The Kiss Curse, by Erin Sterling

Posted on October 14, 2022 by Thistle

Gwen is perfectly happy with the way life is going in Graves Glen. Magic has been rightfully returned to her family’s lineage, her cousin is happy in her new marriage, her shop is doing well, and Gwen has even started to mentor some younger witches in town. The last thing she needs is another Penhallow witch coming over from Wales, especially one as stiff and arrogant as Llewellyn (or Wells, as he prefers). Gwen already knew she could never forgive Wells for his absence at her cousin’s wedding to his brother, Rhys, and her animosity only increases when he sets up a competing shop directly across the street from her. But a burning animosity is like playing with emotional fire, and fire can get really dangerous, really quickly…

Okay so yeah, this is classic enemies to lovers romance, with magic and witchy elements. It’s Halloween and talking cats and plastic pumpkins and festivals; it’s dark magic and evil witches and torture devices and glamour; it’s edible body glitter and love potions and sex under the stars. And while I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I did The Ex Hex, I still loved the hell out of it. Gwen was a brilliant heroine and I loved getting to know her better. I also liked getting to known Rhys’ brothers better, and I wonder if Bowen will feature in the next book! My only real quibble was probably my own fault, as I was focused on the wrong red herring for almost the entire story. That made the resolution with regards to one particular issue feel a little anticlimactic for me. But honestly, without getting into spoilers, I have a feeling that issue might also feature in the next book of the series.

Anyway, thoroughly enjoyed this one, and it was perfect for the season!

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The Ferals: Sunday

Posted on October 12, 2022 by Thistle

It’s never good when your doorbell rings at 7:30 am.

This morning, our neighbor found a cat stuck in our tree. After the cat got out safely, she went over to our front entry and started rubbing up against the bricks there, so our neighbor thought perhaps it was one of ours that had escaped. It was not, but seeing how friendly the cat was, Jason picked her up and brought her inside.

Meet Sunday, the sweetest little calico brown tabby ever. Of course, when we first brought her inside, we weren’t sure what we were dealing with. Was she a community cat that was friendly but could turn feral at any provocation? Was she someone’s lost pet? Was she an indoor/outdoor free-roaming pet that just happened to be at our house at that exact moment? I recognized her tail – she moves it in this double-curled way that is very distinctive – from an overnight video of a cat we took back in April. This cat had only appeared on camera the one time, but it reinforced the idea that this might be an indoor/outdoor pet or a friendly community cat.

Jason got the kitty some food and water, which she ignored completely. She was agitated, mostly staying by the window as if she longed to get back outside. The only sign of aggression, though, was a hiss at our cats under the door, and we blocked the crack so she wouldn’t be bothered by them. I tried to scan her for a microchip, but didn’t find anything, and I didn’t know if I was using the machine wrong or if she simply didn’t have one. Meanwhile, Jason called our vet, who told us to go ahead and bring her in to have her scanned there and checked for spay.

By 8:30, we were at the vet, who confirmed that Sunday had no microchip. However, she did have a spay scar and tattoo! But with no ear tip, and her being as friendly and clean as she was, we didn’t think she’d been TNRed. Which left Jason and me in a bit of a conundrum. Try to find her owner via social media? Leave out flyers and just keep Sunday in Jason’s room for now? Surrender her to the animal shelter since she was friendly and could be adopted out? Let her go so she could find her own way home, assuming she had a home?

We put her in Jason’s room temporarily, while I re-downloaded NextDoor and re-added the neighborhood facebook pages that I generally tend to stay away from. Then I began looking into surrender procedures in case my social media searches came up empty. Thankfully, though, my social media searches did not come up empty! The facebook post had been up less than ten minutes when a woman said this looked like her cat Sunday, an indoor/outdoor roaming cat who she confirmed was spayed but didn’t have a chip. She lived like a block away from my house, so her mama swung by to verify that this was indeed Sunday. To make a long story short with a happy ending, she was!

