Kitty Spotlight: Sajah

We’ve mentioned Sajah, our new kitten, a few times here. Sajah means “lion” in Korean and he is quite the lion cub. He is 3.5 months old, and a little stocky fluff ball. We originally got him to give a companion to Nymeria when Misty passed away just over a month ago, since Nymeria is still a kitten too and needs companionship while we are at work. So, please meet Sajah:

The second day after we got him, Sajah ran away. We had the door open for a split second and he took off with his short stocky legs. We were up all night searching, and it was cold. We were worried about him. This was stress atop grief from losing Misty…wasn’t a good few weeks. Every night we searched, and every night we gave up a little hope. We put flyers up everywhere, calling his name, shaking his toys he loved so much. But we just didn’t find him. And then about five days later, we got a call. Turns out he was across the street, literally across the street from us. A woman heard a crying in the night and then in the morning and found him hiding in an undercarriage of a car. He was okay, just hungry, tired, and dirty. He knew he was close to home but couldn’t quite find it. Phew. What a little punk.

First day we got him

Sajah is very mischievous, almost without meaning to. He doesn’t quite get how to cover the evidence and sneak away from the scene of the crime. He has recently gotten into the habit of jumping on the counter (undoubtedly from Nymeria) and sneaking around for food. He loves food. In fact, he also tried to get Nymeria’s food every time after he finished (faster), but he’s stopped for fear of us and punishment. One time we were eating popcorn on the couch and he basically dive-bombed into the bowl. It was pretty funny, but not when he tipped it all over the floor.

Found them like this

Scrounging for honey

Sajah is also skiddish when we aren’t lying down or sitting or have food in our hands. It probably comes from the fact that, like Misty, Sajah was born feral (simply meaning in the “wild,” outdoors, not with humans). The few days outside probably didn’t help either. Even if we had been feeding him just minutes before, if we walk towards him he will run under the couch as fast as possible.

Enjoying the sun

However…if we are lying down or sitting on the couch, you can be sure Sajah will find his way there. He may be skiddish when we’re standing, but he will snuggle into you and Nymeria when you’re sitting. He particularly loves lying on our necks and faces while we sleep (thanks, Sajah). And he has the loudest purr, and you can feel it vibrating too! We are very happy that he has fit into our family of big cuddlers.

Nymeria and Sajah have been getting along more so now than when we first got him. At first, he was constantly annoying Nymeria, pouncing on her and biting her–playfully of course. Now, Nymeria is used to being the younger, annoying sibling. It’s good she’s getting a dose of her own medicine, but she was getting very tired of constantly getting bowled over and would seek us for refuge. He’s calmed down and now they play when they both want to. And we have caught them cuddling lots.

Lion and Panther

Sajah has the most scratchy meow when he’s hungry (which is all the time) and will not cease if we are preparing food. Gets pretty annoying but would rather him be vocal than quiet. He does have cute meows when he’s cuddling or wanting to go on our laps. Although I wasn’t really ready for another kitty, Sajah has found a place in our home and our hearts and has certainly become part of our family. We look forward to future with him and Nymeria.

Ultimate lion cub pic…my favorite

Cheers and Meow

Dec102012

Rest in Peace, Misty

Perhaps you’ve noticed that we haven’t posted for over a week now. We have some very sad news to reveal: Misty, our baby kitty (the white one), passed away Thursday, November 29th at night time. It was very sudden and expected and we believe it had to do with her brain and the fact that she was born feral. Could’ve been a cyst, aneurysm, stroke, and so forth. Even if we wanted to know, it wouldn’t change the fact that she’s not longer here. If anyone knows us, they know we see our animals as kin.

We are heartbroken because she was only just over six months old, but there was nothing we can do. We got her cremated and have her urn close to us, she will always be remembered. We are healing slowly and can now think about how grateful we were to have her at all. She will be very missed by all who knew her and her quirks. She came so far from being under-socialized and turned into a cuddle monster. Nymeria, her younger sister, misses her too, for they were never separated. If you want to learn more about Misty, click here. Here’s a few pictures of remembrance:

Help, I’m adorable!

First day we got her

Thank you to all who gave Misty love.

