It was Taylor and not Tyler we went to last night. Thank heavens. Tyler is a lot further away. It was a fun little trip, for me. Lin did whatever it was he had to do … switching some antenna lines or something like that. I don’t know. I am not in the business of building cell phone towers, and my interest in the process could be considered very low.

It was cool being there though, as it wasn’t just another cell phone tower, of which I have seen many during the last decade or so at all stages of construction. Nope, they are putting antennas on the Taylor water tower, so I got to do something most people don’t get to do. I hung out inside the locked fence at the Taylor water tower after midnight. I used the opportunity to play around with the shutter settings ands such on my camera to try to get some nighttime shots, and of course, Lin explained all sorts of technical stuff to too, which wasn’t as boring as it sounds.

Apparently, taking nighttime shots with my camera is a huge battery drain, because I only got about 30 photos before my newly charged batteries died. Good thing we weren’t there longer or serious boredom would have set in. Of the 30 shots, only three turned out worth keeping, but I did learn a lot more about how my camera works. It’s not like there was too much of serious interest to take photos of anyway.

Here’s my favorite one:

I’ll save the other two for when I find I have nothing of note to post on my web site. Besides, the front page is a little image heavy right now.

Mmm … roast. Those Yukon Gold potatoes are very tasty too. I was surprised by how much different the flavor was between them and your regular Idaho potato. I can’t wait to try them in other ways … like as french fries.

Anyway, the roast was so tasty, I had to show it to you to make your mouth water.

Lin has to go to Tyler tonight to do about an hour’s worth of some sort of cell phone tower work. I’m thinking of going with him, just to get out of the house and spend time together, but … if I didn’t go with him, I could play a video game. Aaah … decisions, decisions. On one hand, the love of a wife for her husband. On the other hand, the love of a gamer for a new game they just started last night (Radiata Stories). It’s going to be a tough call, but I’ll probably end up going with Lin, because I sort of already said I would, and if I don’t, he’ll know it’s because I want to hog the TV for my gaming addiction. I wouldn’t want him thinking my PS2 is more important than he is.

It’s just so unfair, this having to work at relationships stuff. I mean, I didn’t get to play at ALL today due to high levels of household responsibilities. Wah!

But I bet I can find a way to blow off just about everything around the house tomorrow and play myself silly.

And of course, you should never ever make a big long post about kittens without posting a photo of said kittens. I am certain there’s a law about that on the books somewhere.

I had the gall to not scoop the kittens’ overnight business out of the litter box before going about my day. I then had the gall to not do so before leaving for the store. To put me in my place, both of them decided to poo and pee, multiple times around the box while I was gone, and then, because that just wasn’t a big enough mess, they dig through the unscooped litter box and threw kitty litter everywhere … piles of it. There was almost more kitty litter on the floor than in the box.

Furthermore, there is nothing quite so entertaining as turning around while cleaning up a kitten created catastrophe and seeing both of them sitting just outside the bathroom door watching with what appeared to be glee. I’m not kidding … GLEE and amusement! The least they could do is try to look a little guilty or at least compassionate.

Though they were so adorable sitting there, I had to stop and giggle at them. They are such innocent little babies. They are also far too picky about the litter box. It wasn’t in a terrible state this morning. It wasn’t even in a terrible state when I left for the store. I mean, just how much can two kittens pee and poo in about twelve hours. It’s not that much. But no, they get peevish if there’s anything in the box but fresh clean litter. Ugh.

I think the new litter we tried might be a problem as well. It was one of the Arm & Hammer Multi-Cat super-clumping ones. I have to tell you, there was nothing at all super about it’s ability to clump. I have had non-clumping litters that did a better job of clumping when peed on. Also, its special ability to better maintain odors in a multi-cat household? Non-existent. I’d swear it reeked of cat pee as soon as I poured it out of the box. We won’t be getting that again!

In other kitten news, they are really liking the new cat food (Wellness Core). Both of them have stopped gobbling their food all at once (and then expecting more later), and they are both content eating exactly the amount they should be eating each day. I have also noticed some attitude changes. While I can’t be 100% certain those are attributable to the new food, though diet can change a pet’s behavior, they have been much more calm since yesterday, which was their second day on the new stuff. They are far more content than ever to play with their toys and each other rather than roaming around the house looking for things to get into and tear up. Also, the last few days, they have sought us out for attention and love far more than they have since they were tiny little things. They seem to be sleeping better too, if twitching feet and kitty dreams are any indication. Maybe they were just about to enter a new stage of kitten behavior anyway, but it’s odd how suddenly they have changed. Really almost overnight. I’m sort of hoping this means a few less days when I have to ask myself why I wanted to get any kittens at all and why the hell I had to have two. They have been more trouble than any cats I have ever had. I still love them though … even if they are completely mental at times.

