Sticky, Sweet, & A Little Overdressed

I know I shouldn’t have a favorite, but I do. I can’t help it. I mean, just look at her:

More puppies - just waiting to be adopted! - over at Newscoma.

Since lots of folks are searching for it and ending up here anyway…

this is indeed a bee hive, but it’s not the bee hive you’re looking for. Nonetheless, I have taken the trouble to provide you the link to the pictures of those bees making their hive in a jar. At right is my favorite of those pictures. ‘Cause I mean, as a vegan (most of the time), I don’t eat honey. But I mostly don’t eat honey because it’s, like, bee vomit. But if you think of it as kissing and not vomiting, it’s a lot nicer, isn’t it? I think so.

Cory & the pup in my cubicle

Originally uploaded by Kate O’
Coworker Cory with coworker MaryAnne’s puppy. This dog is so freakin’ cute. She yawned and out came the tiniest little squeak I’ve ever heard.
More days like this, please!

OK, right off the bat, here’s the sucky thought du jour: I can’t decide if we should go through with the trip we were planning to Europe. Though I’m in luck if I need to travel, because I’ve got bags under my eyes that could hold my entire wardrobe. Why? Because we spent the night in a hotel room with all six cats while we fogged the house for fleas.

I cannot properly do justice to the level of annoying this whole flea thing is. And it’s not just fleas annoying me. Allow me to whine for a moment.

• I’m pretty sure I saw somewhere that it’s the hottest August ever on record in Nashville. Even if it’s not, it should be. So let’s just get that out of the way right now, ’cause the extreme heat sure isn’t making anything (or anyone) easier to deal with.
• Remember the rats? Well, they’ve apparently nested underneath and in the walls in the back of our house. (One of my coworkers suspects that this is where the fleas are coming from, but I don’t know if there’s any way to be sure.)OK, and side note — this is a bad story. Feel free to skip to the next bullet — Karsten went out weeks ago and got rid of the junk pile, busted up the old deck, and started digging out the weeds around the house. He hit a nest with tiny wriggling ratlings (it’s easier to call them ratlings than “kittens” when your aim is to get rid of them). It was an awful scene and he was devastated at having hurt them but the aim is, after all, to eliminate the population from our property. So as a compromise, whichever babies weren’t already killed from the impact of the shovel got carried off to an empty lot a few hundred yards away.But anyway, even after all that there are still rats in the walls, and we’re not sure how we’re going to win this one.
• Baby Clyde is doing better, we think. He apparently had a blockage in his digestive tract so when they x-rayed him, his stomach looked totally full even after a day of intense vomiting. Not sure how or why, but the next day’s x-rays showed his stomach clear and his lower digestive tract filling up, so the vet was satisfied that things looked to be on the right track. But I’m still nervous because we don’t know why he was having trouble in the first place. Which in my mind means it could happen again anytime. But considering I thought he might be dying on Sunday night, I’ll be relieved if all we’re dealing with is a bad case of indigestion.
• And the fleas! The fleas are driving me nuts. I mean, it’s just exactly the kind of thing that really gets to me. I can’t take any kind of insect in large quantities. I won’t even release ladybugs in the garden ’cause they freak me out en masse, but individually I’ll let them crawl all over my hands and arms. A whole mess of bugs I don’t like under any circumstances invading my living space? Definitely gonna mess with my mind.
• One of the other cats, Blackberry, has had a long-standing problem with urinating where he shouldn’t. We’ve fought it for a while, but it had been getting worse recently. Took him to the vet and found out he has a pretty serious bladder infection. Uh, OK. Now I feel like a terrible cat person. So we’ve been giving him pills twice a day for weeks, and if you’ve never had to give a pill to a skittish cat, well, you just haven’t experienced life.
• Between the overages in the house renovation and the flea/rat/vet/hotel expenses, we’ve depleted our checking account to levels we haven’t seen in years. It really sucks and it makes me feel anxious. I think having had the experience of losing nearly everything we owned and getting as close as you can get to bankruptcy without actually filing, I’m having traumatic flashbacks to my anxiety level at that time. Our situation right now in no way resembles our situation then, but it’s hard to shake an experience like that.
• Oh, and I’m trying to accomplish about a million things simultaneously in the next few months at work. So there’s that, too.

I’m really trying to keep everything in perspective by remembering that we have a house, we have our health, and we’re not broke (yet). But the amount of stuff we’re having to deal with is enough to make me whimper.

