High Holy Mass of Contradictions

No really! I want to know. Food is very serious to me, y'all.

So, rawfoodists don't eat food that's been exposed to heat over 100 or 110 degrees or whatever (I've seen a pretty broad range cited, actually), right?

So does that mean that produce grown during a heat wave is out of the question? Or does the heat restriction only apply once the fruit or vegetable is removed from the plant or the plant itself is no longer in the ground?

(Yes, the attentive among you will surely point out that I should know as I myself kept to a raw diet for a short period of time once. I felt great, too. But it was too much work and I got lazy.)

The ugly: we spent the entire weekend obsessing over fleas. In 8.67 years of living with multiple cats, they have never had fleas. Admittedly, our cats have been outside (on leashes) more lately than ever but I also think the flea population must be larger this year, probably due to the heat.

Anyway, we'd "treated" the cats with some over-the-counter Hartz crap a few weeks ago, but it obviously didn't do a thing. Meanwhile, the problem was getting worse. I've been busy with work so I couldn't do much about it myself and had been trying to be patient since I knew Karsten was already dealing with the rat problem in our back yard and I didn't want to overwhelm him. Besides, he seemed confident that the Hartz stuff would work and that the fleas were minimal anyway. On the contrary, it seemed to me that if you spot one, you can assume there are dozens/hundreds/howeverthehellmany you can't see. I regularly noticed fleas on the cats, so I printed out web pages with tips on killing fleas and left them on his keyboard. I suggested he just call an exterminator and get it over with but when he did, he only asked about the rats. He just didn't seem to feel as much urgency as I did about having to coexist with the fleas. It was all starting to freak me out a little. Last week, when I stood in the cat room and could see the fleas jumping around, I had a major meltdown. Karsten felt bad for not realizing how upset I'd been getting about it, but I assured him that everything would be fine it we could just rid the house of fleas. So he picked up the Advantage flea treatment from the vet on Friday and we started treating the cats first thing Saturday morning.

Each cat had to be isolated so they wouldn't lick the stuff off of each other, which meant that we could only treat three cats at a time: two of them were stuck in cages while a third got to be loose, but stuck inside a closed-off room. Meanwhile, we vacuumed the house, sprinkled boric acid powder on all the carpets and fabric surfaces and used a broom to push it down into the fibers, and washed the curtains and bedclothes in the hottest water and dried them in the hottest drier they could withstand.

By mid-day Saturday, there were dead and dying fleas all over the house. So I went around and vacuumed everything again yesterday, but they're still dropping off. It's gross, but it means the treatment is working, so I'll take it.

The bad: it was miserably hot outside. I mean it. Hot. It was 104 yesterday. It makes me feel like I'm melting. And since we wanted to escape the house once we got through each day's flea treatment, we were limited in our options.

Though actually, that didn't go too badly: we ended up going to see a movie ("Becoming Jane"; it was OK), eating out for every meal (all the food was great), thrift shopping (I found some cute stuff), and hanging out with some songwriting friends who were visiting from Chicago (which was fun).

So I guess the bad was really just that every time we stepped outside, we felt like we were about to melt into flesh puddles.

The good: even in my jangled state of mind, I wrote a few songs. Hanging around songwriters last night got me all fired up. When we got home, I dashed off two songs in fifteen minutes along with a few other ideas I'll come back to eventually. One of the reasons I was so inspired was that, although the songs our friends were playing last night were written well and were enjoyable, they were so consistently about relationships ending badly that I felt double-dog-dared to write a heartfelt song that wasn't about that. So I did.

I just posted on Nashville Metroblogging about our dramatic storm experience at Pride today. Check it out!

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

I just posted on Nashville Metroblogging about our dramatic storm experience at Pride today. Check it out!

OK, so we did get a little snow.

It still doesn't mean a snow day for me. At least I don't think it does. I'm going to try the roads and see how they are. If they look icy and drivers act nervous, I'm turning around and coming home.

