Remember the feral cats I was just introducing yesterday?

Well, I got home yesterday evening and discovered these on my porch:

Little wet babies

Yes, Magic Chef decided to have her kittens on a slatted porch three feet off the ground.

One of the kittens had fallen off when I found them and was laying on the ground, crying, so I picked it back up and set it with Mama. In other news, Magic Chef can now be called Magic, because she not only let me handle her newborn kittens, but she also walked up to me and asked to be pet. I guess the hormones have made her no longer a jerk!

I stood by the edge of the porch for a while and watched the babies to make sure they didn't fall off. She dried and cleaned one of them really well, but the one that had fallen was still soaked.

So defenseless

I was worried, and I still am a little, because this is her first litter. But, she purred and talked to them, so hopefully instinct will take over.

You can do it!

Eventually I went inside to change out of my heels from work and into my boots, and when I came back out, Magic and one of her kittens were gone. I waited a few minutes, and she came back and carried off the other one. I later discovered that she had stashed them in the insulation up under my house, which is pretty clever if you ask me. Although that probably needs to be fixed when the kittens are no longer using it.

She seems to be keeping an eye on them- I walked over with a flashlight to peer up into the hole and see if I could see them, and she walked over to see what I was doing- and she got in with them while I was standing there because one was crying. They are just so tiny! I want to intervene and bring them inside where they are protected, but I know that she is the best thing for them. It's hard to stand back and let nature take its course.

Before Magic moved them, Romeo discovered them when walking back from his bathroom break. He was so concerned; he could hear them crying and was trying to reach where they were so he could see and smell them. I obliged him by letting him jump up so I could hold him and let him see, but he couldn't get to them.

"Are these mine?"

The female cats love him so much that they didn't care at all that he was so close, not even when he got up on the porch and walked as close as he could get to them.

Hopefully in a few weeks the kittens will reemerge as healthy, playful babies. And hopefully, since their moms trust us, we can win them over quickly and then maybe find them homes when they are of age. And then, if everything goes according to plan, we'll be able to get Magic and Lexi spayed and hopefully have no more kittens. Maybe Juan Pablo, as well. There are so many generations living at my landlord's house across the pond that it's only a matter of time before another cat works its way over.

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Wacky Weather We're Having

Anytime I talk about the weather, I think of this quote from The Most Interesting Man in the World:

"He never chats about the weather, even in the middle of a hurricane."

And then I feel self-conscious. But oh well! We shall continue forth.

This Thursday through Friday, it rained. And I do mean RAINED. As in, there were two days in a row that I expected to have to float my way back to my house, and the entire town flash-flooded.

"Oh sorry, did you need to see?" ~rain

There was also lightning... lots of lightning. The kind of lightning that leaves me just knowing that I will no longer have any horses left when it's over, and always thankful when I go outside and they're still standing, unharmed.

But the storms did bring with them a couple of neat things, like this water-soaked spider web:

Gross but pretty.

And this fella, who was very confused about why I was crouching down in its face, poking at it with a shovel (for the record, I was trying to drag it out with said shovel so I could see it in the light/keep it from disappearing into the feed room):

I was told this is either a cottonmouth or a water snake... I'm leaning towards the latter.

It was a weekend for wildlife.

Following on the heels of the sudden snake, while I was getting dinner ready for the horses, I looked over and saw this:

Nothin' to see here...

It watched me for a while, which kind of freaked me out because raccoons are not typically seen out in the day unless they are rabid or have distemper (or, a later Google search informed me, they are mommas with hungry babies). But, this one didn't seem sick; it seemed more like it was just waiting for me to leave so it could try to break into my feed cans like a jerk.

I saw one again yesterday in the small paddock by the house, scrounging for dropped grain, and then another one last night also digging for more dropped grain. Possibly all were the same raccoon... I'm starting to think we have a new addition to the feral cat colony establishing itself on my porch. Yippee.

Lexi and Magic Chef

A few months ago, a mama cat (dubbed "Mama") and her two kittens showed up at the house, expecting to be fed. We obliged them, and although Mama has since disappeared, her two kittens decided to stick around and eat food and perpetuate the bloodline (lucky us)- one of them has recently given birth, although we have not found the litter yet.

Although they were very skittish at first, Lexi has become very sweet. She rubs on you, is constantly demanding to be petted (when she is not demanding to be fed), and the other day I picked her up without fuss and carried her to my truck to "take care of" a dead bird that was stuck in my grill. She disposed of it for me in much less time than it would have taken for me to get it out.

