Call Me Sisyphus

So many people have hit me upside the head and told me to resume this blog that I guess I'd better....

When last I posted, we were about done with the painting and stuff upstairs and the Wizard and I were about to move back up to our original bedroom. Part of fixing the upstairs bedroom for occupation was doing some tile work in the bathroom. As long as the tile guys were in the house, we thought it might finally be time to install a backsplash in the kitchen. After all, we replaced the kitchen in 2008, before I started this blog. Here's a before picture:

And after:

You'll notice that we had to change the cat to match the new decor. And apparently these two cats have different tastes in liquor. Harley likes a nice white wine (moscato, if I'm not mistaken); Canti goes for the hard stuff -- rum. And maybe a little Sabra.


I also set up the former middle bedroom downstairs as an office. Or as an animal amusement room. It is a room with a view of a bird feeder.

And a comfy couch for watching television or just, y'know, hanging out with friends.

I have to give up this space whenever Future Vet comes in for a visit, but it's still nice to have a room of my own with a door that slams shuts, for a change. Other winter projects were the inevitable New Year's Day spread:

And cloning black cats:

Okay, okay. I know that these two cats are not identical. Puck -- on the left -- has a pointier face and a longer tail. Moony -- on the right -- is a tad more compact as well as having a rounder face. But it's uncanny how much Moony has grown to look like Puck. In some respects, they even behave in a similar way. But if a black cat comes up to sit on my chest and nuzzle my hair, it's always Puck. If a black cat takes one look at a human and runs in the other direction, it's usually Moony.


We also undertook one much less pleasant enterprise. We fostered another litter of kittens and lost them all to the horrible disease of panleukopenia. We loved you for the short time we had you Chaos, Havoc, Mayhem, and Gennie (aka Intransigence) -- the Four Kittens of the Apocalypse.

And now it's back to the grind. I went out to the garage and up to the Wizard's office yesterday and took some pictures.

I feel like I've been here before. Multiple times. I repeat, call me Sisyphus.

For the past week or so, I've been going through boxes and boxes of old snap shots. Looking at pictures taken in our previous house (when the offspring were younger), I am convinced that our decorating style was Early, Middle, and Late Clutter. Except for one rather astonishing picture of the garage at our previous house, in which the garage is neatly arranged and a vast expanse of floor is visible. I'll scan it in and upload it ... just as soon as I find it again ... I know it's here somewhere....

I've been pulling empty cardboard boxes and empty Tidy-Cat litter buckets out of the garage all morning. The Tidy-Cat buckets were listed on Freecycle and will be picked up over the next couple of days. The boxes will be collapsed and either stored or recycled.

And we're back.