Speaking of kittens, they are gathered ’round their food bowls, so it must be feeding time. I have to go attend to the roast anyway, because in a few hours, it’s going to be feeding time for the humans in the household too. Can’t wait, the roast is already starting to smell tasty … which is probably why they kittens are begging for food an hour earlier than usual.

That obnoxious rose bush in my front yard is crazy thick with blooms this year. I tried to get a photo of the whole bush, but it’s just too dark outside for any photos to come out looking decent. I did get one of some of the blooms the other day when we had a bit of sunlight. I’m not especially fond of roses, and I most especially am not fond of this particular bush (grows too fast and has the meanest thorns ever), but all the same, this spring, it’s rather lovely.

I forgot the olive oil. I managed to do the shopping in record time and under-budget, and I forgot the olive oil. That wouldn’t be a crisis, if there was any cooking oil at all in the house, but I don’t even have a back-up bottle of corn oil. Well, we will just have to live without it for a few days. I am not going back just for olive oil. I finally had a good shopping experience at HEB, and I don’t want to risk blowing that. Though a kid did cough on me while I was standing in line, so tomorrow I will probably die.

I bought a different kind of potatoes today: Butter Gold, also known as Yukon Gold. I’ve been a little disgusted lately with how the regular white potatoes always seem to be so grainy, no matter how I cook them. I’m eager to see if the flavor and texture really is as different as advertisements would have me believe. I think I’ll make a roast with potatoes and carrots tonight. Mmmm … roast.

I always wish on days when it stays so dark outside you can’t tell what time of day it is it would just go ahead and rain. It has been almost pre-dawn dark outside all day, and it’s hot and humid too. That’s just miserable. Rain already!!!

Lin called just as I was at the most insane intersection between the store and our house. He wanted to tell me about the horrible day he was having. I couldn’t talk just then, because it’s impossible to talk on a cell phone and drive a standard vehicle at the same time. Oh, I know people do it all the time, but then people are crazy, right? I certainly wouldn’t want to do it, like to keep at least one hand on the steering wheel and all. I better text message Lin to tell him the groceries are put away and if he’d like to rant, I have a spare hand and ear. Poor dear. He sounded really flustered.

In closing: In what world do people live where doctors treat flu and colds with antibiotics? Out here in my reality, viral infections aren’t treated with antibiotics, because, you know, they won’t do any good against anything that isn’t bacterial in nature. People do know that flu and colds aren’t caused by bacteria, don’t they? Maybe not.

Just a quick update on the Walgreens pet food thing, because I forgot to post about it yesterday (took the day off from the computer).

I stopped by on Saturday on my way home from getting the cats their giant bag of food. The recalled food was off the shelves, but I asked to speak to the manager anyway, and got to do so. They’d been told to “clear it off the shelves” and obviously that instruction wasn’t clear enough for them, and they thought that meant “put it on sale.” Uh huh. Also, they didn’t realize (even at corporate) that the recalls were still ongoing and that they needed to keep up with it. Uh huh.

I gave them a rash of shit, handed them a printout of the latest recall information from the FDA and the web address where they could keep informed. I also warned them that if someone’s pet was injured by their stupidity and laxness, they should be worried about a lawsuit, because that could be a real possibility.

Apparently one of the news stations I called had also contacted them, and it seems that it isn’t just my Walgreens that had been lax about pulling recalled pet foods.

For the record, I actually hate Walgreens as a company, but it is the closest store I can get to where I can buy pharmacy items and the occasional kitchen necessity like milk (or Dr Pepper). I’d like to not shop there, but I’d also like to not have to go to HEB for these things, because I hate HEB even worse (and it’s always a freaking madhouse). So I am stuck shopping there from time to time. Now I guess I’ll be labeled as one of “those” customers. You know, the crazy sort. Don’t really care what management thinks of me though, as the girls that work there love me for always commiserating with them about how much it sucks to work at Walgreens and retail in general. Management can screw itself … I’ve got my eye on them.

And now back to my busy, busy Monday. Hopefully I’ll get to ramble about something later today, provided I don’t decide that a good long nap is in order once the busy bit is over.

Texas is planning to raise the age you can buy tobacco products up a year to nineteen. They think this will keep high school kids from smoking. That plan worked so well ages ago when they raised the drinking age to nineteen thinking that would keep high school gets from getting alcohol. It worked so well they had to raise it to twenty-one the very next year (thereby screwing me twice as I was legal at 18, and then legal at nineteen, and then had to wait to 21 again). The really stupid thing is that tobacco use among secondary students is already 56% lower than it was in 1990, so it seems to me whatever we have been doing has been working. But no … let’s play with the law by changing the legal age by one year.

