I met someone a few years ago MU'ing. Thrown together oddly by @Gingerlily Fromt hat blossomed a pretty damn good friendship through thick and thin, someone my husband calls my work wife/second spouse. Just a super great friend.

Moving to another country hasn't stopped the phonecalls even. She still calls when her work day is done and I have finished putting kids down for naps. She travels for work and makes sure I know where her flights are landing, and when, so that if god forbid something happens, someone knows where she was and when. And food porn. She always sends me picture of all the food she eats on business trips. She's got my back, I got hers. Thanks for that hook up way back when Gingerlily.

My laptop met death by leaky sippy cup of almond milk yesterday in a cascade failure of perceived kindness. All afternoon and evening, we ressurected a really old one that barely functions. I hadn't talked to work wife in days as she was business tripping it. All she had to go on was a post to a game, with my scarcity due to laptop death. I'm elbow deep in dogs and toddlers and 911 emergency dog dropping in for some folks who's booked sitter either just dropped the ball, had something happen,who knows but we're running around town taking care of a bunch of dogs we didn't expect to take care of, including one out in the countryside, ass end of nowhere.

I get back into service radius and there's a message waiting. She's ordered me a laptop, it'll be there next friday. That while it may not be an emergency to me, it is to her.

I love my work wife. I love my Katey. My best friend who has my back, thick and thin. So yeah. RL thing I love? The kindness of other strangers (Seriously there were some very generous strangers) and my work wife. So now, I just gotta hang in there on a laptop with missing keyaps, missing mouse button caps, hangs up on itself every five minutes for about 8 seconds, and whines about windows 10 and reminds me that she's a 4 ram girl, and why am I even....

I'm a blessed person, with good friends.

Omg! My plush imperious old lady! Right down to her super plush cheeks, black dot on her nose and her crossed paws. That look is IDENTICAL! Omg I need to mat and frame this and then order another for Scribe!

The grand dame irl for reference.

Tali

Scribe

Norma Jean

And then I take care of other people's pets and have tons of pictures from them.

@ganymede she has resting bitchy mc bitch face all the time. She lives in the bedroom, terrified of dogs. Got her at 6 weeks old from a no-kill in Norco California. She was huddled in the litter box, terrified. Took 6 months yanking her from a hole under the sink till she learned we were friendly. She's endured a 3 day cross country trip with a harness on and hotel rooms. She loooves chicken. She will brave dogs if there's chicken and she sleeps on a small pillow between my head and the wall at night but only after I lift the covers so she can slip under, be cuddled, then off to her nest at night.

If we are gone more than 3 days, we don't hear the end of it for almost a week with her screech at night giving us shit and usually she will pee on a bed so she isn't allowed in bedrooms while we are gone.

She was my Mother's Day present. My husband is mildly allergic to cats and I accepted I would never have a cat but he brought me to the norco shelter and there she was. Shelter attendant said "She's too skittish, she will make a horrible pet" she has shitty vision too. She can only see roughly 4 feet or so. I said "Well she will never have a home if you keep saying that..." and we took her home.

I will be devestated the day she passes. I love her so much. So. Much. My imperious plush lady.

I used our moviepass cards to go see Isle of Dogs with my son. Had breakfast made for me, a trellis for my garden. A good day Happy mothers day to the rest of you MU momma's too. Hope it's good!

We brought home a kitten 4 weeks ago (Long story short, father in law's girlfriend MIGHT be a little... derpy and thought 2 year old female cats can't get pregnant WTF) and it's been awesome and the toddlers love her. Her name is Ceri, though I want to call her sigourney because she pops out from under couches, jumps on you from her big giant cat tree, and on top of high things and just gets you. But I was denied. Damnit. Even her tail is like the aliens.

Anyways. We picked up our son from his grandfather's and found a home for the two other kittens that were in that litter. We wondered if Ceri would recognize them. So we put them on the cat tree while waiting for the new owner to come.

Sniff, sniff "BROTHERS!" and back to playing with them like she hadn't been separated for four weeks. Gnaw, chew, smack, bat. They all started rumbling and tumbling for the hour it took for their owners to come. I'm glad they're up here and close by. Now we get to sit them and they can all party together.

My oven died spectacularly yesterday in the middle of cooking the turkey (no, 225 is not what i set my oven at wth.... is the thermostat br- bang! Flames! Screaming oven! Melting heating element o.O)

Called up the friend and was like "say how about thanksgiving at your place?" Best. Salvaged. Thanksgiving. Took us an hour to cart everything but there was turkey and the sides, sit and shoot the shit, listen and dance to disco, hang with one of my former daycare kids. Far too much wine and mimosa's. But I super loved it. It sure as hell beat sitting in the kitchen all day with my laptop while menfolk gamed on the ps4. We now have plans for christmas. And W. Virginia for a real no dogs/work spring break.

