Lost and Found

This weekend I had another boring sort of adventure. It’s called give a lost cat shelter, and have your dogs go ballistic until you let her go.

Don’t think that I pick up strays because I feel sorry for them! Our apartment complex actually has quite a few strays. I blame the people who leave out cat food by the dumpsters. The way I see it, those cats are just fine. They’re better off on their own, eating left overs, than going to the shelter where they will likely be put down.

So when I saw a cat by our patio on Friday, I was about to scare the little guy away to stop my dogs from whining and ogling at it in the glass door. Once I got a good look at it, I immediately noticed it wasn’t a stray. It was a clean cat with no rough markings, and it looked terrified of absolutely everything outside.

I sent my boyfriend to go get the cat. Actually, he pretty much walked out to get it without me saying anything, so I followed him. The cat hesitated at first, but soon accepted that we weren’t there to do any harm. We identified it as female, no collar, declawed, and definitely domesticated. She was very affectionate! We decided that since she was obviously a house cat that had gotten lost, we could give her a place to spend the weekend just in case her owners call the front office and ask for her.

The weekend turned out to be only one night. While the cat was very well behaved and we could supply her with a litter box and food (we have ferrets!), our dogs were not so well behaved and the tiny apartment soon felt like an overcrowded zoo. This place just couldn’t handle that precious cat. After the night was over, we called the SPCA the next morning and told them we had a lost cat. Just like that, she was gone! I hope her owners find her soon, or that she at least finds a loving new home. A perfect cat like her shouldn’t be put down!

In cases like this, I can’t stress enough how important it is to microchip your pets. Max is microchipped and I hope we can get Ein microchipped too. It’s just a tiny microchip implanted into the dog or cat’s back with a shot needle. After that’s done, your pet can be scanned with a special remote. Every vet and shelter has this remote. If someone happens to find your lost pet and turns them in, they’ll be scanned and your information will pop up. It makes the chances of a lost pet finding its way home so much more likely!

4 Comments / Jan 31.10

A Busy January: New Year Cleaning

This week is my last week off before Spring 2010 semester. It is also the beginning of the new year, January 2010. Usually during this time, I clean my life up a bit by establishing new habits and cleaning my room. Well, things worked differently this year. I already picked up the habits I needed at the start of December. I was an avid runner a year ago and a gym enthusiast before that, but I let things slip away and decided to pick it all up again. This is good, I’m glad I did it before the new year.

The other difference is that this year I don’t have a room to clean,  I have an apartment to clean. Half of which (or should I say, a good chunk of) is filled with things that are my dear boyfriend’s. I’ve been preparing for him to realize yes, I will go through his things and get rid of them. (In all honesty, he had so many things that my things just wouldn’t fit. Unacceptable!) But the forewarning was unnecessary, because he knows me by now and probably saw this coming months ago.

Together we went through his DVDs and games. Just these two things, and I was left with about 234234 orders to put up on Amazon​.com, and within half an hour 15 items to package and ship out next day. Notice Ein’s glare in this photo. Yes Ein, I do realize how crazy I must have looked frantically packaging these before the post office closed.

And to the right you will see how my desk currently looks like. As someone who likes a clean, empty desk, squeezing my head between stacks of items for sale to use my laptop at my desk is claustrophobic. I’ve since decided to clutter up my beloved bookcase instead.

As you can imagine, the post office guy isn’t too thrilled about my January clean up either. You should have seen his face as I once again went in today with a bag full of items to individually scan and ship. I have since decided to spare him the agony, and hog the self-shipping machine in front of the building.

The funny thing is, we’re not getting a bunch of money out of this. Sure, we are getting a pocketful. But a lot of these movies and games are so old, they only go for a few bucks. Subtract packaging expenses, shipping costs, and Amazon commission and we get…about $2 for some of these. But I figure it’ll add up and maybe we can buy one or two things we’ve been needing to save up for. The true goal here is to de-clutter the apartment. We are slowly succeeding!

I have yet to sell any of the million Rock Band guitars up for sale, nor the drumset. I am not looking forward to fitting those in a box and shipping them, but I also can’t stand the heap of them next to my bookcase.

