FeatherLight

If at first you don’t succeed…

Amanda — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 03:14:26 +0000

Talk about a hiatus! I think my last post was in January – how sad is that? I think of things to write about, funny little things that happen or random sights to share, and then I just… don’t log in. I’m SUCH a blog loser.

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Work is good, but home is so much better. I’m working on a BIG project that will require TRAVEL!! Outside the US!! To JAPAN!! I’m very excited about the prospect of international travel, especially since the company will be paying for the majority of it. The downside is that I’m beginning to feel overwhelmed by all the things that need to be done before I leave. Lots and lots of things. Coordinating with other people, making sure things are set up correctly for testing… it’s A LOT. Not to mention the preparations at home! I’m working on getting a pet/house sitter to come and stay with the animals – I don’t want to board Moses for two weeks, and she’s experienced with bunnies and piggies, so I think it’ll work out well.

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My brother moved his family back to Savannah this month. It’s going to be a better situation for their family; no more overnight babysitters needed! It sucks for me, though. As over the whole “spending the night twice a week” thing as I have been, I wouldn’t trade that time with my girls for anything in the world. NOT A THING.

They left a week ago last Thursday, and came back this last week for a wedding, leaving again Saturday night. When I hugged Emma goodbye, she said “But I’ll miss you…” – GAH. Three year olds do say the darndest things, don’t they?

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Off to bed, hopefully for a peaceful, storm-free night. It’s definitely summer in Indiana!

I’d like to spend my next long weekend in bed

Amanda — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:13:08 +0000

I haven't spent a long weekend vegging out in bed for ages; I'd get a couple of good books, the laptop, and only leave for the occasional snack. And a shower. I may be lazy, but I *am* clean.

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Well… that was different. I’m having a hard time coming up with topics to blog about, so I’m going to start using Plinky to generate some brainwaves. I figure it might be fun, right?

Also, does the fact that I had to go down and back up a staircase to buy a bag of Skittles this afternoon make it okay that I ate said bag of Skittles? Does it cancel it out?

Peeves, of the pet variety

Amanda — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:36:43 +0000

Hair stylists who don’t dry your hair all the way after a haircut, so you have no idea what your hair will look like when it’s dry. This is particularly challenging for those of us with a tendency to curl, because I’d really like to see it both straight and wavy so I can decide if the haircut is going to work.
Commercials for high definition televisions on my standard definition TV set. How am I supposed to see how good the picture is supposed to be on one of the new-fangled LED TVs on my regular old CRT set?
Poor drainage in the backyard. There is supposed to be drain tile installed back there in the drainage easement, but my mud puddle of a yard says otherwise. Giant muddy dog paw prints are not as easy to get out of the carpet as you’d think…

In other news, I’ve been revisiting last year’s resolutions. I actually managed to complete 3 of the 5 – I’m still not fit, and I didn’t travel, but those things just weren’t a priority this year. I don’t know if I’ll have the opportunity to travel this year, either, but getting fit is something I want to carry over to this year. I’m still paying for a gym membership, but rarely using it, so I need to get back into the swing of things. My plan for now is to hit the gym Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday, and to do some at-home exercising Thursday and Saturday. It’s just going to have to be a priority… help keep me accountable, will you?

And now I’m going to spend the rest of the evening catching up on the last 2 nights of TV…

Facebook ate my brain

Amanda — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 03:54:55 +0000

Well, hello there. Facebook didn’t really eat my brain… I’m just too lazy to keep updating my status there and keeping up with the blog. But I promise I’ll do better!

So, it’s Christmas. The first Christmas without Mom, which I’ve already decided will totally suck. It’s not that Mom ever did anything to make the holiday super-special or anything, but she knew it was my favorite time of the year. She always went WAY OVERBOARD with gifts, and while the gifts are not the important part, I always loved that she got me so well… she just always knew what I would like, even if it wasn’t something that I asked for. I will never again, for the rest of my life, get gifts as good as the ones she’s bought me over the years, and that just sucks. I’ve been so spoiled!

I went shopping for Christmas presents tonight – this was my first real shopping trip this year. I went to the mall, and wow. Talk about memories.

