Cat snapshots of horrible quality: Meet Mamakitty the neighborhood stray, and resting August.

I am barely conscious and I can already tell it's gonna be a fuck my life sort of day, so here, have a picture of a kitty.


Meet Mamakitty.
Mamakitty is a medium/longhair calico tabby stray that our neighbor (the other half of the duplex) has been looking after. If I remember correctly, when the neighbor began to do so Mama was pregnant (thus the name) [ETA: see comments for a more accurate bit of background]; she's since been spayed and eartipped, and gets daily meals on our neighbor's porch. Mama was initially pretty skittish and shy around the two of us, but after a few months she got used to seeing Dee and me around, and was willing to come up to us if we had food bribes, and then turned out to be the most lovable ball of fluff—she's still wary of unexpected movement and won't take treats out of hand, but she will run over to us and look expectant and turn into a purring weaving pet-me floof creature. Then she took to sitting on our back porch and staring up at the door with a look of "please" on her face. She's a remarkable cat, what you might call big-boned, stout and thick but compactly so, and you just know all that floof and fullness is what keeps her warm at night, and she's so beautiful. It's a hard thing for both of us not to take her in, and she'd probably do well indoors as long as she had a private space to hide in and was able to set the terms for social interaction. But she has the best of a bad situation with one and a half households looking after her and a relatively outdoor cat-safe neighborhood (insofar as there is such a thing) to live in.

And she's a love.

( +1 more. )

While I'm posting snapshots of horrible quality, I might as well include two of the various resting positions of August.


Back when it wasn't too cold to keep her blanket in the window: It's an August pancake.

( +1 more. )

Christmas tree the first (Dee and me): A miniature foil tree of fantastic colors.

It's that time of year again. Tree the first:

Last year, Devon and I set up a mini black tree with brightly colored ornaments in our room. Dee has a mini purple foil tree (blessedly pre-lit, too, because mini trees in crazy colors can be a nightmare to light) which she's never had the chance to decorate properly, so I had Devon bring up our ornaments (knowing that the color scheme I picked to glow against black would probably look awesome against purple) and we had at, and behold: it is beautiful and bright. Purple tree, pink lights, a silver garland, normal ornaments in green, small in purple, silver, and bronze, tiny in two finishes of teal, and it shines like you would not believe and looks fantastic in the living room.



( +3: at night, close up, and an August cameo. )

Heading to Corvallis tomorrow, and decorating tree the second soon after, and then Hanukkah begins. Hopefully I'll be able to get pictures of it all. But if this is the only one I document with photos, well, it's one well worth it.