To close this unnecessarily long entry, I will say this. Orlando is not meant to have 20 to 30 degree weather on a daily basis. Not in November, not in December, and certainly not in January. I don’t see many good things about freezing weather, other than I can finally wear that cute scarf I throw in the back of the closet and the gloves I put god knows where.

But when our entire back door fogs up, I get to draw all over it and have my boyfriend wake up to exclaim, “Marjorie… What the hell did you do to the window?” I guess that’s winter bliss.

2 Comments / Jan 07.10

Happy New Year!

We are now unbelievably in the year 2010. I noticed that I’m not the only one that had a hard time with 2009. While the year brought about a few wonderful things and some life-changing events, it was also one of the toughest years I’ve experienced. I’m looking forward to 2010 being a good year to appreciate relationships and better myself!

Has anyone made new year resolutions? I haven’t, aside from the point I made above. When I went to my morning gym workout today I noticed quite a few people had made resolutions…  I’m usually the only one in the gym at the time I go in, and this time it was pretty full. Funny thing is, I bet I will never see them there again after a few weeks. It’s hard to declare a bunch of goals in January and continue them until December. This is really because people forget, lose track, or lose interest in what they pledged those early morning hours of January 1st.

I realized this years ago and decided to make general goals rather than specific ones. Here are a few great articles that may help you, if you have goals for 2010 or (like me) consider January a month for revamp:

What does January hold for me? Lots of cleaning. (If you know me, this is one of my hobbies…) I’ll be going through all of my stuff and donating a good chunk of it to charity (or throwing it out if it’s useless), completely moving into the apartment, cleaning places that really need it, refreshing a few old layout designs, making appointments I’ve been putting off, fixing or replacing things that I’ve been meaning to fix or replace, and giving my dog a good scrub down.

2 Comments / Jan 02.10

Music Update: Lights Acoustic Recordings

If you’re a Lights fan like me, you’ve probably seen the acoustic versions of her songs posted on her Youtube account and wanted them on your iPod. Well, I finally figured out how to do this and spent the morning recording from her Youtube videos and editing the conversations out, leaving only her songs in files for iTunes. I know a few of you are Lights fans too, so I’ll share them. Enjoy!

Note that not all of her acoustic covers are here. For some reason, three of them or so didn’t want to convert. I’ll keep working on those and hopefully if I can convert them, I’ll make another entry for them. For now, please let me know if you have trouble downloading!

2 Comments / Dec 27.09

All I want for Christmas

I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season! I was lucky enough to get the new laptop I was begging for since… A long time. I was fortunate to have a Macbook, which my dad bought for me when I started college so that I could bring it to school and type notes. (I also found it useful for browsing Facebook when my professors were boring.) It was never meant to be my main computer, which is why it only had a 50 GB hard drive and little RAM.

Unfortunately for me, my main computer, a PC I’ve had since the dawn of time, died on me for the very last time early this year. I had to use the Macbook for everything, and it came down to me having less than 1 GB of hard drive left. I had to delete a lot of music and games, most notably my World of Warcraft, and I stopped playing a lot of that game this year. (Because really, when you have to play WoW on someone else’s computer, it’s just not as fun.) So for Christmas this year, it was a tie between the new iMac and the new Macbook Pros as the only thing I wanted for my birthday/Christmas. (They fall close together.)

So yes, I opted for the laptop instead of the desktop — the smallest Macbook Pro at 13 inches. It’s the same size as my old Macbook, but it has a 250 GB hard drive and is generally a huge upgrade. This is a laptop that I can use as a main computer. I have to say, the first thing I noticed about it was the speed and the color upgrade. The colors on this thing are even better than my old Macbook, and the difference is amazing. I’m also having a great time with the big trackpad and using finger motions for everything, instead of clicking the hidden button under the trackpad. It’s pretty, fun, and useful.

Needless to say, I already have WoW installed and it plays wonderfully. It’s so great not to worry about hard drive space anymore! I’m thinking about installing Sims 3 on it as well, but we’ll see if I have the time to play another addictive game…

4 Comments / Dec 26.09