I went to Macy’s first – we didn’t have Macy’s in Indiana when I was growing up, but we shopped every year at L.S. Ayres or Carson Pirie Scott. Dad got new cologne, maybe a wallet, and always clothes. Walking through the perfume department made me think of Mom.
I stopped at the Hickory Farms kiosk – we used to get Dad a gift basket every year, so I bought one for old time’s sake. I remember picking them out with Mom when I was a little kid.
Next stop was Johnny Rocket’s for something to eat. As I took off my coat, I realized how hot I had been, and how cumbersome it is to carry around a winter coat in the first place… and then I remembered how we always rented a locker at the mall so we wouldn’t have to carry them around. Do they even have those lockers any more?
Finally, I went to JCPenney. We almost always shopped there for Dad’s clothes, because you could buy big & tall in the store rather than having to order it online. And picking up gifts at the catalog department!

It was just a crazy evening. It was like taking a little trip to Christmas past, minus the ghost to guide the way. Though I guess she was there, in a way.

Staycation

Amanda — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:03:24 +0000

So, it’s been a long while since I’ve felt inspired to post. Really, since I’ve felt inspired to do much besides sit on the couch and let my brain melt by watching too much television. Since I last posted…

The flies have gone. I still get the occasional fruit fly, but the big house flies are under control.
Moses and I have been spending time at a local dog park meeting new people and new dogs. He’s trying to make friends… it’s hard to run with the small dogs; they last much longer in the field. Moses is lucky to make it 45 minutes.
Moses and I have also been to obedience class – our last class is this Thursday evening. He’s doing well, not that he really needed it to begin with. I’m the one that needed it – I have a much better feel for timing, and have learned some nice tips and tricks.
Dad was here for a visit last week – he bought a new Sprinter, and flew in to pick it up and drive it home. He seems to be doing alright without Mom, but I know he’s lonely down there by himself. I’m trying to convince him to move back here, and I think I may be wearing him down. He injured his knee while he was here, and it occurred to him after he got home that if he has to have surgery, there’s really no one down there to take care of him. Gee, the car accident in April wasn’t enough to convince him of that?

That’s kind of it. My life has been boring: work is boring, home is boring… I need a change. Not sure what that might be yet, but I’ll figure something out.

Flies, redux

Amanda — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 03:37:39 +0000

Warning: If you have a weak tummy, you probably shouldn’t read this post…

I think Mother Nature must not like me very much. I really hate bugs… bugs of all kinds, and yet I keep finding them. In the last week I’ve killed three small cockroaches in the garage (and then I heard an Orkin ad on the radio say “It’s cockroach season, Indiana!” Ya think?), dumped about a teaspoon of fly pupae out of an outdoor trashcan, killed two fuzzy spiders, and tonight was just the absolute kicker.

I decided I needed to fill the birdfeeders – I have one finch feeder and one that I use for a sunflower/safflower mix. I store the birdseed in old Tidy Cat containers, and up until recently that has worked just fine. The finch food is fine – no problems with it – but I noticed a couple of weeks ago that the mix was kind of funky looking, and there were moths in it. I figured the birds would appreciate the live food, and just filled the feeder. Well… tonight, I opened the container and took a look, and it was NASTY. It was like the seeds had just fermented and become disgusting. I stirred around a little bit with the scoop I use, but decided I needed to go buy new birdseed. I loaded Moses into the car and we took a trip to Pet Supplies Plus.

When we got home, I thought I’d dump the old seed in the trash and bleach out the container before putting the new seed in it. When I went to get it, I noticed that there were – worms? – crawling on the scoop, which was laying on top of the container. Hmm. Not worms. Maggots. Which means that the seeds I had stirred up before I left to go buy new? Also full of maggots. In the airtight container.

GAH GAH GAH GAH GAH GAH GAH GAH GAH GAH GAH GAH GAH GAH GAH GAH GAH GAH

For the time being I’m storing the new bag of seed in the laundry room, and I’m going tomorrow to find a new storage bin. When I left the finch food was fine, but I may just dump it, too… it’s almost gone, anyway. I just don’t understand… Dad stores his seed in the same type of container on his freaking back porch in HUMID coastal Georgia and has zero problems. Maybe he goes through it faster than I do? Or maybe the flies have just decided to congregate here? It’s going to be the Amityville Horror, or whatever movie featured a whole lotta flies. Save me, please.