Sunday was so happy to be freed from confinement. The second I opened the cat carrier, her anxiety disappeared. She didn’t run the way feral cats often do, but instead began to roll in the grass and rub up against our legs. Sunday clearly knew her mama and was all over her, but also rubbed up against me to tell me she loved me too. (The cat seems to love indiscriminately!) Her mama and I talked for a bit and then she left, Sunday trotting alongside her happily.

Everything was wrapped up before 9:45. I called the vet to update them, and now we are done with today’s good deed! Soooo happy to reunite Sunday with her family, even if technically we could have just left her to her own devices and she would’ve found her own way home. Ha! We couldn’t know that, though, so I’m happy we did due diligence and got it all taken care of without uncertainties!

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Evolution of a Photo

Posted on October 10, 2022 by Thistle

Over the last month, I’ve finally started learning how to edit photos using my editing software. My journey into photography has been very slow. I spent most of 2021 learning basics – how to use a camera in manual mode, how to set up photos (both in terms of composition and exposure settings), etc. I learned how to take pretty decent photos straight out of the camera with little editing beyond cropping and such.

But that’s only the beginning. This year, my goal was to learn editing techniques. Back in February, I learned a few editing techniques from How to Take Awesome Photos of Cats. I began to do more with my photos, using the built-in tools on my phone. Jason bought me the software I wanted for my birthday (On1 Photo Raw)…but then it took me months to open it for the first time. I was so intimidated. It wasn’t until Ambrose graduated from basic training that I decided to use the new software for my edits, and MAN those photos definitely suffer from my inexperience. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, I struggled with the software tools, and the end products feel gimmicky.

So in September, I watched a bunch of online tutorials. They weren’t “how to use the software” videos, which don’t tend to stick in my head, but rather videos that showed the editing process for individual photos from start to finish, using a bunch of the tools. That’s the kind of tutorial that helps me to learn. After each video I finished, I’d grab a new RAW file that I’d saved and go to town on it, trying to learn all the basic things I could do. A photo of an Empress Leilia butterfly on my deck is one of the shots I practiced on. The above photo collage includes, clockwise from top left, the unedited version (straight from the camera), the edited (non-creative) version, and two creative versions to make postcard-like images.

A recent online project had me itching to try my own, so I decided to make a spotlight photo (single light source, using a cucoloris, or cookie). I chose a small bottle of scent I’d bought from Turban de Moda at the Muslim Culture Fest in Austin the previous weekend for my subject. The bottle is absolutely gorgeous and I thought would make a great spotlight! Now, I don’t have a studio, professional lighting, or special tools to make this kind of photography easy. Literally, I set this up in my bathroom, an old curtain thrown over the back of the toilet, camera propped up to the right height by a tissue box, my cookie made by cutting strips out of an index card and then taped to a flashlight for my light source. I set my camera to 85mm, 100 ISO, f5.6, and 0.8 seconds, then put it on a timer so that I could press the shutter and then get the flashlight into place before the photo was taken.

The entire process was a bit ridiculous, and frankly, I wish I’d had some kind of arm I could have propped the flashlight up with because my hand is always going to shake a little, which will always cause a little fuzzing on my focus object at that long of a shutter speed. However, after experimenting with angles of light and rotation of the cookie, I got a shot that was as clean as I could manage in my makeshift setup:

Straight out of the camera, this isn’t a bad shot – but it could be better. The base cloth was too purple, the perfume too green. The orange stripe from the wall was distracting, and too much of the teal shower curtain was visible. My focus depth created a sharp strip across the entire photo, when I wanted only the perfume bottle and its immediate surrounding to be in focus. The photo also needed to be cropped, tilt-corrected, cleaned up a bit in terms of the light-shakiness, and vignetted. I don’t even know how to do the advanced things in the software yet, but even with my minimal knowledge, I was able to modify individual colors, remove the extraneous background, blur out the parts that were too in focus and sharpen the parts that needed that extra tightening. I couldn’t get the shakiness out of the bottle completely – I would have needed the flashlight to be entirely still for that – but in the final photos, it’s only visible if you zoom in real close.

