You like cats, right?

i know i’ve been mia for quite some time now, and it’s because i am looking for a new job and preparing to move to hershey, pa. crazy, i know… but also exciting. not gonna lie, one nathan gerard is the reason i’m uprooting myself in comfortable little corning and taking all my belongings 3 hours south. this is a pretty big step, and i’m becoming more and more psyched and more and more freaked out. bring it on!

anywhoo, as the title suggests, this post is about my cats. yes, i’m about to embark on the big “no-no” of internet interactions: gushing about my cats. pictures included. enjoy.

this is elliot. as you can see, he is made of ears and sass. i got him when he was about 6 months old from a coworker, and his adoring clingyness won my heart in an instant. he’s probably the most obnoxious animal in existence. i love him.
here he is giving me one of his patented “FEED ME NOW BITCH” looks. when my lovely beth lived with me, we voiced all his thoughts. he always thinks in caps lock and is quite vulgar.
i love my kitchen, and i spend a great deal of time there because it’s bright and has a great table to work on. el also grew to love the kitchen, mainly because there are windows. he would sit on this bench and meow out the window all day. ALL DAY. did i mention he has the most obnoxious meow ever? yeaaaaah…
OH HAI I’M ON YOUR BIKE. JUST KEEP WATCHING YOUR MOVIE AND I’LL JUST KEEP MEOWING. IT’S ALL GOOD.
so el haaaaaaaaated beth. probably because she would grab him and squeeze him every time she saw him. frankly, i’d hate her too if she did that to me. this is the face he made when he realized she was staying around for a while. sorry el. you’ll live (and he did).
this is charlamagne hobbes. i always call him charlie, so i’m pretty sure that’s what his real name is. but sometimes i like to have pretentious names for things, so there’s that. charlie was given to me by my nate, he was a poor little bean rescued from under a shed or somewhere equally unpleasant. charlie is the sweetest most ridiculous creature alive. he never bites, he licks. he never meows, he croaks. he never lies down gracefully, he plomphs. he sleeps in the bathtub. he lets el chase him around. he’s so cute!
it took elliot and charlie several days to get along. well, i should say it took elliot several days to decide to be nice to charlie. char would just bounce around and el would growl and hiss at him. it was rather ridiculous. this is right when they started being friends. i remember seeing that they were within a few feet of each other and el wasn’t making some sort of mean noise. finally!
i miss charlie being such a little bean. this, by the by, is pretty much just the cats’ chair. i mean, i’ll sit in, but i also am used to having cat hair all over me so it’s no big.
this is just your stereotypical “melt your heart” cat picture. there will surely be more so consider this fair warning.
heh, this picture makes me laugh. they were both trying to sit on the ledge, but el was being his mean self and trying to push charlie off with his butt. i actually have a recent picture almost identical to this, except they’re the same size. this is also the door/window thing that leads to my wonderful roof, which i have enjoyed many an evening on with my pipe. i will miss that roof.
charlie has since grown into his head, and el has not yet grown out of his utter disdain for anything other than himself.
um, yeah. litterbox. WHAT IS YOUR LIFE. whenever i clean it completely out, el goes and rolls in it. not sits, ROLLS. charlie wants a piece of the action too, but little mcfatty there isn’t budging. ugh.
so to make himself feel better, charlie reclines in the tub. he loves the tub. he licks the water off the bottom, tries to shred the shower curtain, and just generally makes a nuisance of himself in there. that’s also the cat’s water dish, which i moved to the tub after they knocked water all over the kitchen floor every morning. i got kind of sick of slipping in cold water at 6am, so there’s my solution.
here we have dorkus maximus and the goob partaking in their favorite activity: sitting in the sun, being generally useless. i guess you could count “providing cuteness” as a use… they’re also extremely adept at exterminating bugs around the apartment, for which i am eternally grateful. we’ve got a good tag-team routine going there, which usually starts with them finding a bug and ends with me flushing it before they can eat it. blegh.
he has this little squished face with wonky eyes. how could you not love him? did i mention he croaks instead of meows? it’s hilarious!
everyone together now: “aaaaawwwww”… it also should be noted that right after this picture he licked my camera. wtf cat.
seriously i wish i could just lie in sunbeams all day.  no fair. also note how big charlie’s gotten and how big elliot hasn’t gotten.
ok story time. elliot, being a male cat, decided that he needed to start peeing around the apartment. which is great for everyone except me and charlie and anyone else who enters my apartment. one of the things he peed in was my toaster, which i discovered one day when i went to make toast with nate. i believe his words were “i’ve peed on enough campfires to know that smell. burning piss.” yeah not cool. a toaster? really, el? anyways, another popular spot turned out to be my bed, which was doubly not cool. after spending countless hours cleaning the mattress and washing the sheets, i took preemptive measures and used a plastic painter’s sheet to cover the bed. one day i came home from work to find charlie snuggled in a little warm plasticky cave. nice.
