Do cats have belly buttons and dish drainers are a luxury....

(Please note the lack of belly buttons...)

You know how when you're in the middle of sculpting a cat, I mean out of clay...not a real cat...sheesh well we're off to a great start aren't we? You have visions of me putting cats through their paces, toning their abs and encouraging them to lift their legs a little higher, run a little faster and all I'm trying to do is figure out if they have belly buttons.
Course now if I'm the one creating the cat, in clay, not gene manipulation of course then logic dictates in loud and snooty tones that I can MAKE my cats have belly buttons. The clay ones at least.......
As it turns out after a wee bit of side tracked Google-ing, a few moments discussion with my husband, a trip down a faded memory lane back when Ninja, our old Siamese, gave birth on my bed.....ick...some memories are worth fading....I have come to the conclusion that cats DO have belly buttons.
Not cutsie little dimple-y buttons but an elongated scar some where on their stomach, under all that fur. I am the proud knower of this fact thanks to the handy dandy internet. (Providing me with useless bits of trivia since the year 2000.)
Have you ever searched your cat for it's belly button? Then felt mildly guilty because your cat is rolling about in slobbery, purring, roaring ecstasy because it's perceiving a legitimate belly button search as pure petting? Well feline mis-perceived affection guilt aside, I can't find their belly buttons, though both our cats were willing to undergo hours of legitimate belly button searching if I wanted.....it's weird that cats aren't just born with a human hand attached to them...evolution happens everywhere else....why not here?
I opted not to give my clay cat one....though why I feared it I dunno.... I'd already painted a cat pink, orange, purple and even green. A belly button is the least of my concerns regarding accuracy.
Perhaps, to head this wee bit of kitty belly button confusion off before it builds in to a life long crippling fear of sculpting belly buttons on cartoonish, strange coloured cats I ought to sculpt a new cat. And give it not one...but TWO belly buttons. muahh ahhh ahhh Thereby not only defeating my clay cat belly button fear but actually I'd be kicking it's ass. Fear's I mean, not the cats. By the way if you could take all the words I have wrote for this entire blog and totaled them all up in to like phrase categories you would find that I have said "kick the ass" or some variation of it like a hundred million times. Or there abouts, like I'm actually going to add up all my words..sheesh I'm only a certain level of geeky, which means geeky enough to think of it and make up a fake statistic but not quite geeky enough (aka am too lazy) to find out the real "kick the ass" or some variation of, statistic.
So there I am, happily sculpting little kitties, muttering like a mad evil genius as I paint little toe pads, curl little whiskers and come up with a series of delightful names. (Puddums, Puhleez, Pinky, InkSplotch, Nib and Pigment if you're curious, and if you're not then you should definitely not be poking your nose past any brackets or parentheses on my blog cause that's pretty much where I always shove the useless--er..I mean useful trivia that I feel is important enough it should interrupt the regular flow of my words....)
So there I was happily creating a whole litter of kittens, I mean I was practically a cat God, or kitten mother, or maybe both and my dishes were in the meanwhile cluttering up my kitchen sink.
How are these two connected?
I am a crafter, which means I suck at housekeeping.
I do not begin to say all crafters suck at house keeping, I'm saying my craftiness means that it's easy to sit and immerse myself into the world of kitty cat colours, back stories for them, arranging web pages and taking photos of my creations....rather than clearing out the kitchen sink.
Not that I'm a total pig, I work damn hard at trying to stay on top of my messes so as not to have them overwhelm me. BUT as a crafter, inspiration hits and before you know it you've been sitting cross legged in your chair with a million and a half tools scattered across your work surface, blue and purple paint staining your finger tips, your coffee glass has gone empty and you're cackling at old episodes of Arrested Development that you catch up on from Hulu as you craft away....and the dishes...are easily forgotten.....for hours.
Yes we have a dishwasher....did you know they only work right if you keep emptying it and refilling it? It's a never ending, quite depressing cycle if you think about it. Which I do, and try not to or else I'd cry.
Now I have a deal with myself, and maybe this is a shameful thing to admit, but I have a deal with myself to switch the dishes around every day, at some point at least once, so that the cycle of dueling dishes keeps spinning round and round, re-filling the cupboards with sparkling clean glasses and loading up the washer with all the grungy used ones. For most people I'm betting this is easy, for me it's harrrrd, but I keep trying. That way my counter doesn't become some sort of weird quicksand like trap for all the dishes that have been abandoned half way between their destinations, be it the dishwasher or the cupboard. Perhaps this is like dishes purgatory.....though that means the cupboard and the dishwasher are hell and heaven though I'm not sure which would be which. I think I could work up arguments for either side......
ANYYYYYYYwaaaaaaaaaays.....we have this nifty dish drainer basket that straddles one side of the kitchen sink. This sweet little deal that is supposed to make me a house-keeping genius, in that if I'm too lazy....er....I mean busy to empty the dishwasher etc I can rinse the occasional glass and leave it to drip dry in the basket and voila I am a cleaning genius. Sparkling acres of laminate countertops, neatly tucked away dishes in the cupboards and the dishwasher happily chugging away as it scrubs up my days dishes.
Only...it doesn't work like that....What happens is, the basket fills, the empty side of the sink fills and getting at the water tap becomes a chore.
Now you're ewwwwing and making faces, you really oughtta stop that.
See that's what I was saying earlier, that every day I suck it up and buzz through my dish cycle and try and empty the sink, the basket, the washer and return everything to it's illusion of complete organization that I am trying to maintain. But there's been this small chink....this basket while genius in it's design to straddle the sink means I basically gave up half my sink to become one helluva glorified dish drainer.
Hence why I needed a little plastic tray doo-hicky to sit on the counter to drain off into the sink and my sweet little basket can sit on that. Voila, doubled my sink space for filling pots, water glasses, setting dishes to soak etc.
If you're rolling your eyes at such an obvious housekeeping necessity well pbbbbbbbt at you. I am not a natural housekeeper, it takes work, the part of my brain that should in theory be a natural at scooping up socks to throw in the laundry hamper as I walk by is usually humming Betty Hutton songs, or Eartha Kitt. How can I think of picking up socks let alone keeping the kitchen organized with Eartha Kitt's voice buzzing in my head about rather being burned as a witch? (Most awesome song ever)
So housework is a never ending lesson in life for me and I am ridiculously proud every day that I can stay on top of my messes, keep the cycle of dishes spinning AND on top of that get some crafting, writing, blogging AND cooking done. Put it that way I sound fricking awesome right?
Now the thing is, how long did I hunch my shoulders and turn my back favoring little sculpted kitties over getting a dish drainer tray?

