you greatly disappoint me

  Editing pictures for the Etsy updates in April (current pieces still on sale, 40% off with code MAKINGROOM) I was just going through old photo files and cleaning things up a bit when i found a hilarious picture of one of my charges.
        You need to know that Olive is very sweet and affectionate, but in her old house her favorite perch was on top of the high shelves in the studio so sometimes a girl would look up from her project and be startled by eyes looking down from the ceiling thusly:

when are dogs toddlers?

Wiggle. Wriggle. BARK!

Furry frenzy: four months old. 

Just a rolling blur.

four month old Sasza with Nannie Niki

he's almost100 for goodness' sake

Welcome to another tale from The Suburban Jungle Book by Nikyard Hipling.
The average lifespan of a golden retriever is 11 years.

Max is 14.

Fourteen!

He has passed puppy, juvenile, dog and senior citizen, but he is still friendly and alert.
And not above trying to steal some of his sister's food.
Unbelievably, he is also still pretty spry.
Well. okay, spry might be reaching, but still pretty darn mobile for a nonagenarian.

Max has plenty of energy to continue practicing his hobbies of napping, pawing the carpet, napping, licking any exposed human skin he can find and napping.

Max in his favorite bed on the left and his other favorite bed on the right

Though not a big fan of steps, he can still get up and down them by himself. It might take a try or two so i always make sure that he has made it off of the porch before i close the backdoor.
One nice weather day i stayed outside to enjoy some fresh air and make a little vitamin D myself when i heard a crazy rustling sound.

Max was stretched out in the yard, paws in the air, rolling around like a puppy.
He squiggled and turned every which way with obvious joy.
There was pawwing and flailing and growling -the happy kind- and some quiet barks that were the closest things to a yip that a dog that size can make.
Sure, he flopped over tired and panting every once and a while, but he'd lay still for a few seconds, resting, sniffing the ground and then launch his paws back into the air for another round.

I have sat Max and his sister Zoe many times, but i will never forget the first time he completely shocked me with his energetic love of the outside.
Since then i have seen him shamble through the kitchen and stumble down the stairs only to run strong and graceful around the yard.
I guess no matter how old you are or how weak or tired, there is still joy to be found in the simple pleasure of rolling around in the sunshine.

there is hope and then there is folly

This tree "lives" in the sunroom at a house i often sit:

Really, homeowners?


Even I would have to admit that this plant is beyond saving and i keep flowers until every single petal and leaf has fallen off.
You are friendly, intelligent and have great taste in nannies.
Let the tree go.
 Let it go towards the light.
That tree is nothing but sad and painful to look at, which is a problem given that it right next to the tv the gets streaming Netflix.
It's okay.
I'll get you a new tree.
A tree with branches and the ability to photosynthesize.

Sad stick in a pot.

Bare, save a green cone cap.

Mayhaps you'll rebound.