Tali is so smart, and so stupid. I can't afford 5k worth of fencing to contain a dog, but we put in invisible dog fencing years ago. Every 2 years or so though, I need to replace the line. No biggie. Over winter however, it died. A break somewhere and I couldn't go and re-lay it. We made do with sunken dog leads but occasionally she'd get out of the house and toodle around on the sidewalk in front of the house. Neighbour to the right would bitch for the sake of bitching. Finally I can pull up line, re-lay it so she can see the line, get the flags up so everyone can see the line is back. But we reduced where she can go. No more front yard. So we put flags around the area she can go but I didn't think I needed to put flags right up to the house. She's a smart enough dog to not need flags going through the raspberry bushes.

Remember this.

With the kids in the front, she's in the back throwing a hissy fit because she can't come be with the kids. I'm watering the grass seed for the patches and playing with the kids and I hear 'rustle rustle rustle' as 80lbs of rott/lab comes skimming the house right through the raspberry bushes like she's so smart. Big grin on her face. But I hear the collar. I hear it beeping.

See the lines have to go AROUND the house and meet back up with the unit in the garage to keep the line intact. If you want to cancel out a spot, you double back the line, twist it and it won't activate. Because the line sits too close to the interior of the house, from raspberry bushes to the mudroom, the line is braided. But it's not perfect.

Stupid smart dog saw there were no flags in the raspberry bushes between the garden beds and the house. So she went bumrushing through the raspberry bushes with the imperfect assumption that if she gets past it, she'll be fine and can join us on the front lawn.

Wrong. Doggy grin on her face turned to horror as the beeping on her collar stopped and she got nailed. And she about faced without even stopping and ran right back where she came from. We have it set to give her more than enough beep warnings before it nails her. Maybe once a year she forgets herself and ignores a beep or she thinks that squirrel was just worth it and bumrushes the line.

So now she's been pouting for two days now, upset that we dared to fix the line, dared to take away a quarter of the yard, and limit her freedom to 75% of the quarter acre that we own. Nose nudges to take it off. Sits on the patio and glares. It'll be a week before she sucks it up and goes on the grass and she'll give the flags wide berth. I put flags in my raspberry bushes to remind her.

so smart, and yet so stupid.

Ripley!

@groth or, quite seriously, the sheer amount of screaming over the unfairness and tge how dare you have something shiney has made people unwilling to engage it further because it taints the joy from making new things. That, coupled with "must be in public" combibed with forthcoming changes means people are waiting or are just plain unwilling to be dealing with the drama.

What size are these pictures?

Ripley!

@aria If'n you wanna get suuuuper archival friendly, you buy a pack of archival quality photo mounts and use them instead of masking tape. Looks neater, less long term damage from adhesive to the paper since the adhesive is actually between mat and photomounts annnnd, no peeling tape off your portrait!

There. Put my college education to work. Enjoy.

@tributary where did you get those?

@crawfish I have pea gravel in the garden beds but they just keep digging and it's like noooo. Stop killing my lily garden!!!!!

So I went googling. Apparently play-sand for sandboxes comes with a warning on the bag that... it's not actually meant to be played in. And then my cats will use it as a litterbox. So I opted for pea gravel. If I ever have to dissemble it, I can freshen up my garden beds.

But hauling those bags ugh.

Now in the right thread....

Made a pea gravel sandbox for the kids because I was tired of the 4 year old going I'm booored despite a bajillion things. So I got dog eared pickets, spent three days cutting down 2x4's by hand because my table saw and mitre saw got stolen and I never replaced them. Then the kids marked the spots for screws, handed me screws, we assembled it with no plan, and then filled with pea gravel.

I am done being crafty. For today.

I still have to paint it, re-mulch around it and probably some planters because derecho damage killed everything. But I am pleased! $135 bucks all said and done after I account for another 10-15 bags of pea gravel to really fill it up. 1 hour of work.

@herja She's so plush. You know that cat is plush.

Derpy Ripley just staring off into the air. Heeee.

Binged it, it's lovely, the costumes are gorgeous. It did however leave me confused and realizing that you probably need to have a basic understanding of the world it's set in, as it lacks some worldbuilding. They seem to expect that you'll have understanding of different races/peoples of the setting.

That said, I enjoyed it. I'll give it another watch and having never read the series, I'd probably give the books a go just so that I can better understand the world as a whole.

@il-volpe And they wonder why people just go get pets off of craigslist.