(example of my fricking genius multi-tasking. Seared Ahi steak, homemade mole sauce, homemade green epazote/tomatillo sauce with avocados, sour cream and cilantro....this is only one of the many reasons my dishes can sometimes get neglected...)

Ummmm.....a while.....lets just say.
It was something we needed but I swear to you I felt like I couldn't just go GET a dish drainer tray. I needed to think about it, I didn't want to get something that wouldn't really be useful, would mess up my counter top system which is tenuously holding at best. I didn't want to buy something that would break or be nasty or something in a year and then throw it away. I needed to think about it. I mean can you think of anything more extravagant and luxurious than a dish drainer tray thing-a-majig? I mean I have the dishwasher here, I have a double sink, I have a drain basket and my own two hands and apparently that's not enough? Honestly...for now...I guess not.
Little kitties, sweet little cross eyed looking kitties, with your simple smiling purr-fectly adorable faces. You're so much less complicated than my damn dishes. Well except for the whole belly button thing...yikes. That was a nerve wracking ordeal...to poke a dimple in your soft clay bellies or not to?
So I decided, and I got a drainer.

(see my new drainer? Of course not, it's see-THRU plastic..woooooo if they made see-THRU dishes my problems would all go away...oh wait...they do...its glass and if it gets dirty they're no longer see-thru...what I need is see-THRU food....)

I bought the expensive 9.99 one too. I know!!!! For a piece of fricking sloped plastic....wow...but I wanted to make sure I got a dish drainer I really liked. One that spoke to me, one that had the shining gleam of a promise to help me stay organized so I can poke my fingers into clay with wild abandon rather than as a distraction from the growing pile of dishes in the kitchen. It had to be a dish drainer that felt like it could be the last dish drainer I'd ever have to buy, a dish drainer that seemed sophisticated enough to justify my need for it.
Life is all about balance I believe, you're either free falling or flying and from one second to the next. For the moment, I am flying in the house cleaning category. But it takes so little to knock me off course, a tv show, a new Nora Roberts' book, a blog entry that screams to be written, a lump of clay that's begging to be squished, a meal that's whining it needs to be made, a husband that's sweetly whispering, "the dishes don't matter".
A ha but they do, to me.
I shall bask in the glory of my new dish drainer tray until the newness wears off and them I'm just muttering over the sink about how I ever did with out it and be content in the knowledge that my cats have belly buttons.....some where.