Interestingly, on the Saturday morning we plan to skip going to the market, because we have enough food for the coming week and we want to be lazy, is the very same Saturday morning we both spontaneously wake up at 5 am.

What the hell is that about?! Don’t our bodies know we planned to sleep in today?!

Dammit. I guess I’ll go make breakfast.

In the world of fruits and vegetables, things are not always perfect. Anyone who has ever planted a non-genetically-modified-to-be-perfect seed in dirt to produce produce or who has ever shopped at farmers markets or road-side stands will know … sometimes natural produce looks very different from the perfectly-sized and colored things you find at the local supermarket. For those who have never seen a carrot that looked like a hand or an eggplant with a hard-on, I present the Mutato Collection: “a collection of non-standard fruits, roots and vegetables found at Berlins farmers markets.”

Those of us who are more accustomed to peeling and chopping non-standard veggies can also marvel at the wonder of what nature does naturally. Truly some fascinating examples of truly natural produce! Some of them will make you giggle, and some of them may even make you blush.

Ronin is desperately trying to show me that the bowl … it is empty! Something must be done about the empty bowl! Poor, poor, kitty.

There has been much eating, sleeping and cleaning of house and body. Life is good, and it’s pizza day, which makes it even better.

Now let’s talk about the cats.

I have discovered how to get the little brats to be affectionate. Allow an empty food bowl to remain empty.

I fed them yesterday morning, more than their regular daily allotment, but by nightfall, that was all gone. I meant to put a little more food in their bowls after we had dinner, but I fell asleep. When I awoke this morning (still on the couch), I had cats all over me. They weren’t just laying there sleeping either. No, they were rolling around, purring, and begging in the usual adorable ways, and I suspect they had been at it for a while before I became conscious enough to notice. They followed me to the kitchen when I went to make the coffee, and both of them kept rubbing against my legs and then running to the very empty bowls. I ignored them. It isn’t as if they were in any way, shape, or form actually in danger of starving.

After getting Lin off to work, I poured about a half cup of food into each bowl, so I could go back to sleep for a while in peace.

I was allowed a few hours of peaceful sleeping, but as soon as those bowls were empty again, I found myself with two squirming cats on top of me being general pests. Now the rolling around, purring and quiet mewing is easy to ignore and sleep through. I do, after all, sleep with another human being on a regular basis who snores, tosses and turns, steals the covers and hogs the bed. Somehow, I manage to sleep through all of that, so a combined twenty-five pounds or so of cats is no challenge to my ability to remain asleep if I so choose. But they have found one method guaranteed to wake me up … staring and face touching.

Both of them will find locations near my face that allows them to stare, unblinking directly into my closed eyes at just about whisker length away, and then they take turns gently placing a paw on my nose or in my mouth. The first few times they do it, I usually just open one eye far enough to see four huge eyes staring right back at me. They keep at it though … the staring and face touching … until I can’t ignore it and have to wake up. As soon as both my eyes are fully open, they pour on the cute at unimaginable levels. Really, these cats are “cute” professionals.

Well, they may have gotten me out of bed this morning far earlier than I would have gotten out of bed had they not been pests, but I am not putting any more food in those bowls! They have had half their food for the day, and if I give them more now, they will only finish that off and demand more later. I have been giving in to their precious demands too much the last few weeks, and it is starting to show in the form of overly-tubby cat bellies and a large bag of food that is becoming empty at much too quick a rate. They’ll get more food at dinner and not a moment before!

Meanwhile, they are now my very best friends EVER. No matter where I am or what I am doing, I have two cats a few inches away entertaining me with precious cat antics, licking my toes, or in my lap purring madly … all interspersed with trips to the food bowls to check their still empty state. I am rather enjoying all the attention. In fact, I am enjoying it so much, I think splitting the daily feeding into two allotments will now be the norm. Besides, they need to learn that an empty bowl does not mean an empty stomach. Naturally, they do not agree with the concept and seem to believe that an empty bowl means they are going to die within the hour from lack of food. As if these cats even know what hunger is. They are both spoiled rotten with treats and over-fed on a daily basis, and their increasing girth is evidence of that fact.

Well, I am not giving in to the cuteness overload. Maybe by dinner time they will know what an actual hunger pain is … provided I can resist giving them treats for putting on such a great show today for my benefit.

The gas guy has been here!!! He was super sweet and talkative. I didn’t feel weird at all letting him through the house to get to the water heater. Had some problems getting the water heater going (oh my god no), but eventually he got the pilot light lit and told me to wait until the knob popped up and turn it to the on position. It was taking forever, and he said that’s a sign that the box on it is starting to go, and he suggested rather than replace the whole heater, we could just replace that box, and it would be way cheaper.

It’s a little too late in the day to start making bread. We’ll just have to do without tonight. I’m far too tired anyway, not having gotten any sleep yet. At least we’ll have Eggplant Lasagna tonight for dinner!