As I’ve said in the past, I’m sure I’ll find things that I could have done better in the future, when I know more and have more experience. But for now, this photo makes me so happy, and I’m excited to have already learned so much!

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Sunday Coffee – Muslim Culture Fest

Posted on October 9, 2022 by Thistle

Last weekend was my first proper girls’ day out in quite some time, and a great way to kick off October! October is generally a busy time for me. There are a lot of events going on that I love, and the weather is just starting to turn, which gives me a lot of energy. So when my friend Alia asked a group of us if we wanted to go with her up to Austin for the first annual Muslim Culture Fest, I jumped at the opportunity!

In the end, after expected last minute cancellations, there were half a dozen of us who ended up traveling up to Austin in two cars. I drove with Alia and Sisa because the three of us had more open plans and didn’t have to get back to San Antonio so quickly. The weather wasn’t super cool but also wasn’t tremendously hot, so it was a perfect day for the event. The Mexican American Cultural Center was kind enough to be a venue for the festival, which featured lectures, performances, food, art, and various small businesses.

I’ll be honest – I didn’t expect to buy much at this event. I’m not really one for buying things at festivals, beyond maybe a small souvenir. When I saw they had a henna artist, I knew that I would go for that, but I expected that to be all. Ha! There were so many lovely things and while I managed to hold back a lot, I did end up buying stickers, artwork, and perfume in addition to a henna design. Plus food of course. It was all just so lovely, and the venders and visitors were all the kindest people ever.

Alia, Sisa, and I stayed for about 5-6 hours, until the sun was starting to get really oppressive and we’d been on our feet long enough to feel tired. Other than wishing I had more disposable income – because there were sooooo many things I loved – it couldn’t have been a better day.

And to make things even better, the next day, a big group of us got together at our friend Lindsay’s house to watch Hocus Pocus 2 together. (It was adorable. I loved it and I won’t hear a negative word about it!) Two girls’ days out in one weekend?? Just what I needed after feeling so isolated and depressed for the last few months!

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The Change, by Kirsten Miller

Posted on October 7, 2022 by Thistle

Why do [women] keep going for thirty years after our bodies can no longer reproduce? Do you think nature meant for those years to be useless? No, of course not. Our lives are designed to have three parts. The first is education. The second, creation. And in part three, we put our experience to use and protect those who are weaker. This third stage, which you have entered, can be one of incredible power.

Three women, each at pivotal moments in their lives, discover that they’ve undergone a transformation. Nessa has always known this was coming; that when her world grew silent, she would hear the call of ghosts. Jo has spent decades at war with her body, until one day she embraces what she cannot change and learns of an immense strength. Harriett has lost everything, and finds solace in both nature and vengeance. The seeker, the protector, the punisher. Three women called to make the world safer for those without voice.

Oh my. This book. I hardly know what to say about it except that it’s incredible. Take the Golden Girls, add a dash of Hocus Pocus and a cauldron of feminist rage, blend it all together, and then bake to modern times. It had everything I could ever want in magical realism women’s fiction, and was written incredibly well, too. Even better, Miller had me questioning my instincts as I read, not with red herrings or misdirection, but with the same gaslighting that society already uses to get women to doubt their instincts. And yet, by the end, everything I’d intuited came to pass.

There is a mystery at the center of this book, a series of crimes that has Nessa seeking out those lost. However, this isn’t a book that reads like a mystery. It’s part old fashioned crime thriller, part coming of age, part mystery, part vigilante justice, part romance, part gender studies. But also none of those things. One cohesive whole that makes up its own genre altogether. It’s the first book I’ve read in months that I immediately wanted to own.

With everything going on in the world right now – the stripping of women’s legal rights in the US, the horrid brutality erupting in Iran, the increasing movement worldwide of anti-women hate groups, the pandemic-fueled rise in domestic violence, and so much more – it can be hard to read a book that features violence against women. Miller doesn’t make this easy, or gloss over this part. But she also gives back in these women and the folks, male and female, who help them. I can see people expecting this to be an anti-men book, but it’s not. It’s an anti-bad-men book. It’s a book that says monsters exist in many forms, and we are all so fed up with existing alongside them.

