Noodle Arms

Here's my gym update (which I think I've decided to do weekly). This is mildly edited talk-to-text because my arms are currently limp noodles. My trainer switched it up on me and did legs Monday. It barely even hurt. But now that she knows that, I've got to look out for the next leg day cuz she's coming to get me.

Also. I had started to hold some stress/tension in my shoulders again and today's arm workout definitely helped to loosen that up. I'm learning the weirdest things I didn't know I needed to know.

A not very good photo of how Milo reacts when I practice singing.

Snow

On This Day 2014: sent the girls outside to play in the snow without me. Moving back to Kansas was a relief for all of us. Between the girls getting older and the area just feeling safer, we all got a little more freedom. So this was a new experience for us all. Probably not the first one, but it was pretty outside so I took some pictures. And the cats got to have a little taste of freedom too. They had had a short-lived Maryland summer of sneaking out a screen window that I didn't know was broken but are strictly indoor kitties as much as possible.

Our Family Zoo

So I have this label referring to the pets in our home. At one point this summer I could say that we had two cats, two rats and two aquariums. But then one of the rats died.

The first pet to join us was Milo. He was a few months old, we got him from a shelter that partnered with PetSmart.

Now he's a cranky old man of 10 years.

\

A little over a year later, a neighbor knocked on the door and offered me a handful of fluff that she'd found on her back porch. We didn't even know if he was going to make it.

Now Oliver is an old man too, 9 years.

I don't think we even got pictures of Taryn's rats. They only joined us in April of this year. Taryn turned 13 in May and it seemed like a good time to get her a pet of her own. Rats weren't what we had in mind, but that's how things went. They came with their own cage, which is significantly larger than we intended.

The aquariums are different stories. I had received an aquarium kit for Christmas, I don't even remember how long ago and finally got it set up in November 2018 with a tiny baby betta.

I didn't get any good pictures of him with his full-grown adult fins. He died in June on the anniversary of Tim's mom's passing. I was pretty broken up about it, I didn't know I could be so attached to a fish.

Once he'd died, I left the tank and snails to "cycle" for a month and then Jenny brought over some baby fish from her tank and an all black betta fish for Caelie. I don't have pictures of any of those fish either. I started with 4 adult guppies in different colors and patterns, then 4 orange babies and 4 white babies. That was mid-July. Currently I have 8 adult guppies, the 4 orange ones aren't full grown yet, plus 3 mid sized baby guppies that were born in my tank and another 5 tiny baby guppies that were born more recently. I'm going to have to start feeding fish to Caelie's betta soon and I have mixed feelings about it. 

Oh, I lied, I have a picture of Caelie's tank with a blurry betta in it. I kind of feel like his tank is thematically prepared for the population control that is coming soon.

More Memories

On this day ten years ago:

Tonight's kidism: "God made the moon, and the stars, and the sun, and the daytime, and the fish and the trees, and the <bunch of different animals> and um, um....um...
ME: "what about cats? Did God make cats too?"
TARYN: "No"
ME: "Oh He didn't? Well then where do cats come from?"
TARYN: "The store."
<should have seen that one coming>

We had adopted Milo only a couple of months before this conversation. Here's a picture of the two of them in September 2009:

And six years ago today, our little artist:

Caelie saw this picture at church this morning. Here in a minute I'm going to upload her artistic representation of this picture.

And Caelie's version:

Here Lies Eliza Ariana.

So today we held a small funeral for Taryn's late rat. Eliza loved to lay in her hammock and she didn't play very much, but when she played, she seemed very happy. In the short time that Eliza was with us, Taryn did her very best to take good care of both her rats.

We're very grateful to our friends for indulging our whimsy and especially Jenny and family for providing a lovely burial plot at their new property.

Sleepless in Manhattan

This is life with insomnia. After a couple nights in a row of fairly decent sleep at appropriate sleep times, last night was the more typical kind. I spent a lot of the day in a creek, which is the best, but somehow that resulted in crashing about 8:30pm. Going to bed early *sounds* like a good idea, but it really only results in waking up at bedtime. I woke up sometime in the 11:30-midnight range and my whole family was in an uproar.

I'm sound sensitive and when I wake up, I have to readjust to the world and normal noises are painful. I have not yet convinced anyone to respect my need for quieter sounds during this adjustment period.

While I was sleeping, the girls had fallen in love with a lost cat outside. There is a colony of feral cats on the property, but this little guy is not one of them. He's too social. So I guess they were waiting for me to wake up and make the executive decision to bring him inside for the night and take him to the shelter when it opens today.

We got Lost Boy set up in the bathroom with a bed, food, water and a litter box. He was yowling at us while Milo and Oliver yowled back. I was sitting downstairs trying to figure out how we're all going to survive the night when Taryn calls out that her sick rat had finally died. Taryn has only been a rat mom since late April and I'm pretty sure the one already had the tumor when we got her. She wasn't as social as the other rat and so we weren't able to observe it until the tumor was too big to treat.

So then we were problem solving all these things at once. We got Taryn and the rats settled for the night. Then we got Milo and Oliver set up in the "office", the fourth bedroom where we keep our computers and all the cat necessities. It took a while for all the cats to stop yowling, but it took even longer for me to be able to get back to sleep.

I slept from about 6:30am-10:30am. So really, in terms of a good night's sleep, I got almost the right amount, in two shifts which is apparently how humans lived before the invention of electricity. But the chances of getting to bed at a reasonable hour tonight are severely compromised.

Well, it's time to get Lost Boy off to the shelter. It's kind of a shame, he's really a very sweet boy. Our lease only allows so many pets though and we're maxed out.