Week 3 with the Foster Kittens: Six Weeks Old, and Sort of Starting to Make Sense!

Athena

 Six-week-old foster kittens are MUCH better house guests than four- or five-week-old foster kittens! They've ceased their habit of simply dropping trou whenever they have the urge to pee, and now mainly hurry off to their designated litterboxes. Alas, old habits die hard, so there are still a few sneaky little corners that they're reluctant to be dissuaded from. If I can't completely block off a tempting pee spot, I'll liberally sprinkle it with a stinky but cat-safe essential oil, or put a food bowl or litterbox directly on top of it. 

Athena

My favorite kitten is still a sleeping kitten--

Taboo

Athena

Anchovy

--but it's also fun to see the kittens awake longer and playing more. We still need to introduce them to more people, but we've socialized them to vacuums and flushing toilets and other in-house chaos, although Will is still doing her best to turn Pickle into an ipad baby:

Pickle

And Syd FINALLY managed to wean them off of baked and pureed chicken and back onto wet kitten food and dry cat food. Athena is also down to eat her chicken straight from the source:

Athena

When we had them for two weeks, we passed the incubation period of all viruses they could be potentially carrying, which means that we got to introduce them to the other pets! Spots hates all other animals and just avoids them, Luna is mostly okay but I don't think she'll ever be predictable with other animals so I don't really let her around them, and Jones...

They are obsessed with Jones. He is their reluctant god. I thought he'd be a little more into them than he is, considering how much he pesters my uninterested Spots, but mostly he'll just wrestle with a kitten for a bit, then try to steal their food and get told off by a human, then ask to leave the room.

Taboo

It's good socialization for the foster kittens, at least!

We've probably got 1-2 weeks left with this litter of kittens. They need to be approximately eight weeks old but definitely two pounds before they can be speutered, and these guys are currently ranging between 1 pound 6 ounces and 1 pound 8 ounces. 

Athena

They're adorable and we all love them, but five kittens is a LOT, and I don't think we're going to be weeping into our handkerchiefs too hard when we send them off to their forever homes!

Anchovy

If nothing else, I don't tend to buy paper towels or commercial spray cleaner, but I think I have bought more of both those items than I have since the first time I saw them in stock after the pandemic started!

Pickle and Athena

Now, off to go help Syd move kittens to my larger bathroom that she and Matt deep-cleaned last night, then scoop litter, dish out new cat food and clean water, put down a new fluffy pillow, and wash dirty cat dishes, put soiled fluffy bedding in the washing machine, and deep-clean the kids' bathroom. 

And THEN we can snuggle kittens while we study Paleolithic cave art!

Labor Day Weekend in Chattanooga: We Went to Ruby Falls

 

There were SO many caves that I'd wanted to see in Kentucky and Tennessee, but the timing didn't work out for most of them. In particular, my much-longed-for Crystal Cave tour doesn't actually exist, alas, although I have hiked to the Floyd Collins Homestead, at least. Dunbar Cave, where I REALLY wanted to see Mississippian indigenous peoples' cave art, moved their tours to just weekends the very week we visited, argh. 

But Ruby Falls, inside Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, was perfect for a late-evening tour after a long day playing pinball. I mean, why NOT go see a cave at night? It's going to be dark in there anyway!

The tour guide's explanation of how Ruby Falls was discovered was a little hard to follow (later, Matt and I were all, "The guy was excavating for a railroad, right?"), but this little podcast episode is short and precise:

And now I really want to see the original Lookout Mountain Cave! It's bonkers that it's completely inaccessible.

This cave tour wasn't the most educational I've ever been on, but it WAS super accessible, and our tour group had a wide range of ages represented. The tour guide was more fun and bantering than I, personally, prefer (I prefer a tour guide who recites a lot of facts and then lets me ask them a lot of questions and answers me with a lot more facts), but everyone else seemed to enjoy it, so I'm pretty sure the same type of self-reflection is required as when you find yourself continually surrounded by assholes.

(It's you. You're the asshole.)

