Our Caturday guests this week come from reader Jan F. “Mess with us, and we will think about scratching this authentic Art Deco sofa when we get up from our nap. Top to bottom, Ivy, Hazel, Holly. They are the entire rescued litter and are all girls. Rescued cats are the best, as all the Stanford students, venture capitalists and tech bros know.”
Got woken up this morning by a thunder storm like we haven’t had for a long time! It was quite a show!
The geek in me is a bit sad because it’s the Montreal Comiccon but I can’t afford to go because if I do, I know I won’t be able to resist getting autographs from Alex Kingston and David Tennant and Nathan Fillion and Sir Patrick Stewart and they go from $60 to $120 each. Also the older I get the worst I do in crowds.
Oh well, maybe we’ll go out to the restaurant for diner tonight and I’ll drown my sorrows in sushi. ?
I would pay to even breathe the same o2 molecules as Sir Patrick Stewart. No writing or movement required. ??
I’ve breathed the same o2 molecules as Sir Patrick Stewart on several occasions. It was fabulous.
Ooo. Did those molecules seem more engaged! Or delightfully British. Or stalwart. Or extremely versatile ranging from majestic to hilarious. Nicely aged but still hot?
Details please. When? Where? For how long? Though you may want to keep the answers to yourself.
Sigh. I am happy for you.
I once got liberally coated in Al Pacino’s spit during a performance of Julius Caesar. I had a front row seat, which was only about 10 feet away from him. Shakespeare elocution involves lots of saliva.
I should have stated that the aforementioned molecule-breathing took place in theatres, and that I was only one of hundreds of fellow molecule-breathers. Over the years I’ve seen him in a number of Shakespeare plays, most recently “The Tempest” and “Hamlet” (with David Tennant!), and in last year’s “No Man’s Land” with the equally treasurable Sir Ian McKellen. And he is most definitely ALL the things you mention in your first paragraph!
Sir Patrick, David Tennant and Sir Ian! ARRRRG! I am DED from jealousy!
It’s been beautiful weather here all week in the PNW and once the noise of the 4th was over, Lily made the most of it! She did pretty good with the fireworks; one or two here and there doesn’t faze her at all. I brought her indoors mid-afternoon once the frequency started to increase, but it wasn’t until 8:30-9pm that they started to bother her. I think it was just an overload kind of thing; she’s so alert to every little thing all the time that she couldn’t keep up with the constant barrage. She hid behind the washer and dryer until it died down and then she was fine.
This is Herself in the sunshine watching something only she can see. I texted it to a friend who adores her huge ears and said that I should nickname her Pinkie. Friend replied that “wouldn’t that make you The Brain?” So now we have been dubbed Pinkie and the Brain. Sigh. I’m not trying to take over the world, honest! (I had to really scrunch this one down to make it fit the 50kb limit, so here’s a bigger version to enjoy…)
Lily really has star quality and you’re a terrific photographer.
Agreed.
Thank you both! She’s a great subject, although it would be easier if she would just be STILL for a cotton-pickin’-minute!
Lily looks so contented lying amongst the clover.
Oh I forgot, there’s bonus videos this week!
Lily and the hanging strawberries
Lily and the giant ziptie
Jump Lily jump higher! You’ll get a yummy home grown strawberry very soon now.
One of my cats used to love to jump up and snag the babies from my hanging spider plants. Lily reminds me so much of that ‘activity’.
Lily and the hanging strawberries, with the running water sound track, seemed like it was filmed in the Garden of Eden.
Not the Garden of Eden, but my little slice of heaven! (Emphasis on the ‘little’…) I have a nice outdoor rocking chair to sit and read in. Here’s most of it (large version here).
A sylvan glade – lovely spot, looks very restful and to me “doable”. I have a rather large space to deal with so the idea of actually getting to rest in it is pretty much out of the question.?
Of course the sofa is theirs, why else would you bought it to match their eye color 🙂
Beautiful cats, love their names! And why would anyone even ask if they need the whole couch??? 😀
Lovely day here. Not much planned; farmer’s market, some errands. I would love to go on a real vacation (it’s been years) but that’s just not in the budget right now. Some day, though!
I know these kitties personally, and they all have the middle name “Grace.” Three graces, get it? (Nyuk nyuk). They are all as lovely as the day is long. So nice to start off Caturday with them!
Gorgeous lady cats.
Yes they are. And that sofa is great too.
Gorgeous stack o’ cats! Love the room decor too.
Beautiful pile o’ pusses – and a gorgeous couch!
Bird sitting till Wednesday. Lunch with a good friend of ours. Possible trip to Berryfest for fresh fruits and veggies. Slip across the border for dairy. Groceries. Coffee with another friend. Busy, but quiet.