Stay away from [men] who seem driven by their desires. Don’t be one of the women who think they can feed those men. Those that do meet one of two fates. They either end up getting eaten – or they turn into monsters.

This review is only scratching the bare surface of what’s in The Change. Honestly? This just might be the best book I’ve read in 2022.

Trigger warnings: sexual assault, violence against women.

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Wellness Wednesday – Mournjaro

Posted on October 5, 2022 by Thistle

Last week, I said that I began talking with my doctor about medical intervention for weight loss. That was two months ago, and she told me about a new medication on the market, Mounjaro. This is a medication that is primarily used to treat blood glucose and A1C for people who are diabetic, and it can also induce weight loss. It’s similar to – but not the same as – the Ozempic that failed me so spectacularly in 2019 and 2020. We decided to give it a try, to see if I reacted better to it than I did to Ozempic, and I took my first injected dose on August 31st.

For the first four weeks, I was on a pre-therapeutic dose that was meant to prep my body for a therapeutic level. During these four weeks, I really only had a few mild side effects. If I went too long between meals, my stomach would ache with an almost nausea-like feeling, except that it was actually my body trying to tell me that I was hungry. The glucose-stabilizing effects of Mounjaro meant that I didn’t always feel traditional hunger signals, so I sometimes forgot to eat for longer than normal, and that “nausea” would remind me that I still needed to eat. I also had some abdominal cramping/bloating if I ate too much fiber or heavy fat in a single sitting, so I had to be slightly more careful about balancing meals.

As for how much I was eating, things stayed pretty similar to pre-Mounjaro. Breakfast remained the same, and at both lunch and dinner, I would eat a few bites less most of the time. Pre-medicine, I was eating 2-3 small snacks at different parts of the day, and post-medicine, this dropped to 1-2 small snacks. Altogether, I was eating about 90% of the calorie level I was at pre-medicine most days, and the kinds of foods I ate didn’t really change. In the last week of this trial period, the pre-therapeutic dose stopped really affecting me (as expected), and I returned almost to 100% of my calorie level.

This was a huge difference from my experience with Ozempic, which caused major food aversions and severely decreased appetite (cutting down by over 50%). Furthermore, in my two experiences with Ozempic, I gained a few pounds the first time and gained a ton the second, despite eating less than 1000 calories a day that second time! With Mounjaro, though, while eating maybe 200-300 calories less per day, I lost 7.5 lbs in the first three weeks. In the fourth week, when the medicine was only working a tiny bit, I didn’t lose anything. Obviously, the total loss is well more than the total calories not eaten, but I’ve always said that calories-in-vs-calories-out was a load of bunk, especially when something is OFF in your body. Clearly, the Mounjaro reset something right in my body!

A week ago, I took my first dose at the lowest therapeutic level of Mounjaro. For two days, I had some pretty severe nausea off and on, especially if I ate too much at any one sitting. Then the nausea went away, and I went back to eating the same way I had for most of the last month. There were some complicating factors in this past week that increased how much I was eating, and I’m happy to say that my body accommodated the extra volume of food with ease (no nausea!). And in five weeks, I’ve lost a total of 9 lbs now, all without major changes to what I was doing.

I feel better – not because of the weight loss, which honestly makes barely a dent in my body at this size, but in the stabilizing of my blood sugar. I love being able to go long periods without worrying if my blood sugar is going to suddenly drop on me. My anxiety has lessened, and the polyurea that I was seeing the kidney specialist about has almost disappeared completely. I sleep better, food tastes better (though this might be because we’re finally starting to make a dent in the long-entrenched thrush overgrowth!), and I’m in slightly less pain. If some nausea for a few days is the price to pay for that, I can handle that! I just hope the good continues, and doesn’t tip into the Ozempic Route!!

