I received a memo from the desk of the Office of Kitteh Complaints, and such memos are always to be urgently read and promptly acted upon. Previous memos have explained and, again, reiterated the process. Cat photos are expected on Mondays as part of the site’s most popular weekly feature. Their Insta drives a lot of traffic, it turns out.
And, as the weekend memo pointed out, they did not feature into the site last week. It was a serious memo. The subject line was was terse.
So here are the cats.
Not too long ago we ordered pizzas. It was a coolish night, and so they availed themselves of the boxes.
We have, you can see, created two monsters.
Here’s Phoebe taking her afternoon sun in the dining room.
And here’s Poseidon and you can almost see his little mind thinking “PILLOW FORT! PILLOW FORT!”
So the cats, as you can see, are doing well. And now I have to fulfill the rest of their tasks on the memo. They are very particular.
Some time back we had a limb fall from a tree. I cut away a lot of the small stuff by hand soon after it fell, then waited a while and bought myself a chainsaw. This weekend, finally, I got around to cutting it up. I don’t know why I waited so long. This was fast and easy and awesome.
I cut it into firewood-sized sections. The limb was still partially attached to the tree, so eventually I had to break all of the chainsaw rules, fetched the ladder, climbed up, firmly established my balance, reeeeeeeached up, closed my eyes and did what needed to be done for that last bit of the wood.
Felt quite macho.
First time using a chainsaw, as you can probably tell.
We inherited that wheelbarrow in the move, and I’ve come to value it. I had to put some air in the tire, but it works just fine. And the crickets were loving it when I evicted them for these chores.
I could replace that handle, which has been snapped to a little nub, but that’s become part of its charm as I have used it from time to time. It reminds me of what Amity Shales wrote about Calvin Coolidge’s maple sap bucket.
“It had been quaint, it had lived within the painful limits of its self-sufficiency, but it had also yielded all the rest.”
You can see that sap bucket here. And now, for some reason, I want to get stencils for everything.
Things still look properly festive on the front porch. Pay no attention to the dirty floor in need of a fresh coat of paint.
That’s coming in the spring. I am making a list of things to do and that’s well up the list.
My lovely bride has broken out all of the Christmas paraphernalia this weekend and we have deployed it strategically throughout the house and yard. When it was done, we wandered outside and down to the street to see the effect.
Festive, but not overstated. She did a nice job.
The candles in the window are always my favorite.
The tree I was working on earlier? This is it, in the early evening.
The people that we inherited the wheelbarrow from had three kids. Maybe they climbed that tree. I hope so. I hope they had a lot of fun in that part of the yard. It’s easy to be romantic about a place when it gives you shots like that.
