Milo - Writing Challenge, Day 16

Milo hasn’t been officially introduced on the blog yet!

Here’s his story.

Darryl and I went to his mom’s on June 10th and went to his uncle’s next door.  While outside, I saw this tiny little black and white kitten who looked completely terrified and lost. He was in the corner between the porch and trailer and was literally trying to climb through a wall to get under the porch. 

I went over and picked him up. He immediately snuggled against me. Anytime anyone tried to come near me or reach for him, he huddled into me and tried to hide from them.  

When it was time to head back down to Darryl’s mom’s, we started looking around for the kitten’s litter to put him back with. Pretty quickly, we figured out that he didn’t belong with any of the litters there. None of the them were the same size or age, and Darryl’s mom was familiar with the litters there and knew he didn’t belong. We looked all over to see if there were any new kittens, but there weren’t. The couple of other female cats who lived around there that had been pregnant hadn’t had their kittens yet. So, we deduced that he must have been abandoned - either by a person dropping him off or by his real mom, wherever she was.  I didn’t know what to do. I asked Darryl if maybe I should just put him back where I’d found him, just in case.

Darryl said, “You do realize, if you put him back, he’s going to die, right? He’s too young to survive on his own. He won’t be here the next time we come over.”

I replied with, “Well, what do I do?? We can’t take him home. We already basically have a zoo. We don’t need a new kitten right now.”

Darryl said, “Just think about it.” And he walked away, back to his mom’s.

I stood there undecided...for about 15 seconds. I couldn’t figure out if I should put him back or hold onto him and follow Darryl. I ended up taking him down to the house and held him on my lap in the living room. Darryl and his mom kept talking about how the kitten had imprinted on me. He acted like he thought I was his mom and clung to me, and he was scared to death of everyone else.

Eventually I started looking up orphaned kitten care on my phone and deduced that he was going to need formula to start with. Followed pretty soon by that mixed with canned kitten food, and eventually would graduate to regular kitten food. There were also some pretty gross things about helping them go to the bathroom. Thankfully that only lasted a day or two before he started going on his own!

So, it was decided. We were taking him home. We had to stop at Walmart so I could run in and get the stuff he needed while Darryl waited with him in the truck. On the way home, I decided to name him Milo.

Ever seen the movie Milo and Otis? I grew up watching that as a kid. Bo looks exactly like that Milo, and that’s what I wanted to name him when we rescued him. But he was meant to be Darryl’s cat, and Darryl liked the name Bojangles. So, Bo is Bojangles Beauregard (since he’s called BoBo half the time). I still wanted a cat named Milo. So that’s who the kitten became.

And y’all...

If you’ve seen the movie, you know how much of a troublemaker the cinematic Milo is. My Milo totally lives up to the reputation associated with the name.  He was 4 weeks old when we found him.  He didn't really get introduced to the other cats for a couple weeks, not until he'd had his first vaccines.  But as soon as he got over his fear of the other animals...

He terrorizes the other cats. He’s best friends with the dog (just like Bo).  He gets into everything. He’s always places he shouldn’t be. I came home yesterday at lunch and found everything from the coffee table on the floor...the other cats know better. Milo, however, has had the time of his life jumping from furniture to furniture and taking flying leaps off of things lately, skidding off things as he goes by.

He’s a mighty fly/gnat hunter.  He naps with the dog. He has no fear. 

No one messes with Bo’s tail...but Milo does... No fear. 

Chase two cats three times his size across the house as they hiss and spit and yowl at him? No problem. 

Shove a full grown cat out of their food bowl so he can eat it instead? Why not?

When you correct him, he gleefully bounces back into doing what he was already doing and makes you correct him ten thousand more times.  Raising your voice doesn't typically phase him at all.  And lord help you if he's super focused on something.  Like stalking one of his brothers.  He will be so intensely focused that your voice will not exist to him.

He’s definitely showing signs of being an alpha cat. And so is Bo, which should be pretty interesting...

If you follow me on social media, you've already seen about a hundred photos (and that might not be a full exaggeration), so I kept it limited on here, but check out my Instagram for lots more!

Back to Normal

Hey all!

