Good Crazy...

Hi blog,

I know I've neglected you the past several months. I've had so many food adventures too. I want to tell you about cold brew coffee, all the stuff I ate in Portland and Austin, the pitcher of watermelon agua fresca sitting in my fridge, and the possibility that I might start a jam company. But this is what my kitchen looks like right now:

Yep, that's my lunch plate chilling next to a bucket of drywall compound and some other constructiony stuff.  And that space between the countertop and stove is about 8 inches wide, so I've gotta squeeze through there while I'm working on the patch over the old basement opening. My new kitchen is in sight and I'm getting a little crazy.

I've decided that you have to be a good bit crazy to live in a house and remodel it yourself. You've gotta walk over major floor squeaks and by drywall flaws, because YOU HAVE TO FINISH THE STAIRCASE otherwise you can't get into the basement to do laundry unless you perform some sort of acrobatic act. You've got to be okay with checking your pots for drywall dust. And a normal Friday night might involve cruising Home Depot, returning home to install something on a ladder, while your dogs try to climb said ladder because it's thundering outside. Yep, totally crazy.

Jezebel

Hello blog!

It's been a while I know. Last you heard I had a finished porch and not much else. Well the office and and the living room are almost totally done now. They both got an electrical overhaul, paint, new baseboards, light fixtures, and ceiling fans. We also installed new lighting for the front door and had some large trees (including a 110 foot dying pine) taken down. Jeremy and I also had a slight emergency and became plumbers for a day. Pictures of all that coming soon.

A day or two after we found her.

We also had this brat wander into our lives...literally. A few days after Halloween I was woken up by the sound of a crying cat. It was so loud it sounded like she was in our bathroom. When my husband went to investigate he found a teeny kitten bawling it's head off in our neighbor's yard, totally alone and clearly starving. I arrived while he was trying to coax her through a hole in the chain link. I knelt down, put my hands out and she was so little she stepped right through an intact link and into my hands. She weighed 11 ounces and might have been 2 or 3 weeks old, tops.

I tried to find her a home for about 3 days. But after three days of hand feeding her and watching my dogs shepherd her around, my husband confessed that even if we found an awesome home for her, he didn't know if he'd be able to hand her over. The fact that she fit in one hand and purred every time you picked her up didn't help the situation. And so Jezebel became a permanent fixture.

Jezebel today, on a throne of office supplies.

She's 5 pounds of mischief now.  While I was working on this post she tried to squeeze into the space between my laptop and my lap. She does this on a regular basis and it's only a matter of time before I have an awkward moment where it appears I'm giving birth to an adolescent cat. She has a hearty disdain for other cats, wrestles with my dogs, steals their food, weasels her way under the covers, meows at doorways to be let through, can take a collar off in 1.2 seconds, and may eventually displace my dachshund mix for the middle pack position. She is elegant and a holy terror. It's like living with a 5 pound tiger, beautiful and exhilarating to pet, but with the very real possibility you may get hurt at any time.