol.
ANYWAY. Toothless came back to the house on Monday evening (as we returned from our whirlwind NOVA tour) looking painfully, distressingly, upsettingly skinny. How can she get so thin in just a weekend? I ask myself. She only went like two full days without food!
On Wednesday, I’m sitting there minding my own educational professional’s business and the piano student I’m teaching says: “Hey, kittens!” Well, poop. Sure enough, there’s ol’ Toothless with FOUR little furballs. In my yard. Hungry. Sooooooooo I feed them, and Joe catches three and we put them in a box in the garage, hoping to catch Toothless in there with them, and relocate the entire gang to a non-base location. No go. I catch her coming in and out around midnight, retrieving her babies and heading back to the woods. Not able to get the door shut on her. Time for plan B.
**Plan B on hold for Thursday while I make like a cadaver and lay around [with a really evil head cold]. While I’m sick,though, it gives me a chance to mention that once again a tabby cat and an orange cat are boy cats. Still isn’t narrowing the field much. Widowmaker was black and white.**
On Friday, Plan B. Toothless continues to bring back kittens to The Place That Took Them (dumb cat) but now consistently carries around the fourth kitten, the one we hadn’t caught during Plan A. They eat, but she won’t let them stay long, and then she comes back alone later to finish her entree. We wait, we watch, and we catch three kittens by Friday afternoon, this time bagging #4 and missing #3 from Plan A. What to do? Well, I’m not sure now. But they’re sleeping in my room. Me, baby, and three little kittens. No mittens.
Where is Joe, you ask? Sleeping in the guest room, because he finally had LASIK on Wednesday and is supposed to avoid all possible situations that could hurt/touch/damage/bother his eyes. Evidently my habit of playing ping pong in my sleep is not eye-friendly. Oh, and also V wakes you by standing up next to you in the bed and then body-slamming into your face.
Would you like a kitten?
Also, in other news, our lives are going well. You should send me an email so I can get you addresses for a couple dudes we know that deployed during this month. They like to get mail. :)
This is new. People finally get back to sleep and quit fussing at me, then I can’t go to sleep myself. How nice. It’s ok, though. I can sleep in (HA!) later if I need to, and I just got a cool hour’s worth of work done on all the message boards. For the record, I am currently enrolled in:
HIST501: Historiography. The class with the paper from hell. Three weeks to go on this semester, and the comments back on my rough draft were, well….never mind. It irritates me that the rough draft is and will always be worth 10 percent more than the final, but whatev. The price we pay for not knowing that “prose padding” is a no-no in graduate level classes.
HIST500: Historical Research Methods. Not a gimme class, exactly, because the reading level for discussion boards was pretty high, but this one wasn’t as bad at the first one. Again, three weeks to go, and a huge research proposal is all that’s left. Not a big deal, except for actually having to write it.
HIST551: The American Revolution in Context. Looks like fun, several smaller papers and what looks like a biweekly discussion board. A [bleep] ton of reading, though. I had to buy like four books, which is nice for adding to the collection upstairs, but does not bode well for my Bejeweled high score.
MILH510: Survey of US Military History. A bear of a thing, mainly because there’s a bunch of motarded professional students in the class; people with 3, 4, and 5 masters who haunt the message boards and make nuisances of themselves with copiously long posts. This class also looks doable, with small papers rather than a huenormous one, but the professor is pretty hard, uh, bottomed. Could be interesting.
(also, I wrote all of this but the final two sentences at 0350 this morning, when I woke up)
