It's officially kitten season

One of the rooms in the back of the shelter (reserve rooms -- since it's a county shelter they are legally not allowed to turn animals away and so they have what I'd like to think of as "maximum capacity buffering" rooms) is already mostly filled with kitten. Litters and litters of kitties in all kinds of colors.

I also discovered that the soap used there gives me hives if I wash my hands too often (we're required to wash our hands between handling each cat, and I go through about 12 cats per shift). It goes down by itself after a while (it's gone already) but even so, it's unpleasant. It's now obvious why the person who trained me suggested that we bring our own hand sanitizer bottles with us and I resolved to get one, possibly something with aloe. Except when I went to Vons afterward (i.e. just now) I can't find any. Where are this kind of things usually kept? Next to the facial soaps and shampoo, right? (Speaking of which, why are there so many types of shampoo? It's a grocery store.)

Anyway. Have discovered that I quite like apricot Clif bars (which reminds me I need to get another box of cereal bars, lab life seems incomplete without it), and that pearl tea is quite as good without milk as it is with. Tried rosemary-chicken-white-bean soup recently and found it quite good -- a bit like a cross between chicken noodle soup and minestrone, but without either type of pasta (I put crackers in it instead because I need my carbs). Found out that I prefer my soups to come in those ceramic-mug-type-things instead of bowls. Not entirely sure why. Logically I know that being in a mug isn't supposed to make the soup tastier, but it seems that logic doesn't stand a chance in the face of the fact that there is a handle Then again, if left alone I tend to eat ice cream out of mugs, too, so maybe it's a mug thing and not a soup thing.

Did I mention how many kittens there are?