Get Your Nose in There

So this is about cats. And the unspeakable things they do. In the basement. In a box. I don’t have kids, so welcome to my own version of a brag book. Only with more scent-erific imagery. If you have a cat and/or knows someone who does, read on. The following entry contains some useful information. if you’d rather not read my musings about kitty litter, please browse my Amazon Wish List. December is a long way offto wait.

The worst thing about having cats is that they don’t take too well to toilet-training. I acknowledge that this CAN be done. Frankly, I don’t have the patience that would be involved and cats using the toilet? Isn’t there a line somewhere? Wouldn’t it be weird? Sorry, you’ll just have to wait, Marzipan over did it on the kibble this morning.

We have tried several brands of kitty litter. We’ve done scoopable. We’ve done variations on flushable. We thought we’d hit the nail on the head when we introduced those silica crystals. But we had no idea. Last month, while shopping for some little of the kitty variety, the Pet Shop Lady (not Pet Shop Boy… too bad that) suggested we try this. Hello Feline Fresh. She claimed that one could hold the litter box right up under one’s nose and not have the feeling of being chloroformed by a member of the Mob. This is important because I often want to hold a giant box of cat business right up to my nose. Combine this with the fact that I’m a sucker for a rewards program (buy eleventy-hundred, get one free, yes!) and I was sold.

Friends. She wasn’t kidding. This is THE best litter I have tried to date. The folks at Feline Fresh are NOT paying me to tell you about this (ps… Feline Fresh? I have HUGE student loan debt). Out of the goodness of my double cat household heart am telling you, get thee to the pet shop and get yourself a huge bag of Feline Fresh. It’s biodegradable! It clumps! It’s flushable! It will not do your laundry or make you pancakes or take your car for surprise tune-ups, but it will allow you to live out all dreams of placing your face right up against the place where your cat goes to the washroom. And if that’s not awesome, I don’t know what is.

Hippy to the Hoppa

I just spent a week with a bunch of Jonas Brothers obsessed girls. They pretty much convinced me that if one enjoys the vocal stylings of Neil Diamond, and wears a head lamp at the campfire in order to better see the socks she’s knitting, one is not hip. Even in the slightest. No doubt there is some kind of text messaging acronym associated with a serious lack of cool, but since text messaging seems just a tad beyond my ever-aging reach, I don’t have a clue what that acronym might be.

Waaaaaaay back in July, Mack It Up Matheson tagged me to do some kind of blog-esque chain letter list type thing. Thank your lucky stars it wasn’t “One Hundred Things I Have Eaten” or “Between my Toes: A Chain Letter in Pictures”. She has simply asked that I list 7 songs over which I am currently obsessing. Now if I was hip and in the proverbial know, I might call this a meme? Would I? Wikipedia? Can you help me out? Yikes, don’t click that link unless your last name is Hawking. Ah, Daily Meme. There we are. It IS a meme! See? I am hip-hop-oppotamus! Take that!

And just to prove my with-it-ness, I’d like to share with you my seven selections. Sadly, you might come to the very quick realization my taste in music does nothing to aid in my bid for the Merit Badge of Cool. Here it is, nonetheless.

1. No Place at All – Sarah Slean

This could be legitimately cool.

2. I Make the Dough, You Get the Glory – Kathleen Edwards

Again, earning a touch of street cred. Then it gets ugly.

3. Another Day (That Time Forgot) – Neil Diamond

Oh, songs with brackets in the title, how I love thee! See Adams, Bryan: (Everything I Do) I Do It For You.

4. Super Trouper – Movie Soundtrack Recording

Can I get away with saying this is research for work? And not because one day I will be the star of Mamma Mia?

5. Salesmen, Cheats and Liars – Lowest of the Low

Boo yah! Here comes the cool, marching in to save the day!

6. Kathleen – Josh Ritter

Who? Exactly! Hip by default!

7. Bleeding Love – Leona Lewis

Maybe this is a step back in the eye’s of some, but crank it up and you just might find you agree.

I don’t know enough people in posession of a blog that I could possibly meme-along this bad boy, so if you’ve got the notion leave a comment re: your current favourite tune. Or most embarassing favourite tune. Please. The Merit Badge depends on someone having slightly more eccentric taste in music than me.

Past Life Regression

Once upon a time in a former life, I attended The Culinary Institute of Canada in Charlottetown. While there, I learned a multitude of skills all related to the pastry chef trade. I made bread with a vengeance, I churned out huge volumes of lemon curd, pastry creme and raspberry coulis. I learned during one excruciating slide show about fruit. All fruit. Every fruit that could be listed in a Power Point presentation. For those of you not aware, that equals a tremendous amount of fruit and one really long nap.

One of the things that sticks with me most was the week we spent with a bag of piping jelly, rolls of parchment paper and a couple of templates. Our mission? Pipe. Dump that absurdly coloured apricot jelly into a bag with a tiny hole at one end and squeeze it into some semblance of a design. Our Chef Instructor was some kind of hard core. We couldn’t lay down our piping bags until we could produce at least eleventy-hundred IDENTICAL twirly shapes. He mocked us and said that if we could not pipe we might as well be writing “Happy Birthday” on cakes at Dairy Queen. Gasp! Surely not. And so we piped.

A few years later and I am attempting to put myself through teachers college. “I’ve got mad piping skillz”, I think. And where do the best of the best go when they want to do a little piping? Not Dairy Queen, oh no, that’s for amateurs and sissies. I took my mighty case of Piper’s Elbow right into the bakery department at a local chain grocery store. I was the fastest cake decorator the President has ever seen. People would gather to watch me line ‘em up and slap on the non-dairy edible topping. They’d thrill as I made icing flowers and sprinkled cakes with technicolour dragees! Ooh!

Obviously, I couldn’t be there twenty four hours a day to write “Happy Birthday Norm” or “Showers of Happiness Susan” on every cake that came through the place. In theory, every person who worked in the bakery had to possess a small amount of piping skill. Enough to eke out a meager “Congrats” when the regular cake decorator was enjoying a gin and tonic and a night out.

There was one guy. His piping was abysmal. The worst (and also most hilarious) part was that instead of dumping his duds into the trash, he’d line them up in the fridge so we could all have a good laugh the next day. Sometimes I’d walk into the store, taking tally of what I would need to bring the cake counter up to snuff remarking that we must have had a crazy run on cakes last night. Someone sure had a lot of birthdays yesterday. Yuk yuk. But then, I’d walk into the cooler and see twelve cakes lined up with Hapy BirthDay, or Happ Birthda barely contained on the top of the cake. Misspellings, sloppy pipemanship, random misfires from the piping bag – all the night’s carnage was right there on display.

Tonight I came across Cake Wrecks. Perhaps it takes a hardened piper to appreciate some of the nightmares,  but this stuff could not be made up. Pure cake decorating gold!

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

And please do not forget the knitting!

Stitch and Pitch. Jays vs Athletics. Tomorrow night. Be there.