Category Archives: Animalia

Just Because I Can

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Three Things Thursday is hosted at NerdintheBrain.com. Simple: List three things that make your life awesome.

Easy one today: Pets, Birthdays and Three-year-olds.

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Today is my dog Chules’ third birthday. I don’t have time to write a lengthy post today extolling all his many charms, so I’ll just post a couple of photos. I’ve already posted them on my Facebook page, on the American Eskimo Dog Lovers FB page, and now — just because I can — I’ll share them here as well.

We’ll just count this as Chules’ fifteen minutes of fame.

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And speaking of three-year-olds, here’s my favorite one:

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Weekend Coffee Share 3.4.17

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If we were having coffee, I would invite you in and advise you — as usual — to mind the obstacle course of clutter on our way to the couch. The clutter has rearranged a bit. The long cardboard box holding my new bifold door is gone from where it has lain on the floor in front of the living room window for longer than I care to admit, and the door is now bifolding where I installed it in the kitchen closet doorway.

The two large bags of Goodwill donations that sat on the flat box of wood veneer at the front door entrance have finally been duly donated. The box of veneer panels is still there, but is thinning as the veneer gets cut to size and used to line the newly painted kitchen cabinets.

The saw horse bench in the dining room has been dismantled, mostly because I needed to use the “bench” part to make new shelving for the aforementioned kitchen closet with the aforementioned new bifold door.

The kitchen linoleum sports even more paint splatters, although there is less linoleum to splatter as I have begun ripping it out in anticipation of new flooring.

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As you may have guessed by now, the kitchen remodel is still in progress, albeit a very slow progression. The wheels of remodeling turn slowly in my house. But that’s okay. If I weren’t puttering around with the kitchen, I would likely be sitting around getting bummed by the dreary gray skies and rain that have comprised this winter. I am soooo ready for spring.

I’m also eager for warmer weather so I can attempt the concrete counter top construction. Once poured into the melamine mold I built, the concrete will have to hang out in the (unheated) garage for a week or so to set and cure before I move it into the kitchen. I have no clue as to what I am doing with this, so the whole process will be yet another adventure in my DIY home impairment saga.

My dog Chules doesn’t mind the weather, but he is soooo ready for the kitchen remodel to be over. He doesn’t like the noise of the circular saw and the shop vac, although I think he secretly loves brushing up against the fresh paint and coming away with colorful stripes to adorn his fur.

The coffee has run out, so I guess it’s time to get on with the day. On today’s agenda: moving the cabinet doors into the glass studio and setting up space so I can begin painting them. Chules will be so disappointed that the doors are going to be white. No chance for stripes on his white fur.

Thanks for stopping by. If you have any pointers on making concrete countertops, feel free to comment. Maybe sharing ideas will help cement our friendship. (See what I did there?)

Have a great week!

#WeekendCoffeeShare is graciously hosted by Emily at NerdintheBrain.com.

Cat Wisdom

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This post is based upon a post I wrote for a prior blog I maintained in a previous lifetime.

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Cats are amazing creatures. Not just the whole landing on their feet thing, although that is pretty impressive. But think about it: how can an animal that spends so much of its time sleeping actually manage to develop a personality? And speaking of personalities: how does a pet that really doesn’t give a rip about anything or anyone become so endearing to us?

There’s a lot we can learn from cats, and not just how to eat an entire shrew in one piece. Here are five takeaways from my feline observations:

1. Two naps are better than one. At times when we are trying to weigh out a difficult matter, we are advised that it might be best to “sleep on it” rather than making a rash decision. Cats are very deliberate. They sleep on everything. Eat now or later? No rush, let’s sleep on it awhile. Tease the dog or ignore the dog? No need to decide right now. Sleep on it. Someone has laid out their best clothing for a very important engagement? Oh, cool! Let’s sleep on it!

2. A little spit goes a long way. Cats make do. They are masters at grooming. And yet, compare what they have to work with to our arsenal of personal hygiene products. We have deodorant, shampoos, conditioner, body soap, body lotion, skin cleansers, skin softeners… just to name some bare essentials. Cats have rough tongues and spit. They are minimalists, but they get the job done quite efficiently.

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3. Sometimes you just have to cough up a hairball. Cats are unceremonious about getting rid of what’s bugging them. They don’t worry about proper protocol; they just do what needs to be done. Sometimes we spend so much time hemming and hawing about how to do or say something that we forget what the issue was in the first place. You got something to say? Spit it out. Tactfully, of course. And not on the carpet.

4. Fetch is a four-letter word (and cats can’t spell). Cats don’t kowtow to anyone. You wanna throw a stick… you go fetch it. It’s not that they don’t care about anyone else. Well, maybe that’s it exactly. But for our purpose here, let’s just say that cats have high self-esteem and don’t feel the need to grovel. Groveling is bad, and it messes up the fur.

5. If it didn’t sit well the first time, don’t eat it again (are you dogs out there listening?!?). Cats are known for being finicky about what they eat. And not to pick on dogs, but dogs will eat things that cats won’t even look at sideways. In fact, dogs will eat things that cats have already eaten once. But I digress.

