The Kitty

by

What to Do with a Weird Space Specifically Designed for Something Else

As I write this, it is approximately 7:15 and I have been awake since 3:27. My kiddo woke me up, and I am always happy to wake up if she needs me, well, not happy, but you know what I mean. But then I couldn’t go back to sleep. I distracted myself from fretting about, well, you know, everything, by focusing on how hot it’s going to get here in the next few days and how I can avoid using my oven. Then, at four-ish, I decided it was time to stop pretending I was going to go back to sleep and I collected the kitten and watched an episode of Psych. Then I fed the kitten and started my tea and opened some of the boxes that arrived yesterday (two of the board games from my gift ideas list, one cat grass kit). Then I had to rescue the kitten from a piece of tape that had, presumably, escaped from one of the boxes and affixed itself cruelly to his undercarriage. Which is when I discovered that he… well, he needed a bath.

So to recap: It is 7:15 and I have been up for nearly four hours and I have already washed and blow-dried a cat.

On the plus side, he is very pleasingly soft and fluffy once he’s all blown-dry.

Anyway, I need your help. 

We have a bar area in the basement, and it’s beautiful. But a) we don’t really have people over to do whatever one does in one’s home bar, and b) I would like to keep the basement as kid-friendly as possible as Carla gets older, so that I feel safe having The Teens over to our house. 

Right now, it’s very much A Bar, with room to display glasses, two wine racks filled with wine bottles, and three cupboards that are supposed to hold a variety of glasses. My husband used to display his collection of European beer glasses on the display shelves, but we relocated those to the cupboards once we got a kitten. 

The wine in the racks is not drinkable. The previous owners left it here, and noted before they did that it was not drinkable; it was purely for aesthetic purposes. Where a person obtains decorative wine bottles – which, to be clear, are full of real if not drinkable wine – I do not know, nor do I understand why anyone might pay for wine they knew they would not drink, but to each his own. My father, who knows wine, tested a couple of bottles just to make sure the previous owners weren’t, like, super wine snobs and the wine was fine if not great, but he agrees that it is not drinkable. This is to say that I feel no qualms about getting rid of the wine, except that it does seem like kind of a colossal waste. (I had the brilliant  insane thought in the middle of the night that perhaps I could donate it to a church that offers communion. I have had communion wine and it is not what I would refer to as drinkable either. But a) that’s probably dumb for a billion reasons and b) even if it isn’t as dumb as I really think it is, I would not know how to go about offering or transferring my bounty to a church anyway.) 

Anyway, if anyone knows any uses for undrinkable wine, let me know. 

What I really want to know is what else I can use the wine rack/glasses display area FOR. It turns out I am completely unimaginative in this respect. My brain has zero issue coming up with wild and horrifying explanations for whatever made that creaking sound in my living room at 3:45 am. But try to come up with alternative uses for the bar space, and I’ve got nothing.

My husband keeps his Nespresso machine in the bar area. Maybe we could use the wine racks to store mugs? Sleeves of Nespresso pods? (I’m joking about the latter.) Maybe we could remove the wine racks on one side and put in a shelf and an outlet and keep the Nespresso machine there instead of on the bar? 

It seems like “removing the wine racks and replacing them with shelves” might be the best plan, if that’s even possible.

My friend Jen (HI JEN) is expert at hosting The Teens at her house, and I seem to remember that she has a fancy smoothie machine in her basement and maybe a popcorn maker. I wonder if the wine rack spaces are deep enough to hold either or both of those things? Maybe we could put in a microwave? 

The glasses display area also seems like space that could be repurposed. I mean, I like my husband’s beer glasses collection just fine, but it does get dusty and it seems like a bad idea to have a bunch of glasses hanging around out in the open if you plan to have The Teens over. (Also: the kitten.) But what else could possibly go in that space? 

I have googled a bit, trying to find examples of other people who have similarly transformed their bar areas into something less alcohol-focused… but I haven’t really found anything that struck me as useful. 

What would you do with this space? 

by

KAT and Dinners This Week

It’s summer, and I have a kitten. Things seem to be moving at even a more languid rate than I expect from summer hours. I blame the kitten. There are the additional tasks that come with caring for another creature – food, litter box cleanup, grooming – that I have tried to adjust for, waking up half an hour earlier than needed to make sure everything gets done. But there are two aspects of Having A Kitten I didn’t really factor in to my timing: playing and ogling. 

I guess I knew that I would play with the kitten. But I didn’t realize that he would have specific Play Times that would require so much human participation. Don’t get me wrong – he can entertain himself. But sometimes, “entertaining himself” means getting into mischief, because he’s very curious and has no idea which activities/areas/objects are restricted. I have found it better for all involved to dedicate intensive one-on-one attention to him when he’s feeling playful. This turns into 30 minutes about three times a day where I am doing nothing but playing with him. We have a wand with some attachments that he loves to chase. We have some balls with bells inside that he loves for me to throw. I mentioned previously that he adores the little mylar crinkly balls. He has at one point had two spirals, which he loves, and also loves batting under the stove. Both of them are currently MIA. 

The internet has implied for years that cats love boxes, and this cat does indeed love a box. We got a new vacuum and the box it came in has holes on two sides for handles. He loves hiding in the box and batting at things from inside the “windows.” He loves it when I throw a ball inside the box so it bounces of the far wall. We introduced him to the joy of a paper grocery bag today and he is having big fun with that. In fact, I had to take a fifteen-minute pause in writing this post because he hopped up onto the chair with me, purring loudly, planted himself firmly between me and my laptop, and then started biting my arm. So I got him a fresh bag and a feather toy which are currently distracting him very nicely. They are also distracting me, though. 

