Friday Pussy Blog: Small Cat Traps Edition

This has been a busy and frustrating week.

Plenty of boxes from amazon arrived this week. However all but one are too small to serve as cat traps. I believe the kittehs are a bit disappointed that I didn't order bigger stuff!

Jessie Lee cooling her belly on this rather warm afternoon.

Tot will guard the boxes even though they are too small to contain his bulk.

Austin Bluebonnets

This might well be my favorite time of year in Austin when the bluebonnets are in bloom. These are just a couple of photos from the neighborhood.

Imagine an entire hillside along the freeway covered in these! It's spectacular.

King Of The World

Friday Pussy Blog: Pussy Portraits Edition

What a beautiful Friday!

The very handsome Tot.

Sweet Pea pausing during grooming in a pot.

Jessie Lee adoring her daddy.

Bonus Tot yawning.

I do not like the sloppy appearance of this post. I've been trying out the Safari browser and either something isn't set correctly or it does not allow me to center photos on the blog. Consequently, the text appears off-center.

Guess I'll switch back to Firefox for the next post.

Collard Blossom

The collard greens are getting ready to spit seeds which unfortunately means all that attractive leafy vegetation now tastes like cardboard. We should be able to gather plenty of seeds for the fall crop.

First Rose of 2012

Lemon Futures

Friday Pussy Blog: Auto-Incorrect Edition

I've used Microsoft Office Picture Manager for years to crop and resize my photos before posting them to my blog. I like it because it's simple and doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles to complicate things.

Now suddenly when I save a photo after resizing, it has decided to apply Auto-Correct to the color which changes the tones to some god-awful unnatural shit, and I cannot figure out how to turn this off! As I said, it's not a complicated piece of software.

That being said, here we go with the Friday Pussy Blog. I've tried to manually restore them to the originals as much as possible.

Out-of-focus Tot

The incomparable Jessie Lee

Sweet Pea, lizard catcher extraordinaire.

Prickly, Dangly and Squiggly

After nearly a week of doing battle with the flu, I finally felt like getting out today to see what's going on around the ranch

Purple Prickly Pear

Ball Moss

Red Yucca

Friday Pussy Blog: Supreme Cat God of the Food Pantry Edition

The door in the background leads to the utility room/cat food pantry. I wonder why this becomes the gathering place?

One of these two kittehs will establish clear dominance over the situation.

The competition has begun!

Well. It appears we have a winner!

SUPREME LORD OF THE FOOD PANTRY!

Happy Friday, everyone! Hope yours was great. Ours was pretty dismal. Cold, wet, and somewhat stormy!

The Painted Kitchen

It's been awhile since I first painted our kitchen yellow. After getting yellow travertine tiles installed a couple of years ago I had been mulling over the idea of painting the kitchen again in a different color. I love yellow -- it's one of my favorite colors -- but not everywhere! (I actually went through that phase once when I was about 13 years old and EVERYTHING in my bedroom was yellow.)

Here are some before and after shots.

Before: kitchen area

Before: cooking area with freshly made hamburger buns and ketchup courtesy of Sheldon.

Before: dining area.

After: kitchen area (interior poorly lit due to extremely bright morning sun).

After: cooking area

After: dining area

I must confess I am thrilled. This new color really accentuates the counters much better than yellow did. It's also much more forgiving than the yellow was when painting around the white door trim and baseboards. I also think perhaps I'm a more experienced painter now than I was at the time I painted the kitchen yellow. That was my first major painting project, and since then I have painted every other room in the house.

Now I just need to do something about the drab off-white doors. I haven't painted any doors in this house and I'm definitely not looking forward to it but it must be done.

Friday Pussy Blog: Painted Tot Edition

This has been a busy week! I decided to paint the kitchen after mulling over various paint samples for months. (A separate blog post with photos is forthcoming shortly.)

The area around the windows is inset about 5 or 6 inches and I decided to paint that area that frames the windows a slightly lighter shade. The Tot was sitting on the window ledge as I painted down the left side. As I started painting the right side he decided he wanted none of that so he started backing up.

"Don't back up, boy!" I shouted.

Oops. The poor boy got a dusting of paint on his butt.

A wet towel got him nicely cleaned up and all is forgiven.

It's a beautiful Friday with abundant sunshine streaming through the windows and rather warm temps. It's almost too warm for outside work.

The Tot approves of the kitchen makeover.

My orange Totloaf.

Jessie Lee pretending to snooze in Sheldon's office chair.

Hope your Friday is equally relaxing!