I miss small talk.
I didn’t realize this until Monday, Tuesday, when people were walking, running, jogging by and I would be far more chatty than I normally am with strangers-walking. And then picking up pizza last night (we have finally run out of things that Must Be Cooked in our fridge), and I wanted to talk talk talk.
Not about anything important. Not to form any meaningful connection. Just to chat. Just to have intercourse with another human being that was in no way Important, or tricky, or anything. Just Chatting.
(Husband is not great at Chatting. Even social media these days is fraught with traps, although cat pictures are safe everywhere (which is good; Oli has taken to camping out on my desk and sometimes directly in front of my laptop camera) and my realization yesterday that I could make masks and skirts that met was met with lots of favorites… but little interaction, even at the small talk level.
I want to chat with people about how their day was and what they had for dinner, you know? What their cats are doing even when I don’t care, so I can talk about what my cat is doing (sleeping on the back of the chair next to me, like she does every morning; Theo is stalking the house looking for something and Oli is probably looking for more food.). Or you know, what our plans are for the weekend (Same thing we do every night, Pinky.) or the yard chores we can do now that the snow is hopefully gone.
We need to repair our garden beds. I suppose at some point we’ll actually have to GO to Lowes, since they do not deliver peat moss, even when you’re having a fridge and a lawn roller delivered.
Oh, and then of course we’re going to roll our lawn (roll your own… ♪♫) and we bought lawn timbers (we had to measure our lawn to buy a fridge!).
And firewood.
And more firewood.
Last night was moving firewood to clear a spot to put the car in the Spare Driveway (so our house has 2 driveways – one in front of the garage, and then, 50-100 feet away, one in front of the house. The garage one is currently, and often, filled with firewood.) so the ‘fridge could be delivered.
So! What are you up to?
What are you doing this coming weekend?
How’re your yards, if you have them? How’re your cats?
How are you doing with socialization and interaction?
Did anyone else scroll through two weeks of XKCD comics to find the CORRECT coronavirus comic?1
…OH that’s part of why I keep listening to podcasts.
NOISE
I am all for chattering about cats, gardening, and house maintenance. Can’t promise not to whine a little, though. :}
Whining’s fine, I promise. I’ll probably whine a little too!
HOw’s your cats-garden-Maintenance going?
Poor Oli cat got a mat in his short and curlies and had to endure some unhappy combing!
We have no pets (maybe someday?), but I recently discovered that the cat I’d seen in the window next door goes outside sometimes, and will meander into our yard. It was not up for saying hi to me when I went outside to try to introduce myself, but neither did it run away. Eventually it ducked back under the fence to its own yard, and watched me for a while as I pulled more maple seedlings. I hope it will decide to make friends.
The garden is still theoretical; the plan is to build one raised bed this year, and plant some things that need containment (peppermint!) in pots, and see how much more we have time for this.
We knew the house had been under-maintained, but we hadn’t realized quite how many problems we’d trip over along the way that hadn’t turned up in the inspection report.
Poor Oli! Mats are no fun at all. The results aren’t pretty, but sometimes clipping out a mat involves less suffering for human and cat than combing. Was he at least not clawing/nipping you?
Aww, neighbor friend cats are a good thing. My dad had one for years.
Oli is very patient with mats and doesn’t tend to claw, because he knows Humans Take Care Of Him, but he’s gotten growly about the short and curlies.
I wish you luck with the house! The fun will continue – “oh, what did we find?”!
I had a occasional neighbor friend cat … many apartments ago, now. A cat trotted up to the porch with me as I was getting home on a chilly evening, and was all “well, why haven’t you opened the door yet, human”? I figured she belonged to someone upstairs and wanted back in to her place, but no, she kept following me when I went to my apartment door. Trotted in like she owned the place, sniffed everything, hopped up on to the papasan and a couple of other chairs and right back down, turned down an offer of water, accepted a few pats, and asked to be let out again. Every so often after that (weeks or months apart), she’d turn up again and do roughly the same thing, with slightly more patience for being petted. Eventually I learned that she lived in the building next door, and “supervised” a good chunk of the neighborhood.
Hopefully the fun will … at least slow down eventually? But that’s going to take a while with a 90-something year old house.