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HOME INVASION

HOME INVASION

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last night i was nice and comfily asleep, lost in land of zzz’s when out of the corner of my dream-state hearing i note a weird cat noise.
eh, nothing of it. back to zzz land. nate, however, gets up and investigates. suddenly:
“KATE” – i look at the clock. it’s 3:30 a.m.
he runs into the bedroom, throws on the light. “the front door is wide open! that black stray cat was inside and i nearly pooped* my pants! ralf’s missing!”
i jumped out of bed, threw on sweatpants and sweatshirt, and hurried outside. chasey was patrolling the entryway like a cat sargeant, and i thought i saw sophie out of the corner of my eye.
grabbed flashlights on the way out and started calling for ralf. it wasn’t a long search – nate found him halfway to the intersection and hauled him inside. his tail was poofy but still curled up like a pig’s tail; it made for a weird combination.
no sign of sophie, so we did a house search for her, and she was under the bed, hiding.
so, i tried to get back asleep but was all keyed up, and i probably didn’t get back to actual sleep until probably 4:30-5.
i woke up for the morning groggy and headachey, but hauled myself out of bed. sophie, who normally is all up in my grill in the mornings, was nowhere to be seen (still under the bed).
~~~~~~~
today, i came home, and the first thing nate yelled when i walked in the door was HOME INVASION. chasey had puked on the bed twice during the day and was making attempts to puke all day. ralf was back to his usual dopey self. sophie was out from under the bed, and she hopped up in my lap. i started petting her, when i noticed a clot of something above her left eye. she had a gouge above her eye and a scratch below her eye: that stray cat almost took sophie’s eyeball out.
i see who the real hero is here.**
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*he didn’t say “pooped”
**it’s not ralf.

uhoh

uhoh

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so last weekend you know how nate and i put in the flower garden box at the front of the house? well, we had to jack it up to make it even. now the dirt is shifting and it’s been raining, and it’s pushing out the wood. i’m fully expected a blow-out tomorrow morning after all this rain tonight.
i’m not quite sure how to fix it! it would make since to push a stake of some sort deep in the ground to keep it in place or to drill something into the foundation. not sure how to go about this.
will have to use my google-fu to figure it out.

weekend projects continued…

weekend projects continued…

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so let’s see…
i painted my front door red. the front flowerbed box has been assembled and filled with dirt. hopefully the rain staves off long enough tomorrow for me to plant some flowers in it. pic will follow if there is no rain.
ALL VEGETABLES have been planted. i’m crossing my fingers that my tomatoes do something. if i don’t see any progress in two weeks, i’ll go to walmart closeout and buy their leftover tomato plants.
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i made lemon macaron yesterday, and they are DELICIOUS. time consuming as all get out, but delicious. i wonder how much money i could have sold the whole batch for sometimes. $75? maybe.
i visited megan and jane today. had cheese fries and moa time with megan. went to izzy’s ice cream shop with jane (wasn’t THAT impressed).
 

birdie

birdie

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Yellow-rumped_Warbler_m17-48-113_lit was a little after 10 p.m. when i got home from commencement last night. i grabbed the pizza i had brought home out of my passenger side and went to walk in the house, when i noticed right there in front of the door was a little bird hopping around. i think he was a yellow-rumped warbler.
i didn’t know how long he’d been in there, but he didn’t fly away when i got near him, so i stuck a cup over him to make sure he didn’t hop under my car while i put the pizza inside. nate came out too and poked the little bird to see if he would take off – nothin’.
so i scooped him up and placed him outside on the grass, hoping he would find his way back to wherever he came from. he didn’t fly away or anything, just hopped, and i wonder now if he had a wing issue that i should have helped him out with before throwing him to the elements.
this afternoon i suddenly thought of him and wanted to make sure he got away last night, so i scanned the part of the yard where i’d let him loose. sure enough – there he was on the grass, dead. 🙁 poor little bird. i don’t know if he was on his deathbed when i let him outside, or if he just didn’t have the wingpower to get through a close-to-freezing night. maybe i should have let him spend the night in the garage.
i know he’s just a bird, but it makes me kind of sad.

the birds! the birds!

the birds! the birds!

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goldfinchi got a bird feeder pole a few years ago for christmas because at the time i had no deck to nail bird feeders into. i hung up some feeders, and it seems like all i’d gotten in the past were wrens, robins, and blackbirds.
so i wasn’t expecting much when i stuck my pole out in my backyard and filled my feeders. boy was i in for a surprise.
baltimore_oriole_glamorthe first birds i noticed were the goldfinches. there are literal flocks of goldfinches that come and hang out on my feeders and on the ground for breakfast. then the orioles came! this was such a nice contrast to the boring blackbirds and wrens i’d gotten in the past.
