A report on the cats

Missed Cat Blog Day on Friday.  I have been gardening, swanning to the Cape and the Berkshires, cooking every tomato recipe in the repertoire and finding agents to query for the Burning Man book, Festival Madness. 

By and large, the cats are cool.  The orange cat is very cool, eating well, looking out the window, shedding all over the Calvin Klein down duvet, and wondering why the black and gold cat with the big stomach continues to give him the stink eye.  He gives her a pretty wide berth.  Usually.  

Said black and gold is cool unless the orange cat gets in her face.  A few days ago he wanted to play and made chasing motion, which set her off in a tizzy of hissing.  Sometimes she is caught eating his food and slinks off (guiltily) when reprimanded. 


Nonetheless, life is CAT is pretty calm.  Good birdwatching from the living room window, and chipmunk watching from the kitchen window.  Many places to nap.  Eats of schedule.  Plenty of petting.  What's not to like?

Cat Tales

Normally, Friday is Cat Blog Day, but I'm running behind.  Thisbe, who is in mourning for her housemate Annie, has acted strange of late.   She's always been an Extreme INDOOR cat, never venturing further than the garage or the front porch.  We've let her out on the deck a bit lately, and she's been content to sit under the table or a chair, and race into the house at the first sign of danger.  Noises, strangers and who-knows-what are Thisbe's idea of danger.

A couple times she wandered down the stairs and into the yard and seemed to be somewhat clueless about how to get back to the deck.  Once, I met her around the house and let her in the front door, which she found most MYSTERIOUS.
Yesterday, from her perch on the deck, she spied one of the baby chipmunks.  Ahhh!  Cat toys!  She left the deck and gave chase, but didn't even come close.  She returned, and sniffed around the neighbor's deck and seemed, well, confused.  Decided to go back to where the chipmunk was last seen. Went under the neighbors bushes and then their front porch.  Most uncharacteristic behavior.  I was in hot pursuit.  Thisbe jumped onto neighbor's front porch and wanted in the door. 

Listen, the fuzzy imbecile, this is NOT OUR HOUSE.  She sniffed around and acted obtuse.  Don't know where their dog was, or she would have been catatonic.   Finally I picked her up (all 16 heavy pounds) and carried her as far as I could before she let loose with the claws and wriggling and then growls and hisses.  She lay in the grass and sulked. 

I called her from the steps of the deck.  More confusion.  Can this be MY house?  I thought it was the other one.   Hmm.  Guess I'll check it out.  Oh!  It is my house.  Yikes.  I think I'll go inside and chill and think about this business.  Do I have two houses?  Where are the cat toys?  

She lay on the floor in a state of prostration.  Stress is stressful.  Her housemate, Annie, never liked it when Thisbe went outside.  She has no brains and will get lost immediately.  How true.

One of those cats with no sense of direction.  Who knew? 

Poor Thisbe,  I had to give her extra treats. 

Burglars Beware: Cat DNA lurks everywhere

Someone has finally come up with a good use for cat hair.  Our vacuum is full of it and all my dark clothes as well.  Rugs, furniture, it's cat hair uberalles.

Actually, Friday is cat blog day, but what the hell?  http://www.care2.com/greenliving/cats-help-solve-crimes.html

Bird Watching 101

Thisbe watching birds.  A cat's most cherished activity.  Annie enjoys the same pursuit.  The birds seem oblivious to the presence of a cat just a few feet away.

I haven't been posting, alas and alack.  I've been writing.  I did yet another rewrite of Promiscuous Mode, and it is now (whole MS) with an agent, but no great hope.  I've done some more on In Flight and am almost 5000 words into a crime short story.  Sent another story into a contest.  So the writing goes apace.

Also cooking up a storm.  Big Valentine's Day menu which we ate on for days.  Then S.O.'s birthday dinner of stuffed cabbage.  Finished it last night.  Mega-yum.