So yeah, I can’t decide if we’ve now spent enough unbudgeted money on all these various problems to mean that we should hold off on our long-awaited vacation. The vacation that coincides with our 10 year anniversary. The vacation we’ve been trying to take since 1999. The vacation we could really freakin’ use right about now.

You see what I’m saying? We’ve been really looking forward to this. So to put it off, while it certainly wouldn’t be the end of the world, would hurt and would suck and and and. Yes, we’d get over it. But it would be a big disappointment.

Anyway, it’s not time to decide yet. For one thing, I don’t think we’re out of the woods with the whole pest control issue, so there may actually be even more money to spend. But also because we still have a little time before we have to make the decision, and I may yet come up with some genius plan to make everything work. Hey, it could happen.

Mais il y a peu de chances. Le sigh.

Our area lost power for a while last night. Turns out it was birds. Weird.

ETA: Oh, and I also want to say that people have no freakin’ clue how to drive when the power is out. When stoplight intersections have no power, people barrel right through. We had to drive out of the neighborhood to find food, and it was a white-knuckle experience getting through the intersections. Idiots.

I’ve just seen the cutest bird ever. (I tried to get a picture, but it was all a blur.) That is all.

As luck would have it, I needed a feel-good moment today, and my coworker Mic just happened to send this link around. He took this video of a baby panda in the Atlanta zoo, and it is soooo cute, your eyes will sting with the unbearably fuzzy cuteness of it.

The bird is free! He (she? How do you sex a chick, anyway? No, wait, smartasses - don’t answer that.) must have made his way out of the wall overnight. He was sitting on the floor in the basement this morning, so I wrapped him in a towel and took him outside where he hobbled into a patch of vinca. I have no idea if he’s injured or just can’t fly yet, and no idea if he’ll survive outdoors, but at least now he’s where he should have been all along.

And I can stop being upset about the poor thing.

A bird nest must have fallen from one of our eaves down into the wall near the front door. We can hear a bird trapped in the wall chirping repeatedly for help. I ache for that bird. We keep going back and forth about whether to rip the wall open to try to get the bird out, but my guess is that he or she is injured from the fall and wouldn’t survive at this point anyway.

But it’s grisly and it breaks my heart.

Our new meerkat painting!,
originally uploaded by Kate O’.

Sorry, I’ve been meaning to post an update on the animal art auction and have been too swamped. Or lazy. But swamped makes me sound more important, I think, so I’ve been swamped.

Anyway, we won a painting! And not just any painting: a meerkat painting!

Karsten loves meerkats. All along, I was hoping we’d find a good painting done by meerkats. But the first few we saw were kind of disappointing. Cute, of course — it’s impossible to imagine meerkats painting without being nearly cuted to death — but each of the surfaces had very little pigment on it, so there wasn’t much to be cuted by.

But then we saw this one, and we both agreed it was wonderful. And the colors in it even complement the shabby chic aesthetic we’re going for in the bedroom. So we bid on it and guarded it throughout the evening, and we won it! For a lean $52 (the auction sheet stated its value at $90ish, and just for the frame and matte I’d say that’s about right).

So if you click through to the rest of the pictures on flickr, you’ll be able to see more of the animal art that was up for auction. It was really a fun evening. If it happens again and you’re local, you don’t want to miss it.

She’s here! She’s finally here!

Hot off the presses, here are some pictures of Bopper, the newest addition to our kitty family.

It wasn’t easy meeting five cats, some of whom are more than four times your size!
http://www.honeybowtie.com/kate/kitties/images/bopper_faceoff_10042004.jpg

But how could anyone resist Her Royal Cuteness?
http://www.honeybowtie.com/kate/kitties/images/bopper_fromabove_10042004.jpg

After many hours, everyone kept their distance, but Bopper was still very curious.
http://www.honeybowtie.com/kate/kitties/images/bopper_profile_10042004.jpg

Now she’s finally relaxing after a long, scary day of meeting five huge cats:
http://www.honeybowtie.com/kate/kitties/images/bopper_relaxing_10042004.jpg

Edit: Here’s another one, too adorable not to share:
http://www.honeybowtie.com/kate/kitties/images/bopper_ninjapose_10042004.jpg

Check out this beautiful ichneumon wasp I saw at Cheekwood. Here’s more about the ichneumon (only they call it a fly). I’d never even heard of it, but Nature Boy Karsten knew what it was right away.