Now that our closest storm has passed by, I got out and took some pictures of the effects in our yard. We were very lucky to have escaped the major damage some of the surrounding areas got, but we definitely saw severe weather. I've never seen hail that big!

I'm sick, apparently, or at least that's what my body seems to think. My brain wants to go outside and play in the snow, but without my body, it would probably be a bad idea.

And yes, I said snow! Can you believe it? We had 60+ degree weather on Monday and there's snow on the ground today. Weeeeeird.

I spent almost the entire day yesterday writing -- easiest thing to do since I was a sickie -- and am pretty psyched about getting to do this all the time. Karsten also gave me a CD of some random melody ideas (something he does once in a while) and I already came up with lyric concepts for two of them. Rawk!

Black Cherry is running around the house screaming for Karsten, who is out doing a grocery run. We had no yogurt in the house for breakfast! But at least there was coffee. Much coffee. Can you tell? ;-)

Back to writing!

Our power came back on last night around 10 PM. It had been out for over 24 hours.

I was already asleep at that wacky hour because, hell, there's just about nothing else to do. But I got up and immediately went to inspect the food in the fridge and freezer. I'd left the fridge doors closed all day to keep in the cold, but now that the power was back on I wanted to see how they'd truly held up. Amazingly, everything in the freezer still seemed to be frozen solid and nothing in the fridge seemed any less cool to the touch than usual.

Does anyone have any idea if it should be safe or unsafe? I'm vegan, so there's nothing animal-derived involved.

Oh never mind, here's a food safety link that says that a full freezer should keep for up to two days. Whew. And it suggests that anything in the fridge is probably unsafe, but then where it gets specific about what to discard, it's all animal-derived stuff. I think we're safe.

One of the lesser-known hazards of such a lengthy power-outage is that you have to eat out for every meal. So we had breakfast at my company's cafeteria, Karsten picked up lunch from Baja Fresh and brought it to eat with me at work, and we ate dinner out at the Mediterranean place. Our dining budget is now as bloated as my belly is from all the food. I'll be thrilled to have a whole day of normal at-home meals today.

the power at our apartment is Still. Out.

Since last night.

And I'm so not pleased about the fact that we're going to have to replace everything in our fridge and freezer.

Blah.

toastytuft just spent, like, 40 minutes watering all the flowers and shit at this house.

And now it's raining.

The gods have a very pesky sense of humor.

Wow. The power just went out several times. It's a magnificent storm! :-)

My life suddenly feels so dramatic! I must use scads of exclamation points!

Karsten and I are house- and dog-sitting for my boss' boss in Belle Meade (non-Nashvillians: it's where this town's wealthy and entitled people live) while she and her two sons are in Italy for three weeks.

Yesterday, we went out to run errands and, on our return, were blocked from accessing the street leading into to the dead-end street where she lives by police cars and a huge tree that had fallen in the storm. Fairly dramatic, no?

Well, today we went out and were blocked from the same street by police cars saying that a telephone pole had caught fire on this street. Presumably it had been struck by lightning.

Danger is getting ever closer! Next I'll probably stub my toe and round out the trio of hazards!

Snow, snow, go away. It's freakin' April in middle Tennessee, fer cryin' out loud!

Reposted from cortezthekiller's journal:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/cortezthekiller/113448.html?#cutid1

Snow! Right here in Middle Tennessee! There's clearly a lot more of it where cortezthekiller is than where I am, but I'm still seeing the little flakes falling outside my window.

I am SO ready for Spring. Bring it on!

It's 9:30, and it's just now 33 degrees. I ran from just before 6 until around 6:30 when I couldn't take the cold and wind anymore.

If I wanted weather like this I could have stayed in Chicago.

This just in: severe thunderstorm warning for Davidson County. No duh. I can hear it loud and clear at my desk.

The warning says to stay away from outside walls and windows. I sit facing away from a wall of windows. Heh. Maybe since I'm not looking at them, they're not really there.