Cavalier holiday card 2012
Two days after arriving home from 40 days in Europe, Heidi and I were married at our house in Oregon on November 11. In celebration of our legal union, it seemed like a fun idea to start the tradition of designing a holiday art card each year to send to family and friends. This year’s […]
Crazy cat people: Transformation complete?
It is time to continue the story of our apparent transformation into crazy cat people. I left off a couple of months ago with my two “Autumn cats” posts. When we moved out of our apartment in October, we did in fact bring two outside/stray cats (Daisy and The King) with us to our new […]
Autumn cats: Conehead cat and Smokey (Part two)
This is a continuation of Autumn cats: Part one. This autumn, in addition to transporting furniture and boxes of crap we’ve accumulated into our new house, we’re contemplating moving two or three stray cats with us. These planned acts of kindness clearly put us on the road to becoming crazy cat people. Read part one […]
Autumn cats: Becoming crazy cat people? (Part one)
As the chill of the autumn rainy season descends upon us, we have been moving from an apartment into our house for the past couple of weeks. This means leaving the dwelling that gave us Eli and Repete and the “outside” cats we feed that live under our building. Since we now have a nice […]
Four-eared cat, China’s Olympic facade, tainted drugs
Yoda the four-eared cat is an Internet sensation. Everyone wants to see the little horned devil. I think I like him better than that poor six-legged deer. Though I like Lily, our 25-clawed demon cat best. This article was amusing, if you care about the grand, elaborate façade China has put up for the Olympics: […]
Tennis shoes, aliens and Wimbledon on Independence Day
The Oregon State University Nutrition and Exercise Sciences office is collecting old shoes this month to benefit kids in the local area through the Congressional Reuse-A-Shoe Drive. The goal of the drive is to collect as many worn-out athletic shoes as possible, which will then be recycled and turned into donated sports and play surfaces […]
Lily the polydactyl kitten
We brought home our new polydactyl (six-toed) kitten, named Lily, from Portland three weeks ago, on May 25. Lily has 23 claws: 13 in the front (on 12 full toes) and 10 in the back (on 10 toes). Her left front paw has an extra tiny claw/mini-toe in between two toes. And the inner “thumb” […]
Cats and ducklings: Part two
This is a continuation of Cats and ducklings: Part one. Since our cat Smokey died on Sunday, April 6 and was cremated on Thursday, April 10, these became two significant dates in our search of a new companion for lonely Eli. Reincarnation is a comforting idea, especially for grieving mothers. Soon enough, a litter of […]
Cats and ducklings: Part one
Happy Mother’s Day! I was going to hold off posting about all of our recent cat and duckling experiences for a bit longer, but I’ve been inspired by Google’s avian-themed logo doodle for Mother’s Day. It looks like they’ve got a white pekin duck mothering two mallard ducklings. Hooray for adoptive parents. Unless that’s a […]
Queen wasp in a bottle = new cat toy
Today we found a wasp on the kitchen ceiling. Seems odd for Oregon in January. I captured it with an empty juice bottle easily. I originally thought it might be a paper wasp, because we recently had an open-comb wasp nest on the far side of the building. But this wasp was not slender and […]