Austin’s apartment occupancy is up to 90%, which means rents are going up and apartments are getting harder to find. I am so glad to not have to worry about that anymore. I’ll tell you why this crisis is starting. They haven’t been building any new apartment buildings, and they keep tearing down apartment complexes they deem old and worthless and putting up high-priced condos. Not everyone wants or can afford to buy a condo, especially not at the prices these things have been going for. Would you buy a 500 square foot apartment for twice what it cost us to buy a 1000 square foot cottage? Most people wouldn’t, and certainly not the people (like students) who aren’t planning to live here long term. Yup, very glad not to have to worry about rent going up. If buying the house has been worth anything, it’s been worth knowing our rent will never go up again.

The Texas Legislature has decided to do awake with the TAKS test (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) … the be-all, end-all test that you must pass in order to graduate (whether or not you have had passing grades your entire school career). Instead, they are replacing them with “exit exams” which in my eyes just sounds an awful lot like final exams with a fancy name. Doesn’t matter what they call it, if the State is involved, it will likely end up being a big mess and stressing students out with a whole bunch of stupid exams rather than the one crazy one they have to take now. Whatever happened to teaching your students and testing them, then passing or failing them based on that? Oh yeah, that went out at just about the same time I decided I couldn’t be a teacher anymore because the system was fatally broken.

The City of Austin wants to do away with the plastic grocery bag. I’m all for it, as I have hated the things since the first time I had to carry groceries in them, but I think a good first step would be to teach the people putting things in grocery bags to put more than one item in a bag and to not put things with handles, like milk or laundry detergent, in a bag at all. It would also be nice if all grocery stores still had the option of paper bags (you know, a renewable resource that doesn’t take thousands of years to decay in a landfill), and if they do offer them to not look at you like you are a moron for asking for them. I used canvas bags for a while, and that works OK on small trips to get a few things, but on a full shopping trip, as much as I am paying for the groceries, I have no desire to bag them myself, and you don’t want to know the kinds of looks you get at HEB if you expect them to put your groceries in a canvas shopping bag … not to mention, they do not have the skills to actually fill a bag with goods.

The weather here is grey and looking like rain again. Blech. Oh well, at least I got some housework done, and now maybe I can squeeze in an hour of video games before Lin gets home.

The Food and Drug Administration has opened a criminal investigation in the widening pet food contamination scandal, officials said yesterday, as it was confirmed that tainted pork might have made its way onto human dinner plates in California.

More than 100 hogs that ate contaminated food at a custom slaughterhouse in California’s Central Valley were sold to private individuals and to an unnamed licensed facility in Northern California during the past 2 1/2 weeks. The hogs consumed feed that contained rice protein tainted with melamine, the industrial chemical that has sickened and killed dogs and cats around the world.

They don’t know if eating the pigs that ate the melamine can cause problems for the human consuming it. That’s just a big “Who Knows” right now, but I don’t think I would want to eat any of it. Better safe than sorry, right? And what have I been saying about this stuff getting into the human food supply? Call me paranoid if you like, but it looks like I’m not the only one concerned about it, and I didn’t even think of the angle of the animals getting it in their feed. You can read some more about the hog farm situation here if you are interested, but that wasn’t the quote I wanted to pull from that story. That was just the One More Thing I thought I should mention. Sort of an I Told You So moment.

The quote I wanted to highlight is this one:

Five companies received the contaminated Chinese rice protein concentrate. Three firms have identified themselves by announcing recalls; the other two are not publicly known because the FDA will not name them until the companies say they used contaminants in their products.

We come back again to the five pet food companies that they know received shipments of the poisonous rice protein concentrate. Three of them have recalled foods, but we don’t need to know who the other companies are unless they admit to the FDA that they used the stuff in something?! What, did they just order and receive it months ago to have it sit around their warehouse as decoration with no intention of using it in actual pet food? Yeah, right … and we should just take the word of these other two companies as told to the FDA in secret that they didn’t use it at all! If you knew that five companies that make canned beans had gotten tainted supplies of some sort, would you be content knowing that three of them had come forward and admitted it but two of them were apparently telling the FDA they hadn’t used the stuff … so there’s no need for us to know what brands they are? I think you’d want to know so you could avoid buying those cans of beans just in case! Sorry, but my trust of corporations (and the FDA) doesn’t extend quite that far, and they would be reacting entirely differently if it was human food we were talking about and not pets. Or maybe not, and that’s just as scary, isn’t it?

