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By Amber, on January 13, 2011, at 10:09 pm Yesterday while I was at work I was surprised to receive a call from our security company about a motion detector in our house being set off. Getting the alarm system set up was one of the first things we did when we bought the house in the summer of 2008, and we have never had a false alarm. The motion detector gets set whenever we are out or sleeping, and supposedly it takes an animal of at least 40 lbs to set off the kind we have. I was 80% sure that Sweet Pea had finally figured out a way to trigger it, but I had the dispatcher send the police to drive by anyway.
 Does this look like the face of shenanigans? The dispatcher was supposed to call me back and let me know whether the police had seen anything. One hour, two hours — we have had slow police responses in the past, and I was sure that our burglar alarm had been lost at the bottom of the priority list. I thought of the off chance that someone had broken in and I imagined Sweet Pea wandering the neighborhood, and not being able to find her as the sun set and the temperature plummeted. I couldn’t take it anymore; I had to go home.
I crept the car past the house a couple times, looking for anything out of place, and saw nothing but a tag from the police, who had indeed responded within 10-15 minutes of the alarm. Opened the garage, everything appeared to be there. I relaxed a little and I was dying to know what that cat had knocked over to set off the alarm. I came inside, stood and looked around carefully, and saw…nothing. Nothing out of place, nothing smashed to pieces.
So it looks like it was just a malfunction. At least, I hope it was — we only get so many free false alarms per year, and Sweet Pea is only two, so she has plenty of mayhem-causing years ahead of her. The security company will be out very soon to swap out our sensor and batteries, and hopefully I won’t get any more calls like I got yesterday.
On the other hand, if she did somehow trigger the alarm, the odds are good that she will do it again, because she does not learn:
Sometimes I get the impression that maybe she’s not very smart.
Either way, only she knows what really happened yesterday!
By Amber, on December 19, 2010, at 10:38 pm Today was delicious! It started with pomegranate:
And progressed to chocolate:
After breakfast I took my photo for MAC Me Over (did you enter?) and then did a whole lot of Christmas baking. Today was cheesecake day. I learned that making two cheesecakes in the mixer at once is not advisable — I’m a little surprised that my beater blade survived 64 oz of cream cheese at once, but it did! I have some other treats to make, but there weren’t enough hours today.
Of course, I got plenty of help from the Pea. When I’m cooking and she goes missing, I usually know where to look for her:
I don’t know what is so fun about getting trapped in small, dark spaces, but I guess we all need hobbies.
By Amber, on December 16, 2010, at 10:21 pm Mail delivery in our neighborhood is spotty — packages usually either get thrown over the gate or we have to pick them up from a USPS warehouse, which is seldom something convenient enough for us to do within a couple days. The one time I had to pick up something from FedEx, it was a nightmare — the customer service agent at the 800 number gave me one set of pretty reasonable hours, whereas the sign on the door at the depot indicated that they are only open to retrieve your package for about 10 hours total per week, all in the middle of weekdays. For some reason the staff took pity on the small crowd of us who’d received erroneous information, but they made it clear that they were not happy about it. (Then I submitted a detailed comment to the FedEx website suggesting that they find out the location’s real hours, and they emailed me to ask for more details, including the exact location, but I blew it off because I wasn’t sure how to get more exact than the street address that I had supplied in my original comment.)
Anyway, the point is that anything we order or receive as a gift gets sent to my office, where things are less likely to become airborne. If the mailroom staff at my company were locked in the mailroom for a year with no clocks or calendars, they would know when December had arrived solely by the number of packages that arrive addressed to me. (True story: the other day I thought my coworker had bad gas. At the end of the day I realized it was the gourmet food delivery sitting on my desk. He probably thought the smell was me. Sorry, Coworker!) Today’s load:
This morning the delivery guy asked how many more times he would be seeing me today. I told him I didn’t know, but that it would be plenty more before I left for the holidays! Sometimes it’s a little embarrassing to be the Girl With All the Packages. But not embarrassing enough to make me want to spend time at the mall and the post office during the holidays! (True story #2: the other day I waited in a long line to use the automated postal machine. The window line was even longer, so one guy ahead of me had decided to use the machine to print postage for his dozen Christmas cards, which meant having to go through the menu and the weighing process as many times as there were cards. Bless his heart.)
Time for some more holiday kitty pictures!
Happy Thursday!
By Amber, on December 12, 2010, at 10:56 pm We’ve had a pretty relaxing weekend around here. We slept late, stuffed ourselves silly (as usual), and did some holiday shopping. Sometimes I like to take a lazy weekend day as an at-home spa day. I did that Saturday since we weren’t planning to leave the house, and I decided to have a little fun with my nail polish:
I liked it better in my head and at first I thought I’d be changing it before the weekend was over, but it’s growing on me. Reminds me a little of peacock feathers. Did my toes, too:
For the nail polish fiends, that’s two coats of Revlon in ‘Minted’ and one of Nicole by OPI in ‘Too Rich for You.’
Sweet Pea had a busy weekend of galloping around the living room, chasing after toys, attacking my feet, and singing outside the bedroom door. She sat on my lap for a movie Saturday night, which is a positive step in her snuggle training. She is taking a well-earned rest from all that productivity:
Just looking at that picture is making me sleepy. Do your pets have that effect on you, too?
By Amber, on December 9, 2010, at 10:00 pm Last weekend while Mark was at work, I turned on the holiday music channel and pulled out the decorations. Sweet Pea really seems to enjoy sprawling out under the tree:
I may or may not have had to teach her some things I may regret in order to get some of the pictures.