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of course i got some purple finches (i’d had a few of those up in st. joe – not very common though). then i saw a few rose-breasted grosbeak and a few indigo buntings, as well as a woodpecker!
i decided to get a hummingbird feeder, which was a good move. i saw a hummingbird sunday morning zipping around the feeder.
 
Indigo Buntingi put my birdbook next to my sliding doors, and i need to get my long lens on my camera so i can start taking some pics of these birds.
 
 
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next step is a pair of binoculars. somehow i’ve become a bird watcher in my old age.

moving forward

moving forward

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even though nate doesn’t have a job and money’s tight, i still want to move forward with gutters, which means a deck is right around the corner. i still want a yard this summer, dang it! money or no money! sometimes i wish i could just forget about money and make things look nice. boooooooooo.
things this summer i want to do:
-gutters
-garden
-flowerbed in the front
-plant a tree in the front yard
-do something about the fact that i can see my neighbors’ firepit and party area while i ‘m standing anywhere in my living area
– if not a deck, put fake patio stuff on the ground in the back so i can sit out there in a chair
 

craigslist killer averted

craigslist killer averted

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i sold my chest freezer when nate and i moved (for too little, i might add).
i’ve been searching craigslist for a while for a decently sized chest freezer so i can get back to buying a quarter cow and hopefully some pork too. i needed something in the middle – nothing 5 cu. ft and not as big as my old one (25 cu. ft).
finally i found one in onalaska, so nate and i went over there today and got a medium-sized freezer – yay! it’s plugged in sitting the middle of my dining room right now to make 100% sure before hauling it down to the basement.
haven’t found the craigslist killer yet!

slowly but surely

slowly but surely

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you may recall: after crappy wireless quality on my ps3, i ran an ethernet cable out to the living room and found my wireless was just crappy, not crappy internet.
running a wire through the house, however, was not viable. it needed to run through the basement where i wouldn’t trip over it. it made sense for the cords to run from cable outlet to cable outlet, but SCARY, amiright?
i wanted to make sure i had the right measurements and general idea of how to go about running a cord through the basement to the living room, so my dad spent an afternoon with me a few weeks ago, and we got the general locations figured out for the holes in the floor to the cable outlet boxes. after some not so successful attempts, we gave up.
today i went back at it, breaking the bottoms out of the cable outlets so i could see what was going on. success! after making the holes a little bigger, i was able to run my drain cleaner thing up the hole from the basement and grab it from the upstairs. i taped the ethernet cord to the end and pulled it down to the basement, then up to the living room.
and because i don’t have the right boxes nor the supplies to make an actually cat5 outlet, i did the ghetto thing and just ran the cord from the bottom of the faceplates. ha! no one will see them anyway.  hooked that bad boy up to my switch, and now my ps3, tv, and xbox are all internet ready. woo!

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this is a horrible picture. but in the lower left you can kind of see the cord that’s just hanging out.

all good things

all good things

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so ends another year of kablpomo. i didn’t do half the things i wanted to do for it, but i did write every day, and that is the main point of kablpomo. on top of that, i didn’t forget any days, and i actually looked forward to blogging every day. i think that is a first in the 3 (4?) years i’ve been doing this.
you might not see a lot of me in december, as i will be compiling content for kablpoye (kate’s blog posting year) to celebrate 10 years of blogging (2004-2014, baby!), but i will pop in from time to time and let you know how houseblog and christmas are doing. i’m excited to get my tree this year and decorate. (last year was a bust as far as decorating for christmas.)
for the rest of today’s post: a reflection on houseblog.
my walls are as painted as i want them to be right now, i’ve got pictures up in the main parts of the house, and the garage is clear of stuff so that nate and i can both park in there (good thing, too, with snow coming this week). my living room isn’t quite as big as i’d hoped it’d be, but it’s certainly cozy enough and is set up for some good christmas movie viewing. with the blue grey walls and dark cabinets, my kitchen is as close to my favorite ikea kitchen as it’s going to get, i think. 🙂
the office is kind of boring right now and the bedroom needs some work, but for now it’ll be good enough.
this summer i need gutters for sure, and maybe we’ll start on the basement or deck. either one will work for me. for now, though, i think it’s time for a break and to sit down and enjoy the house.