I have been hard at work the last couple of weeks drafting new blog posts and coming up with some ongoing series of posts. I've really felt the need to write lately, and I'm finally enthused and have some things I'm working on that I can easily write about!

Most of our big projects for the house are done for now, and I have some more time to dedicate to stuff I want to do rather than only the stuff I need to do (and some of the stuff I had previously only wanted has majorly turned into stuff that is now needed - you'll see in an upcoming post, one that will probably turn into a series.)

I hope all of you are doing well, and I hope you enjoy what I have to say! I'm looking forward to getting back into this and a lot of other things I've been back-burnering for the past couple years.

Have a great day, and happy reading!

The (Hopefully Last) Big Move!

Hey all!

I promised to write again soon, and I am now about to start fulfilling that promise.

Remember how I said there would be some new and exciting news?  Well...my boyfriend and I bought a house!  It's definitely a bit of a fixer-upper, but we both love it.  We closed on April 18th, and started preparing the main rooms the next day so that we could begin moving in ASAP.  We painted the living room, and cleaned the house from top to bottom.

The first coat of the green made me question EVERYTHING about this paint...but the second coat transformed it, and we ended up absolutely loving it, especially when paired with the yellow I picked out....so much so, that we decided to do the spare room with the leftover we had of these two colors!

A quick picture I snapped before they started moving the living room furniture in.

Plus the furniture and some more chaos.

See? The green worked out really well.  (I don't think Darryl realized I was going to take this, lol)

After that, we started moving things in from Darryl's apartment.  I wanted the living room, kitchen, and bathroom to be finished first so that we could kind of have a command central.  We lived out of the spare bedroom for a couple of weeks while Darryl and his best friend, Justin, installed floating floors in the upstairs (the upstairs consists of two rooms - one sort of leads on to the next, so we're using both of them as the master bedroom area).  I also painted upstairs, and the finished product looks like a completely different space than it did when we started.  It is absolutely freaking amazing.  (Stray piece of information: Every wall in this picture that isn't white, we painted.  The only wall in the house that didn't start out white was a brown wall in the living room - that's the green wall behind the couch now.)

I forgot to take a lot of better before pictures until things were already well under way, but I did have this and a couple of others!  This is upstairs in the one half of the bedroom.

Annnd, almost after!

The other half of the bedroom, while it was in progress.

We got this flooring from Lowe's.  It's called "Tavern Oak".

I'm in love with my kitchen.  I'll post pictures of it plus our stuff later, but right now I have boxes all over the place from where I moved more of my stuff in last weekend.

Once that was completed, we moved our bedroom stuff upstairs and started working on the spare room, then after that, the office.  I had the painting completed in both rooms long before the floors were completed (again, floating floors), but honestly, the guys really had the hard part.  The house was built in 1938, and it seems like there isn't a completely straight wall anywhere in the house, as they found out while trying to get the ends of boards to match up exactly.....I don't think it ever happened precisely the way they wanted it to. lol

One corner of the spare bedroom, post-painting.

The office, in progress.

Almost all of our stuff is in now (some of mine is still in a friend's garage, but we're slowly moving it in as we get other stuff out of the way).  It's really starting to come together!  Darryl put a bunch of his photos up a couple weeks ago, and as soon as I dig out the box mine are all in, they will join them!

Leo and Sawyer and Felix (you all haven't been introduced to him yet, but he's Darryl's hamster, lol) are all here and right at home.  Leo is ornery as usual, but he's much better behaved and happier now that he's back with me full time.  (My apartment situation over the last year didn't really work out well at all, and I ended up pretty much just in and out to take care of Leo and Sawyer and clean anything that needed done on a regular basis, and that was about it - not an ideal situation at all, and I hated leaving them there, but I had nowhere else to take them - where I was staying didn't allow them.  So now we're all back together, and it's so much better!!)  Everyone has adjusted incredibly well to the new place.  Leo is still nervous of new people when they come in, and his go-to is to jump behind the couch and stay there until the new people leave, but he's slowly beginning to come out quicker and quicker, if he even hides at all.

It's been an amazing experience so far, and I can't wait to see what happens next!

2014 Year in Review

I haven't done one of these for a long time, so I'm sitting down and reading through everything I've written this year (which isn't as much as in previous years, unfortunately) and reflecting on all that has changed - which thankfully is mostly good so far!

