Black Doggerel

Oh shit. Blade Ninja Kitten just managed to get inside the dog couch while I was in the toilet. That couch is going to have to go (assuming I can get the damn cat out of it). I have an identical one in the bedroom in much better shape without handy cat-holes in it.

( cut for a lot of whining and grumbling and moaning )

I think there's something wrong with me. First there was the healthy food craving, and now tonight when I went into the kitchen planning to start chopping and cooking said healthy food, I was overtaken by a weird impulse.

The next thing I knew I was cleaning my fucking kitchen. I've just come from scouring roughly a year's worth of accumulated shite off the cooker. I've also scrubbed all the countertops and disinfected the chopping board.

( If I'd had the slightest idea I was about to clean, I'd have taken a before picture. This is the after picture. )

WTFBBQ??

OH THANK YOU SQUISH. I was cleaning the floor by hand anyway, what's a little extra dog puke?

note to self: empty the fucking hoover BEFORE trying to dehair the damn flat. You know perfectly well it cuts out when the bag gets full. You know that the hoover bag has a capacity roughly that of a Ferengi's capacity for altruism. You also know that when it cuts out it won't work again until it's rested for like two hours. You also knew perfectly well you had someone with allergies visiting today. You, ma'am, are an idiot.

...and I am fully aware that this is the second time in less than a month I've used that line for a title, but it's so appropriate for so many situations.

Today, though it's a reference to the beginning of Project Black Dog HQ Is Not Going To End Up Like Grimmauld Place, Damn It!

These last few months, betweeen my mother being ill, the kittens, the heat, the lack of visitors and me being less than 100% myself, my normally lackadaisical housekeeping efforts have tipped over into the utterly non-existent. And there are eight animals living here: seven of them shed hair, five of them eat day-old chicks on the floor, two of them leave muddy pawmarks, one of them pukes yellow bile when he eats grass and one of them is a bone-lazy pack rat with a long-standing pathological aversion to cleaning. Recipe for disaster, no?

It had gotten to the point where I'm getting reluctant to post animal photographs because of the disgustingness of the backdrop. It had to stop. The stopping starts here.

The bedroom (aka cat room) is trashed. I'm putting that off till the kittens leave; just keeping the litter trays fresh, wiping the eating area floor and checking daily for stashed uneaten food is as much as I can cope with for now. But if I don't get some sort of handle on the rest of the flat before that happens I'm just going to get overwhelmed and go into avoidance mode on the whole thing until I end up living in the sort of squalor that gets flats repossessed and tenants committed. Not. Going. To. Happen.

So I've started by sweeping the floor (too much hair!!) and scrubbing the kitchen floor and the fronts of the kitchen cupboards. Next job is the crap piled on and around the coffee table, windowsill and the windowside dog cage.

Well, I'm going to watch another episode of ER first. But that gets tackled before I go to sleep.

( Cassie meets her second biggest fan )

Since Cassie's had free run of the whole flat again, I've had to keep the windows on the safety-catches, only open two inches. It wasn't too bad at first because we've been having a cool rainy spell, but today Flaming June kicked in again and the flat was like a heated greenhouse.

so I went down to B&Q and spent the last of my Christmas-present gift-vouchers on my new toy. It's heaven. It was actually worth the misery of hauling it back from Castlepoint by hand. Added bonus: it forced me to clear the accumulation of nasty dust and crap off the top of the dog crate and tidy that corner up a bit. It tended to collect junk because I usually sleep on the living room couch and use it as a bedside table.

The gift voucher was some kind of special stupid one that I could only spend all in one go, so I've also got a bamboo blind for the bedroom, a paint roller kit, a combined ratchet screwdriver/socket set and some duct tape (my computer chair has a split and is leaking sponge chunks all over the room). I feel ever so domestic!

The last day or so I've been puzzled by Spike continually snuffing and staring at a point on the wall in the hallway. Yesterday I realised what that was about - that's where the kittens are, just the other side of the interior wall inside the wardrobe. (The wardrobe is built-in - a section of bedroom partitioned off with a sliding door, not a piece of furniture). My sweet obsessive boy! The dogs have been allowed into the bedroom during litter changes and feeding and they've seen the kittens from a distance, but I have a barrier of boxes (full of stuff) around the wardrobe door so they haven't been close to the wardrobe. Cassie makes it clear she doesn't want them inside that barrier, so they're only in the room when I'm there to stop them jumping it.

Mum phoned me this morning, sounding very weak and sorry for herself. She's still unable to keep anything down, and her nose feeding tube (she says it's like she's a horse with a nosebag) came out in the night. They're putting her on a drip again and she was waiting to be taken down to X-Ray when I phoned - it seems she may not be there when I visit.