The lesson here is that we can be discriminating about what we will and will not accept or put up with in our lives. And just because someone else thinks something is a good idea for us, just remember it’s not their face in the food bowl.

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As I watch my kitty sitting next to me and staring blankly into space, I’m sure he is contemplating more nuggets of wisdom to reveal to me some day.

We’ve only just clawed the furniture – er, I mean scratched the surface.

The Daily Post Discover Challenge: Conventional Wisdom

Weekend Coffee Share (1/8/17)

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#WeekendCoffeeShare is graciously hosted by Diana at ParttimeMonsterBlog.com.

If we were having coffee, I’d advise you to bring a sweater when you come over. The house was 59 degrees (F) when I woke up this morning. It has since warmed up to 59.5. This is despite my heat pump running nonstop.

I don’t really understand how heat pumps are supposed to work. Something about exchanging inside air and outside air, but with the outside air at 33 degrees, I’m not sure I want it being pumped into my house. Nor do I want 90 degree air coming into my 88 degree home in the summer.

The user’s manual for the unit says something about how the system doesn’t work that great when it’s really cold or really hot outside. Seems to me, those would be the times you would most need it. I must be missing something about how the heat pump works. Mostly – right now – what I’m missing is heat.

Okay, I’m done complaining about creature comforts. For now.

If we were having coffee, I would update you on my kitchen remodel. It has progressed from, “This will be a fun challenge,” to “Oh my God! What have I gotten myself into?!?”

I decided to replace the double doors on the utility closet at the end of my cabinets with a bi-fold door to allow for better visibility and access. I will likely redo the kitchen floor in the near future, so I figured I might as well remove the multiple layers of flooring where I’ll be installing a sill for the bi-fold. The build up from one floor being laid over its predecessors over the years has accumulated to about an inch in depth, so it’s been like an archeological dig getting to the original surface.

I removed the facing at the base of the closet and discovered a mass of what appears to be old wall insulation that has likely housed many a generation of rodents over the past half century.

Without much further investigation, I cleaned all of that out with my shopvac (I haven’t looked yet to see if I sucked up any mousies into the vacuum). Then I peeked under the closet to see what else I might find.

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At the very back of the space, there are two little holes leading to the outer wall of the house. They are cute little holes. In fact they look kind of like the holes drawn in cartoons, where cute little whiskered animals live behind the walls.

Today, I’m going to seal off those cute little holes and remove the boards beneath the adjacent cabinets along that wall. I suspect that entire area has served as a superhighway for rodents over the decades.

Please, have another cup of coffee. I’m in no hurry to get to that particular task. Maybe I’ll position my cat at the entrance to the kitchen in case any current residents become displaced from their nests. The cat would love to make new friends. Unfortunately that’s about all he would do with them.

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I wonder if mice like coffee. Excuse me while I set out an extra cup. Do you suppose they take cream? Or just drink it black?

What? You’re leaving now? Well, okay. Watch your step. We wouldn’t want you squishing any of my cat’s new pets.

I wish you a fantastic, warm and vermin-free week!

Change is Afoot; Change is Ahead

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Two years ago I began a blog about my favorite pastime, stained glass. In my first post, I indicated that the blog, Glass Manifestations, would be about:

“glass (sort of) because working with glass is how I do a lot of my processing (thoughts, feelings, ideas, inspirations…), and hence a lot of my thoughts, feelings and ideas are made manifest in my art. But… also about insight and growth, in the hope that what I manifest tomorrow, or next week or next year – in life as well as in glass – will continue to improve. In quality, in meaningfulness, and in pure, simple pleasure.”

A month into the blog, I signed up for a WordPress Blogging U course on writing poetry. With the very first assignment, I realized that my poetry attempts might not fit into my Glass blog theme of insight and growth and meaningfulness.

Nope. That first poem was about leaky water faucets and dental floss. I decided I needed a different venue where I could express those random, ridiculous and totally irrelevant thoughts that obviously didn’t get the “meaningfulness” memo. Hence, What Rhymes with Stanza came into being.

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In the two years since, my Stanza blog has grown and expanded beyond poetry to where now I express my random, silly and possibly meaningful thoughts through photography, prose, embellished conversations amongst animals, and sometimes art.

The Glass blog, in the meantime, just wasn’t as fun a place to hang out for me. And so the blog languished in neglect.

With the new year, I’ve done a bit of reassessing about my blogs and have decided to combine the two, moving some of the material from the withering glass blog over to this site. Hopefully that will occur seamlessly and behind the scene, so long as I don’t confuse the export/import process with the reblog function. (If you see fifty new posts from me in a single day, you’ll know I failed.)

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This blog-meld won’t change the Stanza site to any significant degree. You’ll likely see more posts about stained glass and art, and I’ve added a gallery of my glass work for those of you who care to look. Other than that, you can expect my usual deep and evocative take on what chickens discuss when no one else is around, fascinating tips on how not to handle home improvement projects, copious photos of my pets, and maybe even a poem or two.

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I’m looking forward to a fun, random, insightful, meaningful year! I hope you stick around to share it with me.