attack of the cherry tomotoes

I enjoy working the land with my farmer BFF.
On the phone.
In the divine not-garden of my apartment.
Just 2 days ago i was helping her weed lima beans while painting my nails that stupid not-as-blue-as-advertised color.
Kudos to everyone who grows their own fruits and veggies and herbs or cultivates lovely flowers and bushes and bonsai. You people are amazing.
Growing things is not for me.
I vastly enjoyed a Chia Pet once, but that is the highlight of an otherwise bleak botanical history.
We already know that biting, stinging and/or blood-sucking insects are an issue for me.
Plus my ghostly pale to lobster red in 10 minutes or less complexion.
And the heat.
And the dirt.
And the back-breaking work.
Lordy, the WORK.
But tonight i stumbled upon yet another reason i shouldn't garden:
 the plants fight back, people!
The house i am currently sitting has an herb garden in the back and a lovely veggie patch on the side, both of which i have been faithfully watering, which is the one bit of gardening of which i am capable.
The garden is growing right along, bursting with produce.
The cherry tomatoes in particular are really producing lots of fruit; so much in fact, they were starting to look like clusters of grapes. I have been waiting for them to become red, but finally realized that these must be an orange variety as none turned red and the orange ones were so ripe they were falling off of the plants.
So i, as a good and industrious housesitter decided to pick them before they rotted.
It is all about the preparation, people.
I waited until the sun was below the houses, wore long pants and had on my wee mosquito fan.
I was safe to go into the garden.
The tomatoes were so plentiful and ripe that if i pulled one, ten more fell off the vine into vast squash vines that assured that the renegade tomatoes would never be found. A-ha! Holding my container under clumps of 'matoes meant that gravity did most of the work.
There is chicken wire around the patch. My people mcnugget-sized stature (totally saw that on a shirt that made me cackle with glee) was not aiding in the process of picking over the wire so i pulled it aside and entered the lion's den.
Man, there were a LOT of ripe wee tomatoes (too bad i don't really enjoy eating them) and even two impressive zucchini. I was just going about my merry picking way imaging how astounded and proud Rea would be when i told her i worked the land and how the home owners would be pleased as punch to come home to their own fresh harvest when i noticed it.
The backs of my hands were starting to itch a little.
Then they were starting to itch a lot.
Then, cheese and crackers, what is wrong with my hands?
I finished picking everything i could reach without wading into the vines themselves and ran into the house balancing the container full of 'matoes and giant zucchinis on my forearms.
Produce goes flying into one sink as i hit the water and start scrubbing my hands and wrists in the other (don't you love double sinks?) with the closely available Elmo Cherry Berry liquid soap.
Some chemical naturally occurring in the plants (as i know there are no pesticides, etc being used on this garden) was making me itch like mad and break out in crazy red patches.
Damn you histamine! 
Double scrubbing calmed my skin down enough for me to be able to rinse all the veggies and get them spread out on the counter to dry.
Then it was benadryl time both topically and internally.
Yes, my friends, i am actually allergic to working the land.
To paraphrase Dr. Ellie Sattler in Jurrasic Park (both the book and the movie): Plants are living organisms that will defend themselves, aggressively if need be.
Indeed.  

"i'm being chased by a snake in a fur coat"

I have never seen a dog chase its tail in real life.
I always assumed that it was one of those things used in cartoons and comics that doesn't actually happen.
This morning i was enlightened and delighted.

BTW, the title of this post comes from my all-time favorite Garfield comic strip.
(i think somewhere i still have the original that i clipped out of the paper when it was first published in the early/mid-80s)

from one nest to another

Oh hello there!

I am a girl about town right now, enjoying everyone else's vacations.

air conditioning... sigh

You're going away?

I will miss you terribly.

Can i have your keys?

sleeping with 2 blondes

Max and Zoe greeting me at the door

Meet Papi

Oh how i love housesitting, especially borrowing other people's pets for a little while.
The newest addition to my temporary menagerie is a black labrador retriever named Papi.
Well, he's mostly a black lab -about 75%- with a little something mixed in there, resulting in white toes on his hind paws and a fabulous white blaze on his chest. As a puppy his tremendously large and floppy ears -which he has grown into nicely - looked like they'd flap right off of his head like a butterfly or papillion in French, hence Papi.
Here are a few of Papi's usual attitudes:

I don't know what we're doing, but you have a cookie in your hand so i will play along.






Hi there! Wanna give me a cookie?







Was that the sound of someone opening the cookie jar?

When not eating cookies,
thinking about cookies,
asking for cookies
or going outside simply to convince you to give him a cookie, Papi enjoys playing tug of war and napping in a wing back chair.


Thoroughly an indoor dog  [when i took him out for a walk in the snow he was so, so, so excited to put on the leash and ran right out of the house directly to the car, assuming we were going for a ride; he stopped at every car along the street and looked at me like, Is this the car we're going in?], he does still have some genetic memory of being a retriever.

Look what i killed  for you!

Super excited to meet new people, Papi will spend 10 minutes ripping the stuffing out of a toy and then proudly present the eviscerated remains to said new person.


