Jennifer @Home

Herding cats

In recent adventures, we've been preparing to enter our cats in a national LOLcats contest having the cats trained to an Invisible Fence.  Ok, so it's nutty.  But as I head back to full time work, it seemed better than leaving them in all day to redecorate the house, or out all day to run far away and get smooshed (not such a concern with Pepper, but a major concern with Salvador). 

Guilt over potentially frivolous expenditure aside, this experience has been worth a great deal in terms of comic relief.  The trainers come every day, and guarantee their work.  Apparently, they'll let us know when both cats are fully trained.

The first couple of days were pretty ridiculous:

Salvador was first --

You want me to do what?

Ok, not just no, but HELL NO.

Then it was Pepper's turn --

Listen folks, I didn't convert from the wild life for THIS. 

 Hey bub, I'm not walking on that leash.

Told ya I wasn't gonna walk on that leash.

After a week of this, the trainer says Salvador is done!  But they're not going to release both cats from training until Pepper is done too.  That way, they can start being out together.  We have a cute little cat door that they will learn to use, so they can have access to food and air conditioning all day, and hang outside as much as they want. 

The best part:  we will no longer have a litter box in the house.

In other news, yummy soap!

The frog/salamander mold is really cute and the goatsmilk soap is refreshing with peppermint essential oil.  The kids love this --

But my personal favorite has to be the honeybee mold; I make soap with honey in it for this one.  Here, I added some ground spices which went to the bottom of the mold and made a neat speckly pattern, not to mention smelling GREAT!

Kitties and other things

Long time, no blog.

Join 40+ HPW crowd, lose touch with blog!  Fall far behind on email!  Lose ability to utter complete sentences after 9 PM! 

Become very familiar with TV schedule.  Friday nights, "Numbers," in which arithmetical geniuses team up with FBI-types to solve difficult crimes using amazing math.  Hey, as crime dramas go, it's pretty good, thanks to characters with interesting relationships.

We've had a really exciting June!  It all started with sister Catherine's fabulous wedding, which I'll blog about more properly when I have photographs.  Catherine was gorgeous!  Ron was dashing! Kids were all so cute!  Can't wait to share photos.

The next weekend, we were off to St. Matthias' for Dad's installation as rector -- another great family gathering, fun and meaningful occasion.  Really enjoyed meeting Mom and Dad's new church community, and seeing some friendly faces from the past (when I was their organist-choirmaster, 13-14 years ago!)

The sad news this month is that my sweet old kitty Alberthe died while we were at the wedding.  She was 14, and getting visibly older, but I wasn't expecting this quite so soon.  We've all been missing her.  Here is a photo Isaac took of her about a year ago.  One of her favorite spots -- waiting by the food dish!  She started off as a spunky, rambunctious kitten, keeping me company as I did manuscript research for a year in Brussels.  When I first got her, she wouldn't respond unless I spoke French (which was all she had ever heard before).  The funny thing is, our other cats learned from her only to pay attention to French, so some things never change.  As she aged, she became a very sweet-natured, mellow cat.  Just a few weeks ago at the choir party, she was stretched out in the middle of the rug, doing her "everyone!  please admire me!' pose.  It is at least comforting that she seems to have been happy and comfortable right up to the end.  Avoiding long suffering is a really good thing.  But still, I'll miss her.

Just for fun, here's a picture of our other cats.  Isaac calls them the "double spotters"--

Can you tell where one ends and the other begins?  They look like this much of the time.  Pepper was about half-feral and became friendly to us over a couple of years.  At which point we snatched him and had him neutered.  This did much to solidify his trust, as you can imagine, lol!  He got over the insult eventually, and has become a (yes, obese) mostly indoor cat.  Poor thing spent so long being hungry that he doesn't know when to stop.   Salvador is a very funny, very friendly 2-year-old cat that we got for Isaac after Eve was born.  Isaac saw this adorable kitten with a moustache at the vet, and offered what I thought was a very well-reasoned argument (at four years old!) about how sad it was to only have old cats that got sick and died (we had lost Cate and Shadow earlier that year). I have to say, he had a point... Giant Pepper was terrified of tiny baby Salvador at first, but now they are the best of friends.