Our pussycats enjoy their Christmas present early

Showing how high the new cat tree is — we had to put down the seats in the back of Caroline’s car to ferry it home

Dear friends and readers,

We do have occasional cheerful moments. One occurred late yesterday afternoon when Caroline and I brought home the pussycats’ Christmas present: it’s the most expensive gift I bought this year, cost even more than the black American girl doll:

Climbing aboard

What do you think of it?

Yvette came home from work and we had on our favorite TV program: the British Antiques Road program so she sat down to watch and the cats looked on too:

Soon Ian became distracted with the ins and outs of the structure:

and Clary decided it was too near the mantelpiece not to survey the world from that vantage point:

You cannot see how we have drapped the structure with strings and favorite toys. At bottom a bowl of water.

Here we see Ian deserving his secondary name: Snuffy (as in Snuffalupagous) who we all instantly recall from Sesame Street’s salad days really thought he was hidden from others when he couldn’t see them. He was hidden because he was at the time invisible to all but Big Bird:

That night he slept near me but in his old lower cat tree which has a big bowl area and green pillow. He is a creature of habit.

Alas, life has not been so uniformly harmlessly innovative: this morning we took him and Clary to the vet to have their claws clipped (euphemism: “Pedicure”): Well Ian pissed all over the floor when we were putting him in his carrier, he wet Yvette’s jeans as she was doing the putting; at the Vet’s he pissed in his carrier and over the tech — and really did keep up a perpetual protest caw-caw crying the whole time there and back. He is sitting on my desk just now sniffing my books … Clary did better; she accepted going into the carrier, and if she was at first wary of me and Yvette upon returning home, she is now resting peacefully on her usual grey plush-y mat behind this Macbook Pro.

And to round off this Christmas blog, before I get up to help Yvette make our early supper as we are daring to drive to GMU this evening to listen to a concert of Irish folk music

First Bygone Days:

and on her dazzling fiddle:

I am eager to go.

Sylvia