Gigi, I was thinking about your comment, and I got to wondering: if River Song and the sixth Doctor had kids, what would their hair be like?
Their hair would be magnificent! ??
Hello all! It’s beautiful weather up here in Billings but seriously hot – 101 or so all weekend and next week is supposed to be 104-107. Yikes!! But anyway plans for today are just to hit up the local museum’s annual art fair and then a coffeehouse downtown that is branching out into serving beer and wine as of today. And try not to melt. My poor Cricket spends most of her time passed out on the kitchen floor these days. Ooh and I also got an order of books in this week and plan on poring over those all weekend too. Hope everyone has a lovely weekend!
Hello all!
I have been negatively impacted by humidity as of late. So today is an indoor day for me as the dial is already at 84%.
I have found a good pattern for getting housework and artwork done on days I do not have to go out. I do dishes and the next chore on a written list in the mornings. Then artwork or writing or website in the afternoon and early evening. Late night for tv and internet. Seems to be working. I don’t feel guilty drawing for hours if I have done some chores.
Millie now can sit, paw, sit up, dance and!!! bow. She is a fast learner. Once she bows consistently I am going to teach her down, crawl and roll over. Down the road I would love if I say “poof” instead of “bang” and she flopped down asleep. We shall see. ??
Artwise, I have completed drawing 33. I will be writing a description and then uploading to my website over the weekend. I have a very detailed drawing in my head that will, for the first time, require preliminary sketching. Something very dramatic that has become more detailed as I think about it.
I had a huge computer scare this week that required me having to call AppleCare for on screen help. The end result is my TELLING ALL OF YOU TO MAKE SURE YOU HAVE YOUR DOCS, PHOTOS AND CONTACTS BACKED UP ON TWO SEPARATE CLOUDS!!! I watched in horror as my 1595 photos reverted back to a much older version that took hours to download again AND my contacts disappeared from my MacBook and then my phone. They WERE NOT in my Apple iCloud!!!!! Luckily I had them backed up on Verizon. I am now uploading all of my photos and important docs to Verizon as well.
I almost had a heart attack and kicked myself because I have a 3Terabite external hard drive that I have not used yet!!
Back up. Back up. Back up. Have a good weekend all.
You haven’t used it?! My external drive is divided, every hour Time Machine and weekly a clone.
Well I will now!!
Just when I thought I could start saving money again after spending oodles of cash doing up the house, along comes the announcement that the Vaudeville Theatre in London will be hosting a year-long Oscar Wilde season beginning in October. Being a huge Wilde fan I couldn’t resist finding out more, and ten minutes later I’d booked tickets for the first two plays, “A Woman of No Importance” and “Lady Windermere’s Fan”. AND I’m seeing “Salome” at Stratford-upon-Avon later this month!
*rattles piggy bank*
Alice Shortcake, I saw your book for pre-order on Amazon. Any word on the Kindle (e-book) version? As I said, I will take three!
N. Fritz, there’s been a bit of a hiccup with the book. I withdrew the title from CreateSpace and republished it with IngramSpark as they offer distribution in the UK. I’m having a cover designed for the e-book version and it should be on sale, together with the print version, on 6th October. So hopefully you’ll be able to get your books in plenty of time for Christmas!
I’m about halfway through the follow-up book. Here’s a 1906 advert for what must have been one of the first dinosaur films:
Prehistoric Peeps: The Professor’s Dream.
One of the most elaborate productions ever staged, giving with remarkable precision the impressions of a dreaming Professor, who has been overcome by sleep while engaged in scientific research in a cave. From the floor of the cave a a monstrous dinosaur arises and and chases the scientist into the camp of some prehistoric Britons, whose attitude is the reverse of cordial. Having slain the dinosaur, the Professor is chased in turn by a diplodocus, an ichthyosaurus, and other huge monsters, eventually finding his way back to the cave, where, surrounded by menacing forms, he is reduced to a state of rigid terror.
Length 375 ft. Price £9 7s. 6d.
THE HEPWORTH MANUFACTURING COMPANY, LIMITED. 17, Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London W.C.
There’s going to be a follow-up? Cool!! I loved the first one.
There is indeed! It will cover the years 1900-1910. Hopefully there will be at least two further volumes in the “comic and curious anecdotes” series and a book devoted entirely to pantomime.
I have to get my act together and order the first one! Did you say it’s temporarily unavailable?
Yes – I switched printers and the new edition is available for pre-order. It’s out on 6th October.
You’re killing me Alice Shortcake! Will they put on my favorites, The Importance of being Ernest and An Ideal Husband?
Gigi the green with envy cat lady.
Yes – they’re coming later next year (MORE expense!), together with a folk-opera version of “The Selfish Giant” and a reading of “De Profundis”.
