life changing purchases

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Some Quick Bullets, Mainly About the Kitten

We have welcomed our new housemate!!!!!

By the way, it is Very Difficult to do anything at all when you have a kitten. He is quite darling and very distracting. Case in point: it has taken me three days to get this poor excuse for a post into WordPress.

He is what I consider to be the platonic ideal of a cat. He is playful and weird and does that thing where he will be walking sedately and then will suddenly take off for reasons known only to him. And yet he is also incredibly cuddly, and will sit on or beside his humans for hours, purring loudly. He has had no trouble identifying and using his litter box, he is already starting to come when we call him. He seems to prefer being in the same room as his humans, although he does enjoy exploring the house. He is friendly and cheerful and not easily startled. He loves to play with toys, especially these silly little crinkly mylar balls – two of which are already lost forever underneath our oven. He loves to look outside. He seems to prefer sleeping on his back, fluffy tummy bared.

When I called the vet to make our kitten’s first appointment, the (very kind and friendly) person I spoke to asked for his name, and then said, “Oh my god, my cat’s name is Leonardo, too!” And then he added, “We named him after ALL the Leonardos.” But then he could only think of two – DiCaprio and DaVinci. Are there other Leonardos? I mean, there’s the Ninja Turtle. But I’m pretty sure that’s a mononym in the spirit of Cher/Beyonce/Sting, right? Anyway, I’m trying to get the nickname Lenny to stick, but my husband and child are resisting with all their might and they might be wearing me down. I already have to scroll through my parents’ cat’s name and their dog’s name before I come up with Lenny, and with my kid saying her chosen nickname constantly… I don’t think I can keep it up. Lenny may end up being his blog name, which is a surprising benefit of having a blog. Perhaps I should have chosen a blog name for Carla instead of reserving them for potential future children.  (Edith and Eloise were my top contenders.) 

Pre- and now even peri- (intra-?) kitten, I have been sleeping pretty well – waking up only once-ish per night and falling back to sleep pretty quickly. Because sleep is normally a major challenge, I wanted to note for Future Me that sometimes it’s not. Is it because I am taking all the supplements right now? (Magnesium, B6, B12, iron, vitamin D – okay, so not all all but more than I was taking which was nothing.) The other thing I will note is that I am still tired. If I sit down, I will fall asleep. So either there’s something going on that we have not yet tested for (all my labs are totally normal, and my at-home sleep study showed no evidence of apnea), or – and this is my personal theory – being tired is just How It Is, and maybe I notice it more now because I am less busy.

 

My kid is still in school, but summertime is imminent and I Am Pumped. I am looking forward to more leisurely mornings, to spending time outside, to forcing encouraging my child to read through bribery the thrill of the vast literary canon.

On the cooking front, I am in one of those phases where I cannot think of a single food I want to eat, let alone make. We’re depending a lot on leftovers of the few things my husband suggests and/or takeout. To make matters more complicated, after such a long, damp, cool spring, we have suddenly been skyrocketed into the 80s and it’s too hot to turn on the oven. My air fryer makes a mean piece of salmon though.

Oh – okay, more about the kitten. 

So far, I have had itchy eyes but no other allergic reactions to the cat. And I could just as easily attribute my itchy eyes to the increase in pollen outside. 

Let’s see. Are there any negatives about having a cat? I mean, I can’t do anything unless I shut him away in his temporary room. But that’s not annoying as of yet. He does, of course, occasionally scratch the furniture which is not ideal. But I was expecting that, and we are also working on it. It took me all of two days to release my deeply-held conviction that I would never ever welcome a cat tree into my home; now we have a cat tree. He gets carsick, which is sad. Oh – he is obsessed with my houseplants, so I have temporarily relocated them to higher places and may need to re-home some of them. (Why are so many houseplants toxic???) He is also obsessed with climbing on the kitchen table, and then immediately shoving his entire head into whichever water glass is sitting there unattended. 

