As promised, less kittens and more big fat white cats in the back yard! We hit up Home Depot yesterday for the first of what will probably be several trips there to populate the yard with plants. they had a surprisingly good selection, both for the garden and the window boxes I bought months ago but have yet to fill and mount. And yes, the window boxes are the lame plastic kind, but that's all they had at the XXtra discount store. In fact, HD was running low on decent planters too, I saw only one window box worth anything, and it was too small. To remedy this, we tried to get plants that would spill over the edge of the box to minimize our gauchity.
For the boxes we got annuals (including some 'double impatiens' which I just think are swell), but everything for the yard is perennial, so that we may enjoy the greenery for years to come. Or until we win the lottery. We're sort of reaching at straws, picking out stuff we like with little plan as to where stuff will get planted. But I guess it can go anywhere for now, it's not like we're gonna run out of room with the few plants we have so far.
At some point I'll have to remove most of the mint plants that sprouted up everywhere. I hate to tear up a perfectly serviceable plant that is doing a helluva job covering the side of the yard, but then, it's not like it won't just come right back.
I still want to get some big planters and plant some tall skinny trees so that I may move them around the patio at will, but HD had only superlame planters left. What's up with the state of outdoor furnishings? It's like people want their yards to look like the Enchanted Fairy Forest of Faux-Bronze Pots with Little Fleur-de-Lis all over the place. To the customers' credit, it seemed all the plainly designed planters and whatnot had all been sold, leaving the fugly stuff behind. But somebody must be buying this crap. I'll take my plastic boxes over the ostentatious stuff any day!
I've got the rest of the week off! If only I could enjoy it, but the specter of the workload when I return will ruin my ability to savor my freedom. Unless, perhaps, I get really drunk.
One more cat thing to round out the week: when I got home yesterday, the kittens had been moved again. They had already been moved from one closet to another a couple days ago, but now it appeared Lucy had taken them out of the bedroom completely. I searched likely spots throughout the house, finally coming down to the basement. I walked into the band room and found kittens all over the place!
Mother cats move their litters for a variety of reasons. She may have felt the closet was too exposed to potential predators, she may have decided we were futzing with the kittens too much, she may have just been too hot in there and wanted to lie on the cold cement floor of the cellar. But most of all the experience reminded me that cats largely run on autopilot.
So thus, I realized that cats are largely a bundle of instinctive behaviors and not necessarily the caring and thoughtful mothers we want to believe they are. As of 8AM they were still in the closet but who knows where they'll be when I get home. I am hoping they can be relocated to the room next to our bedroom, it's the room we use the least, except as pass-through to the other rooms, we just have to put some barriers up so the kittens don't spill out.