Sister T still hasn't gone into labour and is highly fed up.

I really need to get some cleaning done here. I've been so tired the past two weeks that the flat's slipped to an unprecedented degree of disgustingness. It's so bad that I'm putting off calling the Council about the dribbling tap because I don't want anyone to see the place when it's this revolting. That's classic Mum behaviour right there and it needs to stop. Except I have to go out the door in a minute to go to the hospital and when am I going to do it? Arghh! I also forgot to turn the oven off after heating a half-pizza last night. KITTENS ATE MY BRAIN.

In the meantime, I've defused the tap's water torture effect by keeping either the coffee pot or one of the dogs' water bowls under the drip at all times - it stops the nerve-shredding noise and that way at least the water doesn't all get wasted. The weather is much more bearable as well - we didn't get the storm here but there was some rain, and it's cool and grey and soothing again today. Small victories!

Grr. Some fucking obsessive clean freak in this building flooded the lower stairwell with what smelled like neat bleach. It's lying on the floor in pools, and just walking through made my eyes water and my nose run. No way to avoid the dogs walking in it on the way out and back. I just sponged all their paws off in case it burns or they want to lick them, which Spike heartily disliked.

Spike has taken to sleeping pressed against the door of the cat room. His is a pure and slightly creepy love. Cassie did come out to say hello to him yesterday when I fed her, though.

Kittens later. My sister's lovely bloke came over on the way back from visiting Mum last night and drove me to Grimmauld Place and back so I didn't need to walk it. Joy! He also took a short video of the kittens on his new camcorder (their excuse was that they'd want it to take baby videos, but I know my sister - any excuse to buy nice toys!) We didn't have the software to upload it straight to my HD but he's promised to email it soonest.

It's colder and cloudy today; looks like rain. Maybe even that thunderstorm I hear rumours about. More joy!

Oh, and my fucking kitchen tap is broken! It's not just dripping, it's unstoppably, noisily trickling. Must ring Council before I lose my last remaining marbles.

*sigh* Unforeseen drawback to having a cat - I can't open my windows properly any more, and the place is like a fucking greenhouse in the mornings. Fortunately the windows here have safety catches, which means I can at least have them all open two inches, but I can't disengage the catches. I wouldn't put it past Cassie to forget she couldn't fly and take a leap - or Spike either, which is why I've never fully opened his lookout window even on the hottest days.

At some point I'll have to look into making screens of some sort. I have a picture in my mind of a wooden frame with vertical bamboo or dowelling bars, the way we used to have in the hawk-house. Actually, the bars would look coolest on the diagonal but that'd be tricky to make. I watched John do enough woodworking over the years (and helped make the hawk-house windows) that I can see exactly how I'd build them. I'm just not sure I have the manual strength/dexterity to actually do the work.

The ornamental palm trees in the flowerbeds in the Castlepoint car park are in bloom. I took a picture of the flower buds a while ago, because their grainy cauliflower-like forms pleased me:

( The song that was playing reminded me to post it )

They look like big pale-green feather dusters now.

I need to readjust Spike's harness every morning. He's a wriggler and he always seems to work it loose. Luckily it's not too awkward because the medium-size harness fits him best with all its fittings cinched as small as they can go. He's such a big bouncy personality that it always startles me to be reminded how little of him there actually is. He's 23" at the shoulder but he's never gone above 40lbs - he's all legs, ears and teeth, bless his heart.

Day off from hospital visiting, not going to Grimmauld Place till after dark, elbow a bit too stiff for IM; I'm too hot and sleepy to be really bored but yeah, I'm at a bit of a loose end. Can you tell?

whoa, this is bad. very groggy, almost hallucinating, and the cough has already got to the point where I have a sharp pain in my diaphragm when I breathe.

however, I don't think I'm hallucinating that my electric meter went from £15 to less than £10 while I was away. wtf?? I left the fridge and freezer on and although I had the 'puter running (it was doing stuff while I was gone) the monitor was switched off. My heating and hot water are included in the rent and not connected to the electric.

Seriously, those numbers might make sense if I'd left the fucking oven on or something, but I didn't, so I say again, wtf??? are those stories of electricity leaking out of the sockets true after all, or have the Feegles acquired a time machine that runs on mains electricity or something?

I feel too crappy to do anything about it, but the money I put in on Friday was supposed to last two weeks (which it usually DOES) and at this rate it's going to last one. it's a good job I feel too crap to eat anyway; that means I can cut the extra out of the grocery money...

who is it that has that Feeglespotting icon? I want to steal it. Can I?