January
I started off the year at my mom's house, where I spent the better part of the Christmas holiday break.  Even though I wasn't in school, I still had a bit of break from work since I work on a college campus.  I put together a list of goals for 2014 (in all actuality though, I haven't reflected on this list much throughout the year).

Goals for 2014:
1. Get my license.
2. Buy a car.
3. Read 5 of the classics.
4. Blog more.
5. Try at least 10 new recipes.
6. Lose 15 pounds.
7. Get an apartment.
8. Take the GRE.
9. Start working on earning my master's certificate in GIS.
10. Work with Orion more and start being afraid to go faster than a trot.

Looking at these goals now, some of them became null and void at different points throughout the year (i.e. #9 and #10).  A lot of the ones that I can't mark off  yet weren't complete failures, not yet anyway.  Some of them are in the works.  I am pretty proud of the 15 pounds and apartment though.  I've wanted to get an apartment for a long time now and finally have one that I can afford with roommates that are awesome.  And even though those other goals aren't at the point where they can be marked off yet, I do not under any circumstances consider this year a failure.  Quite the opposite actually.  I feel like I've had a lot of self-discovery this year.

February
I had a lot of self-discovery going on in this month, as I realized that I was finally happy again and continued moving forward.

March
I didn't write this month, but I was still dealing with quite a bit personally (aftermath of a bad break up in which I kinda lost myself) and settling into the new role I took on at work as supervisor and safety manager.  By this point I was doing it on my own and teaching myself as I went along because the person who had those roles before me didn't teach me very much about it when I took it on.

April
This month I reflected on how I was coping with the changes happening in my life, I journaled a lot (btw, that journal is almost completely full now; I'll probably have to start another one for 2015), I realized that I really wanted to do something with physical therapy.  I figured this out when I was going to PT for a rotator cuff strain that I obtained back in October of 2013.  In that same post, I also decided to start blogging more (a constant struggle this past year, lol).

I also started doing the FMS Photo a Day challege.  Check out the tag "FMSphotoaday" to see those.  I want to do more of those next year since I've failed to do anymore this year.

I also made up a sort of cheat sheet for myself and any other bloggers interested and created a 20 Things to Blog About post.

May
I revealed that I had been working on a book that I wrote in high school.  That is not finished at this date, but I did make a lot of progress on it and do still plan to publish.  Mostly what is left is formatting for Kindle.  I have the cover photo picked out (spoiler: It's Orion). This was also when I started thinking about and eventually did get into proofreading on Fiverr.  I did that for a few months before getting too busy with work in the fall and quitting.  Perks of being self-employed with that. lol.  I am thinking about getting back into it on a smaller scale sometime soon.

In that same post there were also KITTENS! Cute little furry gray babies that are now pretty much feral thanks to their momma being scared of her own shadow.

I also talked about some TV shows here and here.

June
I made the official announcement that Orion was coming to live in the town that I now reside in, for a price comparable to what I was paying before and with much more in the way of facilities, albeit slightly neglected facilities that needed a bit of work.

"Mom, I'm moving?"

Fiverr gigs started rolling in and kept me busy, but I started pulling together what I would need for Orion's move and asked for advice. I took my last ride at the old place and came up with goals for Orion. The main goals were to get his feet in better shape and to get him to take his bit.  His feet are something I've had to keep up with, because it's just generally good for his well-being and also especially important because of his DSLD.  Bitting, not as much since I'm no longer riding him.

Before I moved Orion, I spent a day with one of the boarders at the new barn, someone I'm friends with from college. We rode and swam and got horribly sunburnt in the process. I rode the barn owner's little Paint mare, Vanna, who has since been sold.  Such a good little girl.  I miss her.

Vanna is the little girl on the left, Merrill is the big boy in the middle, and then of course is Orion on the right.

Oh, and I found out there are snakes at the barn. Black snakes. Huge ass black snakes.

And huge ass spiders.

Orion moved to his new home not even ten minutes from where I now reside.  He made some new buddies and loved it.  He also was diagnosed with DSLD, a condition that is not fun for either of us to deal with.  Before I knew he had it, and what prompted me to have him checked for it, he bucked me over his head, and I broke my collarbone.  I went home with my mom to recuperate for a few weeks after that.

