I had to stay home this morning to wait for the plumber, and there was lots of sunshine, so I took more pictures. I’m still in auto mode, but I’m watching my Nikon School DVD, and reading my user manual, so eventually I’ll actually change a setting and see what happens. There are a lot of buttons and dials, so it may take me awhile just to learn what they all do. Typepad reduces the image size quite a bit, so I added these pictures to my Flickr account too, if you’d like to look at them a little bigger.

The cats love the new bathroom almost as much as I do. Lucy sits and looks at the spout on the tub, until I turn it on for her, so she can get a drink.

I got a pretty good close-up of our Christmas tree. You can see a couple of my glittery nests, and a pair of wings.

I finished up my gift-wrapping while waiting for the plumber this morning too. This idea I blantently stole from Kathleen. I’ve had the same Amy Butler paper for quite a while, and this was a very good use for some of it.

My sister and Mr. P will be in town for New Year’s, and she’ll be bringing her camera along, so we can go on some photo adventures out and about in San Diego. Fun!

It snowed this weekend, so it was a perfect oppurtunity to turn on the Hallmark channel, watch sappy Christmas movies (my guilty pleasure this time of year), and decorate! Please ignore the unpainted walls, and just be glad the duck wallpaper is gone. Now that the bathroom is pretty much done, I’ll be moving on to the living room, but I’m a little busy at the moment.

I never thought it would happen, but I actually got a fake tree this year. First of all, it’s hard to find narrow trees to fit in our little house. Second of all, I like having the tree up for a good long time, and by the time I get the tree down, it’s an extreme fire hazard. And third of all, I’m the one that has to water the tree and clean up the needles, and I just didn’t want to have to deal with all that this year. So, I found this skinny tree a couple weeks ago, and now that it’s up, I actually really just love it. I love the way it looks, and I love that it doesn’t make a mess, and I love that I can leave it up until New Year’s, and I won’t have to worry about it drying out. I think I’ll go collect some branches from the pine trees in our yard, though, so we can still have that nice pine smell in the house.

It’s a cloudy day, so this is the best I could do for now. Lucy loves the Christmas tree. I’ve even caught her sitting in the middle of it, reaching for the ornaments from inside the tree. It will be a miracle if it doesn’t get knocked over. She also likes to just sit underneath it, especially when it’s all lit up. Both cats loved the lights as I was arranging them on the tree, and I had a hard time convincing them that electrical wiring is, in fact, not a good thing to chew on. That particular window sill is Petey’s favorite place to hang out and enjoy the sun and the view of the chickens under the lilac bushes. Now it’s even better, since there’s a pretty tree to look at too.

This year I decorated the tree with lots of vintage ball ornaments, birds nests that I caked with glitter, and gold angel wings. The garland is actually a gold and green mesh floral wrap, I just sort of shove in the branches. If I get ambitious, I want to make a felt bird for the top, but I’m not sure that’s going to happen before this Christmas. I found a little gold butterfly in with all my decorations, I think I should get more and put them all over the tree too. Wouldn’t that be pretty?

I added a few pretty decorations to my kitchen too.

The stocking is from last year’s Annual Christmas Swap with Yvonne. We’ve both just sent our packages for this year’s swap, and I can’t wait. I’m such a lucky duck that we have this tradition! The gumdrop wreath I made a few years ago, and it’s survived quite well. Also, when hungry husbands say, "oh, is that a candy wreath?" all I have to do is remind him that those gumdrops have been in a box in the shed since 2003, and he’s suddenly less inclined to pluck off a gumdrop and pop it in his mouth.

There’ll be more decorations soon, but for the next couple days I’ll be hanging out with one of my brothers, who is in town for a show. I have the next couple days off and we’re going fishing and Christmas shopping! Speaking of family, a couple more members have joined blogland, so check out the links to my other sister-in-law, where you can see pretty pictures of my brother and cute nephew in the snow, and my very hilarious cousin, who thinks she is a hick.

This is why I haven’t been around for the last week or so:

Also this:

And then there is this:
 
I wrote about losing my sweet girl Gigi last summer. I didn’t write about how almost exactly a month later, Dune also died from a tumor in his lung. It was just too sad. So now, after living for seven months with no cats in our house, we brought home two new babies. Officially, they are Mr. Lucy’s Birthday/Christmas presents, although, honestly, I was ready for a new kitty myself. So up there at the top is Petey, and the little calico/bengal mix is Lucy. We decided that we really ought to have someone in our house actually named Lucy. Now that I think about it, I’m going to have to come up with a new nickname for Mr. Lucy, because otherwise that would imply that he is married to our cat, which is just weird. As he is a very private person, he doesn’t like his actual real name to be used on the internet. Maybe someone in my family will have a better suggestion?

So, anyway, Petey and Lucy are 8 months and 9 months old, respectively. We got them from the Helen Woodward Animal Center, which is such a nice facility. They had been there for about 6 months, and were living together in the same kennel. It’s completely different having two kittens, we didn’t realize how used we were to our old cats. These two are either bouncing off the walls, or doing this:

There doesn’t seem to be an in-between state for them. Although this morning it was so warm we had the back door open and they discovered the chickens:

One or both of them were at the door until I left for work. As far as I know, they could still be there. It’s like television for cats!

Expect to see more of this little buggers, although it’s taken me all week to get any decent pictures of them, they move so fast. I still have to get a good picture of Lucy with her golden tiger eyes open.

As for the chickens, remember how I had 19 hens, and had given 4 to one co-worker and 3 to another? Well, the three hens turned out to be 2 hens and a rooster. And since that co-worker lives in a residential area, the rooster was kind of a problem. So we agreed to trade one of my hens for the rooster, and now the lucky devil gets to live here with 18 hens. Oddly enough, they had named him General Tso, before they realized she was a he. How’s that for foreshadowing? Here is another picture of him:

He’s quite the looker. He’s an Araucana, and he crows. A lot. This morning at 4:30 our neighbor started up his Harley. This woke up the General and he started crowing. We didn’t hear the Harley, but we sure did hear the General. If nothing wakes him up during the night, he starts to crow at about 6:30, which is alright during the week, because I should really be up by then myself. On Saturday? Not so much. We’re getting used to the sound though, and I think it will eventually just be another background noise here on the farm.