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In other, non-bug related news… I found a funny thing the other day while browsing the intranet job listings at work. Here are the job requirements as written by HR:

Education/Qualifications

A minimum of an Associate’s degree required.
Candidate must be an expert in Adobe InDesign.
Strong skills in Word, Excel and Powerpoint needed.
Strong attention to detail neccary.

I just thought it, you know, necarry to share that with you. In case you needed a laugh.

Cesar Millan can suck it

Amanda — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 02:28:04 +0000

Not really. I’m kidding.

So, Moses has seemed kind of bored the last couple of days with only ME to play with. I mean, he’s mostly just a fluffy throw rug anyway, but he does like to play. I have plans to try out a dog park in the Avon area this Saturday (I have to pick up a day pass tomorrow), but what to do in the meantime? We walk around the neighborhood on a daily basis, but that’s getting old quickly. I went to the Indy Parks website today to see what parks are close to me – I figured we could walk for a good, long while and he’d get some exercise. You know, a well-exercised dog is a well-behaved dog… I’ve been watching a little too much Dog Whisperer, I think. Anyway, the closest park to me is Southwestway Park. I always thought it was just a softball park, but it does have a playground and picnic shelter, AND hiking trails.

When I read the words “hiking trails”, I had visions of the nice paved paths at Eagle Creek Park. Or at worst, the mulch-covered trails that wind through many Indiana state parks. I packed Moses up – water bowl, bottle of water, treats for the road, and plastic bags (you know, in case he left a deposit on the trail) – and we headed out. We got out of the car, I sprayed myself down with some skeeter keeper-offer stuff, and we hit the trail. It was kind of downhill at first, and a wee bit muddy, but it seemed to be gravelled so I thought we’d be okay. We came to a clearing pretty quickly, only it wasn’t so much a clearing as it was a cleared path for power lines. Whatever… we kept going, came to a fork, and Moses wanted to go left so left we went. Went a little further down an increasingly muddier trail, climbed up a little incline, and took a right. I’m thinking that at some point, we’ll come back out close to where we started, so we forge ahead – up a little more of an incline. It was doable, though I was breathing heavily by the time we got to the top. Kept going… and came to an even steeper and longer incline. Still thinking we’d come out where we started, we headed up the incline. Moses did just fine, but I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO DIE. There’s a reason I don’t do interval training on the treadmill… I’m overweight and very, very, very, out of shape. Anyway, we kept going until we ended up in that same clearing with the power lines, only… we were two towers away from the one we started out next to. We started to walk up the next incline, and I decided that was it. We were turning around. I’d rather the devil I knew than not knowing where I was.

We made it back to the car in one piece, not really worse for the wear. Moses was still ready to play when we got home, so the half hour hike didn’t wear him out much, but I’m pretty well done for the day. I tell you, if this is going to be a regular thing, I’m canceling the gym membership.

Lady of the Flies

Amanda — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 04:04:22 +0000

Oh, God. I walked into the bunny room tonight to find that a first generation set of houseflies had taken up residence in the corner by the window, over Roxy and Rosy (the girlie pigs) cage. I had noticed more flies than usual in the house today but chalked that up to open doors and windows and ill-fitting screens – it was only 83 degrees here today and was a nice, breezy day to have the windows open to air things out. Evidently, the flies are coming from somewhere else and I’m terrified that that somewhere is the bunny room. Wouldn’t you think the highest concentration would be where they hatched?

See, this perturbs me for several reasons. One: while I may not keep my rabbit room sparkling, bleachy clean, I do try and change litter boxes and clean cages frequently enough to avoid something like this happening – for me, that’s one litter box every night, or a litter box change every 5th day. If I notice that someone’s litter box seems heavy or needs to be changed I’ll even go ahead and do it. Two: I HAD a fly infestation like this four years ago which prompted me to rip the carpet/pad out of the rabbit room and paint the concrete floor. The flies had laid their eggs under a plastic storage bin where one of my rabbits had made a puddle without me knowing about it and it hadn’t dried out, so made a nice, warm environment for baby flies to grow. Third: I plain old don’t have time to eradicate flies. There’s no safe way to do it around rabbits except for fly-strips and fly-swatters, and that’s just more time than I can spare.