We had a pretty large group walking down these long and narrow cave passages, and so to my horror, the tour guide introduced a call-and-response for the last people in the group, who THANK GAWD were not me and Matt, but a young couple just behind us. Every now and then, he would call out, "Tick, tick!" and the couple had to then respond, "BOOM!!!" To their credit, they all seemed really into it. It just made me not want to exist in this particular universe, is all.

HOWEVER, the cave passages WERE all rather long and winding, and various parts of the group would often pause to take photos or admire something, which would get parts of the group backed up, and then someone else would also want a photo so then those parts would get backed up further, etc. It was all well and good when it was a single passage, but at one point I came upon two identical cave passages in front of me, one straight ahead, one curved to the left. 

Which way had the rest of the group gone? Hmm, no way to tell. 

Should I choose one at random? Probably not, but think what an adventure!

Just then, heard very faintly from far ahead, came a distant "Tick, tick!" We still couldn't tell which passage it had come from, so the couple withheld their boom until the tour guide came back and fetched us.

The next time there was dilly-dallying, another visitor in our group was stationed at a confusing junction to wave us the correct way...

I really liked the informational signage that accompanied some of the cave formations, so we'd know what we were looking at--

--or just to tell us the names of the most famous formations:

The mood lighting was maybe a little cheezy, but I liked it, too:

It was a fun change of pace from the typical yellow lighting inside a tour cave.

Our tour was essentially an out-and-back trek to the titular waterfall:

Again, there was a little bit of a cheeze factor with a prerecorded light and sound show, but I thought we had plenty of time to gaze in admiration at the waterfall and discuss amongst ourselves its formation and the watershed that flows into it.

By the time our cave tour ended, everything else on-site was closed, but we could still walk up the stairs to see the original castle-like tower that Leo Lambert had built from the rocks he excavated while improving the cave entrance:

It must be an incredible view on a clear day, but it was beautiful even on this overcast night.

There is still SO much that I wanted to do in Chattanooga that we didn't have time for! I want to revisit the national park sites, ride the incline railway, stay in the Chattanooga Choo-Choo hotel, kayak to that island in the Tennessee River, and visit the bakery that I'd promised to bring Syd treats home from but it turned out to be closed on Labor Day, oops.

Next time!

Labor Day Weekend in Chattanooga: On Day 3, We Were Pinball Wizards!

THIS is the other compelling reason why I wanted to come to Chattanooga. Not only did they have a museum exhibit of fantasy art, but they also have a museum of pinball and arcade games, all playable with one single admission price!

Matt loves all kinds of video games, including vintage arcade games and pinball games, and I LOVE pinball. Although I owned Nintendo Pinball when I was little, and the movie theater where I worked as a young adult had a pinball game that I spent way too many quarters on, I had never, until this day, played my fill of pinball.

It was a GREAT DAY!

Happily, the rain that had mostly avoided us on the previous day was spitting down off and on all day on this day, which made it the perfect occasion to eat a hotel breakfast and then walk over to the Chattanooga Pinball Museum. I accidentally got into the line for the Maple Street Biscuit Company at first, because we turned the corner, I saw a long line, and assumed that obviously everybody else in Chattanooga would be standing there on a Sunday morning at 10:58, as well, waiting for the pinball museum to open. I mean, what on earth ELSE would you want to do on a rainy Sunday in Chattanooga?!?

Fortunately, Matt was all, "OMG stop standing in line for biscuits, we just ate, come over here and play pinball."

So we did!

The pinball games are set up in roughly chronological order, each with a little stand-up informational blurb sitting on it. The stands were a bit in the way, but later I saw someone hook the stand over the side of the game when they went to play it, so then I did that, too, so that everyone would know that I was an expert.

I absolutely loved the mechanics of these older games. The score physically ticks over as you play, and there are literal bells that the pinball hits that make a delightful musical cacophony. It is magical!

Some of the older games ARE pretty racist, though, which is a bummer:

I love these stylized stencils on the sides:

Move forward in time a decade and you're dealing mostly with sexism rather than racism:

And now you've got more colors and lights and digital effects!