A snippet of useless information: a few years ago I was thrilled to discover a kind of six-degrees-of-separation link with Oscar Wilde. My great-great Aunt Amelia’s husband Harold Dilke was an (illegitimate) nephew of Sir Alexander Dixie, who was married to Lady Florence Douglas, sister of the notorious Marquess of Queensberry…so two of Harold’s cousins were also the cousins of Lord Alfred Douglas!
Rain and thunder outside today, making it a good day to stay in and work on projects. I’m cleaning the corner of the room where Ani the rabbit has her cage, and I discovered that so much garbage had piled up behind the cage that I’m lashing some cardboard to the back so that won’t happen so much in the future. Ani, of course, has already started chewing on the twine I used to tie the panels, so I can see this will be an ongoing task.
I use clear plexi panels and small clamps (the kind used for gluing stuff together) for that sort of thing – or zip ties. You can make them tight enough that they can’t get their little mouth parts in to chew them. A bungi cord can work, too.
Thank you, that’s a good idea. I already have the cardboard panels in place, but if Ani gives me too much trouble with them I’ll try your idea.
I know how it can be – it’s a gradual process to set them up and figure out all the best ways to foil whatever it is they can get into. I used cardboard at one point – actually, black mat board – when I got rid of it I was amazed to see how much spraying had been done – all recorded on the black surface of the paper. Bunny Graffiti! I had a male and I think her was the perp, despite his having been neutered.
How is Ani getting along with Half Tail?
Another 90+ degree weekend in Colorado, but it’s not humid here, so I can (barely) survive without central AC. My big project of last weekend, replacing the steps to my back door and basement, turned out very well, but I could only manage 4 steps alone. This morning, my lawn guy came over to help tear out the last 6 steps (the big ones). Three hours later, the job is nearly done and I’m taking a break before I finish nailing in the last few treads and risers.
Stairs had linoleum, this beautiful carpeting, and then another layer of beige carpeting before this project started.
Yes, somebody once looked at that carpet and thought, “That right there is the best way to beautify my home.”
Now stairs look like this:
I like them, they look very nice!
I love blue contrasting risers!
They go with the back door and with other colors in my kitchen.
Thank you all for validating my decor choices!
You should have seen the original Victorian wallpaper in the hallway of a house I once owned. HUGE eagles and Roman ruins, carefully preserved by several coats of incredibly hard dark brown varnish. In the end I just gave up, sandpapered the rough bits and papered over it…
That carpet has a distinct 1970s look, redolent of the days when it was illegal to decorate your home in colours other than brown, avocado, gold and purple.
My best friend lives in a flood zone, and after hurricane Sandy her house has to be raised. They finally started it in October of last year and it’s still not done (grr). In the meantime they are renting a house from a friend of her mother’s. It appears to have last been decorated in the 70s. I have no doubt that the kitchen appliances are older than I am. But the best (worst) part, I think, is the fully-carpeted upstairs bathroom. Why?!
The owner is selling the house; I wonder what potential buyers think when they see it. Any buyer is gonna have a lotta work to do. (I just hope my friend’s house is done before he sells it.)
With a little ‘baroo’ head tilt, you get a much better idea of what your new steps look like.
Wish I were as talented as you DebG. Desperately need to replace some outside steps and small landing to my front formal entry soon.
Wow! stairs look great!
Debg, you never cease to amaze me – your new stairs look fabulous. I know how you feel about the old carpet – I often see things like this and wish I’d been in on the design meeting when it was approved. What WERE they thinking???
I own a shirt that looks like this carpet. It was one of my favorites for many years. The best part is that the shirt is made of a stretchy polyester jersey fabric, has wide-ish collars and long sleeves.
Julie, the 70s ensnared many, many fashion victims. So did the 80s, come to think of it! I’m relieved that most photographic evidence of my fashion choices have ended up in landfills somewhere.
My parents bought their house in 1978. This is what the kitchen carpet looked like. (Yes, I said kitchen carpet.)
I’m having a 70s flashback now…
That’s enough to make me motion sick.
Remember the kitchen carpet they advertised on TV where, if you got a stain, you could use the provided cookie cutter thingie to cut the stain out and replace with another cut-out piece of carpet? Gee, I wonder why that didn’t fly. With this carpet you’d have to match patterns or suffer the consequences.
It’s just silly to have carpet in any room where food and/or water spills are likely. (We also still had the carpet when we got a new puppy. That’s just a disaster waiting to happen.*) Some throw rugs you can toss in the washer, fine, but wall-to-wall carpet? My friend is currently renting a house that has carpet in the bathroom which is god knows how old. I’d be afraid to pull it up and see what kind of yuck is under it.
