On sleeping in a strange place...

Peripatetic living comes pretty naturally to me. Hell, I've been all over the world. Going to strange places and doing strange things, though it's not the pleasure it was when I was younger, doesn't cause me any special distress. I'm always this neurotic.

The boys and Click, though - they've never lived anywhere but the Property. For Ghost and Click, their big move came when they crossed the plaza and moved into the Interim Lair. It'll be an even bigger change when they actually leave Landlady's Property and come to The Secret Lair. Which will, I swear, happen sometime before one of us dies of old age.

So their reaction to this week's Big Change has been instructive and frequently entertaining. LB, the puppy, is completely taking it in stride. Our daily walks involve leashes this week, which I expected to be a big hassle. Just to confound me, LB walks on heel like he just dropped in from obedience school. I can only assume he found all that time on the tie-out cable useful, because he hasn't given me a minute's trouble. As for everything else, he just seems to think it's fascinating - and fascinating is good. His people and his pack are here, so what's the problem?

Click is okay as long as she knows where LB is. She has truly adopted the puppy as her own child, and she only gets upset when he's outside and she's not. Given the difference in their species that's a little weird, but in case you hadn't figured it out before we don't count points off for weird here. There's another cat in the house, but that's only Sassy and Sassy really doesn't count. She's been hiding in the bedroom all week, and I only this morning caught a glimpse of her.

Ghost, on the other hand, has become a complete drama queen. None of this is right, we're all conspiring to bring him to misery and ruin, and if we had a scrap of humanity left within us we'd drop what we're doing right now and take him HOME. His only comfort is that there's a bed he's allowed to share with his person - that would be me - and as of last night he decided that he would henceforth share that bed with no creature possessing more than two legs. LB, being the young one in the pack, went along with the joke. Click, though, is unimpressed with Ghost's histrionics. She is Cat, and Cat sleeps on the bed. So the bed is now divided into two parts, and I'm the DMZ.

As I write this, the first batch of chicken is in the pressure canner. Looking good so far, four pounds of boneless, skinless thigh meat rendered down to six pints worth. Once this is out of the canner, I'll start working on the next four pounds. This'll keep me in chicken for quite a while, hee hee.

Also, yesterday my friend M rather casually scored me another free toilet for the Lair! He's amazing - he went on Craigslist, found somebody who was remodeling a bathroom, texted, phoned, dropped in, and came back with a (hopefully functional) toilet in the back of his pickup. Our success rate with salvaged toilets hasn't been very promising, but both those earlier thrones had sat out in the weather. We knew their plumbing bits needed refurbishing, but didn't realize their tanks had filled with rainwater and frozen, lacing them with hairline cracks. This one should be fine, which will bring me one step closer to converting the Secret Lair into a place I live, rather than just hang out and work for a few hours ever other day or so.

I'm taking pictures of the canning process, so before the day's out I should come back with pictorial evidence you can laugh at with me. Later.