i have since gotten both elliot and charlie fixed, and all pee instances have ceased. however, after elliot was fixed he had one last hurrah. apparently, it takes a bit for the testosterone to level out and for everything to chill after the surgery. i had the neuter certification on top of a stack of papers on my coffee table, and i went to work. i came home to find that just the certification page had been knocked to the floor, and the sentence “this certifies that elliot has been neutered” had a nice little pee spot on it. i think he knew exactly what he was doing. punk.
charlie is most certainly always the center of attention, but el is usually not far behind. he reminds me of some overprotective mother in this.
despite his severe obnoxiousness (ie, keeping me awake for hours at night by meowing NONSTOP at himself in the bathroom mirror. he liked it because it echoed. thankfully fixing him stopped that too…), el is really quite loveable. he cuddles withe me whenever i sit or sleep, and he just generally likes being in the same room as me, if not on my lap. you could pet him all day and it wouldn’t be enough, and he’s very mild-mannered, not one to bite or claw. he is quite shy, but charlie has helped socialize him and he’s usually curious enough to wander by and check you out.
have i mentioned that this punk, who falls off of flat surfaces all the time, has gotten out and gone roof hopping? yeah. so that screen door doohickey used to be quite broken in the screen area, but i would keep it open when it was hot out anyway. one afternoon (before i got charlie), i was sitting in the kitchen enjoying a popsicle and futzing around on the computer. el was staring intently out the screen at some bird or squirrel, when suddenly he just blasted through the screen and out onto the roof. i stood there, frozen in panic, and then threw my popsicle into the sink and followed him out there. the roof is nice and flat right in front of the door, but then angles around the corner and juts up into impossible steep ridiculousness with all sorts of nooks and ledges and such. well el was just happy as a lark, bounding around 90 degree angles and onto various parts of the roof. ignoring my calls and threats, he proceeded to leap the several foot gap to the neighbor’s roof and disappeared over the other side. i ran out to the road, and followed him as he hopped 5 houses down. at this point, it was clear that he wasn’t going to come down anytime soon, and my only option was to go home and seethe. my popsicle was melted, my cat was who knows how many roofs down, and all i could think of was that he falls off the bed if you just look at him wrong. well twenty minutes later he’s at the screen on my roof, waiting for me to let him in. he’s lucky he’s so cute. damn cat.
(this is not mentioning the numerous other times he got out onto the roof and got STUCK, forcing me to climb out and wrestle him down through power lines and who knows what. it’s a miracle that both of us are alive right now.)
i snapped this a moment too late, but they were both sleeping on those boxes. in case you can’t tell, this is my pantry. whenever i open the door to the pantry, BOOM both cats are in there. why. i have accidentally locked one of them in so many times now they’ve learned how to push open the door from the inside.
i think his little brain is broken. it wasn’t much to sneeze at to begin with, but when nate was here the one time, we got a lazer pointer (i had one with el, and he loved it). charlie is insanely fast and surprisingly graceful when chasing the lazer, but then he can’t seem to accept that it’s gone. he knows i’m controlling the little red dot from the little thing in my hand (he gets all excited when i pick the pointer up. he actually knows the jingle of the key ring and comes running)… but he continues to search for the dot for hours after i’ve put it away. i really think i broke his brain.
does anyone else notice that clean clothes are cat magnets? if you can’t tell, he’s lying on a pant leg. a freshly laundered, previously cat hair free pant leg. thanks, char. i swear i set the pants down and he was just suddenly on them. same thing happens with boxes. they claim every box, whether or not it still has stuff in it.
so it’s probably hard to see, but the hair around their ears is all spiky. they both have earmites, poor things, and i have to clean their ears out every so often. i was just using warm water and cotton balls, but i had to take el to the vet once because i thought he had an ear infection. turns out it was just the mites, and the vet told me that cleaning with mineral oil will get the wax out and suffocate the mites, also allowing the medication to reach the mites and kill the remaining offenders. after searching the drug store, the only mineral oil i could find was scented baby oil, so i had to use it. they did not like it, and i had to wrap them in towels to make kitty tacos to even get close to their ears. it was out of control. but hey, clean ears. to make up for practically sitting on them and swabbing their ears out, i gave them a can of wet food, the cat equivalent of mcdonalds. mmmm.
el loves to sleep in high places. this is the top of my jewelry armoire (yeah i have no idea how to spell french words), which is the same height as a dresser. in fact, when he sits on the dresser, he prefers to perch on the tin that holds my necklaces, since it is at least 3 inches higher than the dresser. silly kitty.
so that’s about it… for now. i seriously have hundreds more pictures and stories i could post, but it’s late and i think 27 pictures will have to do at the moment. el and char are both asleep, which is a good indication that i should be as well. ciao.

