Feeling squirrely

How cute is this little guy, enjoying some seed treats in our squirrel & chipmunk feeding station (otherwise known as our back deck)!

I have a few minutes before Dej arrives for our LOST fix.

I was up from 2:30 this morning on. I lay there stressing out about the outdoor cat enclosure I want to build. As much as part of me wants it, I'm terrified of it. I have friends who have them and have not had any problems. I envision my cats finding a way to escape, someone cutting the wires, a tornado blowing them away...all kinds of crazy things that scare me. I am admittedly on the paranoid side when it comes to my babies and their safety, but I take my responsibility and commitment to them very seriously. The other thought that jolted me was the huge expense it would introduce. Currently, we treat the dogs with Revolution, but since the cats are always inside, I don't need to treat them. If they are able to go outside, I will have to treat ALL of them for several months of the year with Revolution. That would run somewhere between $700-1000, depending on the weather. UGH!

I am now walking around with a meth face. It’s disgusting, and I feel a little bad leaving the house and making people look at the grossness. It started with a tiny, little pimple on my chin. Eeww. Things on my skin bother me, and I pick at them constantly until either it’s gone or I’ve made a much bigger mess of it than I started with. I really needed to get this disgusting pimple off, but squeezing as hard as humanly possible about 25 times in a row didn’t do anything but make it bleed and hurt. At this point, it became a matter of principle, that after all the pain, I was not about to leave the damn thing there to win. So I got the tweezers, and a pin and dug it open and cleaned it out. Now I have an absolutely huge, painful, repulsive, giant sore on my chin.

Everyone in my family has pointed out how gross it is, just in case I hadn’t noticed. M said it looks like I have a big bloodclot on my face. I don’t even know how my students could focus on the material I’m teaching, with the giant red sore staring at them! I wore a red shirt today. It is nicely accentuating the wound. So now that the repulsive thing is about 50 times worse than when I started picking at it, I keep picking at the scab. It’s just so wrong. Still, even though it looks worse, it’s somehow less offensive to me to have the nasty scab than to some kind of gross bacteria under my skin making a pimple. Nonetheless, it's still a constant distraction to me, knowing I have something on my skin that doesn't belong there. I will, almost certainly, unconsciously pick at it again and make it even worse before this week is over. Maybe a bandaid would be best at this point.

I got home late from class tonight, and it seems to be impossible for me to leave the building until 30-45 minutes after my class has ended this semester. I have the requisite 10-15 minutes of student questions after class, but then I have three geeks who are planning to go into IT. They have so many questions about the career field, majors, schools, programming languages--things they bring up that I am incapable of walking away from. After every class, after I've answered all of the class questions, one, two, and sometimes all three of the guys are waiting for me. I love to see people excited about this career field! It is an awesome career in many ways. So we talk, and I answer lots of questions, and then I realize 30 minutes have passed and I need to get home to my waiting chores and little girl.

So I scrambled into the house tonight, greeted everyone, and headed right into the herbivore room to start chores. I forgot to remove my jewelry first, and I don't usually wear jewelry in there. Birds LOVE shiny things (as do I) and are capable of destroying any piece quite quickly. Usually Hurley-bird flies to me right away, sits on my shoulder and tries to chew on my nose ring while I do chores. He was beside himself with glee, chewing my necklace, pulling my earrings out, yanking on my nose hoop. It was hard to be productive while trying to avoid his crazy little beak. The jewelry and I made it out of there intact, though I took it off halfway through my chores.

Many, many years ago, I made the mistake of leaving a beautiful ruby ring on my entertainment center. I returned home to find that the ring was still there, but the marquis ruby in the center was missing. The surrounding diamonds were there, but the ruby--gone. One of my cockatiels at the time(Romeo, Lily, or both) decided to neatly remove the ruby from the setting. I searched the floor for hours but didn't find it. I even watched and checked their little poops for months but never found the ruby. I still have the ring, as I intended to replace the ruby someday. Ah, the joys of living in a zoo!
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Obviously, I typed the above last night, but the kids arrived to watch LOST before I had time to add pictures or post. I've added the picture, and now I need to go. I was actually planning to type a little more, but Daisy just learned that Basil is not a cat that she should prance up to and sniff. He smacked her in the head, so now I need to go soothe both of them. The twins haven't ever been exposed to dogs, so I am still trying to get them comfortable with them from a distance. Maybe next time I tell Daisy to go out of the room she will listen! Yeah, right.