Magic Chef is still skittish and can only be touched when she is eating. Oh, what's that? You want to know why her name is Magic Chef? Well, let me tell you!

One day we were trying to come up with names for the cats that had decided to stay. One of them was laying on top of a broken dishwasher that was recently replaced in the house, moved outside, and never picked up again. I told my roommate, "Whatever brand the dishwasher is, that's her name," thinking it would be something like "Maytag". My roommate walked over and said, "Uh, it's Magic Chef". To which I responded, "So let it be known."

As long as the cat is a brat that runs away instead of letting me pet it, she will be called Magic Chef. If, one day, she decided to be more friendly, I will shorten it to a more society-friendly "Magic".

Living the good life

This male, who I suspect is the proud papa of the recent litter(s), decided after being fed here a few times that he didn't really need to go back to wherever he came from. He has the funniest, squeakiest meow, that's even funnier since he's a male cat. He can be very skittish, which makes me wonder if he was abused, but he has become very sweet towards me and will come up to me and let me pet him.


He has a range of names- I usually just call him the first thing that comes to mind. Some of these names include Powderpuff, Juan Pablo, Juan Carlos, Rico Suave (apparently he's Hispanic), Paul, and Casanova.

Ah, the life of a country bumpkin.

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Weekend shenanigans

So this weekend went too quickly... but it was super productive.

For starters, I worked almost 15 hours on Saturday. Yikes. The good news is that I get paid overtime. The bad news is that... well, I had to spend an entire Saturday at work.

Saturday night, my friend Elizabeth, who was in town for a young professionals event, stayed out at the house. I can't say I was super awake once she got there, as I had been up since 5 that morning, but at least she got a warm welcome from Fiona and Romeo who were SO EXCITED about having a visitor!

Sunday morning, she and I went to breakfast, and then she headed back home. Meanwhile, I drove over to Half Price Books and browsed (and bought), passing the thirty or so minutes until Patricia and Justin got done with church so I could meet up with them... for lunch.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't immediately eat another full meal after having breakfast. On the bright side, the Ninfarita didn't affect me at all like it did the others, because of all of the food.

After Justin and Patricia headed back to Houston, I went home and, determined not to sleep the rest of the day, changed into my boots, put on a hat, and grabbed my new shatter-resistant sunglasses that make me look like Jack Nicholson. And then, I got out The Weed Eater. I call it The Weed Eater because it is like a weed eater on steroids. It looks like a push mower, and it can power through just about anything- probably even small trees. This is great for me, because I cannot. I did have an incident the last time I used it where it sucked up about 15 hay baling wires, which was about as fun as you can imagine to disassemble, requiring wire cutters and some swearing.

After weed eating everything I could find, I got out the riding mower and, sporting a sexy little respirator to protect myself from inhaling all of the flying dirt and debris, mowed down everything I could find. Mind you, I had just done all of this two weeks ago, but it was already starting to look like a jungle out there again. Poor Fiona was having to wade through the grass to go to the bathroom, and Romeo was tracking all kinds of grass seeds inside the house, courtesy of his face.

Then, not feeling like I had tortured myself enough, I pulled out the tree trimmers and clipped the trees on the sides of the driveway that were blocking my view when I pulled out, along with the tree that scraped the top of my truck when I drove under it. This entailed me hanging precariously over the ditch, reaching out as far as I could, along with a lot of jumping and clipping midair to get branches out of my reach. I definitely cursed my lack of tall boyfriends.

Anyway, I was very happy with the final result:

So manicured!

There are still a couple of trees that I could stand to weed eat around, but my screaming muscles today think it's ok to let them go.

Because of all of the yard work, I was super exhausted by the end of the day, so I created new ways to torture my horses that did not involve riding:

Sup.

Unimpressed, as usual

Poor Chica's eye flared up again with the Great Windstorm of May 2013, which is why it looks weepy there.

After getting everyone fed, I finally took some time to relax and watched the movie Clue while eating dinner, and then I started Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, which I'm excited about because I really enjoyed The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I'm aware that these are older books and not a new discovery, but they are just so clever! I'm super glad that it's a four-book trilogy.

I'm looking forward to next weekend- several friends are coming into town to hang out and paint the town red. The following weekend is another conference, but then the weekend after it- memorial day weekend!! At this moment I have no plans, nor do I plan to have plans. Three days of doing nothing except riding and reading and lounging about sound pretty swell to me right now.

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