For now I think I’ve taken care of most of them… there may be one or two hanging out lazily by the ceiling where it’s warm, but I’ll get ‘em eventually. I just hope none of them laid any eggs anywhere. I spent about 90 minutes in the bunny room cleaning the most suspicious-looking litter boxes and a guinea pig cage, and killing as many of the buggers as I could find. These are like mutant flies… it takes more than just a swat to kill them. It seems like they get stunned, fall down, and then I have to step on them, pick them up in a tissue, and flush them to make sure they’re really gone. I’m thinking they may have come from a pile of Moses poo that I picked up and bagged yesterday before mowing the lawn; it was, shall we say, infested when I picked it up, and I foolishly put it in the garage. There were not a lot of flies in the garage, though, and not a lot of traffic in and out today, so I don’t know how they migrated in the house… but that’s my hope. Because otherwise? I have to demolish the bunny room and start all over. And I don’t know if I have the energy for that.

I HATE BUGS.

Friday Foster – Willa

Amanda — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:35:00 +0000

Oy. It’s been a while since I’ve featured a Friday Foster rabbit… I think it’s about time I resurrected that category.

To recap (even though the majority of my readers are also IHRS volunteers), I volunteer as a foster home for domestic rabbits in need of rescue. Over the last 7 or 8 years I’ve lived with more rabbits than I can count, all of them with very different personalities and idiosyncracies. Anyone who thinks rabbits are just livestock animals needs to come and stay with me for a while… of course, I don’t think any animals are just livestock animals, but that’s a post for another day.

Let me introduce you to one of my current foster rabbits… this is Willa.

We received a voicemail at the beginning of May from some concerned members indicating that there was a domestic rabbit at a local animal shelter, and could we help? At the time we were trying to work out how many rabbits we could take to help the Missouri HRS chapter with a confiscation case they were working with, but I had room, and our commitment has always been to local rabbits first.

I picked Willa up from the shelter on May 22, not knowing what to expect. All of the shelter staff I had spoken to kept telling me what a nasty bunny she was… I imagine that if I were stuck in a tiny cage surrounded by predators, I’d probably soil myself, too. At any rate, they took my carrier back to the kennel area, and what they brought out was this beautiful, vibrant, lively Harlequin rabbit. I brought her home and set her up in a condo with a litter box full of hay, gave her some toys, a water crock, and a food bowl, and left her to settle in. Do you know, over the next 24 hours she did not leave a single pootie outside her litter box? Not ONE. So much for the “nasty” bunny.

Willa is a sweet girl, and she’ll make someone a wonderful companion. She really doesn’t like hands reaching into her condo – she tends to cower toward the back, although she’s getting better about it each time I have to lift her out and put her back in. She is not shy about letting you know that her food bowl is empty – she either fills it with her toys, or turns it upside down. She loves to be petted once she gets over the initial worry about what those hands might do, and she especially loves treats.

My hope for Willa – and for all of our foster rabbits, really – is that she is able to find a home with people who will love her and respect her for being a rabbit. So many potential adopters seem to have such high expectations – I think it’s because they have no or very little experience with rabbits, but many people don’t understand that rabbits are not like dogs or cats. Rabbits make excellent companion animals, but not all homes are the ideal homes. The goal, I guess, is to find forever homes.

If you’re interested in adopting Willa, or any of our other adoptable rabbits, please visit our website at www.indianahrs.org.

New addition

Amanda — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:52:47 +0000

This…

is Moses!

I finalized his adoption with Indy Great Pyrenees Rescue today, and couldn’t be happier. He’s really sweet, and has been such a good boy since I got him home. He fell asleep on the ride home – I had to take a detour because of a road closure I didn’t expect, so it took almost an hour – and as he’d breathe out, his cheeks would puff out, too. It was too cute! I’m very excited to have him home with me, and can’t wait to write about our adventures.