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September 2022 in Review

Posted on October 2, 2022 by Thistle

September just flew by! Maybe it’s because I was so busy with foster cats this month, but it felt like September was less than two weeks long. It’s strange being home without the kids. It’s changed things in more ways than I expected – like for instance, I haven’t even bothered to decorate for Halloween yet. I never would have waited that long if my kids weren’t around, and they didn’t even approve of me decorating for Halloween before October! It was just part of my personality with them, I guess. Or maybe the busyness from the kittens and the grief from having my aunt and my grandma pass away this month, plus no longer having kids at home, is causing more depression than I realize. In any case, I’m still adjusting to this empty nest thing, but it’s not as different as I expected (especially as Laurence calls home almost every night – I think it’s especially hard for him because his roommate never showed up and he’s up there alone!).

Reading and Watching
I expected this to be a big reading month, but after my third book, every other book I had out from the library was a bust! I did finally find a book I’m enjoying toward the end of September, but I’m not done with it yet.

Of course, it’s the start of TV season here, so a bunch of shows have started their new seasons, including the Great British Bake Off, one of my faves!

House
Other than the unexpected replacement of our dishwasher and garbage disposal, not much happened on the house front this month. We did some more work on the front and back yards, and finished converting the boys’ old room into a combo office/foster room. That’s about it.

The Ferals
I suppose I should label this “the fosters” by now, but I’m just going to keep as is, because who knows when I’ll end up with another batch of neighborhood kittens on my doorstep? Hopefully not, but considering how many community cats roam this area, I’m sure there will be some kittens in the future. In any case, we began fostering again this month. First there were Panini and her three little babies, who we had for a week before the stress of being near other cats was too much for Mama. Then we got a batch of kittens who ended up having a potentially deadly virus! They were on three different medicines, and a few times, had to be syringe fed. But I’m happy to say that they’re all on the mend and doing so much better than they were just a week ago!

(Austin, on the right, isn’t angry or scary – he just has a gremlin face. He was purring here.)

Health/Fitness
My health was focused on two things this month – the introduction of a new medication, which I’ll talk about more in detail in my upcoming Wellness Wednesday post, and a 30-day mobility challenge. This isn’t like other 30-day challenges, but instead a 1-2 minute functional movement exercise each day. This could mean doing a few cat-cow stretches one day, or rocking back and forth on your feet, or shoulder-flossing. They’re designed to loosen tendons and joints for larger range of motion, and are particularly helpful for people struggling with mobility (me!). I liked quite a few of the movements and will probably continue to do them for a bit, trying to incorporate a few into my week as I can (hopefully) incorporate more physical movement again soon.

Favorite Photos
It’s really hard to choose favorite photos when you have so many cute kittens in the house. You love ALL the photos, even the bad ones! Anyway, here are the ones that rose to the top.

Top row, left to right: baby Schnitzel; nap time with cats; crepe myrtle blossoms in the sunset

Bottom row, left to right: a sudden storm; empress leilia butterfly on my deck (which I actually edited into a postcard collage type photo!); my little gremlin-boy aka Austin

Highlights of September
This seems like a short list, but honestly, that’s only because “snuggling with kittens” was like 50+ highlights of the month. It’s the best thing ever to watch them run to you for pets when you enter the room, to have them purr and snuggle into your neck, to see their eyes light up when Jason gets home and they see him for the first time all day, etc.

  • Ambrose got married to his best friend, Tyler, via proxy marriage on Sept 1st
  • Lilo got adopted!
  • Cadbury mini-eggs adapted to become Cadbury “mini harvest handfuls”
  • pumpkin cream cheese muffins, mmm…
  • Ambrose was chosen as a Green Rope at tech school –>
  • snuggling with kittens – best thing ever!
  • discovering Countryle (like Wordle for geography)
  • first Halloween decoration
  • first weather front cool enough to leave the windows open overnight, near the end of the month
  • Brandon Sanderson got a tiktok!
  • the official GBBO tiktok responded to one of my comments, eek!

Coming up in October
It’s going to be another busy month. So many plans – possible corn maze and pumpkin patch, my first planned creative photo shoot, a Muslim-fest with friends, a Hocus Pocus 2 viewing with my hiking gals, maybe another haunted Halloween hike, Halloween in general… October is often a busy month here but it’s also a month that I tend to love and feel very energized by, so hopefully that’s true this year!