This 1982 Haunted House pinball game was my second favorite game in the museum:

You can't really tell from my terrible photo, but it's a multi-level game, with an upper level at the back that is the haunted attic, but then, if you hit the ball just right, it will roll down into a hidden lower level below the main deck. A green light will turn on, allowing you to see that your ball has rolled into a haunted basement, with new obstacles and flippers that you can control, but the ramp is REVERSED so that it tilts down towards the back of the game! Such an awesome gimmick and very Upside-Downy.

Matt enjoyed the pinball games, too, but he was really there for the vintage arcade games:

He literally stood there and beat the entirety of Streetfighter II:

OMG 1991 me would have been just as impressed as I was on this day!

My favorite thing about pinball is all the millions of fun, creative themes every game has:

Each game always has a new and different creative theme, and new and different gameplay elements that you've never seen before AND that support the theme.

And check out how much of it is hand-drawn. It's like playing a vintage comic!

I don't always love a lot of sensory input all at once, but for some reason, being overstimulated by pinball is the BEST.

Check out the wings on top of this game!

Okay, the one sensory thing that I do not like, actually, is multi-balls. Ugh, two balls in play is TOO MANY BALLS IN PLAY! I can't watch them all, and I just end up losing all my balls quicker than if I'd only kept the one.

So even though I loved the theming of this pinball game (you KNOW how much I love space!), I actually loathed playing it, and I *only* played it something like four or so times before I was done with it for good:

Its multi-ball gimmick? Ugh, I can barely even stand to think about it again. It blasts you with THIRTEEN BALLS SIMULTANEOUSLY. Because it's Apollo 13, get it?

2/10, recommend playing only four times and then never again. That Star Wars: Episode I game to its left was surprisingly awesome, though!

For lunch, we walked through the drizzle to Burger Republic, where I ordered this spiked Nutella shake--

--and then complained to Matt for half an hour that I didn't think it actually had any alcohol in it. But just now, as I was forwarding their spiked shake menu to Matt via email and asking him to learn how to make me ALL of them, preferably this weekend, I noticed that there's also a regular, non-alcoholic Nutella shake.

The menu was one of those giant chalkboards on a wall that you had to look at before you ordered at the counter, so now I'm wondering if I saw the Nutella shake in the spiked shakes section and ordered it without specifying the "spiked" part because I didn't realize there were also virgin Nutella shakes on the menu...

Well, when Matt makes it for me it'll definitely be spiked!

Lunch hit Matt hard, so afterwards, he suggested walking back to the hotel for an afternoon nap. Since it was his birthday weekend, I told him that was an awesome idea, and was then all, "Do you want to just walk back to meet me at the pinball museum when you wake up? Because that's where I'm headed!"

While Matt napped, I discovered my 100% absolute favorite pinball game on the planet, 1999's Revenge from Mars:

It is SO FUN! There's a holographic video screen made possible via a Pepper's Ghost effect that hides the back area where the pinball can go, which means that the game can have all these video-based mini games where you shoot the ball at various holographic targets that are on top of ramps, so you get real-world effects as well as video effects. And the mini video games were SUPER entertaining, like saving the White House from a giant spaceship, or saving the Eiffel Tower from alien troopers, etc.

This 1973 game also had a fun mini game associated with it:

As you play, the pinball builds a game of tic-tac-toe in that central grid:

I was disappointed in this Star Trek: TGN pinball game, which had a lot of cool ramps and gimmicks, but it just wasn't as fun:

Eventually, Matt came back with a second wind--

--and we played pinball for a couple more hours--

--before at one point, just finishing a Hot Wheels pinball game, I kind of blinked and thought, "Huh, is this what it feels like to maybe be kind of tired of pinball? What time is it, anyway?"

Only 7:00 or so, which meant that I'd ONLY been playing pinball for, oh, let's say 6.5 hours. I could literally play another 6.5 hours of pinball right this second, but on that rainy Sunday evening, I reluctantly shook out my aching hands, and found Matt, who reckoned that he, too, could probably be done with pinball.

Instead, we went to go look at a giant waterfall under a mountain!