Meetzorp

I had a 3-day weekend this past weekend due to Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Day. A 3-day weekend is always welcome – in fact, I wish they all were, considering as how I generally spend all of Saturday on the run, then Sunday doing basically jack. That Monday in a typical 3-day weekend is usually a perfect balance between getting stuff done and being a lazy bum.

This past weekend, however, I managed to be a pretty productive member of society, in my own grumpy little stay-at-home fashion.

I had every intention of organizing my workroom on Saturday. It’s something I have been meaning to and needing to do for AGES. Instead, I ended up sewing, which was not in any way a bad thing, it was just not what I should have been doing with my time. Nevertheless, I finished making a blouse (photos of which will appear later) and got my new pair of jeans to about 80% completion. They’ve got a ridiculous lot of decorative topstitching, so they’re taking forever to finish. They’re going to look pretty awesome, I think, so the extra work should be all worth it.

Saturday night, I ended up baking some cookies. On basically a fluke, I invented a particularly tasty recipe when I was doing my holiday baking, and I wanted to be sure I could duplicate the results, because they’re daaarn good. You’ll find the recipe at the end of this entry. Also, since we were planning on going mountain biking early on Sunday morning with some of Joel’s co-workers, I figured it would be nice to bring a snack along for afterwards and share out some cookies. We’ve taken a thermos of hot chai along on our winter mountain biking excursions also. After a couple of hours of riding around in the woods in below-freezing temps, a good cup of hot, spicy, sweet tea is just about the best thing in the whole world. It’s like the ideal “recovery drink.” That and a couple of cocoa-orange-spice cookies and you really cannot find a way to be anything but happy. Good biking followed by good snacking is pretty well impossible to top.

Sunday was very awesome. We had to get up at the crack of dawn to do our mountain biking. Cameron, Joel’s old co-worker had called the ride for 9:00 a.m., meetup to happen around 8:30-8:45, so we had to get up and moving and be out the door by 8:00. We’d been kind of expecting quite a few people to show up – Cameron had originally proposed a very loose-format offroad time-trial where they’d time themselves against their initial start time & see who finished in the least amount of time. However, only Cameron, his buddy Aaron, Joel and I braved the cold, so we all just took off to play in the woods. I REALLY wish I’d brought my camera, because the frozen creekwater had the most beautiful frost crystals on it, and there were several creek crossings that would have been incredibly picturesque. The whole Blue River Park trail system has many charming vistas. The next time I go out there, I’m totally bringing my camera.

Joel had managed to leave one of his legwarmers at home, so he was ready to pack it in before Cameron & Aaron were. I’d met up with the lot of them as they were looping around to explore a different part of the trail system, and Joel told me at that point that he was up for about an hour more and then he’d be done. So, I tried to estimate an hour more of riding for myself, and apparently did pretty well, because I had just gotten back to the truck and got my helmet & gloves off right as Joel rolled up. Cameron & Aaron were still riding, but we were ready to call it a morning. It was cold, and we had many things we intended to do yet that day. Like wash a cat and finish sanding the back bedroom at Joel’s house.

Yes, I said “wash a cat,” unfortunately. My asthma/allergy problems have been WAY out of control lately, totally overpowering the Allegra I take and making life very difficult, especially at night. One of my two cats is the main culprit, though both contribute. Griswald, who is longhaired, seems to shed less and cause me fewer problems. I can let him sit on my lap and pet him for any length of time without issues, whereas when Smallcat gets on me, I’m sneezing within 5 minutes and miserable shortly thereafter. Smallcat sheds as though fur were going out of style and is pretty lax in her grooming. She had acquired a particularly unpleasant patina of grime on her white fur which was probably a mixture of body oils and whatever dust she could pick up around the house. She was, in a word, grody.

The last time I’d gone to Brookside Barkery, I bought a bottle of anti-shed shampoo, and a spray on conditioner which I hoped would cut down on her dander, grodiness, and shedding. Sunday was the day to begin the experiment.

Joel helped me with the wrangling aspect of the cat-washing endeavor. We ran about 2″ of warm water in the kitchen sink and kept the faucet running on a low stream. Joel scruffed the cat and lifted her into the sink. I swung the faucet back over her and began directing the stream of water over her back and sides. She yowled and whined and struggled desperately while I soaped, lathered, scrubbed, and rinsed her from the neck back. She bore up under it pretty well after she realized there was no escaping. Seriously, for a peevish little cat, she was pretty stoic. Therefore, the bath was not nearly as lengthy or traumatic as I’d been expecting, and it didn’t seem like it was that long until I was toweling her off. It ended up taking three full-sized bath towels and a dishcloth to get her marginally dry, and she spent the rest of the afternoon huddled up in front of a heat register, giving off dirty looks and licking at her fur.

Smallcat, being toweled off, then setting up shop by the register. Sometimes she can be almost clever.

Her tail looked especially ratty when she was all wet.

After we determined that the cat was mostly dry and not likely to catch her death of a chill, we departed for Joel’s house to continue some of the extraordinarily messy home-improvements we’ve been working on. Sanding ensued, resulting in the following pictures:

Okay, sanding also resulted in finishing off the patching-and-sanding phase of the back-bedroom renovation, and on Monday morning, we primered. On Monday afternoon, we went and bought paint for that room. It’s going to be and adventurous combination of light orange and BRIGHT lime green. I’ll post pictures after we’re done with the paint phase.