Two Down!

Well, it's been quite a time here the past couple of days!

Sunday, as you may recall, Mandy worked with her sister, Carrie, and Carrie's fiance, to empty out this apartment, dispose of all the stuff the girl and her roommates had left behind and then clean it after that. We ended up with a nice tv set, a mattress and box springs for my bed, plus various other things -from a nice quilt, to pots and pans (teflon inside with a red exterior -snazzy).

One of the items left behind was a brand new computer desk -still in the crate, never opened. I was kind of looking forward to a new desk here, however -but unfortunately -it was not in my cards after all. Seems the girl who had hired Carrie and Robert to do this clean-up called Carrie Sunday evening and asked about the desk -if it had been junked or if one of them had taken it. Carrie had explained that her sister had taken it and the girl then said well, it was a mistake, that the desk had belonged to her roommate and she had planned to take it back to the store where she had purchased it. Yes, it was a desk that she had even paid $400 for too!

Well, luckily for her, no one had opened the box and begun putting it together although it is sitting here in the living room, behind the sofa, taking up more space that we really don't have any extra of the space thing to begin with ya know, what with the two organs sitting in this room now too! (I still haven't been able to just trash the first organ I had here before I was bestowed with the beautiful Hammond organ from my late aunt's house. Just can't bring myself to throw things like that out to the trash pickup people like so many folks seem able to do.) However, Mandy has no way to load this desk up and take it back over to State College so it has to sit her until Thursday now -till Carrie has a day off -and she and Robert will come over to pick it up and make arrangements then for the girl and her roommate to get the desk back. What ticked Mandy off over the whole desk deal was that when she and Robert were carrying it out, the girl even offered to help them to load it onto the pickup truck! Geesh, you'd think if it wasn't to be tossed out, she'd have realized or known that then, wouldn't you? It never ceases to amaze me what people -especially young college students or new graduates - will leave behind for the trash crew to haul off to the landfill. Sometimes, I truly do believe many people have more money to throw away than they have brains. Such waste!

I have a surprise too -it's something that certainly has been a big surprise for me -and that's my little "vegetable" garden I planted in early June in an old, narrow flower bed alongside the house. I'm notorious for being the plant killer -never able to keep a plant growing in the house and my previous attempts at planting a vegetable garden (something I haven't tried for well over 20 years now). Because the stuff just either never came up or died shortly after sticking their little heads out of the ground, when I got the tomato plants, plus some green and jalapeno pepper and cabbage plants and put them in this little plot, I never expected them to even take hold -much less to actually produce anything. But I was wrong and they have been growing fairly nicely -well, all except the cabbage plants that is. I think maybe the crowding was just too much for the cabbage plants to take. But anyway, here's some pictures of my lovely tomatos that are starting to form (I've counted at least nine little tomatos so far and I think there are three jalapeno peppers now too.)






On the bottom picture, you can see how narrow this plot is and it is probably only about 12-15 feet in length, so the plants are really crowded in there. Plus the tomato plants are in dire need of some stakes to hold them up as well. Bill was supposed to bring some stuff home from the garage that would work to stake them but he forgot them yesterday. He says there's some stuff in the basement and the lean-to behind the house that would work for that purpose too but I don't know what stuff he has earmarked and what would be okay to remove from his stash so hopefully, tonight he will pull out the pieces I can use for my pretty tomato plants to keep them growing and producing now too!

Now, I haven't posted any pictures for a while of the lovely little kittens we have had here but we are now down from the original four siblings (two males, two females) to one of each! The fattest of the kittens -which we had just been calling "Chubster" -found a home over a week ago when our next-door-neighbor's daughter and her boyfriend came over and made a selection. They took Chubster -who was just the cutest little grey ball of fluff with a little dabble of white under her chin and a tiny star of white just above her nose.

One of the male kittens -"Blacky" left late Saturday night to go live with a young woman who, along with a male friend of hers, showed up here shortly after midnight and in need of some help. Seems she and this guy were driving down the road up along the hillside behind our house, going a bit too fast for road conditions without the rain that was pelting down at the time and she didn't make the curve at the bottom of the hill. She hit a tree and the car flipped over. How she and the guy with her were able to get out and not have a single mark on them is almost beyond belief. But anyway, the walked up from where the car had flipped over to our house and came down here looking to be able to make a phone call for someone to come pick them up. As she was using the phone, I was joking that the cost to her for using the phone would be that she would have to take one of the three kittens that were left. She had laughed when she realized I was joking about charging to use the phone and had said sure, no problem, she'd love to take one of them so little Blacky, one of the males (tiger stripe with a lot of black coloring) went to live with her.

My son had just arrived home from his cross-country drive from Nevada to here in the 1971 Chevy pickup (bright, bright yellow no less) that his Dad had given him and he was down here showing off his new vehicle to us when the couple appeared at our house in need of help. Bill, Clate and Mandy all went down to where the car was resting on its roof and the guys got it flipped over and then towed it up to the garage at my son's house. Because it was quite damaged, the young woman had told Bill he could have the car to do with whatever he wanted -which would be to tow it to the recyling place where they buy old cars for so much per pound in exchange for helping them out of the bind they were in with the car and the wreck, etc.

However, this morning Bill learned that over the weekend sometime, she had given the junker to another guy in the area who also deals in junk cars. Needless to say, Bill was not too happy about the turn of events, since he's the one who went out in the rain and with my son's help, had flipped the car upright and was nice enough to tow it from the scene for them at no cost. So he's planning now to remove the exhaust and the catalytic converter before the other "junker" guy gets there and tows the car home. Bill also says if the car is still there tomorrow, he's going to remove the tires from it too then.

So anyway, we are now down to two kittens left here and one of those will be leaving after August 12th as the driver of the van who picks Maya up and takes her to her school, brings her back home too, will be taking "Javier" -the remaining male and the tiger stripe kitten in the picture below. The little grey female left then will be Chino (all Spanish names, courtesy of Kate, the 16-year-old here) and we're hoping someone will come along and offer her a good home too!

Aren't they just too cute though? All four of the kittens, although they were playful amongst themselves, are very quiet, very gentle natured little things, much like their mother, who has never tried to scratch the kids under even some not so very gentle handling that Kurtis especially has been known to dish out. Amazing, isn't it, that a grown cat and the kittens too, have not been the least bit inclined to lash out at the kids in their over-zealous handling of them.

Now, back to the business of trying to find that one last kitten a home.