*Apparently we lived with plywood floors in the living room for the first several months because the previous owners had dogs that were not well-trained. My parents had to pull it up because it smelled so bad, but couldn’t afford to replace it right away. Thankfully I was too young to remember that (I was two and a half when we moved in), but they kept the kitchen carpet for a few years at least; I was 5 when we got the puppy. Eventually it got replaced with linoleum, and now it’s something that looks like tile but isn’t (it’s all one piece).
Good afternoon everyone!
Okay, I mentioned this somewhere on Thursday night and it’s not the full video but it’s the only one I could find. So here is Ne-Yo singing to a pen full of kittens that dedded me so.
I’m so glad you shared this! After you mentioned it, I tried googling to find a clip, but couldn’t find it anywhere. Everything about this is just too cute.
Yeah, I didn’t even find this until the next morning. I looked on Youtube before posting in case someone had uploaded the whole clip but no luck. Oh, well.
So this week I’ll be cat-sitting for a friend’s kitty (more like cat-checking-on; I’m not actually staying with her like I would for my parents’ cats). She’s a little Calico named Violet. I’ll try to get some pictures. He said I could just go over Monday/Wednesday/Friday (they left this morning and will be back next Saturday) but knowing me I’ll stop by every day after work just to make sure she’s okay (it’s not exactly on my way home but it’s not terribly out of the way, either; it’s where I go for game night). Sometimes she’s sociable and sometimes not, so we’ll see if she wants to cuddle with me. I figure either she’ll want some attention after being home alone or she’ll be mad that her daddy left and hide from me.
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So I got sucked in a bit of a Buzzfeed vortex last night and took this silly quiz:
What Type Of Mom Are You Going To Be One Day?
This was my result:
You got: Cat Mom
Screw kids, you have cats! You are a creative and caring person who has a lot of love to give, just not to humans.
I looked at it but I couldn’t answer many of the questions because I didn’t know who the people were – and they sure didn’t have any musical artist I knew anything about!?
Ha, I did one a couple weeks ago that had something to do with TV shows, and on every single question I had to click “I don’t watch this show.”
I too got Cat Mom. Big surprise!
Well, you do have the ears…
I helped my brother move the daycare to the new house today. Quite an undertaking, we moved all the appliances (fridge, stove, dishwasher, washer, and dryer). Then moved his MILs appliances in from her rental house. We are too old for that heavy lifting, we both have bad knees, and will both be likely to find it hard to move tomorrow. He had asked his friends and his wife’s family members to help, was planning to cook hot dogs and hamburgers for everyone who helped. His daughter from out of town drove 2 hrs just to help, but she has congestive heart failure, so she was good for packing things into boxes, and hooking up appliances once we moved them. His other daughters live in town, and neither of them came over. His grandkids were a big help, they are ages 6, 8, and 10, but they lugged a lot of boxes without complaint.
Patty, Just reading your post made me tired.
I am tired. It was 95 degrees today, hot and tired. The last time I moved it was 1981. I hope I never have to move from this house, over 35 yrs of accumulation, I’d be tempted to just burn it all.
Patty, I hope your aches and pains ease up quickly. Once we reach a certain age, heavy lifting is too painful. I was walking around like Quasimodo last weekend, and even a little this morning, thanks to the Big Stair Project–and I had HELP yesterday!
Wow, Patty, what a project! You must be pooped. I’m so impressed that the grandkids helped out – I think at that age, my idea of ‘helping out’ was more like ‘getting underfoot.’
Oops. I totally forgot to log in and comment yesterday. I really meant to, but I’m re-watching Babylon 5 (first four seasons, anyway), and I only had a few episodes to go to finish out the first season, which is mostly painful but does have a few surprise links to several seasons down the road, so I forced myself to sit through even the bad episodes by watching one a night. I may have to switch to watching earlier in the day, though, because when we get too far into the Shadow episodes, they’ll end up either keeping me awake or giving me nightmares, I’m afraid!
But I owed myself the marathon; I worked so hard all week that I didn’t even have a chance to watch *one* episode several nights. Yuck. I’m getting too old for this kind of a work schedule!
Not much else happened. We’ve had thunderstorms and rain every single day for a while now; fortunately, neither dog is bothered by them, so I can enjoy them. I love a good thunderstorm; when I was a teenager, our house had a 10-foot-deep roofed front porch that was bottom half wall and the top half screened, and when my girlfriends would spend the night, if we were having a storm, we’d sleep in sleeping bags out on the porch so we could watch the lightning. It was great!
Anyway, it’s been a quiet week. Dean got a Gentle Leader for Sebastian, our silly little cocker spaniel who’s also VERY stubborn, and he works very industriously at getting that Evil Torture Device off. He actually got the nose part off this morning, which is amazing! But he’s also learning to walk with a slack leash, which is VERY nice. So we don’t much care if he hates the thing, it works!
Everybody have a good week! And DebG, if I ever remodel my house, I’m going to hire you to help me, okay?