We love the above quote from "Family Guy", and use it all the time to describe our pets when they get anxious. And as funny as we find it, it's true. They really, really hate change. Who could blame them? They don't really know what's going on with us most of the time anyway, nor do they know why things suddenly change. I so wish my pets could speak English. At least with children you can explain to them and they'll understand a little bit.
And things are changing rapidly around here. This week is going to be huge. First of all, Shane left this morning for his first few days of work training. I'm excited for him, and hope that he really enjoys this job. (To have him be gone so much and hate his job would be pretty much the worst thing ever.) But he had to be up well before I did this morning, which hasn't happened in...I can't even remember the last time Shane got up before me. The dog watched him packing and started pouting. The cat, confused about why Shane was up first, came to check on me and make sure I was all right. Then he roundly scolded Shane, presumably for changing things on him.
By the time I got out of bed the dog had already peed on the carpet to show her displeasure. I didn't punish her for it. Between her eye problems, her paws aching from our long run yesterday, and Shane leaving, I just felt bad for her. After breakfast I filled her Kong toy with peanut butter, hoping that it would keep her busy for at least a short time.
Just about the time they start getting used to this change, my little brother will be leaving town and my in-laws arriving. Shane will come back, and we'll have a super busy weekend celebrating my brother-in-law's graduation. I know from both of our graduations that it will be total chaos. The pets will hate it, and there's really no way to tell them that it'll be ok. I'm just going to have to snuggle them frequently, and spend some quality time with them when I can.
On the plus side, my in-laws will be arriving. :) Visits with them are always fun. Almost as good, Shane had the brilliant idea to ask them to bring up their rototiller so that we don't have to rent one. We'll till up the garden this weekend and I'll start planting some of the cold-hardy crops (peas, beans, carrots, parsnips, cabbage, broccoli) outside. The leaves are starting to pop out and it's been much warmer at night the past couple of days so I'm confident they'll do well enough from here on out. The tomatoes, strawberries, celery, etc., will stay inside a while longer until it starts getting actually hot outside.
Shane scolded me for buying organic powdered sugar this weekend. He's with me when it comes to most things, but it was "twice as much" to buy the organic stuff rather than the regular powdered sugar. They're both made from cane sugar, rather than GMO sugar beets, so I found myself trying to defend this purchase. On a limited budget, how do I justify buying something so extravagant as this? Because he wasn't wrong about the price. But I reminded him that powdered sugar is something we hardly ever use. The last bag I bought has lasted us for well over a year. If we used it constantly, I might instead have reached for the non-organic. But for this? I think we could spare $4 instead of $2. I didn't go into the social/human rights part about why pesticides are bad--let's face it, even if they turn out not to be terrible for us to ingest (which hypothesis science is rapidly proving wrong) there's still the fact that pesticides are bad for the workers who have to spray them onto the fields, often without proper safety equipment and for wages low enough that getting their later medical conditions treated is a huge burden. It's nice every once in a while to remind myself why buying organic is worth the higher price, even if you're not sure that it's actually better for your health. It's better for someone's health, and it's always better for the environment.
I was buying the powdered sugar to make a pre-birthday cake for my little brother. His birthday is later this month, but he leaves on Thursday so I wanted to celebrate with him. We made pizzas, I made this coconut cake (the only change I made was to add a little bit of sugar, about 1/2 a cup, to make it more like birthday cake and less like coffee cake) and we watched "Arrested Development". It was a great evening.
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