I've also been working on a writing group's web site, dieting, working out, working on finances, yada yada.  The diet is just a calorie count diet, which means I have to enter every bite into this web site which helps figure out the calories.  It took a long time at first, but I'm kind of into the hang of it now.  Total loss:  3.5 pounds, but hey, that's something added to the 3.5 pounds I lost before the formal diet.

The thing about a simple calorie count is that no food is forbidden.  A lot of diets say that but weight watchers will penalize you a gazillion points for a tablespoon of butter, but you can eat a whole can of beans.  The more something is portrayed as forbidden, i.e., foodstuffs, the hungrier I get for it.

So I take my lumps with 1/4 cup peanuts and the St. Andre cheese and  eat less of something else.  I haven't been hungry, by the way, in spite of the fact that I'm trying to stay around 1200 calories on days when I don't work out.  Turns out I wasn't eating THAT MUCH to begin with. 

I made my mother's recipe of lemon squares to take to a friend's house.  They are so good I will post them here soon.  And I also made crepes with a sweetened cream cheese filling and a strawberry sauce to go on top.  This gave us dessert for  4 nights, 2 crepes each.  A lot of bang for the buck and also cheap.

Tomorrow I'm baking a chocolate/walnut pound cake to take to another event.  I would rather take a salad but it has to be something easily transportable.   Doesn't sound like a diet, does it?  Small portions are the key.

Tonight, we're back to chicken breast, and I'm doing the Boston Globe Saturday/Sunday recipe with  one main dish and then another made from the leftovers.  Not high cal and very tasty looking.  First Spanish, then Mexican. Spanish Style Chicken

Then you make the Mexican Recipe with the leftovers:
Chicken Chilaquiles

 Off to work on my short story.  It's a lot of fun, and I'm visiting Mattapoisett today for research.

Ta Ta

Grapeshot

Friday is Cat Blog Day

A well-behaved Proustian cat. . .

We seem to be getting the knack of the injections (Thisbe and I). The secret seems to be don' t
swab her fur with alcohol. I suspect she knows the smell of alcohol from the vet and the Proustian memories it calls up are not the equivalent of tea and cookies in cat.

No, the latest crisis, well, mini-crisis, is the Eating Of The Christmas Cactus. Our Christmas cacti almost never bloom at Christmas. We've already had the Halloween cactus and the Veteran's Day cactus and now the Thanksgiving cactus. I hope these plants save something for the Holiday they are SUPPOSED to bloom for.

We've been out of cat grass for weeks, and both cats decimated the Baby's Breath that was part of a bouquet. I put the Christmas cactus on the library table where said plant will be easy to admire. Ooops! Thisbe admired it and ate a blossom or two. Probably a spent blossom. Eeek!

I don't wish to gross anyone out, but the vomiting from this little snack was profuse and disgusting and lasted several hours. I was beginning to think "Call Veternarian on a Holiday" when the cat appeared to be all right and stopped tossing her cookies, or in this case her cactus. She actually came upstairs and slept on the bed last night, and seems fine this morning.

Today I will brave Black Friday at the pet store (how bad can it be?) and buy cat grass. Yesterday when I mentioned "Black Friday" on this blog, it immediately received a comment which was actually an ad in not very great disguise. I guess that's why some blog sites make you copy the crooked numerals and letters before you can post. Not a bad idea.

So Black Friday! Black Friday! yada yada.

Apropos yesterday's food contributions: The Brussels-Sprouts-Cauliflower casserole was a winner. I took it from the oven just a few minutes before we had to be out of the house, neglecting to take a picture. It was toasty and brown and a little cheesy (in the good sense) and the pine nuts had turned a golden hue. If you ever need a holiday side dish that is not lo-cal, this one is a winner. And the veggies tasted so good.

The cheese cake was to die for and we probably will, with all that cream cheese and eggs clogging ye olde arteries. I dare not get on the scale today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week. Maybe Jan. 2nd.

Shop till you Drop, but personally, I'm buying lunch and a couple servings of cat grass.

Meow!