Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Tasty Trio Tuesday

The boys enjoyed a tasty dinner of Sardines one night. I have had trouble finding them packed in water lately at the grocery, but finally saw them the other day.
Boneless and skinless are the best! And now with an easy open tab :)
The boys really enjoyed them...I was surprised Devon ate, since he can be a bit picky with canned type food, preferring his dry. I suppose it was because they were 'imported' that he felt they were elegant enough for his sophisticated pallet.
Do you get any kind of special treats for the holidays?

Friday, December 24, 2010

Merry Christmas Everyone

We are posting this on Christmas Eve, since we will not have access to a computer for a few days. We want to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas! Safe travels if you are traveling, and pleasant dreams tonight as we wait on Santa Paws to arrive.

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Thankful Thursday

Smokey is thankful for his self-heating mat...it has a foil liner that helps reflect body heat back to you.

Hopefully we can get back to our Thursday in the Garden posts soon. Right now, our garden is pretty dead looking. We have tried covering the hibiscus with burlap, so we'll see how they do this winter.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Tuxie Tuesday

Various pictures of Cousin Pirate today for Tuxie Tuesday!
Pirate is secure in his mancatlyness and enjoys laying on the pink blanket.
Most of the time you'll find him just lounging in the floor...near a favorite toy.
He loves to roll in the grass when the weather is nice...
What, you talking to me?

We hope you enjoyed these pictures of cousin Pirate today!!

Monday, December 20, 2010

A Social Network Christmas



We enjoyed this video clip yesterday at church. It helped you see the Christmas story in a different way...Enjoy!


This weekend we spent most of our time out shopping...why we waited until this weekend, I'll never know! It wasn't too bad though, and on Saturday we even had snow showers while we shopped...that was fun!


The boys helped wrap everything when we got home, although I was a slacker and didn't take new photos of them. Here's a couple from last year though for your cat fix :)


Friday, December 17, 2010

Friends Friday

Today we wanted to thank our friends for sending us Holiday cards! These are the ones we've received electronically...We have also loved all the paper cards we've received in the mail. Our mom is feeling bad because we are getting more cards than her! :) Thank you friends here in the blogging world...you make the world brighter!













Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Two on Tuesday

Over the weekend we had quite a few guests at the house. I held a two day scrapbooking event, and my dad and Aunt spent the night with us on Saturday night. The boys didn't get much rest, so we all ended up on the couch on Sunday afternoon for a nap. Smokey curled up on my chest, and when we woke up, Devon and Tanner were on the couch as well snuggling. A break in routine sure does make a mancat tired!

Monday, December 13, 2010

Secret Santa Paws

Our Secret Santa Paws package arrived on Thursday, but it took mom a couple of days before she opened it for us! We were very excited to find out who sent it and what it contained!
Finally the moment arrived to open the box...Devon and Pirate checking it out...smells interesting...
Smokey came over to sniff the card, and to learn that the box was from the Manx Mnews Cats!

Tanner loved the treats...greenies and temptations! He is looking up at mom with expections...can we have some please?
There was a stocking full of fun toys inside...Devon and Tanner and Cousin Pirate helped mom remove the items one by one...she was really being slow! We played laser chase for a long time that afternoon...we love that toy!
This ball with the mouse tail was a big hit too!
Tanner thought this ball was funny! Cousin Sophie making her way over to see if the treats have been opened yet...
Gathering closer and closer to mom waiting to see what comes out next!
Smokey came over the see what the fuss was about and to check out some toys! There were several balls of different sizes and textures, and a springy toy that hangs on a door knob! Mom even got a calendar with a cute kitten on the front!!
Look how sweet Devon and Tanner are being...
Finally the treats were opened...Smokey gobbled up his Temptations and then ate the others!

Tanner thought sitting in the box was great fun too. Much to his dismay, we are reusing this box to ship our Secret Santa Paws gift off as well :)

Thank you Abby, Jinx, Ping, Boo, and Baby Gracie...we love our package!!

