Partial to the bean…

We brought our new kitty boyz (Dooley & Cream, rechristened Fred & George) home on Friday. They spent the first day/night in the downstairs area (with the pool table and the litter boxes and lots of stored stuff to hide behind or under). Yesterday morning we opened the door to the rest of the house; Fred was all, “it’s about time” and dashed upstairs to explore. George was more, “what fresh hell is this???” and slunk back under the pool table. Since then Fred’s had the run of the place and seems quite happy. George is pleased to have visitors in his hidey-hole lair but is nowhere near ready to venture out to the living areas.

Concerns so far: Fred’s a jumper, so it’s going to be a challenge keeping him off of the counters, making sure none of the plants on the windowsills get knocked down, etc. He’s also extremely interested in the guinea pigs and jumped on top of their cage last night, which freaked them out (understandably). It’s impossible to tell whether this is “wow, those are cool wiggly things, I want to smell them” interest or “wow, those things look delicious, I want to rip them apart” interest. As for George, besides the extreme shyness, he is an eater, which means (a) he’s a big fatty boy, (b) he’s going through the food in a nervous eater way, hitting the food bowl every time anyone comes down to see him, and (c) he will eat scraps and bits of anything he finds on the floor — like dead leaves tracked in from outside, spiderwebs he finds in the corners, shiny bits of the toys that were sent with him from his foster home, etc. We’ll definitely have to be extra-careful about any little bits we leave on the floor.

On the upside, there’s this.

Another reason I’m freaking out about the cats (who are coming to live with us on Friday! Yay!!): I have no idea how they’re going to react to the guinea pigs. I’m extremely worried that they’re going to stalk them, climb on the cage, and otherwise be all bloodlust-y about them. When we brought the piggles home to Lilith, she was like 18 years old and she was like, “guinea pigs? Okay. Whatever.” So I have no experience introducing healthy full-grown guinea pigs to healthy full-grown cats. If anyone has any encouraging experiences to share, please do…

Since Lilith died in September of ‘10, we’ve been a cat-free household — just us and the guinea pigs. This has been an unusual state of affairs for us, obviously. We had Lilith for 19 years, her sister for most of that time as well, and there were other cats before them for both Anth and me. Going over a year without a kitty in the house is not the norm. The girls have been ready to add to our family for months and months and months now, but I’ve been dragging my feet, because it never felt like the right time.

I’m not entirely sure it feels like the right time now, either, but last night we submitted an application to adopt this guy and this guy from a local rescue organization. We went to the pet store after school yesterday to buy hay for the piggies and “Cream” (we won’t be keeping those names, BTW) and I just about fell in love. “Dooley” was sleeping for a long part of our visit, but he did wake up after a while and was quite friendly, especially with the girls. I’d said right from the start that, if we were going to get cats again, I’d want “teenagers”, ideally around 9-12 months old, so that we could get to know them as actual cats with personalities and not interchangeable balls of adorable fluff before we decided to adopt them. I wanted males, because I’ve found boy cats to be reliably sweeter than girls, and I wanted two cats who were already friendly with each other. Meeting these two last night just felt really right, and we’re going for it.

This is not to say that I am not freaking out. I am freaking out. This is because (a) we have not had any cats in over a year, so I’m “out of the groove” as far as cat care, and (b) the last few years of Lilith’s life were increasingly intensive in terms of the care and accommodations that she required, so that last time I had to provide cat care it was a real pain in the butt, and of course (c) I am living with a really uncomfortably high baseline level of stress these days, and I kept saying that we’d think about cats when things settled down a little bit, but of course that’s never going to happen, so I’m just taking the leap. But I’m feeling really intimidated and overwhelmed about it, making up disaster stories and worst-case scenarios and really losing track of the fact that people have cats and they get more cats and the cats just hang out and it’s totally fine and not a giant deal. Hopefully once the application process is completed and we get to visit with them some more and they come to live with us, the stress reduction of having cuddly furry things to pet will outweigh the increase in my workload that results when it turns out that, shockingly, 92% of the workload of caring for them falls onto me.

If you’re on Facebook and you’re seeing this (because my blog posts should still be automagically publishing to my Facebook wall), please leave me a comment on Facebook just to confirm that Facebook is not down for all…

Some of the sites that I can’t access this morning include:
- Facebook
- Twitter (sorta – the site itself loads but I can’t load any tweets)
- CNN
- USWX.com
- W00t
- Amazon
- Vimeo
- Netflix

Some of the sites that work just fine for me include:
- Google
- AccuWeather
- YouTube
- beanmom.com and all sites & lists hosted there, thank gawd

This site says that Facebook is up, but this site says it’s been down for two hours.

Silver lining: Alice will have no distractions from getting ready for school this morning, since she can’t get to her Facebook.

I woke up too dang early today — couldn’t stay asleep past 4:45 or so, which is rather massively uncool. Oh well, I thought, plenty of extra time to either get some work done, or use my bonus hour to noodle around guilt-free on Facebook. But I can’t get to Facebook. Or CNN. Or Twitter. Or any of my work sites. The Internet Traffic Report shows a large number of big routers down, including the one nearest to me. I can get to some things (like my site, obviously), but not others. Hmf.

In other news, we finished turning the key on Sammi’s palate expander last week. We actually only turned it 28 times, so there’s 2 more to go, but the orthodontist appointment was on day 28 and he said “close enough”. I asked Sammi if I could do those last couple of turns anyway but she wasn’t up for it. And speaking of Sammi’s teeth, on Sunday night I was flossing them, and one of them fell out. It was a baby tooth, thankfully, but not one that anyone had noticed was loose, so that was shocking and surreal.

…every year around this time, Google makes an amazing announcement, and ThinkGeek puts out a raft of fantastic new products! Has anyone else seen any mind-boggling news today??