I Need to Tell You About the Tidy Cats Breeze Litter Box System
It’s been over six months of cat litter dream life–I do not say this lightly, I LOVE MY CAT LITTER SYSTEM.
Here’s how it works. You have a litter box, but instead of tiny pieces of clay litter, it’s got bigger pellets made of some kind of sustainable material (I can’t find it while writing this article but I remember from my internet rabbit hole that it was plastic and foam). The pellets are about the size of a piece of rabbit food. You don’t use a ton and they last for about a month, with regular refills from your stash.
Introducing Our Rescue Persian Biscuit Reynolds
Enter Biscuit Reynolds. He was super snuggly with us and really sweet. The thing I wanted most in a cat was a good snuggler. He was supposedly 4 or 5 years old, had been surrendered by a previous owner who had adopted through the rescue. The owner was a touring musician whose roommate let Biscuit get out and he got lost for a few days.
I Got Back Together with My Ex and Started Relationship Coaching with the Lesbian Love Guru
With the heady mix of old intimacy and new relationship energy, I suggested we might want to get relationship coaching. In fact, neither of us is willing to call each other “girlfriend” yet because we want to eliminate fears of slipping back into old communication patterns and the stuff that was so hard before. It hasn’t happened yet, we’ve done a great job of communicating through rough spots; often we just stop a conversation that feels like it could get sticky and awkwardly back out of it. But it could happen, and a professional might help us set the kind of foundation we never had before.
Enter Christine Dunn-Cunningham, the Lesbian Love Guru, who I met over the summer. I was thinking of working with her as a single person who wanted to open myself up to finding the future Mx. Branlandingham.
New Episode of the Lesbian Tea Basket! Birthday Cake Tea!
There’s a new episode of the Lesbian Tea Basket!! I review Birthday Cake Tea from David’s Tea in NYC. It’s a super brandy brand kind of tea store with overpriced tea with fancy things inside it like birthday cake sprinkles (as in Birthday Cake Tea). My birthday is tomorrow so I kind of went for it with this $4 cup of tea. Also I said in the video they were in NYC but apparently they are all over North America.
Link Farm: Marriage is not a Coupon to Redeem, International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, Supporting a Loved One through PTSD
“Marriage is like a chlorinated community pool that we now have access to. I think that people forget that queers have been swimming in the ocean the whole time. We have always had to be creative about how we create our love relationships and, now that we don’t have to be creative, I hope we still can be.”
Care and Death, Death in Care, Care in Death: Bear’s Peaceful Passage
The past two weeks have been a doozy. My elder cat, Bear, a handsome eighteen years old, got really sick. It’s hard to tell when a cat goes from being just an old cat with some bouts of dementia and a propensity to angry poop in the hallway, to actually-really-sick-call-the-vet. There’s a subtle shift. He had a really bad accident on a Saturday, the kind that involved a grumpy roommate and me just mopping the whole house. Then he puked, then he just sat still. More still than usual and he sleeps about 23 1/2 hours a day. I put a call out to my friends on Facebook if there was a vet person I could talk to about whether I should go to the vet. I’ve known so many people who have dumped thousands of dollars into an old cat to find out what’s wrong only to have to let them go anyway. I didn’t want that to be Bear’s experience in his senior years, I just wanted him to be comfortable and happy.
Sandy’s Aftermath
I guess I’ve been slow to write this post because I was waiting for the aha moment of why I got so anxious after the storm. I think some of it was how connected human beings are–in Brooklyn we were literally surrounded by devastation.
New Episode of the Lesbian Tea Basket: Sleep Tea
In this episode of the Lesbian Tea Basket I talk about my cat ALF’s near death experience and how this has amped up my anxieties and how I’ve been having trouble sleeping! And so I bought some Sleep Tea from my favorite tea dealer The Herb Shoppe and I do a little experiment about whether it will actually help me sleep.
I didn’t have this list of ingredients while I was filming but I just called the Shoppe and they are so helpful. Here’s what’s in it. You can totally order it from them maybe not on the website but you can call the Portland store and get them to ship it to you. I love local indie businesses!
Things That Delight Me
I’m sitting in a West Philadelphia coffee shop drinking all the cheap beverages (iced coffee, green rooibus tea, soon to be followed by CHAI probably, caffeine I’m getting crazy on you) and working on my book. So far my shitty first draft* is 30,000 words long and that is an incredible jaunt down my emotional, sexual and party roads for the last four years. Someday soon I will share it with you, dear readers, in a form you can hold in your meaty paws and will hopefully make you laugh and cry and want to go out and have hot fat sex.
In the present time, however, I have some stuff that delights me that I want to share with you.
Balance, Priorities, New Lesbian Tea Basket, Everyday Glitter
In the last couple of years as I’ve learned what is really important to me and learned to let go of what isn’t, how to say no to things and how to check in with myself about what I am doing and how I am doing it. Moreover, I’ve learned how to identify for myself what is important to me, how to turn off all the voices of what I “should” be doing or who I “should” become, what my body “should” look like or how much I “should” love myself even when it’s hard. I got tired of shoulding and wanted to instead be living and enjoying my life. Thus, I have created a practice whereby I check in with myself about my priorities. I try to do this every week, but basically it comes up for me when I feel off balance.
Brooklyn! Next Thursday, February 9th, Rebel Cupcake Celebrates Prince!
And speaking of Rebel Cupcake, it’s next week! You should come! all the details are below and on the Rebel Cupcake page.
I love Prince a lot and I think the best dance floor action for Rebel Cupcake of all time was last year’s Prince tribute.
Everyday Glitter
Things I have already done with Penelope: Dressed her up in Macy’s puppy clothes, filmed a forthcoming episode of the Lesbian Tea Basket, cuddled with her while watching a Mandy Moore movie.
Things I intend to do with Penelope: Read her Charlotte’s Web, watch Babe: Pig in the City (so she starts to understand what happens when her momma takes her out on a leash), take glamorous photos of me all dressed up holding a piglet.