bunnycat

Good grief. Such a week (or 3 in blog years.)

Kittens are well and growing, I need to weigh them but that would imply that I could get them to be still for long enough. Moon Pie is rocket powered to begin with but even Ottov2 is all wiggles lately.

It is a good thing to see though. They should be running around like fiends.
So far they are pretty well behaved though occasionally their kitten-brains take over and they get into something that either they know they shouldn’t or that they had to climb up, open, dig through and then finally unzip and unwrap to put little kitten sized teeth holes in… which pissed their mama off.

I remind myself, they are kittens and I should have put that behind a door they haven’t been able to open yet. Also, Moon Pie said she was sorry and when I looked her in the eye as she was about to climb up to the area that she did this bad thing last (because I know it was her…) and asked her not to do that, she trilled, then climbed down and beat up her toy mousie instead.
Smart little cat.

She’s still fueled by kitten brain, so I give her some leeway, but seriously smart little cat. Ottov2 is an olympic level ignorer though. (I checked that it wasn’t deafness even though she doesn’t fit the profile for standard deafness markers in cats, all white males, notably.) I had Moon Pie sitting near me and Otto was on top of Ft Kitten out of view and I crinkled a wrapper from one of the Trader Joe’s plastic tubs that they love (lightweight, they don’t eat it, it makes noise, free-perfect) and Ottov2’s little head shot right up and zoomed in on the wrapper.

I suppose it still is possible that she may be a bit deaf in certain ranges, but I sort of doubt it given her propensity to focus on the blinds pull strings even when I talk right at her where I know she can see me.

They are getting pretty big. If you look at the pictures they really are looking like cats now. I have the picture on my computer desktop of them looking like bookends around my samurai clock and they were such kitten shaped things. Now they aren’t much more than 5 or 6 pounds each but the cat equivalents of homunculi.

12 weeks

19 weeks

I’ve left Ft. Kitten open at night for them to run around and sleep with me (on me) since July-ish. For the most part they don’t throw wild parties and put pizza on the turntable, but occasionally I will be roused from my normal sleep of the dead to something being knocked over and I stuff them in the cage til I wake later and let them out while i get ready. I like letting them run and exercise, and the kitten thunder isn’t a problem at night.. only the loud crashes bother me.

They don’t see the crate as being a punishment either. I didn’t want them to. I wanted it to be a safe, consistent place, but it also serves as a “perhaps you should settle down” location as well. Ottov2 mostly just jumps up to level 3 whenever she is in there and starts snoozing. Moon Pie may crank a bit, but she hasn’t lost her mind or anything about being in there.
If I am visible while they are awake, its another thing altogether.

I haven’t been able to get into my office (a large closet thing) for more than 5 minutes at a time lately. I had to work out portable arrangements to fix that as I am not ready for them to explore my office yet…especially since I have all my yarn in there. They are in plastic tubs, but given how smart Moon Pie is and how willing Ottov2 is to join in yarnicidal mayhem, I’ll spare all of us the grief and just keep it closed.

That leads to my next issue that I need to solve… I haven’t been able to knit in months.
I miss it and frankly, I have plans that are on hold. I could just go knit elsewhere, but I’m loving being home with kittens also I like them to run around instead of being cooped up all the time.

I don’t know when (or if) Moon Pie will ever get over her yarnicidal tendencies. You can see the crazy go to 11 when I break out any sort of string thing; if it is wool then it gets worse.
Ah well.

I also catch myself calling Moon Pie “Bunny” sometimes. Kitten reincarnation, it is nice to think Bun wanted to come back to me. So I’ll just go with that.

Haven’t done much aside from house projects since I went to the Aquarium last. I snagged Tex’s iPhone 4 to get higher res photos on Hipstamatic last time and I was pretty pleased with the results. We might go back Sunday to see the white shark they have in the big tank.

(click to see the web cam they have going)

I’m fascinated by white sharks. Other sharks are cool, but white sharks are so much more interesting. They are seriously smart, they do things like stick their heads out of the water to get a better view of something, they have personalities…and very large teeth.

So I have Shark Week favorites on the ipod, mostly great white stories that don’t play up the idiot mentality and that actually talk with intelligence about them and I watch them fairly frequently. Shark Man from 2007 with Michael Rutzen (bonus! I friended him on Facebook… LOL) and a couple of new ones from 2011 season about the Atlantic whites resurging in population (along with their food source resurgence). I also really like Chris Fallows – wildlife photographer – who is turning into a white shark expert as he goes along.

I like that actually. Its kind of my own M.O. for career trajectory. If you ask me what my five year plan is, I will 1. lower you in my esteem about 500% and B. not have the faintest clue.

I have a French degree and a graphic design degree and I have done Tech Support, Technical Writing, Technical Project Management… see a trend? School learning is ok, but I learn new things better if they interest me. It also helps for me to have a project that needs new knowledge for me to learn. The more I see of the apprenticeship model, the more I like it. Next time I get bored or if I get laid off again (UNIVERSE:please, no…) I’ll probably go do that.

I was listening to Bill Bryson read his “At Home” book, or maybe it was his “A Short History of Nearly Everything” and was hearing about taxonomists being in short supply and thought “Oh hey. I should try taxonomy.” Might suit me. Might not. We’ll see if I get into it sometime. So who knows what I will do over the next 5 years. (I can tell you that cleaning up after sloppy, crazy kittens is the short term plan.)

*obsessive alert*
I buy a lot of stuff online (duplicate shirts, pants based on a previous brand/size success) and I download the images in the various colors to keep on file of my clothing inventory. I used to just make a web page (since I live in Dreamweaver anyway) but now I have Closet on my iphone hand-me-down and it lets you build packing lists. (Ostensibly this is an outfit app, but I ignore all that with my mostly uniform work outfit that I instituted and use it almost exclusively to build packing lists. Best. Game. Ever.)

I’ve got a family trip next FRI that I am packing for and I was pondering the hot weather back east, but now I think I might need to introduce some fleece and possibly a rain layer into the mix.

Don’t know yet, but I’ll probably post the results.

Week 4 of the new phone. I do like it a lot, but I miss my Centro.
Its been kind of a funky transition that I suppose most people go through when moving (house/car/phone). I’m having to consolidate and reorganize all my addresses into my Gmail account rather than my Palm Desktop. I suppose I could have just done an export, but I figured after 14 years of the same database with only cursory tidying up over the last however-many-years it was time to start afresh. Like spring cleaning.
Of course, I’m getting a little obsessive over it, would you expect any less from me? No, I thought not.

The search for a bluetooth keyboard continues. I actually have the perfect keyboard (Stowaway) but when I opened it up to get it going with Roy Batty, several screws fell out of it and a piece of plastic broke off. So I put the whole pile in a ziploc bag and glare at it from time to time while I google other options. Pesky items that don’t last even 10 years. Hell, my cat lasted longer than that.

Speaking of hell and my cat, I managed to extract several videos of Bunny meowing at me from my Centro and put them on my new phone. I have to watch them rather judiciously or I’m a mess for about 12 hours.

The long weekend coming up promises to be filled with sharks and chores. Possibly some knitting. The trip to Green Bay looms as well. I’ll write up a packing list and a musing on luggage next. I’ve learned its best not to try to logic myself out of wanting matching luggage… it’s…well, dangerous. I might regret it, but it doesn’t seem to matter.
Know thyself and thy carry-on luggage neuroses.