Cold and Cats

The ridiculously cold weather is affecting many parts of life these days. Hearing it’s -14 (not including the windchill) outside the minute you wake up kind of kills your desire to get out of bed and go to work.



It’s also very dry so my skin is dying. There’s not enough lotion in the world to keep it hydrated. And the zillion papercuts I get everyday are magnified. My nose and sinuses have pretty much given up on me. I don’t have a cold, my nose is just so dry it bleeds at the drop of a hat. I’m doing what I can, but I can only drink so much water and shoot so much nasal spray up there in one day.

Also affected by the cold is my car. The check engine light came on (again) Thursday morning. So we did the great car switch and Adam’s dad took it in with him to work Friday morning. They ran the diagnostic and some gasket something or other is loose or something. I don’t know. But my car isn’t the only one who’s come in with this problem so they didn’t have the right part to fix it. And it’s backordered. So, my car will be fixed in two or three weeks. They tell me driving it won’t hurt it. I’m holding them to that. Luckily I don’t drive much anyway.

Anyway. All anyone can talk about these days is the weather. It’s supposed to warm up at some point. In April. *sigh* We’ve been kicking the heat up a couple of degrees the past few days. 65 just wasn’t cutting it. We still let it re-set to 63 overnight though. I’m plenty warm with blankets, Adam, and at least two cats sharing their warmth with me. And since they say most of your heat escapes from your head (although I remember reading something recently that debunked that), Carly takes care of that by wrapping herself around the top of mine. JC usually curls up by my knees. Even so, I’m not looking forward to our next gas bill.

Speaking of bills (and we were, kind of), I had my review at work a couple days ago. Four years now. One more year and I get an additional week of vacation. Boo-yah. Everything is great and wonderful. Go me. And this year I got 3.3% because they did some kind of funny math to get around the 3% freeze. Or something like that. It’s nice that I got a raise at all though, I know. Adam’s salary has been on a freeze for over a year. It’s rough. And now he’s gone back to hourly, which he was not too happy about. We do what we have to I guess. On the plus side, he now gets overtime again so when he worked on Saturday morning he got time and a half.

The weekend was pretty un-exciting. I did some shopping while Adam was at work yesterday morning. When he got home we headed to Simon's for cheese, Sam's club, and to American to complain (again) about our missing lamp. It's supposed to be delivered to the store tomorrow morning so we'll see. I made this leek & gnocchi bake that was so good.



I used prosciutto for the first (and probably last) time. It was so salty. And expensive. I'll probably go back to swapping bacon for it, but it was good to experiment a little.

This morning we did our weekend trip to Menards. We watched Mr. Woodcock. Well, I missed parts of it because I was doing laundry. But that's ok. I don't really dig Billy Bob anyway. He's... creepy. Adam went to get his haircut and then picked up lunch from this new place in town - Bumpa's Bagels - on his way home. The sandwiches were good. Mine was a bit messy, but they really piled the chicken salad on! The rest of the day was football. I spent the afternoon/evening going through all my old Rachael Ray magazines to clear off some shelf space and refresh my recipe library.

I also spent a good portion of the evening taking pictures of the cats. They seemed to be doing all kinds of weird and interesting things:

JC & Carly, tolerating each other's existence:


Connor, so serious:


Seriously, this cat HATES me...


Aah, the fun of a see-through coffee table:


In my head this shot reminds me a lot of that scene in As Good As it Gets where Greg Kinnear's character is sketching Helen Hunt's character in the hotel bathroom. When she walks, she's like a cat version of Raquel Welch. Does that make me weird?


This one will mess with your eyes. I caught a great photo op when the sun was shining in my eyes and I had to close the curtains. Looks like a shadow of Ted, right?


But you can tell in this one that it's actually Connor behind the curtain. So cool...


This one just amused me for some reason.


Streeeeeech!


Amazingly enough, Ted can still squeeze himself into the teepee.


Connor nabs the best seat in the house.


The legless position that still baffles me.


And, finally, Adam's cat moustache that makes me crack up every time.