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Wellness Wednesday – the fatphobic rhetoric of “true” loss

Posted on September 28, 2022 by Thistle

About a decade ago, I met two different folks who had lost a large amount of weight. The first was a young woman who had lost about 40 lbs and didn’t really have much more to lose; the second was an older woman who had lost 150 lbs and still needed to lose another 100 lbs, and had plateaued there.

A few months after meeting the first woman, she told me that she hadn’t been able to lose any weight until her doctor gave her a medication that essentially caused her heart rate to speed up all the time, so she was always burning tons of calories. Despite this truth, she spent a lot of time telling people (in person and through blogging) that she’d lost the 40 lbs through strict personal discipline, healthy diet, and exercise. She claimed that if she could do it, anyone could.

A few years after knowing the second woman, she suddenly began losing weight again, and dropped off that last 100 lbs. She started facebook groups dedicated to healthy living, citing her own willpower and determination over many years to lose all 250 lbs. If she could do it, anyone could. Except that behind the scenes, she’d had gastric bypass surgery, and after a long plateau, further weight loss surgery that enabled her to lose again. She didn’t tell anyone this as she sold them her services in mentoring and coaching them.

Here’s the thing. Weight loss is HARD no matter the circumstances. It’s hard to do by personal habits alone, it’s hard to manage on medications that do weird things to your body, and anyone who thinks surgery is an easy route is deluded. But in our culture, weight loss achieved by anything other than personal dedication and willpower is considered “less than” and “not real” for no reason other than fatphobic rhetoric that says fatness is a personal flaw caused by laziness and bad choices. We need to stop that crap. Weight loss is hard no matter what, and frankly, even with medical intervention, it’s often impossible to sustain longterm. Those women I mentioned above should have been able to be honest about how they got their results. I don’t blame them for not admitting the full truth (though I don’t condone selling your results dishonestly for profit). The more of us who speak the truth, the more we can work to end that fatphobic rhetoric.

Once upon a time, I did lose 100 lbs on my own willpower and determination. It took over three years, and it was extremely difficult. A few years later, I began gaining weight out of nowhere for reasons my doctors and I still haven’t fully determined, though we have a better idea now. I’ve been unable to control my weight in any way since then, regardless of how I eat or exercise. Altogether, I gained 120 lbs in two spurts (70 then 50), and the last 50-lb spurt put me over a line where my body no longer functions well. There’s pain, there’s the beginning of problems in my blood work, etc. I’ve lost mobility, and I struggle to do very basic things due to pain.

So two months ago, I spoke with my doctor and the two of us began to make a plan to hopefully help me lose weight via medical intervention. Because frankly, I don’t care how I get back to a point where I’m pain-free again. I don’t need to be super thin – I just want to be mobile and out of pain, and to have my body back on the right track again, the way it was two years ago. I won’t let fatphobia or shame or a feeling of failure to do this on my own prevent me from getting there. And I’m not going to pretend I’m doing this by my own grit and determination. I need help, and there should be no shame or guilt in accepting that help.

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Sunday Coffee – Y’all, this has become ridiculous by now.

Posted on September 25, 2022 by Thistle

Oy. So I dropped off a cliff this week. I didn’t mean to disappear from the blog but wow it was a crazy week. It didn’t help that last weekend was insane between trying to replace the dishwasher and taking care of a suddenly-upset mama cat! That meant that I spent the early part of the week trying to catch up on my normal weekend stuff. Then I got new foster kittens who were sick and needed meds, which of course adds an additional load. (Not complaining – I chose them because apparently few foster parents are willing to take on sick babies – just meant some extra work.) Then my grandmother passed away this week, which was an entire complicated mess of feelings. (My mom has not once bothered to reach out to me since her little blow up in August. She didn’t bother to come see Laurence before he went off to college in Canada, and I can only guess that one of my siblings has told her that Ambrose has gotten married.) And then, at the end of the week, we discovered that the foster kittens weren’t just sick, but sick with a potentially deadly calicivirus, so we have to be on the look out for sudden fading kitten syndrome.