July 2014
This month (I'm getting lazy with my links here because there were a lot of posts from July) I talked about my Fiverr business, posted a lot of pictures, discussed some ideas about conditioning Orion in my handicapped, broken collarbone state, and bought a lot of books.

I also finally opened up and talked about what had happened with Orion.  I had to sit on it and do a lot of processing (and overcome to wooziness that the concussion I had and pain pills I was taking at the time were causing).  But I finally wrote about it and posted it on here - with a lot of pictures.  This was before the diagnosis.  Eventually I wrote about that, too.  That also took a bit of processing, and I contemplated whether or not I was willing to risk riding him again, for his safety and mine.

Went to a river with a friend.  :)  Always fun times.  Reflected on life a bit more.  Jumped on a blog hop band wagon and had fun with it (I should do more of those this year. Hmm...).  Continued to visit with my boy, who was as sweet as he's ever been and seemed to know to be careful around my injury.  I shared some inspirational pictures/quotes that inspired me and talked about some of the things I'm thankful for in my life right now, namely Orion and the bond that I have built with him regardless of the issues that we've dealt with.

August - December 2014
There wasn't a lot of blogging during these months because I went back to work and had less time and also because I went back to live with my grandpa and had no internet again.

In September, I wrote a blog post that was kind of a rant/vent session about a sort-of friend's attitude toward the world, but it ended up being kind of therapeutic for me in the process.

In October, I turned 24 (good God, life is going by fast...). I had a lot of visits with Orion, and he was the world's biggest sweetheart.  I also found out about an apartment available with some people that I knew from college, and the price of rent/utilities/everything seemed almost too good to be true, so I looked into it...and I loved it.  It was an apartment with guys, and I've never lived with guys, so I was a little nervous about that - and some of my family was REALLY uncomfortable with that.  But I knew them and knew they were good people, so I gave it some serious thought and finally decided to go for it!

On November 1st, I got some of my stuff moved into the apartment and stayed my first night there.  Chels helped me move what I had available to me to move at the time, and we went to a Halloween concert back home that some friends of ours were playing at.  Awesome times.  It was a great night and one I'm not likely to forget, made even better by the fact that when I went home that night I was going home to a place of my own for the very first time.

I finally got a new laptop during a Black Friday sale on Amazon.  My huge old HP that is still awesome will be retired as a desktop computer once my desk actually comes to live at my apartment and relinquishes it's spot in my old room at my mom's house.  It's issues just cause it to have to stay in one place at all times.  So a desktop is the perfect job for it.

December hasn't seen much writing, but there's been a fair bit going on.

For example.  Meet this goofball.

This is Tank.  He's an English bulldog puppy born on October 1st, and I've been watching him for a little while now.  He was my brothers' Christmas gift, but since my family's landlord doesn't allow pets, I've been taking care of him until some factor in that situation changes.  I can't say I really mind.  He's adorable and a really good puppy.  Ornery as all get out, but really laid back and easy going too.  He likes to flop down on my kitchen floor and snooze the day away while I do stuff around the apartment - this is if he isn't following me everywhere or chasing my roommates feet/shoes or playing with the big dog, Milton, who is a 10 month (I think?) old lab mix and roughly about 4x the size of Tank, if not bigger.

Other news from December is that my laptop arrived.  I love it.  I put up my first very own Christmas tree in my first apartment with my roommates.  And my new cat, Leo, promptly tore it down within the first day.  He gets locked in his bathroom at night and when we all have to leave now because he's pulled the tree down three times since we put it up after Thanksgiving and has broken who knows how many ornaments and pulled off and lost who knows how many more.  Turdface.  But we love him anyway.

So that's it! My 2014.  How was  yours?

Happy New Year!

Well hey there!

I'll start this post with saying that life is really good right now.  

I have this awesome new little Lenovo ThinkPad X131e Chromebook (something I found by looking into the suggestions of achieve1dream's husband).  It's a little smaller than I pictured in my head, but it has Chrome OS, something I've been pretty interested in since I use Chrome all of the time.  So far I really like it.  I'm slowly transferring the files from my other laptop over to this one so that when my 6.5 year old HP Probook eventually dies, I don't lose anything.  I'll probably eventually pick up an external hard drive, but for right now, I'm putting that off.

