Nuclear wasteses; I eated it
Not really. This is one of Scubafreak’s six cats, coming along nicely, thank you. They’ll be ready to harvest any day now. He’s got a classified going out next week trying to rid himself of a few. If that doesn’t work, what say we all pile into a rental car, drive to Colorado, and take his flash gun away from him before he hurts somebody.
In fate’s ongoing Summer War on Celebrities, actress Mollie Sugden died today. She was 86. Best known for her role as Betty Slocombe in Brit TV’s Are You Being Served? She managed to outlive Wendy Richard (who played the young tart) by some months.
As I am tired from a long day of shopping, making black currant syrup and choppin’ broccoli, I invite you to put paragraphs one and two together and build your own Mrs Slocombe’s pussy joke.
July 1, 2009 — 6:51 pm
Comments: 22
Kittens! Hot buttered kittens!
Get ’em while they’re cute!
I have a feeling Scubafreak is going to be a six cat man forever. But just in case anyone’s in Colorado and feeling a mite peckish, look how good the little fuzzies are coming along!
June 16, 2009 — 12:48 pm
Comments: 7
She sees…dead people?
I must tell you — although I am as psychic as a potato — Badger House doesn’t feel the least little bit haunted to me. Despite its old bones (between 399 and 421 years old, depending on whether you believe our earliest property tax bill or the plaque on the front), it feels nothing but warm and happy. This place has been added to, taken from, patched up, mutilated, renovated and redecorated so many times, all the ghosteses must have packed their bindles and hit Ye Roadde centuries ago.
But Charlotte here is kind of freaking us out.
She’s a spooky girl. She was a feral kitten and she’s been a one-weasel cat ever since, but she did pretty okay the first few days. She explored the house, she cautiously interacted with Uncle B. She was acclimating faster than I expected.
Then she stopped coming downstairs one day. She’d hide in the closet with the water heater if I left it open. I had to move her food up. She slept twenty hours a day, only came down when I carried her and scooted back up the moment I let go. It was a cold week; I put it down to that.
Then she gradually calmed down. She began coming downstairs for a few minutes on her own. Accepting skritchies from Uncle B. She’ll still startle at the least noise, but after weeks and weeks she’s getting back where she was on day three.
But for one thing: she’s fixated on a particular spot on the wall. She’ll be grooming or snoozing or playing with string, and suddenly she’ll jump like she hears something and stare at That Place (this lucky shot catches her the very moment she stopped chewing toe and started the creepy stare). No doubt about it: she’s watching something.
The spot is in the short hall between the livingroom (with the fire) and the dining room (where Granny Weasel is hung). There is a small window. There’s nothing else there. Now.
But all the old geezers in the neighborhood tell us that’s where the front door was for hundreds of years, until the major renovation of 1970-something.
wwwwoooooOOOO0000OOOoooooo!
February 11, 2009 — 8:42 pm
Comments: 26
How to tell you’re in an exotic foreign land…
Whiskas comes in flavors like duck and rabbit, which makes annoying Warner Brothers cartoons play in my head whenever I feed the cat (DUCK season…WABBIT season…DUCK season…WABBIT season…). And the packet is in five languages.
Also, you have tea with the vicar. Tea with the vicar, I am so not kidding. Tonight was the second of our premarital counseling sessions (oooh! ‘Premarital’ makes it sound so naughty). She didn’t show us any more of Margaret Calvert’s industrial design work, but there was this graphic of a cup filling up with anger and resentment and spilling over with sarcasm, or some shit. I don’t know. I drew a picture of an weasel going “grrrr!” on it when she turned her back.
The vicar is a very nice lady, or I wouldn’t put up with a minute of this.
Then we came home, started a roaring coal fire and set the chimney on fire. No, no…we were able to starve it before it burned down Badger House, but that means no more fires until the sweeps come. And the sweeps can’t come until Thursday. And it’s going to be Really Very Cold this weekend.
But never mind. I’ve always said one of the great benefits of living in a multicultural society is that the airport ladies’ room teaches you how to say, “please put your tampon in the receptacle provided” in a variety of pointless, mouth-grinding, ugly languages. So here, courtesy of Whiskas, for your enlightenment and entertainment, is “complete pet food for adult cats” rendered in a bunch of stupid foreign tongues:
Alimento complete para gatos adultos.
