7 posts tagged “cats”
What did you do in 2008 that you have never done before?
Also, in the process of understanding my role as a parent, I think i said "no" too much during the earlier part of this year. I thought about this whilst on vacation with my family and resolved to do better, to know that parenting isn't just protecting and restricting but also about teaching a child to question limits and go out and experience things. This seems to be doubly true and needed in the case of my brother, and I'm glad I had this epiphany and reformed.
What, you ask, happened on this fateful day in history? I'm sure lots of things and some of you will even look it up in Wikipedia to enlighten me ;) but my reasoning for titling my post such is that's the day I took one photo for each hour I was awake. It is now July 10, and I am utterly shamed that I didn't post these previously. Originally, I was waiting for a friend to post her photos from a similar exercise. Then I just plain forgot about them. Egads. Anyway, click on the mosaic to see the slideshow of photos from 5:33am - 11:11pm and please feel free to comment, either here or on Flickr :)
Now part of a series, I suppose. More questions from my brother:
- Cats don't have like a boyfriend and girlfriend do they?
- Does that mean they just do it whenever they want to?
1. New cat: Friday before Christmas, a bundle of black and white mewing was at our door. Seeing as she was very good looking and declawed, we assumed she had made a run from her family. We put signs up in our neighborhood the next day, but have received zero calls to claim her. A couple of brief tests later, she's now trying to acclimate herself to life with the other pets and the preteen.
2. New pantry: As I type, my husband is busily and noisily screwing drywall up for those most massive and wonderful pantry I've ever had the privilege to cook out of. Since moving to Florida, we'd been making due with a little four-foot, thirty-dollar job from Target to hold dry goods. This one is at least six times that size, has lights, deep shelves and is making use of a previously unused area of the house. Brilliant.
3. New hair color: Egyptian Plum by Clairol. Because I'm worth it, dammit.
4. New plans: Motivating a friend to write a book or a dozen, getting my crafty biz going, learning new art techniques, and doing everything in my power to live a blissful, creative life.
More than three months ago, I shelved this blog in a fit of despair.* I needed to find some way to put my head down and make my life work, and I hope I am now arriving at that point.
To that end, I'm rebooting this Vox for the New Year and am giving it the following direction:
- My Vox is going to remain a personal blog, about the tribulations and festivities in the life of a near-30-year-old woman living in the Sunshine State, married, raising her brother, feeding the cats and overpriced terrier. When I burn a loaf of bread, celebrate a report card, or have a funny anecdote to share, it will go here. If I like a movie, read a book, or have to out my obsession with Project Runway, it will go here.
- I'm setting up another blog to chronicle my creative aspirations and my fledgling attempts to sell the goodies and oddities I create. If you want to see pictures of collages, messy journals, and stitchery, it will go there.
While, in general, I have a big o' fear of overlapping my personal and (ha!) professional personnas, I also plan to do a kind of monthly recap on my Vox of how things are going over in artsy land. Mainly for the purposes of hoping to shamelessly lure you to my Etsy storefront, obviously.
I'm also going to take the leap and start pointing people who actually know me (other than you, Donut Pusher) to this blog. If you went to school with me or know me from some other venue, gosh, I hope I didn't rant about you in this blog's earlier incarnation. I kid, I kid...
To those in my Voxy neighborhood: Hey, thanks for keepin' me in your loop. If you had a baby, opened a business, got married, ditched the jerk, or otherwise made huge moves in your life since September, I hope they have worked out for you, and I'm sorry I didn't write. Special shout-out to the very creative Lorri, whose Vox I wandered into whilst investigating other arty-crafty blogs for inspiration for my new venture. There are so many very talented people out there doing amazing work, it is both inspiring and scary to me!
More soon, including 2007's "mayfly." (Don't know what that means? Looky here. Want to read 2006's? Looky here.)
* "a fit of despair": This phrase makes it seem needlessly dramatic, but things were very low on that day in September, and I don't mean to diminish my emotions or feelings about life as I felt them then. We were unable to make mortgage payments on our house, my mother's life insurance policy had been denied, and, in a less than ten-hour window, both of our cars died. Life was not peachy keen, and I still own that feeling of damnation and don't mean to make light of it with these four words.
For the first couple of days, the tree has been up sans ornaments, since this is Ripley's first exposure to a Christmas tree and Bishop has been known to climb our smaller one Christmases past. Thus far, they seem content to just scramble around it and nibble at the lower branches, but I predict at least one kitten up in the tree before this puppy comes down.
Overall, putting up the tree and miscellaneous decorations was a bit depressing. My mum wasn't feeling well and my husband said he was "Christmas-ed out" from decorating at work, so I kinda fiddled around with things all day and did everything solo. Well, that's not 100% accurate. From the bottom two photos, you can see I had some help from Ripley, our kitten. After some initial exploration of the tree branches when they were laid out on the floor, she quickly laid claim to the tree's box and took a nap. Can't say I didn't envy her.
Anyway, today I finished putting up all the non-glass/breakable ornaments and will eventually supplement the post with a photo of the completed tree. I realized whilst hanging the ornaments that there could be a good blog post about individual ornaments, their history, their meaning. My mother's tree has an interesting mix of ornaments--storebought and handmade, celebrating interesting milestones (my first Christmas with my husband, our various new homes, etc.). Plus, not every tree has an ornament with a hedgehog hugging a cactus and don't you just want to hear more about that? ;)
Show us your pets.
Submitted by Prakash Daniel.
- Bishop, our first stray off the streets of Baltimore.
- Ripley, in the middle, became ours a mere two weeks before our move to Florida.
- Yoda, my mother's cairn terrier was waiting to greet us at our new home.
