Hard at sleep.

Yes! Not faking it.

Almost in Slumberlandia!

Slumberlandia.

Andy stops by for Greenies.

After he eats most of his treat, he senses an “oh-oh” moment’s coming on….

~~tickle! tickle! ~~

“We are NOT amused, Douglas!”

Andy moves on.

Yes, the recliner is beyond the easy reach of Doug, so Andy is safe from unwanted attention!

Andy and I do this stare down thing. I seem to have won this one!

Yes, he woke up, stared a bit at me, then took a kitty bath!

=(^+^)=

Decluttering continues. Ugh! I’m ready, now, to run a lot of papers through the paper shredder. I bought an office-level shredder several years ago when I got tired of a little one that took forever to shred and you put it on the edge of a trash can. Just getting that out of the way makes a big difference. Papers and books are the worst clutters, I think. They accumulate and require almost a paper-by-paper check to determine if they can go or not. 

Anyone who has followed me forever will recognize this as my original blog photo heading. Once kitties became my thing, the heading needed to reflect that. I like the current one a lot!

“Hey, Andy!” I call Andy by name.

He responds to it and…

…assumes there are Greenies in it for him. (Of course, he got some!)

=(^+^)=

I took several bags of cat litter (used – ugh!) to the dumpster. I’d put it off for too long, assuming they’d be a hassle to lob over the rim of the dumpster once I got them there. They turned out to be easy enough to put into the dumpster, thankfully, so that was an incentive to not accumulate them in future, thinking they’d be a hassle. The hassle was having so many piling up inside, taunting me! LOL!

I double and triple bag the used litter for security purposes. I single-bagged one once and it developed a leak when I picked it up. Of course, that was a delight to clean up off carpet.

I put Andy’s litter box “contributions” into a small container that grocery store plastic bags fit over. When it’s full, I slip a plastic bag over the container, invert it, let gravity transfer the waste into the bag by lifting the container out. Container out, I tie the bag off. Lately, instead of trying to stuff a full bag into a second one, I’ve doubled empty bags to save the hassle. I think I’ll start bagging “it” before the container is full in future, though, to make them easier to handle. A full bag must weigh 20 pounds/ 9 kilos!

=(^+^)=

Decluttering continues. It seems endless some days. Perhaps it is! The goal is to be more careful about buying things that seem to be necessary but turn out to be minimally useful. I tend to be a sucker for those sorts of gadgets! Cat toys are an especially good example of things that are money wasted. Andy is very fussy about toys, rejecting most of them.

“Hey, Andy!”

“You left one.”

~~~

“So?!”

Andy is a cat.

I think Andy’s tired of this!

Andy and I didn’t do anything constructive today. For the record, Andy’s “horns” are up in the last photo. I think kitty “horns” are too cute!

It’s Andy’s “Treat Time”! Hey, Andy! Come get your treats!

~  nom! nom! nom! ~

Let me get that “Andy leaves the auditorium” shot before you go, Andrew! 

=(^+^)=

I got a very late start this morning. It is rare that I haven’t put together one or more posts before the day they show up in your feed, but it happens. Anyway, Andy and I are “here” (alive; above ground; warm; not dead yet; amongst you still), though Andy wasn’t happy I pointed the camera directly at him for the establishing shot, below:

The little rascal blinked in time for the shot, a residual behavior going back to when my little Nikon digital camera blinded him with a flash. Too bad, though, because I like to have at least one decent photo of my kitty boy in each post!

The smartphone camera function can flash, as Andy suspects, but there are enough lighting and editing features on the newer technology to take care of most photo editing issues.

=(^+^)=

My apartment cleaning continues, though a full dumpster stalled progress for the past few days. No point in creating bags of crap that have to sit around till the dumpster is emptied today. (There is a half-dumpster load waiting to be taken out now!) When I started this clearing out last January, I thought I’d be done a long time ago, but I hadn’t counted on obstructive heart disease and a hospitalization wiping me out for a time.

After release from the hospital in April, I began a life of fighting oxygen cannulas and tripping over the oxygen line, which (to top it off) always got tangled on things in the apartment and my walker. You’ve never heard such strings of vulgarities in your life as those uttered from my mouth. (No, my mother never heard me say such things!)

With the new obstacles to continuing the decluttering of the apartment, I thought I’d have to hire a cleaner, so put things off till I realized I could work smarter and get the task done by myself. Yes, it is possible to vacuum sitting on a walker! Or clean up clutter. Or move trash bags to the door and toss them out to the back of my car, parked on the grass by the front door. The trick of using smaller trash bags, lighter loads, proved to be a great one, making this a much more viable option. 

The kitchen is largely decluttered and organized now; the north bathroom and south guest bedroom and bathroom are reasonably decluttered, with some touch up to do; the front room is my current project since most of the decluttering is on the computer desk and by my glide rocker – minor pickup and sort work; the dining room table and the wall behind it is a mess that might take a bit more time to do because stuff there probably will have to be trashed or put away in different places; my bedroom will be last, I think. It used to be where I “hid” things when company came and I didn’t have other places sorted out then. Some obsolete electronics, for example, are there, waiting for me to believe there is no point keeping them! 

It sounds like a lot left to do and it is. I am comfortable, though, knowing that I’ve worked out the way to do it so I don’t leave a mess for someone else to do after I die or am moved to a care center. Have to be realistic about these sorts of things!

Andy says it’s time to stop writing about it and time to start cleaning and sorting!