Happy Thanksgiving!

Things I Say To My Cats

This post was inspired by a Facebook status update I posted earlier today, which was inspired by me realizing how much I talked to my cats when I was home alone with them on my lunch break from work.

This is just a small taste of the colorful conversations we regularly have.

Bad Hair Decisions

This is a story about bad decisions.

WARNING: This post is rated R for extreme hair choices, hair-related violence, and graphic incompetence. Not recommended for people who have a heart condition or are hairdressers and know better. Reader discretion is advised.

Part 1: "I need a haircut."

Once upon a time, it had been almost a year since I got it cut or colored, so my hair was pretty sad looking.

I knew it was long past time for a haircut, but I kept getting too busy or forgetting or just putting it off. 

My hair may not have a voice of its own, but I can always understand when it's trying to tell me something. When it gets too long between haircuts, it starts to reach out. It grabs on to anything around it, like seatbelts and tree branches and other people. A while back, Daniel and I were walking out to my car with one of his friends, and I made the mistake of wearing my hair free. It tried to attack him.

Part 2: "Let's get ombrés!"

Finally I decided to listen to my hair and started thinking about going in. At the same time, I was going through a mid-life crisis (at 21, I know, apparently I'm not going to live long) and decided I needed to do something drastic to my hair. I thought about doing something like this:

A friend of mine messaged me on the day of The Terrible Decision and said "Let's go get ombrés! I made us appointments for tonight!" 

"Oh, um. Alright then!" I said.

She picked me up from work and we drove to our hair appointments. That's when I realized... our appointments were at Paul Mitchell Hair School. That's right. A school. For people who don't know how to do hair yet.

"Well, alright," I thought, "I wanted to do something drastic, I guess this is it!"

I told the hair girl what I wanted, and then decided that I wasn't even going to look until it was over. If I thought about it too hard, I was definitely going to freak out. And for good reason...

During the course of my hair adventure, the instructor came over a couple times to check out the progress. The girl doing my hair seemed... less sure of herself than I would have liked. 

Since my hair was so far past its expiration date, at one point it actually took two girls to brush through it. Once it was brushed, they both worked on coloring it, since I have a lot of hair. While they were putting the color on, one girl said to the other "Are we doing this the same way?"

But I didn't care, because I was doing something drastic.

Finally, three and a half hours later, my hair was done. They turned me around to show me the finished product, and uh...

It ended up looking more like this:

Yikes.

Part 3: "I can fix this..."

I tried really hard to live with my new hair. I really did. But it takes a lot of effort to stay in your happy place that long, so I knew eventually I'd have to do something to fix it. 

I had already spent an egregious amount of money on the first dye job (they charge by bowl of color, which my hair takes... several), so I was wary about going back to a salon. Plus I have developed some pretty severe trust issues when it comes to hair, having lived twentyish years with a gigantic mass of curls.

Suddenly, the thought crossed my mind... Why don't I just take matters into my own hands?

I'd heard horrible things from my hairdresser friends about grocery store hair color, and plus I was a little afraid to use it on myself, so I took to the internet to find a safe and natural way to fix my hair. I found the answer I was looking for: Hydrogen Peroxide.

The Internet told me to just spray it on, leave it for a bit, and wash out. That seemed easy enough, so I took to the bathroom to solve my hair woes.

One thing I forgot to consider was that H2O2 will also bleach your skin.

Photo has been enhanced to show detail
(because I'm already white enough so it's hard to see)

It turned out better than I expected, in the end. My hair didn't all fall off of my head, and the color came out semi-normal. 

My eventual plan is to try the H2O2 a couple more times, maybe bleach the rest of my hair all the way to blonde. Of course, I've resolved to treat it a little better, you know, blow dry it less and use better hair products. And I will definitely make sure to cut it sooner next time.

But the most important lesson that I've learned out of all this experience is that my ponytail is my ponytail, no matter what color.

Onomatopoetry: Cat Version

Here's some more of this stuff, yo. Enjoy.

Charizard Uses Bite... It's Super Effective

Friends of Nigel 5: Mousecop and Charizard

Alrighty, so, I went to draw some pictures for my blog and realized my tablet has not been charged, and I don't feel like waiting until it's charged. Therefore, today's blog post features ACTUAL PHOTOGRAPHS!

And also this picture I drew a while ago:

Let's start with the story of how MC and Cha-zizzle came to join our little family...

Part 1: The Deal

Once upon a time, there was a myself named Jackie. She didn't have any kitties because she lived in a teeny apartment and the evil apartment overlords charged $ARM.99 in non-refundable pet deposits and $LEG.00 (before tax) for monthly pet rent. To make up for her lack of kitties, she would often go visit pet store kitties, hoping to fill the void. But that often ended up in embarrassing shedding-of-tears in a public place, which was disgraceful, so she stopped going.

Eventually, the lease on the Apartment of Death and Sadness came to an end, and Jackie and her spouse were forced to seek residence elsewhere. As luck would have it, several cities away, an old lady was getting to old to care for her home, so she was moving in with her son and his family, and he was ditching her house for cheap. And thus, Jackie and Daniel became homeowners.