(Amarillo, Abiline, and Austin)

So yeah, it was a bad week, and then to make it worse, I tried out like five different books and they all weren’t for me, so I haven’t even been able to read. Boo! It’s always sad when you have a string of books you’re excited for and then discover they’re not going to work for you. (Whether that’s the book or your own mood!) Hopefully, the upcoming week will be better both in life and in books.

You know what I wish for? I want the weather to turn. It has been relentlessly hot here. Every time there’s a teaser in the forecast where it’ll only get up to 92 degrees and it may actually drop to 68 degrees in the wee hours of the morning, those teases go away as we get closer to the date. It was mostly in the high 90s this week, and though the mornings are now in the low 70s instead of the high 70s, that comes with a wave of extreme humidity that no one loves. By this point in the year, we usually have at least one brief cool front that gives us a hint of what will come, but I guess with it being ridiculously hot from April onwards this year, it should be no surprise that September is still miserable. There is a predicted brief front this week – lows in the low 60s and a few days where the high is only 89, but I’m not holding my breath yet. Fingers crossed, though!

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Sunday Coffee – Unexpected

Posted on September 18, 2022 by Thistle

Man oh man. So our weekend imploded. None of it is catastrophic levels of explosion or anything, just very unexpected. To start with, I went to unload the dishwasher yesterday morning to find it overflowing with water inside, not drained at all. We’ve had soooo many problems with this dishwasher, which we got in November 2020, that at first we thought the filter had gotten clogged again despite us rinsing every dish that goes in til it shines beforehand. But no. For the second time in less than two years, the internal pump had died. The first time – a month after we got the dishwasher – it was under warranty and we were able to get the part fixed for free. This time, it would’ve cost more than a new dishwasher to get the part and have someone come out to fix everything. And considering that particular dishwasher, which supposedly was a high-end, energy-efficient, super quiet blah blah blah appliance, had been a nightmare since day 1, we decided to just replace it.

So that was our Saturday – picking out, buying, replacing the dishwasher, which led to the discovery that our garbage disposal (which was probably as old as the 1997-house) was also starting to go. Rather than wait until this also broke down, we just went ahead and replaced it at the same time.

All that is enough for one weekend, but it gets better!

So far, fostering cats and kittens has been a mixed experience, especially fostering cats. The kittens have never had any real problems that we couldn’t handle. However, y’all will recall that we had one mother cat get extremely territorial and aggressive after spotting our household cats outside her room. She was semi-feral, so we didn’t put much weight on that. Sunflower didn’t mind our other cats, nor did Lilo, who was a mother cat. But all through this week, we’ve noticed a worrying trend in Panini.

Panini is a great mother who is very attentive to and protective of her babies. They’re all in their own room, but of course there’s a crack under the door, so the cats can sniff each other, plus they can see each other whenever we open the door to go in/out of the foster room. At first, this seemed to be okay. Panini didn’t like seeing the other cats, and she’d back up and sometimes hiss if she saw them. As her babies have started to get more mobile, though, it’s like her strong protective instincts have kicked in. She’s started to become terrified. We started putting a towel at the base of the door to prevent her from seeing the cats under the crack, but even the towel started terrifying her. Twice last night, she began to yowl and run around the room, knocking into walls, just absolutely freaking out. It wasn’t aggressive, just terror, the poor baby.

I had to write back to the animal rescue that I foster for to ask if I could bring the family back in, for Panini’s sake. I don’t want her to hurt herself. And Jason and I have decided that we can’t foster adult cats any longer – it’s too unpredictable, with our seven permanent cats in the house. Kittens are very flexible and curious. They don’t mind the smell of other cats so much. It’ll be much safer and less stressful for all if we stick to this. I will say, though, that I’m going to miss watching the Bistro Babies grow up, though. They’re so adorable and I’m absolutely in love with Schnitzel especially (he reminds me a lot of Hulud). It’s a wrench to give them up. But we’ve gotta do what’s best for Mom.

Keep your fingers crossed that we have no other disasters this weekend. Heh.

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