Papi's daddy, who was in Florida, is an antiques dealer and it shows in the house:

the hallway is better decorated and lit than some museum, the guest room is nicer and more beautiful than most hotels, the dog eats out of cut crystal bowls, the oven is used to store fabulous copper cookware (found out after preheating it to 450 degrees) and many items, like this rug, have tags on them like you could just buy them right there and then.
The bed in the guestroom is a one-of-a-kind daybed/chaise that is beautiful and comfortable; however, fitting a full grown lab and a not-insubstantial Niki onto a twin mattress was interesting, but after some accidental clawing, cold toes and issues about who was sleeping on which side (i don't sleep well unless i am on the right) we figured out that with an extra blanket and proper preparation it was indeed possible.

Such a pretty bed.

Unique. Classy. Lovely. Small.

The dog steals covers.

triple tigers

okay... they aren't really tigers.
This week I have been kittysitting a trio of tabby brothers:

Walter is super social and wants MORE TREATS every second of his life.

Jake is the smallest and really playful.

Zack is the least social with new people; I was warned that I might not ever see him.

This is how they line up on the tree for treats every single time: Walter on the top, Jake in the middle and Zack someplace in the back close enough that I knew he was there, but not close enough to touch.


Since they are cats I am not staying at the house, just going over every day and spending some time with them.
Normally our schedule is treats, playing, check water and clean litter boxes, play some more, treats again and then catnip before I leave.

If you are trying to play with/exercise three cats at once, laser pointer is the way to go.

All three of them were interested and I could make sure everyone had a turn.

It is fascinating to watch their behavior and try to guess who is going to attack next based on body language. They always set themselves up in a circle like pack hunters, but never attack at once.
Honestly, I could do this for hours and I think they could too. A few times we played until someone was breathing hard (I think it was Walter) or until all three of them had finally flopped over to be laying on their sides instead of crouched.

The only weird thing about the laser game was that Zack kept looking at me.
Not at my hand, not at the laser pointer, not in my general direction, AT me.
He would suddenly just look me right in the eyes, like I know you are doing this; i'm playing along because it is fun.
Unnerving.


There are lots of other toys that I've tried all week, but none of them engender the interest of the laser pointer, though Jake is quite fond of the feathered bell thing on a stick.

He'd catch it in his claws and then chew on the string trying to liberate it from the stick.

Smart kitty.

The second or third night he shocked me by jumping through the air to attack it.

You can tell that I wasn't expecting it by where I have the camera aimed.

This kitty was getting serious air; it looked like Air Jaws.

Even once I knew to point the camera higher he still managed to shock me by launching himself through the air at the toy and INTO me.

As I am getting ready to leave there is another round of treats and then I put some catnip on the middle layer of the kitty tree.
Interestingly, Walter -who loves treats more than he loves air- is not at all interested in the nip.
Jake has both eaten some and left it alone on different nights.
Anti-social Zack?
Totally a nip fiend.
I mean he is ALL ABOUT the catnip.
[When I put that together with his skittishness I imagine him in the basement, under a couch listening to Phish or Dashboard Confessional and writing somber poetry.]
In fact, if I have some catnip in my hand he will cozy right up to me and let me pet him.
The brothers' humans come home tomorrow night. I'll miss them -- not enough to adopt my own cats mind you, but still it has been a fun week.

MENTAL MORSEL: invented in 1960, lasers were top secret military technology. Now they are shaped like blue plastic mice and sold at PetSmart.

Public Service Announcement: This household uses a brand of kitty litter I haven't tried before: Tidy Cat. Let me tell you people, it is a freaking miracle. When you walk into the house you don't even know that a cat lives there, much less three of them. If you have cats, you might wanna consider the Tidy Cat.

