My long awaited return to blogging

As numerous people (Steven and Taylor) have pointed out, I have not "taken to my blog" in quite some time. In general, I feel like there is very little to write about, as there is very little going on. I am still jobless, the apartment is pretty put together, all (well, all but one) of our boxes are unpacked. This problem is compounded by the fact that I began an entry several days ago, Firefox crashed, and I lost the post. How does one recover from such a profound loss? I feel like the only things I have to talk about are my cat and things that I've cooked. And while I enjoy them, I don't know that I really want to turn this into a cat or cooking or cat cooking blog. But I suppose if I'm going to write, it is going to have to be about one of those things.

So first up is Josie. I don't think we had her the last time I posted, or maybe we did but I refrained from mentioning her because we didn't know if we were going to keep her. Our relationship with Josie was a work in progress, which I am happy to report is now blossoming. When we adopted her from PetSmart on that fateful Saturday, we did so knowing that we would have two weeks to give her back should things not work out. We had been told that Josie was "shy" (a word that turned out to be a major understatement) and would need a little time to adjust. When we brought her home, we quickly learned that beyond being shy, she was completely unsocialized and pretty feral. As we are not small enough to wedge ourselves behind the couch, we didn't see her for the first two days she was here. The two week trial period loomed over us like a dark cloud. What if we kept her for two weeks and she still hated/was petrified of us? Did we really want to be the people who returned a fluffy, adorable kitten? There is something shameful about returning a pet, even if it is in the best interests of the animal and the owner. Suffice it to say, Josie was stressing us out.

I had heard that it sometimes takes parents a while to love and bond with a new baby. I can understand that. I don't find babies to be inherently lovable. Kittens, however? I have never met a kitten that I didn't instantly love. I was worried that even if we kept Josie, I would never REALLY love her because I couldn't even get near her. Everything changed when I approached the situation from a "tough love" perspective. She wouldn't eat unless she came out and ate in front of Steven or me. I spent numerous hours sitting in the room with her, so she would get used to me. Copious amounts of meat flavored baby food helped. Slowly, Josie came around.

Now as I type this, Josie is sprawled out on my lap, fast asleep. This is a daily routine for us. After she has tired herself out playing with her toys and doing laps in the dining room, she curls up in my lap or on my chest and sleeps for as long as I let her. She loves watching TV, stretching herself so that she lays across both Steven and I. Our feral beast has truly become a lap cat, and we really love her.

In Josie related news, a few weeks ago I decided that Josie needed some artwork to contemplate. I had the idea to hang three small paintings above her bowls at "cat level." It would be cute. It would be whimsical. It would be a quick, cheap project (which are my favorite kind). I had wanted to try silhouette painting for a while, so after a quick trip to AC Moore it was settled: Josie would get three cat silhouette paintings. The most difficult part of the whole process was finding a cat silhouette to use for reference. A quick Google search will produce a slew of "Halloween cats," their backs arched and faces menacing. I wanted something a bit more serene. The easiest way to paint a silhouette is probably printing a photo, cutting it out carefully, tracing it on your canvas and painting around it. My canvases were so tiny that cutting out an image to trace on them would be more trouble than it was worth. I just freehanded the silhouettes onto the canvases and hoped for the best. Here is the end result:

(The far right painting is plum, not murky brown)

On boredom and desks

The drawbacks of being unemployed are vast. For starters, there is the obvious lack of money and the crippling fear that you will no longer be able to pay your bills. Another drawback is the boredom. When I was living at home I could combat this by keeping odd hours. This allowed me to sleep late and stay up all night, perusing the internet for bizarre things. Now that I am out on my own, I have to follow the sleep schedule of the household breadwinner. I get up when Steven does, and usually am asleep within an hour of him. This gives me roughly 8-10 daytime hours to try to fill with activities.

All this spare time allowed me to tackle a project that I had been mulling over for the last few months. When I was but a wee girl, my parents decided that they would turn our attic into a playroom for me and my two older brothers (my sister, Taylor, was just a toddler then, and letting her loose in the rickety attic of 100+ year old house wouldn't have been advisable). This "remodel" mainly consisted of the three of us choosing paint colors for our respective areas and covering any gaping holes in the floor with thick carpet. For now I won't talk about how our interpretation of sponge painting looked more like the house had sprung a rare pox, I will just focus on the desk. My father (who probably now would be labeled as a mild hoarder) found a broken desk out on someone's curb, and like many other things that he has found, felt that we needed to keep it. He mended the legs and put it in my corner of the attic. Over the next few years, we collectively realized that due to the frigid temperatures in the winter and the sweltering heat of the summer, the attic wasn't an ideal play place and the desk was moved to the bedroom that Taylor and I shared. For a while it was home to an ancient desktop computer but over time it became a place for me to stack (horrible, embarrassing) CDs and a place for my sister to stick her gum.

When we moved to our new house about 5 years ago, my sister and I finally got our own rooms and I had custody of the desk once again. At this point, some 11 or 12 years after acquiring it, the desk was a little worse for wear. Now that it wasn't buried under heaps of clothes and miscellanea, the desk looked dated and kind of junky. I had considered painting it, but that would require buying materials, and sanding it, and actually having to clean it out. And who really wants to do those things when Judge Judy is on and you are kind of tired anyway? Well, when Steven and I were assessing which furniture to bring with us into our new apartment, I felt somewhat protective of that old desk. Sure it was caked in gum and Sanrio stickers, but I couldn't just leave it. So we loaded it into the U-Haul and I got motivated.

I wish I had thought to take a picture of it before I got started. It was only after I sanded and primed it that I thought, "Ooh! Maybe this will turn out nicely and I can do a before and after!" Well, it's going to be more of a during and after. Here is a picture of the desk all primed and ready to be painted. This step was easily the grossest and most horrible as there are few things worse that touching gum that has been in a mouth that is not your own. If you want to imagine the before, picture orange-y wood and also, inexplicably, glitter in some drawers.

The following day I was up bright and early, ready to paint. After two coats of "Pins and Needles" the desk was looking infinitely better, but I really didn't want to put the old handles back on. There was nothing really wrong with them, but they were the same brass handles that has been packaged with every piece of wood furniture ever assembled. My desk deserved better.

So Steven and I ventured to Home Depot to look for new handles and also tiny nails for another side project. The handles there were nicer and certainly more modern, but nothing really matched the idea I had in my head. Nearly ready to give up, we ventured further down that aisle to a wall of silver fixtures, mainly intended for use in a sterile bathroom environment. And then I saw it. Handles better than those I could even dream of, and ON CLEARANCE. It was as if the fates had aligned just for me to have a marvelous desk.

I still have 3/4 of a quart left and am resisting the urge to paint the guest bathroom to match.