So in order to avoid those other two companies who got tainted rice protein but whose names I am not privy to, I bought food with no damn grain in it at all, because I am betting that next week or so, we will be hearing more about those two companies and more food will be recalled. Go ahead, call me paranoid, but you know as well as I do that I am quite often correct about these kinds of things. Besides, better safe than sorry. Cats don’t need to be eating grains anyway. It’s not a part of their natural diet no matter how healthful the pet food companies say it is. Luckily over the last few years, options without grains are now becoming available that don’t require a vet’s prescription (and apparently not all of them are free from being recalled for being deadly anyway). Thank heavens for that. I’d love to feed my cats a raw diet, but that just isn’t going to work out for me right now. At least they have this new food that is damn well near all meat (actual MEAT — no by-products) … and they LIKE it.

Sorry to be going on and on about these recalls, but this is the sort of thing that worries me. I don’t lose sleep over the possibility of a terrorist attack or global thermonuclear war (anymore), but something happening to the food supplies? Yeah, that causes some residual stress. We are not self-sufficient. How many of us are these days? Even if you have a home garden for veggies, you can’t possibly produce enough to feed even one person healthy meals day after day. Man cannot live on tomatoes alone. If something serious happened to the food supply, mayhem would ensue as people went batshit insane … as would hunger, starvation, and sickness. It wouldn’t even take something IN the food to cause a crisis. What would happen if there was an extended gasoline shortage? Yeah, don’t think about it too much. It will start stressing you out too.

I know all this recall business, on top of some personal matters that are weighing on me, is one of the big things stressing me out and keeping me feeling sickly. My friends tell me to just “let it go” and to “relax” which is much easier said than done when you are the sort of person who cares just a little too damn much about everything. Ignorance is bliss, and there are days when I wish I was stone cold stupid, but I’m not … so I feel stress about all the crap I can’t do much about, especially stuff that isn’t getting the news airplay I think it should … like these pet food recalls. It’s an indicator of a larger problem, these Chinese imports that have seemingly been intentionally poisoned in order to boost their apparent protein content, and people should be paying attention. But then, it’s only cats and dogs, so it’s just really not that important is it? That’s another attitude that is pissing me off. Just cats and dogs. Uh huh. I’ll remember to say it’s just boys and girls when some kids treat pops up on a recall list for having some tainted Chinese crap in it.

One giant bag of Wellness Core now sits on my kitchen floor. It was the smallest bag they had (12 pounds), and I didn’t feel like searching for it anywhere else. That should last them about a month and a half (maybe more since it’s such a rich food). Also, they like it. Score!

The whole adventure of getting that bag of food was, of course, an adventure. I called a few places first to see if they carried it, and several places did but were out of stock, likely because all the cat owners in Austin don’t want to feed their cats any crap with grain in it thanks to the continuing recalls. I didn’t call Buck Moore Feed & Supply before going, because I felt like getting out of the house anyway, and it just sounded like a cool store to go to anyway. It’s been ages since I was in a real feed store. This meant driving in the university area, and that was going to be bad enough, but I also ran into a wreck blocking the road and road construction, so it was a pretty crazy trip once you add in the usual insane Austin traffic. I got there in one piece though, so in retrospect, it was sort of fun and challenging. My ability to drive the truck in city traffic improves all the time.

The feed store was awesome. As soon as I walked in the door, there was that old familiar smell. If you have never been in a real feed store, you won’t have any idea what I am talking about. I don’t even think I can describe it accurately. Think potting soil+fertilizers+feeds & seeds+animal medicines. That doesn’t sound like it would smell so great, and maybe to someone who hadn’t grown up around that combination of scents might hate it, but I love it. Brings back lots of good memories. And you have to keep in mind, I’m the sort of girl who likes to wear perfume that smells like dirt and fresh cut grass.

The staff was wonderful too. Super friendly and helpful. The guy was going to carry my bag of cat food out to my truck for me. He just grabbed it and started carrying it! Too sweet, but I informed him I was a country girl and more than capable of carrying a small bag of feed all by myself. I really liked the store and staff. It was, just for the time I was in there, like I was back in my hometown again and not in downtown Austin. Very refreshing. I may have to find excuses to go back more often.

The trip back was more slow and crazy traffic due to road construction. It was so bad, the traffic was even flowing over into the sleepy streets of my ‘hood. Yeah people, just because a street through a neighborhood runs East-West doesn’t mean it will get you to the highway. We have a bunch of dead ends and Cul de Sacs. There were people unfamiliar with our area driving in circles. Just crazy! That’s what they get for turning into what is obviously a sleepy little residential area with very narrow streets.

Now that the cats are fed and happy, I’m going to eat some lunch, call my mom, and then get some housework done. Poor Lin is working again today, so once I get that stuff done, I think it’s going to be time to play some Final Fantasy XII. I’m at the end game, and I just haven’t had the time to get back to it for weeks now, or when I had the time, I just didn’t feel like it. Well, I feel like it today. I need to get my game on!