I’m dying to take a shower. Really. Dying. I wonder how long it’s going to take my ancient water heater to get that water heated up. Hopefully not too long, because I don’t think I can go to sleep until I have had a shower and washed my hair. I was doing OK with not having had a shower since early Tuesday until I got rained on this morning, and since then, I have felt totally gross. Supposedly it only takes about 30 minutes to heat the water in one our size, but considering the age of the thing, I’m betting it takes longer. I’ll be checking in 30 minutes all the same. I really, really want to take a shower!

Phew. One crisis over.

Told you he’d get here later rather than earlier, didn’t I?

Town Lake is no more.

No, nothing horrible has happened to the nice body of water in downtown Austin, but the Austin City Council renamed it to Lady Bird Lake less than an hour ago.

Not that I don’t like Lady Bird and don’t think naming something after her is a great idea … and she did such a great job getting Town Lake beautified in the late 60’s … but the renaming of things that have had their names for ages somewhat annoys me.

Doesn’t really matter. I’ll probably still be calling it Town Lake until the day I die. The only people who won’t know what I am talking about are non-Austinites and young people, and both of those subsets of humans will probably just chalk it up to me being a doddering old fool who doesn’t know the names of things.

I was bored, so I pestered the cats with the camera. Nothing much good came of it, likely because this would be their preferred prime sleeping time. This one was barely cute enough to post, so out of boredom, I will post it.

If it’s going to rain all day today, I hope it doesn’t rain as hard as it is right now. Wow. I ran one more small bag of trash out to the bin, and it caught me as I was getting back to the house. Light mist to torrential downpour (called a turd floater around here) in about a millisecond!

I am done making the house nice for the gas guy’s eventual appearance. Fact of the matter is, it is so dark in here right now, even with lamps on, I could hide a dead body in a dark corner, and unless it was stinking, you’d never know it was there. I mean, it’s like night-time dark in here. I hate it! Makes it easy to ignore the clutter though, so for today, I won’t gripe about how dark it is in the house when it storms. Well, I won’t gripe much.

Lin plopped a huge potted Oleander on the front porch this morning. He wants to plant it between the windows on the front of the house. I was pretty excited about that until he told me not to touch it and to read up on it. It seems that Oleanders are extremely poisonous. You don’t even want to get the sap on your skin. Yeah, that’s pretty damn poisonous. Now that I know more about it, even though it would be quite lovely in our front yard, I am less than thrilled about having it there. I’ll have to debate with myself about it a little more before making a decision on whether to keep it or not.

I said I wouldn’t gripe about the rain anymore today, but I do want to gripe about something all this rain has been causing, other than local flooding and my soggy, soggy yard. Snails. We have been over-run with snails. Snails of all sorts and sizes. I don’t dislike snails, when I see one or two of them a day, but when I step into my laundry room or wander around my yard and I can’t help but walk on what feels like a solid bed of snails, that’s just too many snails. I’ve had to start wearing shoes to do the laundry and go out into the yard. Yeah, shoes! I hate wearing shoes, but as gross as walking on and crushing a bunch of snails while wearing shoes is, doing so with bare feet is about ten thousand times more gross. If this snail over-population keeps going, we are going to have to do something about it. It’s not too mission-critical at the moment, but we want to put in a veggie garden soon, and snails are hell on gardens. I refuse to share my produce with a gazillion snails or have them chew the leaves off everything I put in the ground.

It’s not even 9 am yet. It’s going to be a long and boring day. I think I’ll go do some yoga … in the eternal darkness of my living room.

Just read today’s weather report. There’s a 100% chance of rain here today. Gah! That’s just not right! No more rain! We have had enough!

In other rain-related news, FEMA is revising the flood plains for Travis County, and now our little speck of earth is only a half a block from the edge of a floodplain. In fact, our little speck of earth seems to be on a hill almost entirely surrounded by floodplains. Great. We will only get soggy and maybe be trapped in our home should it ever flood in our part of town. Better than being flooded. Still, every time they revise these things, that line inches closer to our house. I’m not especially worried about actually being flooded, because I haven’t even seen water over the road down the street during this very wet year. What I am worried about is having to buy flood insurance due to living in a floodplain. I haven’t looked into it yet, but I hear it is stupendously expensive.

Oh well, no sense worrying about it just yet. It’s still a half a block away. I better keep my eye on it though. If they revise them again after this year, I’d be inclined to want to get said flood insurance before the revisions pass, in hopes of paying a little less for it.

But please, really … Universe, are you listening?! No more rain!

I thought about going to sleep. Obviously all I did was think about it and not do it. I slept for a full and good eight hours yesterday afternoon. It’s not like laying down in a dark room was going to magically bring on sleep. Why bother trying? I didn’t. Instead, I crammed as much trash into the bin before wheeling it to the street, and then I did a few other cleaning-up type tasks around the house. The quiet ones I could get away with without waking up Lin. I’ll do the rest after he’s up and moving (in about 10 minutes), and then I will settle in on the couch to begin the wait for the service guy.

I guess I’ll tell you what the crisis has been now … now that I am not raving angry about it anymore, and it’s almost over.
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