- did a fuck ton of mermaid shoots
- did a fuck ton of non mermaid shoots
- bought a house
- moved to Missouri without losing a single cat
We've been in our house since September 7th, and traveling to Missouri was long and stressful. I find that I kind of love my house, though. It's big, it's in the middle of nowhere, and Derek and I are working on our in house studio, thanks to a generous grant from my dad. We pulled up the carpet and put down new hardwood floors in the downstairs area that's going to be our studio. Good thing this house is almost 3k square feet, we can afford to block out the entire downstairs for shooting.
I finished my degree, with distinction. I just put in my application for grad school.
Found time to do this:
When we arrived, we had three cats:
Lilikoi (Lili): our fat, sassy orange tabby lady
Mr. Floopies: our distinguished tuxedo gentleman cat
Battletoad (Snodelicious): our white and tabby patch mini monster.
We live in the middle of nowhere, in a really tiny town, so there are a lot a lot a LOT of feral cats out here. The first one to make his way into our brood:
Stonks: the biggest black cat I've ever seen in my life
He just showed up on our porch one day, desperately wanting the attention of our pre-existing cat colony. It took weeks for him to trust me enough to let me pet him, and then more weeks to get him to come inside. But now he's our indoor/outdoor gentle giant, he's a snuggle bug, and I love him to bits.
On voting day, I was outside taking a walk around my property (it's a quarter acre, so walk is unfair. A jaunt? an amble? A constitutional?), Stonks was keeping me company, and I heard a tiny little meow and saw the scraggliest little calico cat. Emaciated, dirty, pathetic. Enter:
Quigley: My calico cunt.
Quigley desperately wanted affection, but Stonks attacked her and ran her off. I found her a few hours later, grabbed up some food for her, and fed her. She was just the starvingest. She sat in my lap, let me love on her, let me pick her up, and I thought, ok, I can get this cat inside and get some food and warmth into it. Joke's on me! Stonks has sprayed around our house and marked it as his territory, so when we got close to his markings, she freaked the fuck out and bit my hand. Like bit it real good. When I dropped her, I tried to catch her, I accidentally yanked her tail, and she swung around and bit me again, clamping down on me with her nails this time, too. I got a wicked infection, my ring finger got swollen and purple and red and ugly. I had to get 13 shots the next morning, 9 of them directly into the wounds, I was on antiobiotics for almost two weeks, and it took two months to finish up all of my rabies vaccines. But I found her the next day, got her inside without incident, took her to the vet and got her vaccinated and fixed, and now she is the fattest and cuddliest protector of me. She doesn't let the other cats near me, she sleeps with me, she loves me the very very most. And we call her stupid face.
So five cats is a lot of cats. Stonks may not necessarily count, as he is also an outdoorsman, so 4 1/2 cats?
Last Thursday, we were getting ready for our first winter storm (yay!). I heard a cat crying outside, and there was Stonks, sitting in the driveway. No surprise there, he loves to sit at the edge of our driveway, as there's a kind of...ravine there, with trees on the other side, and trees lining the road. Next to Stonks was a big grey ball, and I thought to myself, "well fuck, he finally killed a squirrel and brought it home as a present", as he is quite the hunter (he has caught uncountable chipmunks, and gets SUPER close to getting squirrels, they're just marginally quicker than he is). So I wandered over to him to assess the damage of the squirrel, and the grey fluff meowed. It was a tiny little kitten, in rough shape, ear all fucked up, face all fucked up, scrawny, shivering, generally just a bedraggled mess. Enter:
Goose: our adorable little kitten with an ugly URI.
It barely took any effort to get Goose into a carrier and inside. He was clearly tiny, clearly starving, so I ran out to get kitten milk replacer, a litter box, kitten wet food, kitten kibble, and bottles. Derek stayed home with him and cleaned up his face, he had days and days of mucous gunk matted into his face fur and his ears, and his nose and eyes were crusted over. He had fleas, he was just...just a rough little guy. But we've gotten him back to juuuuuuuuuuuuuuust about normal. He's still sick, as all the vets at our clinic have covid and we couldn't get an appointment anywhere else until tomorrow (marking six days he's been with us), but he's playful, he eats enough that I'm not terribly concerned, and he's a love bug. Just purrs as soon as you touch him. He hissed at me the first two days any time I went into the bathroom we're quarantining him in, but that's over now, and he loves me.
We're guessing he's no more than 8 weeks old, but as he's still trying to nurse from Stonks and he's not very interested in wet food, I'm guessing he's 6-7 weeks old.
So. We started with three, and now we have six.
Other than that, there really isn't anything going on. It should be quiet here until May, when we go to Ithaca for two weeks (EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!), and then June when we go to Colorado for a week (eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!) and then July when we go to North Carolina for a few days (I'm unsure how I feel about that one? I'm more excited than not, but there are certain family members that I'm less than thrilled about having to interact with). At the end of July I got back to CO to grab my kiddo back, and then in August, provided I get in, I start my masters. Which is wild to me.
Anyway, I thought I should ramble in here for a little bit. I would like to do better at blogging this year, but we'll see. I have two photo sets to finish editing, and then I plan on soaking up the months and months of leisure time I have between now and grad school starting...maybe read all of the books on my list, paint more, learn to knit better, or just...play video games and veg out, because I've earned that.
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