He has absolutely no grace. I thought cats were supposed to be agile and graceful and have good balance and land on their feet, but Lenny is unaware of these stereotypes. He leaps at things and misjudges the distance. He flops over on things with edges (cat tree, chair seat, ottoman) and falls off them. He trots along the back of the couch and slips off every few steps. I even asked the vet about it; she seemed unconcerned. Perhaps kittens are the equivalent of toddlers, lurching around drunkenly until they fully understand what it means to walk.  

One of my writing partners came over to meet Lenny and, ostensibly, to write. Focusing on our projects was… bordering on impossible. She suggested I get him his own computer. 

If it’s not entirely clear, I love him. He is perfection.

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A Small But Satisfying Purchase

Our new-to-us dishwasher has a little blue light that shines on the floor when it’s operating. But when the dishwasher has completed its cycle and the dishes are clean, the light goes off. The light is also off when the dishwasher is full of dirty dishes. 

This is a problem. The lack of clarity around whether the dishes are dirty or clean has led to Carla putting dirty dishes in with the clean ones. It has led to my husband stacking dishes on the counter instead of putting them into the dishwasher where they belong. It has led to me being annoyed and feeling like I have become both The Keeper of the Knowledge of the Dishes and The Sole Dishwasher Loader/Emptier which are titles I did not consent to and do not want.

(Sidebar: I think it IS possible to figure out whether a dishwasher is full of clean or dirty dishes, at least most of the time, simply by doing a little investigation. You often find a little puddle of water on the underside of mugs after they’ve run through the wash, for instance. Or if the dishwasher has only two plates, a fork, and the water bottle you put into it yesterday, perhaps they are dirty. To be fair, since we are a Full Rinse Before Dishwashing family, it can be tricky to tell the difference, especially if the dishwasher is pretty full. But that is only some of the time, not all of the time.)

It is possible to buy little magnets that tell you whether your dishes are clean or dirty. But the new-to-us dishwasher is not magnetic, so the problem persisted. 

But I found a little clean/dirty sign that you put inside your dishwasher and I love it! There has been a bit of a learning curve – I need to switch the sign to “Clean :-)” at the same time I add the soap, and I need to switch the sign to “Dirty :-(” right when I open up the dishwasher to empty it, but sometimes I forget. It’s helping though! Other people have been putting their dirty dishes into the dishwasher all by themselves. 

Is there a 99.99999% chance that I will be the person who unloads these dishes? Yes.

Who is the primary dishwasher loader/unloader in your household? What title do you bear that you neither consented to nor want?

I am kinda sorta attempting to complete NaBloPoMo, with the full expectation that life will make it impossible any day now. If you want to follow along, or join in the fun, check out San’s blog here.

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Friday Randomosity: I Hate Mud and Phone Calls Edition

Meal planning, grocery store reports, and randomosity. Seems like that’s all I can dredge up for a blog post these days. Thank you for reading anyway.

(Perhaps you could use one of your over-long randomosity bullets as its own blog post! you might suggest. Ah. If only my brain were capable of processing posts in manageable bite sizes instead of epic book-length tomes.) 