We have some more news, and it’s a little better this time. Since Nymeria, our little black kitten, is only five months old, we were very worried about her being alone for 8-10 hours per day since she has never been alone in her entire life. Although I wasn’t exactly ready, we went to the Humane Society last week to look for a companion for Nymeria. Misty could never be replaced. Nymeria grieved her loss (though she doesn’t understand death) and I know she still misses her even though Misty could be a prissy older sister sometimes.

We found and brought home Sajah. He is a 3-month old male, orange tabby. His name is Korean and it means “lion.” He very much acts like a lion cub, too. Extremely playful with big paws and a chubby stocky body. Nymeria isn’t too hot about him yet, but she has someone to play with and she feels better not being alone.

Rest in peace, little snow leopard.

Nov062012

Get Yo Autumn On: Whole-Wheat Banana PUMPKIN Bread

Oh yes I said it…pumpkin. I’ve made tons of banana breads, but now it was time to introduce the beloved fall vegetable, pumpkin. How many times do you think I can say pumpkin in this paragraph? Anyways, this pumpkin banana bread is one, absolutely delicious, two, easy to make, and three, doesn’t leave you feeling guilty. It uses a bit of brown sugar and honey to sweeten things up, as well as the banana and pumpkin that go along with it. I found this recipe here and varied it a bit, put more cinnamon in it, more honey, typical stuff for me. Alrighty, get ready.

Ingredients:

WET
1/2 cup butter
2/3 cup brown sugar
3 tablespoons honey
1 cup pumpkin puree
2 eggs
1 banana
2 tablespoons orange juice (weird)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
DRY
1.5 cups whole-wheat flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon

This is the pumpkin puree I use. You can find it…ANYWHERE right now

Okay, looks like a long list but it doesn’t take long to prepare.

Prep Time: 15 minutes
Cook Time: 55-70 minutes

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees
REAL simple here. Mix all the wet ingredients together

Then, you mix in the dry ingredients like the flour, baking soda, etc. Just look up at the ingredient list above, I organized it for you (it was really hard).

Spoon it all into the buttered or oiled baking tin and place into oven!

Bake for 55-75 minutes. Test it in the middle with a fork or a toothpick to make sure it’s cooked all the way through.

Hope you enjoy it as much as we will! I’m bringing this over to my aunt’s and cousins’ to watch the Election Night coverage as we bite our fingernails. Now that I think about it, I probably baked this to subconsciously soothe myself. Don’t forget to VOTE tomorrow. Please.

BONUS KITTY PIC

Oct242012

Work Those Push Muscles: Chest and Triceps Workout

So there are some workout match-ups that tend to be our favorites. One of those favorites is the sweet chest and triceps pair. It’s a great combination and leaves you exhausted afterwards (my arms are very upset with me now that I am typing). So Alana, you’re probably saying, why is it a good combination? Lemme spit some reasons at ya (not literally, come on).

Triceps brachii

1. Convenience: being able to do your chest and triceps at once can really open your workout schedule. This is especially for the people who tend to try to workout every day or every other day. It gives you a few days to work on other muscle groups without worrying about overworking those muscles. Because ultimately, that will lead to injury. And that’s a no-no.

2. Effective: you’re going to get a much better chest and triceps workout if you work them together. If you’re doing it properly, every chest exercise you do will work your triceps a bit and every triceps exercise will work your chest. That’s just how our body works.

3. Power: it makes you feel huge. Think about the strength, effort, and power that goes into benching.

Anyhow, there’s a few reasons for you. Now let’s get to our actual workout. We have a few pictures for you of yours truly.

1. We started out with a super-set (one exercise after the other, no rest) of push-ups and triangle push-ups, working our chest in the first and triceps in the latter. You don’t need any equipment for this, so no excuses! Go until failure.

2. Our next super-set was incline chest press and incline pec fly. This really requires good strength and power (especially chest press). Unforunately, no pictures of us doing this. For chest press, you sit on the inclined bench, and push your arms straight up.

For pec fly, get in the same seated position. But start your arms out, like you’re going to give a tree a hug, and bring inwards (you tree-hugger!).

