...One of these days, I'll be a consistent blogger...

...well, hi there.

I'm back again...clearly.

*ahem*

Okay, so things have been crazy.  Let's break this into pieces, and I'll slam it behind a break as it's going to be monstrous.  But, before the break, a cute Pablo picture!

Because, let's be honest: this is the internet.  We're powered by cute cat pictures!

Clearly, I Have Been Preoccupied For a While...

...yep, been a while.

*cough*

So, a bunch of changes went down since my last writing...in April...anyways.

1) We bought a house!

My husband and I rapidly outgrew our apartment, so we went on the hunt for a larger one we could rent, preferably one that'd be big enough to support us starting our family in the next year or two.  Well, we live(d) in a college town, and the cost of apartments in the small city just down the street was...unreasonable, to say the very least.  On a whim, we did some thinking, crunched some numbers, and hunted around until we found a 3 bedroom house we loved.  That was, oh, May.

We moved in on September 19th...if that doesn't tell you how drawn-out closing was.  It is very much a buyer's market in our area, meaning houses are for sale at fantastic prices, but all the real estate lawyers in our area are swamped.  There was a solid month of back-and-forth between the seller's attorney, our attorney, the mortgage people's attorneys--it was a blast.

... I'll pause the sarcasm here.

But we're finally in!  Painting isn't anywhere near done, which is stressing me out.  I'm doing what I can between all the other chaos.  We're still living more out of boxes than I'd care to admit thanks to a bathroom reno that had to be done while we moved in, my getting sick, and our other big change:

2) We adopted a kitten!

In the middle of July, an all-black, female kitten had been spotted running around Hubster's sister's yard.  She and my mother-in-law asked us if we'd take the female kitten, and we agreed.  In the meantime, however, my sister-in-law's neighbor's girls had adopted the kitten and named her Shadow.  We were bummed, but we let it go.  We couldn't keep a kitten at our apartment anyways and had yet to get our closing date, so we figured God was just telling us he had other plans.

Well, he did: Shadow had a brother, a tuxedo kitten, and he had set up home on my sister-in-law's porch.  Reportedly, my sister-in-law opened her back door, asked him what he wanted to do, and this kitten came rushing in and never left.  Hubster's sister called us, and we agreed to take him once we got into our house.  She agreed, in turn, to care for him until then.  Thanks to his hilarious mustache, she and her girls took to calling him Pablo Mustachio, a name that stuck.

Meet Pablo!

Our little Pablo is one of the sweetest cats we've met, and he's too cute for words.  His moustache becomes "milk dribbles" leading into his tuxedo chest piece, with a tiny tuft of black as a button in that area.  All of his whiskers are white, even the ones over his eyes, and he has a white tummy and four white socks/booties.  He's also got yellow/green/brown eyes that can't make up their mind as to what color they'll be.  (I call it pistachio green...pistachio...mustachio...*ahem*)  My favorite part?  One of his back "socks" has a black toe.

I mean, LOOK at that toe!

Pablo, as of this writing, is a little over 6 months old and 7 pounds.  We moved into our house on September 19th, and he came home the 21st.  Poor little guy then immediately chased that with a neutering on the 24th, where we learned he still had roundworms (we'd treated him for that in August after his pre-adoption check-up and first round of shots), that he had retained two top canine (fang) baby teeth, and that one of those was trying to become infected.  He came home from the vet on amoxicillin and on strict orders to rest: no running, no jumping, no climbing.

...yeah...about that.

For those who are unaware, keeping a 6-month-old kitten quiet, still, and resting is about as effective as telling a kindergartner after a heaping dose of Halloween candy that it's time for a nap, post-haste.  Nailing Jell-o to a wall is less of an exercise in futility.  He never blew an incision, though, so we call it good.  When Pablo hurt or got tired, he snuggled.  When he had the zoomies and just had to run, well, he ran.  A lot.  Sometimes into things.

It's readily apparent that he's going to be a very long, lanky cat when he's full grown.  He's growing like a weed and into everything we own.  We've decided to make him wear these vinyl nail caps to keep him from wrecking things.  Pablo's very good about seeking out his scratching lounger and scratching box when he feels the urge to scratch; he just forgets when he's playing or climbing that he packs 18 sharp claws between his four paws.  With the caps on, he still can do all the things he wants, but he doesn't inadvertently wreck our banisters, curtains, or hands.

Like I said--house is a work in progress. And he got himself up there without help.

We love the little hooligan, though, and feel blessed to be in a house we love and to finally have a cat again.  Both of us are huge cat people, so being pet-less drove us about nuts.  Expect him to feature here regularly as, as my friends and husband tell me, I was always a crazy cat lady: it's just official now.

#CrazyCatLadyStatusAchieved

Wee!

