Pick your poison

The oldest son made an interesting discovery while cleaning his room this weekend. Stored among some mementos I had put in his room was a birthday card with $25 in it, a birthday card for my younger son, A-7, a birthday card for his second birthday.
Needless to say, A was thrilled with this unexpected largess. He spent most of the weekend thumbing through the JC Penny’s Christmas catalogue. By the way, what’s with JC Penny’s sending a Christmas catalogue to our house during the last week in August! But I digress.
After several days of rather constant begging, he finally persuaded me to take him to the new Walgreens in town so he could spend $5 of his birthday money.
He ended up buying a great deal of junk, including this spooky plastic goblet with a spider on the side of it as part of his potions mixing paraphernalia.
But the goblet, and a request from a lady in my church to come up with Halloween Cards, had me re-visiting my potions and elixirs cards from last year. This year I designed them to look like this.
While I was at the LSS trying to figure out what to use for paper, I told the store owner what my plan was and she said she wanted to see them, too.
Long story short, I took them over to her today and she wants me to design them for a “make-and-take” project during her one year anniversary party in October. A make-and-take is a quick project scrappers can do in short order while visiting the store. She said she would charge participants a small fee to cover the cost of materials, and pay me for my time demonstrating the make-and-take.
It might turn out to be worth my time.
She also invited me to design scrapbook page kits to be sold from the store. Apparently there has been a big request for kits from scrappers who don’t want to figure out how to design the pages themselves. Frankly, I don’t understand it, because I love to do the designs. But if there weren’t people out there willing to pay someone else to do the designing, there wouldn’t be jobs for designers.
We’ve been looking for another cat.
More exactly, L has been looking for another cat.
He found this little girl on the internet Sunday and DH overheard L telling me about the little sweetheart. So, we tried to call the number listed to see if we could get her. There was no answer at either of the two numbers listed, and I left a message.
Last night at about 6 p.m. the cat’s “foster mother” called back to say they had placed her on the first day she was listed, but they decided to keep her photo on the website to see if they could place any other animals from the shelter.
Me, “Hummmm. No, I want a female Siamese kitten, please.”
She “We have kittens coming into the shelter every day.”
Me. “I would prefer a female Siamese, you see our cat was killed by a car this summer and we loved her gender and breed.”
She shocked “You leave your cat outside!”
Me “No, we let her go outside during the day. At night we brought her into the house.”
She “Do you live on a busy street?”
Me, “not particularly, we live in a neighborhood with teenagers.”
She. “You know cats can live up to 15 years. If you get a kitten you can train it to stay in the house.” At which point I can hear my Wyo Sis groan at the thought of Bucky living for 15 years.
Me. “We got our last cat as a kitten and she wanted to go outside. We didn’t let her go out until she was spayed, then we gave her a little more freedom.”
She. “You could just go out in the backyard with your cat and bring her right back, and never let it go anywhere else.” At this point I am thinking the cat lady apparently want’s me to be more careful with my cat than I am with my children. I let them go outside without being with them constantly.
I am also quite sure I am a responsible pet owner. We took her to the vet to keep her shots updated. We had her spayed, we fed her top-of-the line dry cat food (okay, we did that because she had wicked, wallpaper peeling gas when she ate the other stuff) and we put a collar and tag on her.
Mind you, I grew up on a ranch were we loved our cats, and fed our cats, and let them wander through the fields hunting mice or squirrels. Our cats had kittens. We placed the kittens in good homes. Our cats lived happy cat lives.
They were, after all cats.
Animals.
Critters.
Certainly they were cute and cuddly and funny and all those other things one would expect from a cat. They were loved. Their death was mourned. But down in the very heart of it all, we are talking about cats, here.
We are still looking for another female Siamese kitten. But I do believe we have crossed the cat Nazi fanatics off our list of places to provide a cat for us.
I’m not really sure they would give a cat to us anyway if they knew we had a cat flap in the window.