Finally, home & cat stuff

The last install­ment of the update—home stuff

Sam and I are adjust­ing to sleep­ing at a new height. Yes—height. I’ve lust­ed after a cap­tain’s bed for some time, because of the stor­age pos­si­bil­i­ties and how much more walker/wheelchair friend­ly our bed­room would be if we could remove some of the fur­ni­ture that would be made extra­ne­ous by real under-bed stor­age. Well, we got one via Freecy­cle this past week!

It’s a queen-size frame, so our cur­rent (very, very good) mat­tress and box frame fit. That was an impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion. And the head­board is real­ly neat, with shelves that are very handy for one of the alarm clocks, my glass­es, tis­sues, and so on.

The trick is that this cap­tain’s bed was orig­i­nal­ly designed for a waterbed. The box frame fits into the box where the waterbed mat­tress would fit, and you have a sur­face that’s about a foot high­er than our old bed. Then the mat­tress goes on top of that, and we have a bed that I have to use a step stool to climb into.

It is an impos­ing edi­fice! We will no longer be chas­ing our shoes and oth­er items out from under the bed, nor can the cats hide under the bed. There’s one less rea­son to run the Room­ba (it does a good job of chas­ing dust bun­nies out from under beds). And we have twelve big draw­ers of addi­tion­al storage!

The donor was a real gem. She actu­al­ly brought the bed here to us, since we don’t have a truck. It took her two loads to do it, too, in her tiny lit­tle pick-up. She told me that she just want­ed to be sure that it went to a good home. Her moth­er was with her and told Sam that it was her late part­ner’s bed and that it pained her to see it. I thanked her pub­licly for going above and beyond any­thing that could pos­si­bly be expect­ed, and we’ll be pay­ing that kind­ness for­ward for some time.

The attic is insu­lat­ed, as of Fri­day! That should make a nice dif­fer­ence in our util­i­ty bills and win­ter com­fort. Now we need to get into the crawl space and find the source of a draft (and mouse entry!) under the kitchen cabinets/dishwasher, and we’ll be quite snug.

Kiyoshi, the junior cat, has been neutered and giv­en his first round of shots. He seems a bit calmer already. He and Shel­ley aren’t bud­dies, but they are a bit friend­lier now that he’s set­tling down. They can get along well enough to share Shel­ley’s heat­ed win­dow perch. She’s will­ing to put up with him as long as he’s being inof­fen­sive and bring­ing extra body heat into the equation—unless he tries to take the posi­tion clos­est to the win­dow. Then there’s trouble.

At 18, Shel­ley sel­dom leaves the kitchen, where the perch and her food are. The lit­ter­box is in the laun­dry room right off the kitchen. We’ve got a lit­tle seat­ing area in there, so she gets a fair amount of atten­tion. Kiyoshi roams the house, hang­ing out wher­ev­er Katie is when she’s home. Shel­ley is the kitchen cat. She’s los­ing weight, which is wor­ri­some, and she’s got cataracts. Her hear­ing is going, but she does­n’t seem to be in pain or have a bad qual­i­ty of life, so as long as she’s rea­son­ably hap­py, we’ll just keep nurs­ing her along.

And that’s about it. Bor­ing, but wordy. That’s me.