Helfoder för vuxna katter.
Fuldfoder til voksne katte.
Täysravintoa aikuisille kissoille.
Ah, Croatian. The language of love.
January 8, 2009 — 8:53 pm
Comments: 36
Loot! Plunder! Swag!
This? A British Airways place setting…from the Concorde. This is just the sort of brilliant, clever gift-giving Uncle B excels at and I…do not. I made him circle shit he wanted in a gardening catalogue. I’m pretty darned sure this is the first time in my life I’ve ever bought anyone vermiculite for Christmas.
We’ve just polished off the champagne…the turkey is in the oven…it has been an good Christmas. Hope yours was, too!
See you on Boxing Day! (Don’t ask).
December 25, 2008 — 9:02 pm
Comments: 36
Dis-graceful
Okay. I confess. The general lateness and lameness of posts lately? I’ve been…
…umm…
…asleep. And that’s not a metaphor for hot, hot mustelid sex or anything. Uncle B and I have passed out comatose a minimum of ten hours a day since I got here, snoring and farting like livestock.
Seriously, it’s whack. It’s Britain-induced narcolepsy. Turbojetlag. Even the cat can barely lift her head off the pillow to cadge Friskies. I knew I had some catching up to do after a year of low drama and high anxiety, but this is stupid. We haven’t spent eight hours awake in a row since November 26.
Tonight, I struggled awake to the sound of, “oh my god…it’s ten o’clock!”
And I go, “I dreamed I was having lunch with Mrs Rockefeller and Bette Davis.” And I really was.
And he goes, “I dreamed I was watching the Prime Minister put on a conjuring act.” And he really was.
Well. We’re a well-matched pair, I guess.
Surprisingly, that’s not as happy a thought as you might imagine.
December 16, 2008 — 8:30 pm
Comments: 25
Meet my leetle freen’ Johanna
Many activities which appeal to stupid people for stupid reasons appeal to me for good reasons. Really good reasons. Really. It is my curse.
I mean hippies. And recycling (also patchouli, but that doesn’t really figure here). Human beings don’t make enough garbage to spoil the view, let alone wreck the planet (except maybe in China, which is full of diabolically clever and hard-working little people). Upscale Western suburbanites sorting their garbage into colorful plastic bins to be picked up by a fleet of giant belching diesel trucks to Save the Earth is an idea so pointless, loony and mathematically-challenged that even I can work out the formula.
It goes like this: if it is more expensive to recycle a thing than make it from scratch THAT MUST MEAN it requires more energy to do so (in some cases, a lot more energy) and that makes Gaia cry.
Yes. Yes, my hippies. There is recycling that is bad for the planet. Perhaps most of it, as it is practiced today.
And yet…waste is a terrible thing. Maybe because I am sometimes poor…maybe because I was raised by a pack of wild hippies. Whatever. Wasting a thing that can easily be reused offends me right down into my bones. It is an aesthetic judgment, not a scientific one — but I’m an aesthetic sort of a weasel, so bite me.
And zo…meet my new compost bin. Not any compost bin. Oh, no. This is a Green Johanna — a Swedish design that will devour tea bags, coffee grounds, banana peels, meat and fish (including bones!), garden clippings and all that goddamned fruit and veg you buy but don’t eat before it goes off — oh, yes. I’ve seen you do it — and transform them into lovely, glossy black soil. Which, using the magic of whatever the hell it is he does in that greenhouse, Uncle B will transform back into delicious food (if things carry on getting worse, he says, we’re going to grub up the front lawn and plant potatoes).
I love Johanna. I love her better’n that pig we had in the ’70s
And the sweet thing is, the local Council is so chock full of stupid hippies, they’re giving us a Johanna for £19.95, not the £114 list. Hooray for stupid hippies!
December 2, 2008 — 8:20 pm
Comments: 24
Exotica of the Day
Prawn crackers.
No, no…not pr0n, crackers. Calm down there, you crackers at the back. Prawn crackers are a staple of East Asia. Ninety percent air, 10 percent rice, and I think their collective grandmother might have seen a prawn at the circus once.