Friday, December 10, 2010

Flashback to Fostering

We received a mom and a litter of kittens from the shelter one evening...they were all so sick it was pitiful. Mom was doing her best with those babies and you know she had to be feeling just terrible. We got everyone started on meds and kept them comfortable. We started weighing babies daily to check for growth and talked about the possiblity of losing them...it's hard to nurse when you can't breathe through your nose.
Thankfully, they all survived and gradually we added in some other orphaned kittens. In this bed we have the original 4 plus two add ons. Counterclockwise starting at 2 o'clock is Tristan (brown tabby with white feet) he is an add on, Delaney (tortie), Sawyer (grey), Reagan (black), Emma (black and white) those are the original 4, and then there is Walker the smallest add on.
Here's another shot of Walker...there's nothing cuter that that straight up kitten tail!

These guys were all adopted, and some of the original four went in pairs. Their mom Elise was adopted as well...she was such a good cat!

We hope you all have a great weekend!

PS - Our Secret Paws arrived yesterday...we'll be posting about in next week!

Thursday, December 09, 2010

To Read or not to Read

Found this list and fun activity on another blog I read, like her I would like to think I am a reader, but am really just a person that enjoys reading. Many of the books on this list are not books I would choose for fun/light reading, however seeing that I have read only about a quarter of them, I probably should reconsider that attitude :)


Feel free to play along...copy the list...the BBC has got us all thinking again...

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt. My bold is hard to read, so I made the ones I've finished red.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6
The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I've read 24 completely, and have started but not finished at least 3 of them (it's hard to find the italics titles) There are others that I feel I should have read, but simply do not remember them. I wondered if I could make my count higher by stating that I've read some of these books more than once, but there wasn't an option for that :)

I think I will try and challenge myself to read at least 5 more books from this list in 2011. It may not sound like many, but I feel it is a manageable and therefore attainable goal!

Thursday in the Garden

Since it has turned terribly cold around here, there isn't much to show in the garden. Luckily, we've brought a couple of trees indoors (well downstairs from the attic from their boxes) to enjoy!

We can't have real Christmas trees because Smokey is allergic...which is fine with us...less fuss this way! I do miss the aroma though of a real tree sometimes!
This tree is in the study and can be seen by the cars passing by. The boys enjoy hanging out under the tree...
This tree is in the living room...I haven't quite figured out how to get a good shot of the tree without the flash on. I'd love to be able to showcase the lights and the reflections off the ornaments.
I am also thankful for family today...here's our 2010 family ornament that we picked up at the Apple Festival in October. You can read about it and see the lady writing on it here.

For more garden posts, check out Jonesie and the Society of Feline Gardeners.

Devon doesn't know it yet, but he's off to the VET this afternoon for his annual visit...paws crossed it goes well!

Wednesday, December 08, 2010

Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Trio on Tuesday

This week offered a few opportunities to capture three kitties in one photo...enjoy! Cousins Sophie and Pirate along with Tanner in the yard on Sunday afternoon. You can see just how quickly our snow was melting...the cats conveniently stayed on the non frozen ground!
Cousin Sophie in the laundry basket, along with Devon and Tanner help Auntie fold some laundry...it was nice and warm from the dryer!

Devon, on the pillow, Smokey and Tanner all enjoying some quiet time...on their favorite spots.

Monday, December 06, 2010

Mancats like Snow...not really

We had a pretty snow on Saturday this weekend. It's the first snow of the season, and it was a real treat! I love snow like this...pretty for a few hours and then gone, with no road problems.
Devon wasn't so sure about it and just wanted to get back inside...
Tanner was a touch braver, but was not happy with the cold paws!
Smokey could have cared less about the snow and just wanted to eat the grass!

This is the back yard a couple of hours later...it's starting to build up some. Lot's of birds on the feeders!
Out a side window...so pretty!

Well, with the snow around and the bitterly cold wind blowing we spent our weekend inside snuggling. Thankfully there were plenty of movies on tv to enjoy!