As I mentioned yesterday, my day started with a bit of a tumble.  (Or, as I started referring to it today, "Cherish's Attempt to Determine Why Humans Themselves Cannot Fly Down Driveways.")  I am not-so-pleased to say that I am officially feeling my flight attempt.  I am also less-than-pleased to say that my flight attempt bears no cool images.

Yes, another terrible camera phone shot.  You're welcome.

THAT, dear readers, is yesterday's battle wound.  That little patch of red on my leg.  THAT IS IT.  For something that feels like the result of a demented troll with a hot iron launching a holy war against my leg every single time it touches something (re: all the time), this little 3 inch by 3 inch wound is a pathetic attempt at a battle scar.  It almost makes me ashamed to admit how bad it hurts.

...almost...

But on the advice of my sister (...also, if you found my blog, M: HI SISSY!), I am recapping my adventure here in more detail.

...nope...we beat no dead horses in this blog... *shifty eyes*

Anyways, our landlord notified all of us tenants on Tuesday that he was having our building's driveway sealed during the day on Thursday.  We tenants had to move all the cars to the street.  Neither Hubster or I minded doing this, but it was a little complicated in our case.  Y'see, my husband had a jeep he drove up until a few months ago, when it was given a nice little death sentence by the DMV in the form of failing inspection for a total of repairs worth more than it was.  It's been sitting in our driveway ever since, staring longingly at the functional cars we have while we attempt to figure out its fate.  We can't put it on the road, even to park overnight, without risk of ticket as it's unregistered and uninsured.  Landlord told us to put it in the yard, so no sweat.

Yesterday morning, though, found me in a rush as I couldn't find my sunglasses.  Readers, I have (mostly latent) strabismus and drive East in the morning and West in the evening on my daily work commute.  We call this, "Cherish cannot see the road well because her left eye doesn't get that turning away from the sun is kind of important" in Cher-Land.  My sunglasses are a requirement as far as I am concerned, and after three days of rain finally breaking, I wanted to be able to see to drive.  (Because, y'know, it's the important things.)  Hubster confirmed my suspicions: I left them in his car after the weekend's adventures.  He needed me to move Tony the Super Impala, though, so he could move the Jeep before he went to work.  I did indeed move one Tony, then decided to just go get my sunglasses from his Focus while he was moving the Jeep.  Cherish, being Cherish, decided running there was a good idea.

Never mind that I was wearing pretty wedge heels.

Never mind that our driveway is a bit uneven, with cracks here and there, and on a subtle downward slope.

Never mind that I have the grace of a drunken animal walking on a boat in the middle of an angry sea.

Nope, one Cherish decided she was running.  Her right heeled shoe, however, had other ideas.  Specifically, it wanted nothing to do with this endeavor and, instead, wanted to hang out on the asphalt.  Alone.  Cherish, as a result, was somehow catapulted through the air to skid to a not-so-pretty landing in the driveway.  Hence the aforementioned pathetic scrape of evilness.

Angry that I biffed it, I stomped back for my shoe, put it firmly in its place, and stomped its sorry sole the entire way down the driveway and back, sunglasses in tow on the return trip.  Hubster realized when I came back that "fell," this time, meant "Cherish decided to make an airborne attempt at spanning the driveway and, as a result, has permanently embedded some genetic material into the asphalt's surface."  (Aside: you know you're an accident prone person when you have to stress to your husband that this was a different kind of fall, as in it involved blood and pain and a blatant loss of even more dignity.)  Realizing I was probably late to work, I just rinsed the scrape, determined to clean it out when I got to work with my first aid kit.

And now, the new part of the story.  When I opened my first aid kit at work, I found a surprise:

Look--an even blurrier picture!

Ladies and gentlemen, I lost my prescription of Patanol when I moved last November.  Patanol, for those who don't know me in person, is a prescription eye-drop I use for exactly two months in the spring when my allergies raise a righteous fury upon my body: in layman's terms, it keeps me from clawing my eyes out.  My insurance (which changed from the last time I filled it--YAY health insurance reform) absolutely refused to fill the prescription as they deemed it "not medically necessary" though my doctor had been ordering this exact same script for me for TEN SOLID YEARS and the insurance company knew me for, oh, 4 months.  (Another aside: I am told my phone call with that particular company was especially epic as I went all debate champion all over them...I don't take being screwed over well).

That picture?  The one right up there?  My lost prescription.  Good until next year.  And about three months too late to help me.

Apparently, I keep my medicine in a first aid kit now.  >_<

So, yeah, yesterday can take a flying leap off a tall cliff for all I care.  I'm kind of done with it.

...or, y'know a flying tumble down a driveway...I have it on good authority that those hurt terribly when you're over the age of seven.