  • I finally got my hair cut and colored this week. My original appointment was a month ago. But the day before I was scheduled to see her, my hair stylist canceled because she had Covid. And then the day before I was rescheduled to see her, I thought I had Covid. My hair was very, very grey and now it is very, very brown and I am deeply grateful to my hair stylist. This time, she also dyed my eyebrows. You will have to trust me when I say that I currently look exactly like Uncle Leo. (The dye has temporarily adhered to the skin beneath my brows, and my hair stylist promises it will wash out in a day or so. Until then, I say, “Hello!”)
The resemblance is uncanny.
  • (This is not a new bullet, but WordPress disagrees.) Aside from the absolutely ridiculous name, I love it. It has the base primer, which makes my lashes super long. And then it has the top layer. And it’s waterproof so it never runs or smudges. It is a little difficult to remove, but it stays on so well I don’t mind. Since we are all wearing masks for the next FOREVER, it is my new best friend. I wore it skiing the other day, when it was snowing so heavily that my family and I were human moguls by the time we reached the top of the chair lift. And I made the mistake of putting my goggles on top of my helmet, where they immediately became crusted with snow and ice, which rendered them completely unusable, so I had to spend the rest of the day with snow flying directly into my face. My mascara did not budge.
Yes, that is a sliver of my actual forehead. Titillating.
  • Who was it that recommended I watch Sex Education? My husband and I just finished Season 2 and I love it. The first season was good. I wasn’t crazy about the premise: Otis, son of beautiful sex therapist Gillian Anderson, starts offering a sex advice clinic of his own at school, with the help of prickly bad girl Maeve. For the entirety of Season 1, I had to suspend a LOT of disbelief, and plus the advice that Otis charged for seemed really basic – like no one could simply google their issues and get the exact same solution? But the characters were interesting, and I became Very Invested in a couple of the side stories, so we went straight into Season 2. And it was GREAT. The cast of characters are so fun and interesting. Everyone is complex and has their own inner struggles. I love how diverse the cast is (although there could be a little more size diversity), and I love how plainly and non-judgmentally a wide variety of sexual preferences are portrayed, and I love the friendship between Otis and his best friend Eric, and I love Gillian Anderson even though her character can be kind of irritating. Anyway: it is a really different, interesting show and I am hoping my husband will be up for jumping right into Season 3. (This may sound like “no, duh” advice, but if you aren’t interested in seeing/hearing about pretty graphic sex acts, I would skip this show.)
  • Has it been cold in your neck of the woods? It’s been cold here, but nowhere near as cold as it COULD be. I grew up in the land of Minus Sixty Degrees, so I am pretty blasé about our current in-the-teens temps. We do have some pretty serious icicle action going on though. These guys are all come at me bro and I want to say, Whoa, whoa, whoa. Chill out, my dude. No need to get so defensive.
These are two separate icicles from two separate sides of my home. Which is apparently ready to defend me from enemies.
  • Where I was originally going with the previous bullet was that my office is quite frigid lately. I used to have a space heater, one that’s so old I can’t remember when or how or why I acquired it. It died last year. Is it still sitting forlornly in the corner of my office, mourning its inability to fulfill its life purpose? Yes. Despite my sympathy for the defunct space heater, I decided to buy a new space heater and I found this little guy. So far, I really like it. I park it in the middleish of my office and direct it toward my desk, and it definitely makes the space warmer. I think it would be perfect for a cubicle or a small office. It has a little handle, and it is very sensitive to being bumped, and I really like it. It’s little, too – about the height of a hard-bound book, and a very cute little fella. Because as we all know, cuteness is a key factor in which space heater to buy.
  • Not that I’ve been in my office a whole lot this week. Even though I am supposed to be doing revisions, I have instead been traipsing all over hither and thither for all sorts of stupid appointments. Annual gyn appointment. Annual mammogram. Routine physical to establish with a new PCP. Hair appointment. Financial advisor appointment. PTA meeting about something I volunteered for. And then I just had to make a bunch of phone calls (UGH) to set up more appointments. Eye appointments for me and Carla. Dental appointment. Car maintenance appointment. Ugh ugh ugh. I hate being on the phone and I feel like my schedule is BOOKED for the rest of the year. 
Actual text between me and my husband. He is very accommodating.
  • May I complain a moment about the central scheduling system my healthcare provider has? I spent a very long time on the phone with a scheduler, trying to set up eye appointments for myself and Carla. And while I am grateful that I could call one number and get appointments for us both, with different doctors, I am… a little concerned. I explained my time/date parameters, and she found a time and a date. So I plugged them into my calendar on my phone. And then she said, “Okay, I have you scheduled on DATE at TIME.” But… that was not the date she and I had agreed on! So I asked her to double check it, and she confirmed the original date and time, in a tone of voice that indicated I should have been paying closer attention. And then when I scheduled Carla’s appointment, she said, “Oh, I have an appointment on the same day as your appointment – DATE.” But the date she said was not the date we’d agreed on, so I had to ask her to double check it again. Also for Carla, I picked a specific location near our house, and a specific time of day (after school, because the doctor will need to dilate her eyes). The scheduler set it all up, and then said, “Oh, I scheduled it for DIFFERENT LOCATION. Is that okay?” I said no, could we please find a date at the nearby office. And she said sure, and then offered several early morning times… when we had just discussed that the appointment needed to be in the afternoon. FINALLY we got it scheduled, and then she told me the date and time, and they were different from what I had just plugged into my calendar! It was a very confusing call, and I really, really hope that Carla and I are scheduled correctly. 