Unnecessary but Relevant LOLcat:

i'm pretty sure it IS a law (state of course, not federal)

Since I no longer do a Mon-Fri 9-5 (or Mon-Fri 7-6 as was the case) I keep what is closer to my body's natural hours. That is, I sleep later and stay up later.
Night time is the right time in the Nikiverse.
Dinner, therefore, is often 8, 9 or 10pm. If I wait too much later than that I start to get a little odd as the blood sugar gets wobbly.
It is probably a good thing that I live alone because when this happens I tend to have arguments with myself or inanimate objects.
Case in point: on Sunday I was cooking tater tots around 11pm.
Tots are delicious as is, but i'd decided that I wanted them with a little cheese and a lot of Old Bay.  As the timer hit 2 minutes to go I went to the spice cabinet to get the Old Bay.
I didn't see it.

Now this isn't my house, but I am here often enough to know the kitchen pretty well and I know this is where spices are kept.
But it is a tall, narrow shelf, so maybe the can is behind something.
I move things around, lift things up, and stand on my tippitty-toes looking for the distinctive square, yellow metal container.
Nope.
Okay, I say out loud, maybe they have a bottle instead of a can; I mean I just bought a bottle instead of a can so maybe I just didn't see it cause I was looking for the can.
The shelves get tossed again, the timer rings to signal that the tots are ready and the Old Bay is nowhere to be found.
This is crazy, says I to absolutely no one without even a hint of irony.

The lower corner spinny shelves are where cooking things and staples are kept so I open it up and spy some dry rubs, including the house's favorite chili Lime from Stubb's.
This is where the Old Bay must be.
Spinning the top shelf all the way around yields no Old Bay.

Maybe they don't have any since they use so many other types of seasonings, I mused dejectedly, but then angrily replied to myself, No way, Niki; there isn't a house in Maryland that doesn't have Old Bay in it. It's like a LAW, for goodness sakes.
Come on, now; the tots are burning.

Which is when I notice the industrial sized spice containers on the very bottom, including, you guessed it:
Old Bay.
I knew it.
A house without Old Bay just isn't a home.

In case you were wondering,
the tater tots were fabulous.



ps- JP and KP you are out of tater tots

the simple answer isn't always obvious

Last night I was getting my daily blog post ready when the internet disappeared.
I mean, i'm sure the actual internet didn't disappear, but suddenly I was no longer a part of it.
Thinking the router might have had a blip, I went downstairs and reset it.
Back upstairs to my laptop.
No internet.
But now there is a window saying that the router needs a password.
Really?
Since I am housesitting I didn't know exactly what it wanted, but I know a few of the common passwords around here so I tried a bunch of user names and passwords.
Then I realized that it probably wanted the password form the back of the router.
Back downstairs, got the code, back upstairs, enter the code.
Nothing.
Then I realized that with that password there must be a specific assigned user name that I couldn't possibly guess.
Time to text JP.
He texted back a few questions, I replied and he texted back a suggestion.
Tried what he wanted.
Nothing.
A few minutes later he called my cell phone.
We talked through what I was seeing while he made suggestions.
Then we realized that he couldn't remember which password he used so maybe we'd do another reset.
Back downstairs to unplug the router instead of just hitting the button. Wait 20 seconds, plug it back in, back upstairs to check my laptop.
Nothing.
Back downstairs to turn on JP's computer. While it is booting up, he checks the password manager on his phone to find that he didn't enter this password.
Once his computer is running he has me open a browser hoping that the router password was saved and would automatically fill in.
It wasn't and it didn't.
Now we go through a jillion combinations of user names and passwords until HAZZAH we are in the router management program.
I am trying to describe what I see while he is trying to remember what the program looks like.
After a few minutes we realize that I am not on the same page as him, literally.
Random clicking of tabs gets me to the screen that he has been describing.
Right in the middle it says INTERNET STATUS: disconnected.
No doy, computer.
Tell us something we didn't know.
At this point we'd been on the phone for over 25 minutes trying to get this fixed. I am envisioning no internet until they get home in 10 days and JP is totally frustrated.
Exasperated he says pick up the phone and see if you have a dial tone.
silence
Yep, Fios was out; no phone and no internet.
And all we had to do to realize that was pick up the phone.
We said goodbye and I went home as it was almost 11pm and I wasn't waiting for Verizon to get their crapolla together.