That brings me to the next time adjustment, which is for ogling. He is so cute that I spend waaaaayyyyyy too much time watching him be cute and taking pictures and videos. Carla is also spending waaaaayyyyyyy too much time doing those things, and also picking up the kitten every time he’s not already in her arms, and also saying, “Mom! Look at what Lenny is doing!” and also giving me a play-by-play of what the cat is doing anytime I am not looking directly at him.

Anyway, I am living solidly in Kitten Adjusted Time (KAT) right now, which is super adorable but also super non-productive. 

Let’s see. Despite the kitten and his darling antics, we still need to plan and prepare and consume meals. What shall we eat this week?

The rain persists, with little bursts of occasional sunshine. This makes it hard to know what I want to eat. Do I want warm and cozy things, like chicken paprikas and lentil soup? Or do I want fresh summery things like grilled chicken caprese salad or grilled summer squash with lemon-scallion dressing? 

I better come up with SOMETHING.

Dinners for the Week of June 9-15

  • Slow Cooker Balsamic Pork: We haven’t had this in a while but it sounds good. I have never simultaneously had a cat and a crockpot though, so… hmm. We combine this with caramelized onions, feta, Kalamata olives (for me), sun-dried tomatoes (for my husband), and put it all over brown rice to make yummy shredded pork and rice bowls.
  • Cold Noodle Salad with Spicy Peanut Sauce: We haven’t had this in a long time but it sounds like a perfect summer meal. I may buy some flank steak so we can have some teriyaki steak to go on top of it. Bonus: my kid will eat steak.
  • Pickle-Brined Chicken Tenders: This is a big hit around our house, even though it is a bit fussy to make. Carla hopes to have a friend over for a sleepover one of these nights, and this will be a good friend-friendly meal. (I typically make tacos for sleepover nights, but we just had a tacos-and-sleepover evening last week, and I’m not ready to do that exact combo again.) I need some sort of veggie for the side. We’ll have to see what looks good at the grocery store.

Okay, that looks like a respectable list of meals!

In case you were wondering: The kitten tired himself out attacking the paper bag I got him. He is now fast asleep, inside it. 

by

Abundance

Is a Five for Friday by any other name just as sweet?

  1. Sara/hs: I was adding a new Sarah to my contact list and realized that I have an abundance of Sara/hs in my life these days. Growing up, I knew a Sara when I was in daycare and then a Sarah in high school, then I worked with a Sarah for a few years. That was it for a long, long time. Now, I am suddenly swimming in Sara/hs! I love how names sometimes come in clumps like that. Possibly there’s a regional element to it. For instance, I never knew a single Leah, Colleen, or Corrine until I moved to my current city… and now I know multiples of each. When I was in middle and high school, the cute boys were all named Josh; I can remember four in my grade alone and at least one in the grade above me. Yet I don’t think I’ve encountered a Josh since college. Was there a preponderance of Someones in your class growing up? What about now? Have you ever wandered into a cluster of Sara/hs? Which name has the most entries in your contact list?
  • Flowers: My flowers are FINALLY blooming. The best thing about the persistent cool/grey has been that my irises stuck around for a much longer time than they did last year, and really put on a show. Now, finally, my peonies and roses are getting in on the action. I am loving my walks lately, because there are begonias and clematis and dogwood and allium and salvia and it’s wonderful wonderful wonderful. 
  • Supplements: I mentioned this already, but I am suddenly taking so many supplements. Mainly in an attempt to address the sleepiness/sleep issues, although I’ve lost track of what’s supposed to do what. A doctor tells me to take something, I add it to the pile. With my allergy pill and my anxiety medication, I am now up to seven pills a day. I hate swallowing pills. I am terrible at it. Some people can throw a handful of pills into their mouth and swallow them all at once. Some people can – hork – dry swallow a pill. I have to have a whole glass of water at hand, because I require lots of water to get a single pill down. Still, often they get stuck, in my mouth or my throat, and I have to deluge them with water to get them to where they need to go. I abhor it, thanks. The very worst pill I take is not, surprisingly, the magnesium – which is a giant tampon-sized monstrosity. The magnesium is a capsule, so it goes down far more smoothly than the B6 tablet which I can almost never swallow on the first try. Yuck yuck yuck. My B12 vitamin is a chewable, so I use that as a chaser. It definitely helps eliminate the sour B6 taste. I feel like, at 44, I should be able to reliably swallow a pill. Alas.
  • Couches: Until we moved into this house, my husband and I had never bought a couch before. What a lucky, carefree time. My in-laws passed down a total of three couch sets to us over the years and since they were perfectly reasonable couches and also free, that’s what we used for the first 20 years of our life together. But they are old and also not really our personal style. So when we moved to this house, we promised each other we would get new couches. We got a new couch for our basement in 2024, and we finally finally got a new couch for our living room last week. The thing is, we still have the old couches. It is surprisingly difficult to divest oneself of couches, I’m finding. The old basement couch is ripped, so not appropriate to donate. We will end up trashing it. Our trash collection website says we can make an appointment for the collectors to pick up and dispose of a couch, but it also bafflingly says that all trash needs to be divided into four-foot sections. Does that apply to couches, too? How am I to apportion our couch in that matter? Using what implement? A question for the trash collectors, clearly, except they never answer their phone. The old living room couch is getting picked up by a thrift store. But while we are waiting for the question about the former to be magically resolved without a phone call and for the latter to be picked up, they are both living in my piano room. They’re not even usable, they’re so jammed together. It’s… a lot. 
  • Kitty Photos: My phone is jam packed with photos of the kitten. He is so very cute.