A bag of them is usually included with an order of Chinese takeaway (aka takeout) in the UK. At least, that’s my experience. Uncle B says it isn’t always; depends the size of the order. Well. There are no small Chinese takeaway orders in the Badger household, so that’s my experience.
December 1, 2008 — 7:14 pm
Comments: 32
The Taj Mahkitteh
Today’s Hair Across Weasel’s Ass: plane-legal pet carriers. A regular, take-her-to-the-vet-sized pet carrier will not do (never mind that mine is 30 years old, solid as a brick shit-house and served perfectly well to fly a bigger cat than Charlotte from Tennessee to Rhode Island). If the airline doesn’t turn the cat away, there are grievous fines on the UK end for shipping an animal in a container they consider too small.
And so, of course, they provide really precise instructions for choosing the appropriate carrier.
Ha ha! Just woofin’ you. Every document describes the requirements s-lightly differently. It should be the height of the cat standing, the height of the cat sitting or two inches above the ears of the cat standing. There has to be ventilation in all four sides, or it doesn’t matter as long as it’s 13% open to air. The animal has to be able to stand up turn around and lie down again (which makes jump down turn around pick a bale of cotton spin up on my mental Wurlitzer). The problem is the confluence of airline regs, US government regs and UK government regs.
I particularly liked this instruction from DEFRA:
Containers for cats should have litter trays which are either heavy enough not to move around or fixed to stop them moving.
Litter trays! Holy pooperscooper! Charlotte needs at least a five foot radius to operate a box properly. She’s a sweet girl, but stupid. She stands with all four feet inside, hangs her ass over the side and pees on the floor.
Whatevs. I bought her the biggest carrier that’ll fit in the Weaselmobile. And it occurs to me I never told you what needs to be done to bring a dog, cat or ferret into the UK. It’s a hell of a deal, but I won’t complain — they don’t have to go through six months of kennel quarantine on the British side now. They essentially allowing the pet to serve out quarantine at home. Zo! In this precise order:
■ Spay and microchip. (Very important — that microchip is checked before every stage of the process. Some people drop a couple hundred bucks for their own chip reader, just to be sure).
■ Vaccinate for rabies.
■ Some time later — twenty days is recommended — draw a blood sample and have your vet send it to Kansas State University.
■ They send back a document certifying presence of rabies antibodies (my documentation didn’t have the official seal, so I had to chase them to send another one).
■ Six months after this date, the travel documents can be applied for. If the rabies booster comes due before you’re ready (ours did), booster and documentation.
■ When the time comes, gather all the documentation and FedEx it to the nearest USDA veterinary office. They FedEx the docs and the stamped travel permit back. This document is good for four months.
■ Not less than 24 nor more than 48 hours before Puss gets on the plane, one last vet’s appointment. She gets de-ticked, wormed (must contain Praziquatel!) and the vet makes a final entry on the USDA and airline forms.
■ Show up at the approved airline’s freight service six hours before the flight. There are, incidentally, one or two government-approved cat-flying airlines for each city that flies to London.
■ After going through People Customs at Heathrow, hop a taxi and drive four miles (oh, the cabby’s going to love me!) to the Animal Reception Center. They say it takes 3-4 hours to process a cat through. Why? I don’t know!
And…umm…ta-dum, I guess. All for the filthy little crooked-tailed, squint-eyed, bug-eating feral Goblin Princess I trapped in my garage five years ago.
Oh, well. One good thing I’ve gotten out of this: pee pads! They’re giant Kotexes for bed-wetters. You put one in the bottom of the travel kennel to mop up accidents. I got a ten-pack of 30×36″ pee pads for six bucks at Wal*Mart.
So that right there is nine wonderful, lazy Sunday mornings I can say to myself, “nah. I don’t feel like getting up yet…”
November 18, 2008 — 1:12 pm
Comments: 36
You are feeling verrrrrry…kitty-adopting-able
This little semi-feral so-and-so tried very hard to adopt a weasel yesterday by sheer force of will. Cross your fingers for him today; Saturdays are when the cats are mostly adopted (Caturday! Ha!). Posted in all his Technicolor glory in the comments (he’s gray and white, so it ain’t much).
August 2, 2008 — 9:02 am
Comments: 14