The House, Disturbing Pet Stories and The Irish Kitty

We are now counting down the days until the big move! Four separate showings on the house this weekend with one couple extremely interested who already live in the neighborhood, but need a larger home to house them, their grown daughter and grandkids and an elderly mom. They also already have somebody interested in purchasing their house.

If we don't have an actual offer in a few weeks, we'll list with a realtor. The house is cleaner than ever and looking great. The Murph is starting to feel a little nostalgic about this house that he's been living in for 20 years. I warned him this would happen and he didn't believe me until now. I went through the same thing when I sold the house I had been living in for 18 years in December 2011 to move here.

Really he's doing much better than I did so far since I had minor anxiety attacks and was literally shaking at closing. I was freezing cold that day too so that may have been what caused the shivers. Even though he's ready for a change and has been for a while, it is still difficult. The Boy called today and asked when are we moving down there. He's ready for me to be closer even though he's doing much better than I expected. He's doing great actually!

The house looks great though! The lawn guys came this morning and got all the leaves and the handy man/remodeler guy came and repaired some doors, installed a new toilet and did some caulking. Oh and repaired the shower doors of course. No more getting stuck in the shower from hell!

Ed's "room" minus the couch he use to hide under
note - no hairballs!

Notice no kitty throw up stains on carpet now!

Phantom is doing better, but I'm taking him to a kitty cardiologist to get an echo cardiogram to find out what's going on with his heart. Then we'll know what steps, if any, to take with him before we move. He's on a diuretic and special easy-to-digest food with probiotics sprinkled on to help keep him from throwing up, which would be really bad since the carpets are all cleaned!

Phantom's "room"

With everything that's going on around here with

the cats and the move, doing a spring marathon is 

out of the question. I can't even focus long enough to train for one! I didn't even do a long run this weekend and last weekend I struggled through 11 miles. I was doing good a couple of weeks ago, but now I just can't focus. I am going to pick it back up once we move and just try to hang in there with the basic minimum for now.

When I first got Cadence from the humane society, they had already micro chipped him just in case he ever got lost. Both my cats are microchipped, which the Murph totally doesn't understand because if they ever got "lost" why in the world would you want them back, he says. Neither of his cat's were micro chipped or updated on shots or anything. They are "just cats," he says. Now he's down to one since Boo died at age 12 last year of natural causes. I'm still trying to figure out how to sneak Ed to the vet for a thorough check up when the Murph's not around.

Speaking of "just cats", we went out with some friends S and C Saturday night and suddenly I'm seeing them in a new light. Just when you think you know people! C told a tale of having a sick old cat who had diabetes and his ex was spending thousands of dollars on the cat who C felt should be put out of his misery. One day he took the cat to a different vet far, far away from his regular one and had the cat put down while his ex was at work. If this wasn't enough, he then took the dead cat and put it in the garage. When the ex came home she was upset of course and he came in and acted surprised and upset too. But the ex was sure the cat wasn't dead so she made C take him to their local vet to check him out.

Of course, C was afraid to do this because he knew the cat was dead and didn't want his ex to know what really happened. The vet would be able to tell what had happened and C would be busted. The ex insisted so C reluctantly wrapped the cat in a towel and took him to the vet, but once there he refused to hand the cat over to the vet.

C acted incredibly upset and told the vet, "No, no, you can't have him. Nooooo...."and refused to hand him over or unwrap the dead cat. I guess the vet just listened for a heart beat through the towel and determined that the cat was indeed dead and the ex never knew any better.

Upon hearing this story, The Murph was all "YES! When it's time for them to go it's time for them to GO! No spending tons of money on treatments! They are "JUST CATS!" Upon which I give the Murph the stink eye and warn him to keep his paws off my cats and if something "mysterious" happens to one of them, I would be on to him and get an autopsy. Also, no matter what happens with Phantom's heart murmur, he's getting treatment until and ONLY until his quality of life is so bad it's no longer feasible to keep him alive and that would be for ME to decide and nobody else.

Image from remodelista.com

And then upon finding out that I had looked into getting baby chicks last year so we would have fresh, organic eggs and putting them in a fancy Martha Stewart chicken coop in the back yard where the play area use to be, S tells her disturbing baby chick story. When she was a little girl living on a chicken farm (the kind of chickens you eat, not the egg laying farms), her job was to feed the chickens and clean out the coop. She also had to weed out the little baby runt chicks that didn't look like they would make it so they wouldn't eat all the food that was for the healthy chicks. She did this by picking them up by the their little legs and "pinging" their little heads against the side of the coop. This killed them instantly and then she dropped them in a bucket and fed them to the hogs.

The perfect spot for the chicken coop except for the neighborhood covenants

I know!

I'll never look at "sweet" S the same way ever again! I now have nightmares of poor baby chicks getting pinged on the head and dead cats wrapped in towels in the middle of the garage.

Anyway back to micro chipping! Cadence's information is stored at Homeagain.com. I was going through all his papers from the humane society as I was attempting to update his information on the Homeagain website and discovered for the first time that his birthday is March 17. A St. Patrick's Day kitty! And we missed the opportunity to give him a serious St. Paddy birthday bash! He's 7 years old, which makes him 40 something in human years. How could I not have noticed that birth date all these years!

Image from zazzle.com

Happy Belated Birthday to Cadence, my little Irish kitty!

The Not So Great Baby Chick Idea

I had this really, really great idea to surprise The Murph this year with a few baby chicks for Easter.  I thought wouldn't it be great to have our very own egg laying chickens so we could have healthy organic fresh eggs to eat.  Sure we live in a subdivision, not out in the country, but so what.  Every year The Murph has a little spot in his yard where he has a little vegetable garden.  We also planted several different types of herbs last year, so wouldn't it be great to throw in a few chickens and build a chicken coop behind the garden and have fresh eggs as well?

I researched all about it on the internet, found a hatchery that ships 1 day old baby chicks in small quantities (I was going to order 5) in a mixture of white egg layers and brown egg layers.  I found out what you would need to take care of the baby chicks until they got big enough to put out in the yard and was ready to buy a starter kit which included a heat lamp, feeder, waterer, and starter food.  

I even found a really cute place that makes "green" chicken coops that look like an English estate, made of recycled wood from old houses and approved by Martha Stewart.  I mean OMG MARTHA STEWART!  We have the absolute perfect place to put a coop in a separate fenced area in the back yard that was The Girl's play yard when she was little.  The baby chicks would even have an old swing set to play on.  

For the past several months I have really been getting excited about this chicken idea.  I even had names picked out for them depending on their individual personalities of course.  There would be little Tuula,  Sophia Grace,  Rosie, Angelina, Martha Claire...all great names for chickens I think.

So the other day when I am about to place the order, actually pulling out the credit card to make the payment, a sudden disturbing thought stops me.  

Are chickens even allowed in this golf course neighborhood community?  How would I found out?  

So I took a shot and googled the covenants for my neighborhood, not really expecting anything to come up on the internet, but there they were, right there at my fingertips, much like the baby chicken order.

I was extremely disappointed to discover that live poultry was NOT allowed in this neighborhood at all.       Absolutely forbidden.  Pit Bulls, deadly snakes and wild boar, perfectly acceptable, just NO chickens.  So much for fresh, organic, home grown eggs.  

I broke down and confessed to The Murph, told him all about my great idea for fresh eggs, but he didn't think the idea was so great.  The eggs at the the grocery store are perfectly fine with him he said and he's now very thankful for those neighborhood covenants.  Four cats are enough.