My apartment still feels amazing.  I love living here, and my roommates are awesome.  Living with guys is a lot less drama than living with girls (no offense to any of the girls I've lived with before!).  My mom is a Scentsy rep and gives me stuff all the time, so I have warmers in both living rooms, my old Scentsy warmer in my room, and an old metal warmer from a little place in Beverly in my cat's bathroom. And I have more Scentsy tarts than I know what to do with.  Of course, now that I have all these other warmers and have to combat the nasty smells that often drift up through the floor from our idiot neighbors downstairs, I expect I'll go through this stuff a lot faster than I used to. 

We put up our tree the other night.  Leo has been having a field day tearing down ornaments at night when we're all in our rooms or when none of us are here (that doesn't happen often, as we all have completely different schedules.  There's usually at least one of us here most of the time).  I've decided he's going to be locked in "his" bathroom at night until Christmas is over and the tree is down, because the first night it was up, before it was decorated, he knocked it completely to the ground.  I came out to the living room the next morning, and the tree was laying on its side in the middle of the floor... -_-  Little shit...

Orion is doing well.  I think he's having a slight DSLD flare up right now, but nothing too serious.  He's just a little sore and favoring his front leg a little bit, but the other boarder who mentioned it to me today at work said that there wasn't any inflammation.  I haven't been out since the end of the week a couple weeks ago just because of time constraints, but I'm going to go out in the next couple days to check on him and love the crap out of him.

The barn is actually coming along really nicely.  One of the other boarders has 5 horses there right now, and she and her family have been footing a lot of the bill for getting electricity, water, etc. turned on.  The owner doesn't have a lot of money, so this has been a Godsend.  They've also done a ton of the cleaning that Chelsie and I wanted to do over the summer, up until I broke my collarbone and couldn't do the heavy lifting anymore.  With her whole family out there doing stuff, they actually had the money, means, and manpower to get it all done.  It has turned into a really nice place.  It's like a completely different barn with the lights turned on.  There's still a lot to be done, but they've improved it TONS.  I'll post pictures soon.  I have some, but they're on my phone, not the laptop, and I'm going to just wait and do a photo post, which those will be included in.

Those of you bloggers that I usually read and comment on, I'm playing catch up tonight and probably the next few days.  I haven't had time to really sit down and read blogs lately (well...actually, I could have this week, but I got re-hooked on The Walking Dead and House, and so I've been watching those and Christmas movies on TV while I clean and piddle around the apartment....oops. lol).  But I'm still interested in what you've all been writing about and experiencing lately, so I'm going to continue working my way through blogs tonight and in the days that ensue.

I really can't believe that it's Christmastime.  I really can't believe that this year is almost over!  How the heck did that happen?  It seems like we just started January a couple months ago....this year absolutely flew by.  I have to start writing a year in review post soon... I've been sketchy on those the past couple years, but I'm doing on this year.  Too many big things have happened not to.

So that's that for tonight.  Expect a photo post coming your way soon, and more writing, whether it be important life stuff or animal stories.  Everyone knows I have plenty of animal stories.  lol  Or whatever I feel like writing....

Night!

Wordless Wednesday - Fur Baby Love

Wordless Wednesday

My Week in Pictures

It's Saturday, and since I'm spending the weekend with one of my best friends and doing all kind of fun stuff, I thought I'd just share a few pictures from this week.
Enjoy!

I splurged a little bit today and bought myself some new books.  These are pretty much the only things I splurge on the past few years - books and horse things.

Chelsea's cat, Ginny, is obsessed with shoes.  My flip flops became hers temporarily last night.

This is why I love WV...because just an hour or so from where I'm staying, there's this.  And this is just one of the countless amazing sights my state has to offer.

My old church sent me a get well card.  I received it yesterday.  Thank you Philippi Baptist Church!

Who needs a puppy when your little brother does this?

Grainy, crappy quality picture of where I've been doing my proofreading and blogging for the past couple of weeks since the accident.