3. For this we didn’t do a super-set, because we wanted to spot each other for bench press. Personally, I’ve lost a lot of my strength, and can’t bench nearly what I used to (you’ll see low weight in the picture, the bar = 45 lbs). It’s just good to be there and spot for each other to get the weight up and getting help getting it down. We did decline bench press. Go for a good weight and, as usual, go til failure.

4. For our last super-set we combined triceps cable press and double-hand triceps extension. This really killed our triceps (in a good way!). For anyone uncomfortable with triceps exercises, I find that the cable press is an easy pathway to get comfy with working those triceps. You position yourself with the feet shoulder-width apart, facing the cable, and press down the steel triangle or horse rope down and bring your arms back to 90 degrees.

For triceps extension, grab a good weight and place behind your head and do vertical raises.

5. And lastly, to end our muscle workout, we did a cable cross-press. This will get a good pinching burn in your chest and triceps. We juiced out the rest of our strength through these. Always go to the end of your workout. Never stop pushing. Unless you feel sharp pains, THEN STOP. Stand away from the cables, grab each cable in each hand and cross over your hands.

For this entire workout, we did four sets of everything and pushed to failure. It could range from 8 to 100, it’s up to your body and your strength. We ended it with some excellent twenty-minute bouldering where Chris finished a new route that had been challenging him for weeks!

Please let us know if you have any questions! Cheers!

Oct042012

Kitty Spotlight: Nymeria

Very connected with the name (although she doesn’t quite respond to it yet), Nymeria is wild, mischievous, and…well, adorable. She’s our baby girl, 3 months old! She’s younger than our other kitten, Misty, by a month. I actually have the two of them on my lap right now, and Nymeria is watching me as I type. A little too cute to handle, she gets really excited. You can read about when we first got them here. So let’s go over how she was around a month ago (though I feel we’ve had them forever) to how she is today.

Watching me type

So let’s start when we first got her. You can see the first picture I took of her below. She was wide-eyed, hyper, and ready for action (and still is)! She was very friendly, and while we were trying to decide on what kitten to get, she just jumped on my lap. Kind of a give away there. She loves to play, really loves to play. And if Misty is being too prissy to do so, she will sprint around the house, jumping up on the couch and cat tree then jumping off. We play a bit of tag then too, and hide and seek.

First day we got her, wide-eyed Nymeria

Nymeria playing hide and seek

One day I was looking for something in the very small desk drawer, and she hopped right in and laid comfortably

She is very mischievous and she knows when she’s doing something wrong because if we go near her during her crime, she will scamper away as quickly as possible. Nymeria loves to play with this black and white pen and we’ll find it on the ground when we come back or clamped in her tiny little jaws. She has the adorable little nature to her that will be apparent in her face, this baby-like innocence and curiosity. If we push her away from cuddling, she will come right back every single time. She’s also gotten into the habit of cleaning Misty a lot, licking her head and ears, sometimes with a bite to go with it if she’s feeling playful. You can see that below.

Tried out her Halloween outfit. She wasn’t pleased

Nymeria (true to her name) seemed born a hunter. Right from the start, she knew how to hunt and pounce. She had perfect form in her waiting-for-pounce mode and sprung at the exact moment. In fact, Misty didn’t even know how to pounce or play when she got to us, but by observing Nymeria, she does all the time now. Although she’s significantly smaller than Misty, she can do pretty well when they wrestle together. Nymeria is excellent at grabbing the toys we annoyingly dangle over her head and great at catching the toys we drag on the ground like animals. We just need to watch our toes.

Nymeria was not without her problems, though. Actually, she came to us with quite a few problems all at the tender age of two months old. She came with roundworm, a bacteria that affecting her pooping habits. She couldn’t really control it and it wasn’t very good. There were a lot of baths, a lot of scrubbing the carpet, and wiping butts. We kinda got used to it. We had to give her medicine every day which wasn’t fun (using a syringe to plunge the icky goo into her mouth). Then, she got a pretty bad cold, wheezing, sneezing, lots of big bogeys. And we could really tell she was sick. You know with kids, you can tell–her usual rascal self was not there, she slept most of the time, and never felt like eating. But we slowly got her back to health. She has the occasional sneeze now and then, but it’s cute.