And that may or may not be the reason our fake tree has dropped a number of fake needles on the floor.
But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to get the shot. :)
By Amber, on December 2, 2010, at 10:00 pm I got out of the shower this evening and found Sweet Pea having a moment with my Toastmasters magazine. She just loves that Captain Sully:
Sully couldn’t compete with the tie on my robe, though. This is what happens every time I am working at the kitchen counter. I always think she’s just snuggling up to me, and then the wild leaping starts. When I wear a robe, she follows me and attacks the sash. She’s never met a cord or drawstring she could resist:
Anyway, this week went by more quickly than I expected. My highlights included enjoying leftover Thanksgiving food for a few days, a couple really good naps, and hitting a personal best on my deadlift. Oh, and relevant to that link, registration opened today for the Rodeo Run, and I did not register. After my second time running it this past February, I decided that I wasn’t doing the 10k event again. After Muddy Buddy in May, I decided to stop running for a while. And shortly thereafter I decided to stop running altogether. I’ve tried very hard to like running, but after trying for far too long, I finally gave myself permission to hate it. I haven’t run since May and I am no less fit, so running can eat it.
By Amber, on October 19, 2010, at 10:21 pm Quick, what’s the difference between these two types of cat food?
Trick question — they’re the same food. The plate on the right has already been picked over. Sweet Pea won’t eat the rectangles. Sometimes she pushes them right off the plate. At the moment she is a little peeved that we put them in a bowl before we went to Dallas for the night, so she is having a harder time eating around the rectangles. When we come home from work, she acts like she’s starving despite a whole mess of food. I stir it up and she’s fine for a while.
I’m glad we didn’t buy a huge bag of this stuff, since we won’t be buying it again!
As for toast, or Toastmasters to be more precise, tonight I picked up my second ‘Best Table Topics’ ribbon to go with the one I was awarded last week. The topic was my first cell phone. I talked about the giant, grey brick of a phone that I used to call my mother when my car died on a busy road in a rainstorm, and I had just enough momentum to glide into the driveway of a very shady house. The very shady, but very nice inhabitants came out and actually got my car started again, by which time my mother arrived to follow me home. The people from that house also offered to follow us home, but we declined.
By Amber, on September 16, 2010, at 10:00 pm The Irish diplomats of the US, Southerners often have a nice way of saying things — like ‘bless your heart’ when they’d rather give you the finger. Or ‘palmetto bug‘ when they mean ‘the most enormous cockroach you’ll see outside of a zoo.’
Giant roaches are a fact of life down here in the subtropics. Mark keeps our house extremely clean (no small feat with me as his roommate), but we still see them once or twice a year. A couple nights ago Sweet Pea found one, and it was clearly the highlight of her life so far. It was either too dumb or too young to fly, so I let her chase it around until it became obvious that she had no idea what to do with the thing as it flailed on its back. I caught it under a glass where she eagerly inspected it until I decided it had been tortured enough, at which point I carried it downstairs and flung it over the fence into the vacant lot.
Yes, I know, it’s really not that large, but trust me — when they surprise you, they appear about five times their actual size! Click below for a video of Sweet Pea vs. the roach:
By Amber, on September 14, 2010, at 10:00 pm Just some foolishness from the weekend (click for video):
She really seemed to enjoy that game (though maybe not quite as much as my mom and I did). She’s definitely better at twirling clockwise than counter-clockwise. And now that the replacement part for the robopooper is here, we all have something to twirl about!
Bonus photo from the Houston Eating Tour’s grand finale dinner at Rattan:
By Amber, on September 5, 2010, at 8:00 pm It appears that sometime early last week, a vortex opened up above our house, and it has been spilling chaos all over our tidy life. We’re just trying to ride it out in good humor, hoping that this week will be better.
Wednesday afternoon: a Dior counter makeover that left me looking like a caricature of a fortune teller, followed by an increasingly frantic 40-minute search of every closet, cabinet, and cranny in the house for a cat that had seemingly vanished into thin air. I finally found her here:
She had crawled under the coffee table, where there is considerable open space, and slipped through the 4″ gap between the top of the drawer and the underside of the table. Finding herself stuck in the drawer — presumably all day, as her food was untouched — she didn’t even have the good sense to meow while I tore through the house looking for her. I guess she was comfortable. As for me, I think I lost a few years from my natural lifespan.
Thursday morning: got in the car at 5:15 to head for the gym and found it unresponsive. It cost half a day, but we got a new battery and got our money back on the one we had bought just 18 months ago. Lesson learned: buy a brand that can afford to advertise.
Friday: in the morning, a GFCI in the master bathroom tripped and wouldn’t reset, which doesn’t give you a nice feeling as you prepare to leave the house for the day. By the afternoon, one of the sinks in that bathroom had spontaneously broken:
Saturday: I woke up to a dead Litter Robot and a short trail of brown pawprints. We just bought the darn thing a month ago, and since Sweet Pea was in jail part of that time, it has been used for a total of maybe two weeks. Of course this happened on a holiday weekend, so there is no reaching customer service until Tuesday. We have the world’s most expensive scoop-it-yourself litterbox.
Oh, and then there is the mildew and the cracked windshield. Just more items for our to-do list.
However, it is still a holiday weekend. Today we had our usual Sunday brunch, tonight we are excited to try a restaurant where we’ve never eaten, and tomorrow we are sleeping late and then making one of our favorite breakfasts. We’ll also be crossing our fingers that life (and the cat) will take it easy on us this week!
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