  • In my never-ending quest to find ways to use the bananas that eventually soften into mush before anyone (ahem, CARLA) eats them, I attempted a new recipe. It was a MAGICAL recipe, let me tell you. Elisabeth posted it on her blog, and it sounded ideal for my particular child: it contains oats (which she will eat RAW by the bowl), bananas, and chocolate chips. It also used dates, which I had on hand from the sticky toffee pudding we never ate. No liquid though, which I felt was surely a mistake. But no! As soon as I turned on the blender, the banana liquified and the ingredients morphed into a beautiful, uniform batter. I was generous with the chocolate chips. The cupcakes were so easy and seemed so wholesome. And none of my family members liked them. HUGE WEARY SIGH. [CLARIFICATION: They are not dry. They are perfect. If they didn’t have a banana flavor, which I cannot stand, I would have eaten them myself.]
I think they LOOK beautiful, but apparently they are “too DRY, Mommy.”

  • I need some advice about my “mud room,” even though I am pretty sure that my situation is un-fixable. As I have complained about at great length in the past, my “mud room” is a teeny tiny square of space between my garage and kitchen, with a shoe closet on one side. We come in through the garage, remove our shoes, toss them in the general direction of the shoe closet, and then enter the kitchen. It’s not great normally, but currently, with the deep snow we find ourselves in, it’s reached a fever pitch of untenability. Our feet are wet and muddy, so the floor gets wet and muddy. And there’s no easy way to remove one’s shoes and then step into the kitchen, so mud and dirt inevitably get tracked into the kitchen and then all around the house. I am zooping things constantly. I am spraying and wiping the floor constantly. And then, multiple times a day, the floor is a filthy mess again. Plus, the shoe closet is FULL. There is NO ROOM for all the snow boots that have assembled. The other closet, where I store the snow boots in dry weather, is too far away for us to reasonably store the boots in between wearings. And because some people like to wear normal shoes when it’s not actively snowing, I can’t simply stow the regular footwear in the other closet. I guess I could move SOME of the shoes, so that we could put our boots INSIDE the closet, instead of outside. But that still doesn’t resolve the Mud and Dirt issue. I would love to get a boot tray… but the “mud room” is so small that a boot tray would make it impossible to open the door. I don’t think a boot tray would fit inside the shoe closet, either. It’s tiny, plus we already have a shoe shelf in there, taking up most of the real estate. You will have to believe me that there is no In the Garage Solution, either; our garage is tiny, and there is barely enough room to squeeze past our cars to get inside. We cannot remove our shoes outside before we come in. So. Is there some obvious solution I am overlooking? Or is this just a Grit Your Teeth and Keep Zooping situation?
The reality is SO MUCH WORSE than it appears here.
  • This may be really silly question, but if you track your reading, and you also have children, do you track the books you read with/to your children? I track the books I read on Goodreads, and I never used to count the books I read to Carla. (Mostly because my husband is the primary bedtime reader in our household – his accents are MUCH higher quality.) But I have making an effort to read to her more often outside of bedtime, and we just finished Frindle and I tracked it. I mean, I read the entire thing. Out loud. So I want credit. Credit that matters literally only to me. 
  • By the way, have you read Frindle yet? It was seriously such a good book. It’s about a boy named Nick and his teacher Mrs. Granger. As part of an effort to distract Mrs. Granger from teaching/assigning homework, Nick decides to make up his own word for a pen (frindle), and then launches a campaign to make frindle the real word for an ink-filled writing implement. It was a fun book about how words come to be, and how students can make a difference, and how important good teachers are. My voice was wobbling all over the place as I read the last two chapters. It was really such a lovely, fun, moving book. Carla liked it too, but being a child and not a parent/former child, she didn’t fully understand the beauty of the Nick/Mrs. Granger relationship. 

That seems as good a note to end on as any. I need to go gear myself up to make yet another phone call and schedule yet another appointment. And then I have two meetings today. Blech.