Oh the foods you will food (part 2)

So. I made it back alive from the most amazing week of being on a tiny island called Cao Costa. However comma, this post is not going to include any of those pictures or adventures, so you will just have to stay tuned.

Instead, here follows a quick pic trip back through the foods my wonderful Nate made for that epic birthday week I spent with him.

The first meal we actually had was this amazing Indian dish. This is actually happening right after we pressed the tortilla shells for the next day.

Coconut! Nate’s toasting coconut for the coconut rice that is the delicious base for the saucy yummyness that I think was called chicken tikka masala. I could quite possibly be wrong about the name, but that’s not so important. For the record, toasted coconut is oh-so-easy and oh-so-tasty.

Making coconut rice in a rice maker is ridiculously easy. Jasmine rice, coconut milk, toasted coconut are thrown (literally, from across the room and with deadly accuracy) into the pot and then promptly forgotten about.

And now the chicken and onions. I had a laugh when Nate meticulously sliced the onions so they would be the perfect size and shape, but later ate my words because they cooked perfectly in time with the chicken. I can never do that, so I’ve become a fan of burnt onions. Heh.

We are cheater cheater pumpkin eaters because we used a sauce pouch, but OH MAN it was a good sauce pouch.

Step one: pour sauce on your perfectly sauteed chicken and onions. Step two: simmer it until your stomach eats itself. Step three: take obnoxious pictures of the boy you love stirring said simmering sauce.

Step four: gaze upon the beauty.

While I’m fully aware that what I’m eating looks like the contents of a particularly vile diaper, the taste THE TASTE is spectacular. Pair with some wine or, better yet, an IPA and you’ve got a meal that’s so good it doesn’t matter that you’re sitting on the floor because the cat has peed on the couch.

And NEVER forget dessert, especially if it’s homemade chocolate milk with whipped cream and cinnamon.

Hokay. Now, this is the actual date of my birth. Here you see some peaches simmering down for a Paula Dean cobbler (in the words of Nate, “if you’re going to make a peach cobbler, then you’re going to use Paula’s recipe.”).

Nate is also rendering some fatty mcfats for a gravy, and we’ve got full pan coverage on the stovetop. This is going to be a production. Such a production, in fact, that I have very little pictures of the process.

OHMYGOSHMEAT. And beans and wine and somewhere, potatoes. We’re trying to multitask around each other here – I’m making cobbler and helping prep green beans, Nate’s making gravy and steaks and potatoes and just generally being in charge. Good times.

I HAD to take a moment to document this: gravy made from scratch. Mushrooms, onions, garlic, rendered fat, wine. Drool.

Candlelight picnic for my birthday! The best ever. Nate even went out and found my favorite wine. He’s too sweet! The food was too delicious! I’m going to explode from love!

“Dear, you should eat before it gets cold. Take pictures of the candles later.” Wiser words have been spoken, but it’s still good advice.

Cobbler! My first ever, and thanks to Paula Dean, fabulous! We stuck a huge pillar candle in it and sang happy birthday to me and then gorged ourselves. I also may or may not have taken more than two tries to blow out the candle. The ONE candle. Whatever… the cobbler was delicious, and we of course had it warm with vanilla ice cream and whipped cream.

Anywhoo, that’s the end of the birthday fooding, but there was quite a bit more that week. I’m just going to continue with random pictures of those foods now, so sit back and enjoy.

Venison burgers (a deer Nate killed all by his onesy) with mushrooms, onions, colby cheese and spinach. Mac and cheese with bread crumblies! We debated making the rolls ourselves, but decided against it due to time constraints. Slider rolls from the grocery store instead!

Spaghetti with venison meatballs, green beans, and garlic bread! Homemade homemade homemade! YUM YUM YUM! Uuuumm, pee ess, as hesitant as I am to admit to this, we watched the newest Twilight ridiculousness during this meal. WE MOCKED IT THE ENTIRE TIME, and even watched an entire scene in ultra zoom, which made it waaaaaaaaaay better. Oh yeah.

Before I left, while Nate was doing homework, I made white pizza! Crust from scratch, loaded with mushrooms, onions, spinach, garlic, and cheese. It was a huge success, if I do say so myself, which I do.

Ok. So that ends the week of amazing fooding and love that was my birthday. I am now inspired to eat my own dinner (at 8pm) and it will be oatmeal. Delicious, gut-sticking oatmeal. I haven’t grocery shopped in a couple of weeks. Here’s a picture of my cats to send you on your way, wonderful reader.

I would just like to point out that El is draped lethargically on my legs and Charlie is trying to blind himself. And that is all.