Oh yeah, by the way, that happened.

The fortunate thing about owning a home, is that there are no landlords to make rules about whether or not you can own a cat. Therefore, I managed to talk Daniel into letting me get a kitten eventually.

Some weeks later, at a family gathering, my aunt announced that her little kitty, who was only a few months old, had somehow gotten teen pregnant and given birth to five little furballs, which were up for grabs. They were still too teeny to bring any home, but I went and visited to get to know the kittens and pick one out.

Argh! So fluffy! I'm 99% sure the two top kittens are mine.

I went back to visit a little later and took pictures of individual kittens so I could show them to Daniel (he refused to come visit the kitties himself, since he claims to hate cats and wanted nothing to do with them.) 

The kittens with their mom, Autumn. You may remember her from the hit drama "3 Months Old and Pregnant."

I was pretty determined that Mousecop was going to be the kitten I brought home.

Baby Mousecop (also known as Mouserookie)

When I showed the pictures of kittens to Daniel, he saw one little kitty and said "I like that little orange one." So I said "LET'S GET BOTH!"

Charizard was the runt of the litter. Like me.

We made a deal that I got to have two kitties as long as Daniel got to go on a trip with his friends to Indianapolis this summer to see Drum Corps International finals. Seemed like a pretty sweet deal to me.

Part 2: The Betrayal

Now, let's rehash a point here: Daniel very begrudgingly allowed me to get kittens, even though he didn't want them. He said "They will be your kittens. I won't clean up after them, I won't feed them, and most of all, I WILL NOT love them."

Therefore, these are my kittens, and mine alone. 

Right?

Apparently they had other ideas.

Those little jerks loved him more! I would come home from work every day to find both tiny traitors cuddled up on his lap, or on his shoulder, or in his arms. After all I'd done for them, finding them a home, feeding them, cleaning up after them, buying toys for them, they would rather cuddle him than me. 

The truth of the matter is, for all his protestations, Daniel secretly loves them too. 

Don't tell him I told you that.

Cats are liquid.

Part 3: The Present

I kept meaning to write about my kitties, because come on, this blog is really about my love of animals. I just got lazy, though. Now the teeny kittens I brought home are almost all the way to medium-sized adolescent cats. My little baby furballs will be four months old on Saturday.

The mighty huntress.

Mousecop is one of the most outgoing kitties I have ever known. When she lived her mom at my aunt's house, she was known as "Miss Adventure" because she was always getting into stuff and exploring. It has only gotten worse as she gets older. 

A rousing game of "Fight Under Door"

Mousecop's hobbies include jumping on things, climbing drapes, getting sprayed with the Bad Kitty™ bottle for climbing the drapes, posing for pictures, and violently attacking specks on the wall. Her favorite toys are shadows, her own tail, my ponytail, shreds of paper towels or tissues, and Charizard.

The infamous Bad Kitty™ bottle. Note the water level. We have some BAD kitties.

Mousecop cannot stand to be left alone, which means it is a really good thing we ended up getting two kitties. Whenever she can't find me, Daniel, or Charizard, Mousecop will stop, stand in place, and shout "MEOW-WOOOOOW?!" over and over until someone says "We're in here!" She has some huge lungs for such a small animal.

She is obsessed with drinking the water off the floor of the tub after one of us takes a shower. So much so, that the last few times I have taken a shower, Mousecop actually climbed INTO the shower with me and licked the water off the floor of the tub. She stays close to the edge, away from the spray, but she still comes away fairly damp. She doesn't seem to mind, though.

Yesterday, she brought me a generous offering of a dead moth. It was very sweet.

Kitteh yoga.

Charizard is very shy and doesn't really warm up to people easily. When we first brought the kitties home, I opened the kitty carrier and Mousecop immediately ran out and started exploring everything. Charizard sat perfectly still inside the cat carrier for like an hour before I finally dumped her out.

Charizard has the weirdest fur of any cat I have ever seen. Mousecop has regular short fur, and the rest of her siblings had long, fluffy fur. Her fur, weirdly, was mostly short with a few looooong, wispy hairs around her like a halo. The rest of her fur has gotten longer as she gets older, but she's still all weird and wispy.

Charizard's weird fur.

The reason Daniel wanted Charizard when he first got her is because she had bright blue eyes. As she has gotten older, though, her eyes have turned gold, which is pretty cool, because now they match her fur. She's monochromatic, except for her little pink nose.

Charizard's favorite pastimes include sleeping in weird places, hiding, looking really adorable, unintentionally clawing Daniel, and being led astray by the bad influence that is Mousecop. Her favorite toys are plastic bags, hoodie strings, my ponytail, and Mousecop.

Where she should sleep.

Where she does sleep.

Charizard has giant Puss in Boots eyes, so you can't ever be mad at her, even when she makes you bleed, because she will give you The Face and then you'll feel like a jerk. 

Part 4: The End

Daniel just called me a cat lady for writing so much about our kitties, so that's about all I have for now. I'll try to be better about drawing pictures next time, instead of just showing you a few of the gazillions of cat pictures I have taken in the last couple months.

Goodnight, Charizard.