It’s a beautiful sunny winter’s day! Beautiful, if you’re a polar bear, that is. Oh yes, it’s cold. It only got over freezing a little while ago, but the windchill is still below freezing. It’s going to be getting even colder tonight and tomorrow. Yuck. Bills be damned, I have achieved a state of near warmth in the house.

I’ve discovered a new way to annoy the cats. I put my large tomato plant on “their” stool in front of the kitchen window. Now they are annoyed because a) they can’t sit in the window and stare out at the cold back yard and b) they can’t mess with the tomato plant. The reason I put it there was because the brats were messing with the tomato plant. They managed to not mess with it at all until I woke up (late) today. I checked on it before I went to the bathroom to do the morning routine, and when I came out and checked again, someone had been digging in the pot. Dirt everywhere in the den!

No damage done to cats or the plant, but they need to leave it alone. I need that plant to survive, and they need to not eat a poisonous (to cats) plant. Putting it on the stool solves both those problems. Wish I would have thought about that last night, so I wouldn’t had have to cover it with plastic in the house. There just isn’t anywhere else to put it. It’s far too cold outside, which means it’s also far too cold in the laundry room and the storage room, and that leaves the rest of the house which is all thoroughly owned by the cats.

Though they don’t seem at all interested in the plant itself. No, they are in love with the dirt it’s planted in. Still, I am nervous about having a cat poisonous plant in the house … and nervous about anything happening to my precious tomato plant! Even if the tomatoes currently on it never become edible, that plant will be the source of my earliest ever spring tomatoes. It must survive!

I’ve been giggling at Tora for the last thirty minutes though, because she is the most irate about not being able to get to that potted plant, which leads me to believe she was the one responsible for digging in its dirt. She keeps walking around the base of the stool squeaking, and then she launches herself up my drafting table to get on top of the fridge to glare down at my precious plant from above.^† I’m sure she’ll eventually lose interest and go join the other monsters who are huddled under the heating vent over the bed and having a nap.

After assessing the food situation in the kitchen earlier, I really should have bought more stuff at the grocery store. We aren’t out of food, but I will have to be creative with what we have. Tonight I’ll be making what I call Stone Soup. You know that story, don’t you? I’ll be taking a bunch of odds and ends and tossing them together to make a big pot of something edible. I’ve got a bit of chicken, a bit of sausage, a bit of leftover chili, and a bit of leftover pasta. Add some canned tomatoes and maybe some potatoes and more onion and garlic, and it sounds like dinner to me! As an excuse to have the oven going, I’ll probably make some cheese cornbread as well. Yum!

Once all the odds and ends are cleared out of the freezer and fridge, I can determine how creative I will have to get with what’s left. We won’t starve. The cats, on the other hand, are starting to run low on food, and I’ve decided if they run out of food before the weather warms up a little on Monday, they will just have to eat each other. OK, maybe not, but I’m not going to the feed store this weekend. No way. I am not leaving the house unless it’s a real emergency. I’ll be cutting their food rations down just a little to stretch it out a bit. A little less food won’t hurt them. All three are tubby kitties. Let them burn some fat reserves while running around the house like crazy things. It’ll do them some good.

I’m sure there’s something I should be doing right now, like housework, but I ache all over and have a bit of a fever today. It feels like I might have some kind of flu. I hope not, but I’ve definitely caught something. So I’m going to take it easy today and sit and read or play video games and drug myself … right after I bundle up and go check the mail and see what the soil temperature is in the garden. I don’t want to go outside, but I can’t ignore the mail for more than a day, and I am curious about the soil temps right now. Besides, going outside will make it feel even warmer in the house when I get back indoors, right? :lol:

1. † Yes, my darling Tora who is now over a year old and should be just about full-sized can still run up my fully angled drafting table to get on the fridge. I’m quite surprised with her continuing agility, and the other two cats are excessively jealous. [↩]