My least favorite thing about my people is that they are very busy. They seldom have time to give me sufficient head scratches and belly rubs. This is just not cool.

Now they seem preoccupied with someone new…a little Dad person. At least that’s what he looks like to me. He’s very short, has blonde hair, and blue eyes. The last time I saw him he was unable to do much, except sit on the floor or crawl on his hands and knees very slowly. He sleeps almost as much as I do. I can’t understand the gibberish often emanating from his mouth. He often holds things in his hand. Is he a band conductor or something?

When he gets unhappy, he makes an awful racket. I don’t know what he’s doing, but his version of barking is very distasteful to my ears. And my whole group of people go running to him when he does this. Why would you run toward that??? 

The Mom person and Dad person will play with him all freaking day. Don’t ask me why. They’re just weird. What could be more fascinating than me?

With picking a maroon-colored metal roof and gray stain for our cabin, one would think I had already decided on the exterior door color for our cabin and that this job would have long been done by the time we had finished the inside work, right?!

Wrong.

Our exterior doors arrived in a light cream color. We were so eager to have lockable cabin doors that we didn’t paint them in the beginning. In fact the cream color almost became the color of the doors. I was beginning to think that the dark colors I had chosen for the outside were getting too dark and the cream color actually worked with the other exterior colors to my astonishment.

Even my daughter talked about how nice the existing color was and wondered if we needed to keep them a light color. Then reality happened.

With all of the traffic through these doors to work on inside projects, we had managed to put dirt all over these poor doors. I thought they would clean easily with some good old-fashioned elbow grease and cleaner, but I was wrong. I either lightened the existing color (and it was in patches!) or the dirt remained.

Good morning, Word Fans! Last week’s WOW was nescience. The Merriam-Webster definition for nescience is: lack of knowledge or awareness or ignorance. No one guessed the meaning to this work so I guess we’re all showing our nescience about nescience????

Today’s WOW is phreaker. Here are my definition guesses for phreaker:

phreaker (ˈfrē-kər) 1. a streaker carrying a phone 2. one who freaks about philosophy 3. a speaker who only speaks in phrases (In other words, a poet.)

What is your guess for phreaker? Comment below and let’s see who came closest.

Next Post: Painting Exterior Doors

You Might Also Like: Word of the Week: nescience; Word of the Week: jocose; and Word of the Week: flocculate

While the Mom person generally feeds me a scoop of my dog food in my trusty green china bowl, there are additional “bowls” that I get to at least lick when the Mom person is finished with them.

She eats from a lot of these and for some inexplicable reason throws them away afterwards. They come in a cardboard box and stay in the really cold part of the refrigerator until she’s ready to eat them. She must not want the Dad person to know she eats them, because she seldom eats them when he’s around. And if you ask me, his food is way more interesting than hers! There can’t be enough food in those bowls to keep her fed well.

The bowls are also kind of flimsy. My green bowl doesn’t bend and is not easily moved. This is ideal for licking them at the end of a meal. But the flimsy bowls slide all over the place and this is a problem, because the Mom person usually gives them to me when she’s finished eating the 5 bites of food in them.

Even with all the major work done on the inside of the cabin, one final task remained: Trim work. If we weren’t such a nice family, one could argue that there was still some lack of privacy in all of the bedrooms and bathrooms, because the baseboards and door trim had not been put up yet.

This project, unfortunately, began in the summertime last year…in Texas. Much of the work had to be done outside. Granted, we largely worked under porches, but it was still hot, sweaty work.

It wasn’t easy for the hubby and father-in-law–I wanted an arts and craftsman look trim-wise. Each door required 4 pieces of trim. Each window required 7 pieces of trim, including window bucks. Even in a small cabin like ours, that meant entire rooms filled with stacked trim pieces as the hubby and father-in-law routed each piece. And that doesn’t even include the baseboards!

Howdy, Word Lovers! Last week’s WOW was jocose. The DD says she knows this one. According to her, it means playful or silly. Let’s see if she’s right.

Merriam-Webster’s definition is: given to joking; merry; characterized by joking, or humorous. Pretty darn close–especially that silly part. Wish I had the daughter’s vocab!

What are your guesses for nescience? Comment below and see if you’re right next week!

Wednesday’s Post: Endless Trim…

The hubby’s family takes a destination family reunion vacation every three to four years. We have been to Virginia Beach, VA, Hilton Head, SC, Branson, MO, Estes Park, CO, Brown County, IN, and now, Bar Harbor, Maine! (I’ve probably forgotten a few, too.)

When one tries to get 36.5 people together in one location where none of us live, it’s an interesting “expedition,” both planning-wise and execution-wise. (When one of the homes you rented actually has “servants quarters,” you realize just how large this family has gotten!) Thankfully, the family “travels well” and when we hit “road bumps,” we muddle through it all together. Here’s my take on the lessons learned from the latest vacay with pretty much the entire family:

Welcome back, Word Lovers! Last week’s WOW (Word of the Week) was flocculate. Merriam-Webster Online says that flocculate is to cause to aggregate into a flocculent mass. Don’t you just love it when the dictionary does this to us–gives us a definition using another form of the very same word we didn’t know in the first place?! So, if you didn’t click on flocculent up above, here’s the definition for flocculent: resembling wool especially in loose fluffy organization or containing, consisting of, or occurring in the form of loosely aggregated particles or soft flakes.

The dining room isn’t my favorite place. I only go there if the Mom and Dad person work on my claws. I don’t know what I have done to deserve this, but it must be something really bad.

I try to convince them that it’s not necessary by lowering my head, looking dejected and slumping my whole body. I walk very, very slowly to the designated torture area. But the Mom person still makes me lay down, flips me over on my back and straddles my body with her legs.

She also holds down at least two of my legs, while the Dad person takes this loud, dusty whirring device and proceeds to grind down my claws on the other legs. The Mom person talks to me in a soothing voice, but that’s a big trick–while she’s talking to me like that, I’m shaking like a leaf.

The Mom person is stronger than she looks, for such a short person. She can, if required, completely immobilize my entire body! Did she go to school to learn that?

Well, my best laid plans for getting you some updated pics of the cabin did not occur. My latest health adventures prevented me from trekking to the cabin. I’d like to say that I will be there this next weekend to do just that, but I have other commitments on the plate and that just won’t happen until the end of this month–my apologies for the delay.

It’s ironic that I used the term “on the plate” because today I’m telling you about our fantastic kitchen and laundry room appliances. You need to know a few things first:

1. The hubby’s a great amateur chef. He likes better than average kitchen appliances.
2. I can cook and bake, but I can go 335 days without either activity, and be perfectly content.
3. The only time of year I cook and bake is at Thanksgiving and Christmas. The hubby and I go all out for those two holidays, food-wise. Thus, we need a LOT of room when we do so.
4. I like appliances that either self-clean or are easy to clean, since I’m “the maid.”