An adorable sick Nymeria passed out with her cute shaved belly (from her spaying surgery)…we may or may not have wanted to shave it again just because it’s adorable

Yet, despite all her rambunctiousness, she’s extremely sweet and friendly, and would never purposely hurt anyone. Misty, time and time again, steals Nymeria’s food out of her bowl (before we catch her and reprimand her), and Nymeria doesn’t fight her, doesn’t growl (like Misty does), but simply waits until she can get her food again. She’s very patient and loving and would never hurt her sister, who I think in return would eat everything so Nymeria would have nothing. She has an amazing tolerance and easy-going nature which makes her never act aggressive. Nymeria is the ultimate cuddler, whether it be Chris or I or Misty, she will always initiate.

I would say her most distinguishing aspect (besides her adorable waddling bowleggedness) is that she kneads. I’m guessing she was taken from her mother very early and was thus unweaned. Never got used to not having mama’s milk since she didn’t have time to properly wean off it. So, if anyone lays on the couch, you can count up to 5 before you’ll have little black Nymeria paws on your chest. She will then curl into your neck, put both paws on your neck or arm, and knead them, like she’s trying to push milk out of mama. She does this all the time. In fact, right now she’s doing it to Misty on my lap, who definitely does not mind the massage.

Well, I wrote way too much, but I love my kitties. Nymeria is growing up great and healthy, can’t wait to see how she is all growed up. Keep an eye out for the next Kitty Spotlight!

She thinks I’m her mother

Cheers!

Aug202012

KITTIES!

So we don’t exactly have full-time jobs yet…but we went ahead and did the right thing. Which was adopting two kittens (2 month old and a 3 month old) from the Boulder Humane Society. It was a tough decision and up to this point, I was wary about having cats (let alone kittens) in the apartment.

I thought…Maybe they’ll cost too much money! We don’t have the apartment set up yet! We should have jobs! Blah blah blah

Chris wanted cats badly. He was never allowed to have pets growing up and now was his shining chance of glory to snuggle big time with some kitties. So, he set to work whenever I had an obstacle that made me uncomfortable about getting cats.

I’d like to get all of our furniture first. He went on Craigslist and we ended up with a lot of great free furniture (some were prizes from the dumpster). We know how to play it cheap 😉

I want everything scrubbed down first. So Friday morning, we went to town, cleaning all the floors, vacuuming, making sure everything looked great!

And jobs… Hey, we’ve both almost got ’em. And we have lots of savings from smart living.

So Friday, after a long morning of cleaning and chores, we head to the Boulder Humane Society. Even Chris had some doubts about whether it was really time. So we went just to take a look. Now, I’m normally a dog lover, but in our apartment, we can only have cats. But hey, I like ’em too. All animals = love.

Oops. They have a kitten room. WITH SEVEN KITTENS ALL ROLLING AROUND AND PLAYING! It was too much. We were shown in after drooling all over the viewing window. We first fell in love with a small black kitten named Sizzle who was a rambunctious little thing playing with whoever would have her. And she ended up jumping in my lap. Then there were a few others that we were debating…some were on hold…and some we just couldn’t decide.

I, however, quickly decided on Sizzle (who would later be changed to Nymeria–a little Song of Ice and Fire lore for you–and yes, nerd alert). Chris was debating between three others…one playful grey and white, another playful one (ginger), and a calm, sleepy one who was a mix of Siamese and lynx. After thirty minutes of debating, he decided on the Siamese-Lynx mix named Misty and we kept the name.

Nymeria — 2 months old

Nymeria came home with roundworm–a parasite that makes her (unfortunately) poop a lot. She’s freaking adorable and a crazy-awesome snuggler who likes to go right under your neck and nuzzle. But she needs a diaper and I don’t know how many times we’ve had to clean the floor already. But she’s trying.

Misty — 3 months old

This one came under-socialized, meaning she was born feral. The first day, she escaped to any hiding space possible. However, just the second day she warmed up a great deal, didn’t hide, played with toys, and cuddled with her adopted sister. She did, however, give us a horrible scare and–as you can see in the picture above–hid under the dishwasher and we thought she ran away. Phew.

So, as you can probably tell, we’re completely in love. Sometimes I feel like a newborn’s parent and it’s exhausting. Even though it’s a lot of work, it’s worth it when Misty snuggles into your arm, or when you can feel Nymeria’s baby paws on your skin.