Time elapsed from the internet disappearing until I knew what was wrong: 58 minutes.
Time it took to pick up the phone and test the dial tone: 3 seconds.
Time completely wasted that I will never get back: 57 minutes, 57 seconds

sigh...

returning to my pillow after housesitting

also the explanation for no post yesterday
;-)

 

a touch of perspective

A friend inquired if I find it hard to housesit in places where there are animals since I don't have any pets of my own.
It is a mixed bag to be certain.
I like animals and miss owning my own; it is great to borrow someone else's.
 Plus, who doesn't love cuddling with adorable balls of fur while watching Netflix until the wee hours of the morning?
The flip side is that I have been high on antihistamines for almost 10 days. I'm not allergic to fur on a day-to-day basis, but if there is a critter sleeping on the bed with me (or, you know, four of them) I have to take Claritin to be able to breathe when I wake up.
And litter boxes... enough said, right?
But even when a dog goes missing -he's under the bed pretending that he can't hear you- or a cat steals a sub roll from your plate -this is a different cat than the poptart cat; did they not get the memo about being carnivores- or the sister dogs refuse to go out to pee without each other and one of them doesn't want to go out right this second or a cat wants to play poof fetch for an hour -yes, one of the cats plays fetch like a dog- it doesn't really bother me when I remind myself of this:

Imagine fifteen hundred miles of that.
If that didn't send me over the edge, I doubt anything that happens in the ordinary course of a week of housesitting is going to break me.

Tang

A person's pantry tells a lot about them.
When housesitting i enjoy trying to glean insight into my friends' day to day lives by checking out the pantry. [and alphabetizing their spices because who in the world would look for the garlic powder next to the cinnamon?]
For instance, you can tell that a family with a few young children live in a house where Nilla Wafers and Shells and Cheese are purchased in bulk.

wait...


what's that tucked behind the Nilla Wafers?

TANG?

I didn't even know they still made this stuff.

I loved Tang as a kid.

The last time i had it must have been decades ago and i'm pretty sure it involved copious amounts of cheap, crappy vodka.

I definitely got have some Tang.

Being in someone else's kitchen is a constant guessing game.
 Pitcher... pitcher... pitcher... where is there a pitcher?
You know, a giant measuring cup will work just as well.

I made this Tang at 2am, put it in the fridge and drank it nice and cold with breakfast.
Tastes just like i remember: yummy in an odd way.
Thank you NASA for popularizing Tang; i enjoy it, even if Buzz Aldrin doesn't.

Now for the Mental Morsel of today's blog post:
It should surprise no one that the inventor of Tang -William A Mitchell- also invented Cool Whip and Pop Rocks: "foods" that are also as tasty as they are unnatural.

are your spots painted on?

I don't sleep at home much during the month of July because I house sit for a string of friends.
(dear potential thieves: that doesn't mean that my house is empty. not to mention, what would you steal anyway? It's not like my Pez collection is still there)
Right after I arrived at my current abode with the cutie beagle Guiness, I looked at him and thought that his large shoulder spot was running.

What?
Was that there 10 minutes ago?
Has it always been there?
Have I maybe never noticed it?
Is his fur changing with age?
I thought all of these things in rapid succession.
I mean I really thought that somehow he developed a stripe or that I hadn't noticed it in the years I have been staying with him.
It had been a long day.
Then realized that my hand was black, too.
Must be from petting him, my razor sharp mind deduced.
 Dirt.
A perfect line of dirt the same color as his spots from under his dad's truck.
I was able to get some of it off, but now he just needs a full-on bath. We'll leave that for his humans.

Less than an hour later, the cat stood on her back paws, grabbed my wrist with her front paws and took a bite of my brown sugar pop-tart.
Really?

I think it is gonna be a long month

but there's no problem staying warm

Dog, cat, dog, cat, me:

even in a king-sized bed,

it's kinda crowded.