Plaaaay

I’m a good cat owner. I don’t think anyone would debate that. One of the things I’ve done really well is provide napping spots in every room of the house. It puts a lot of pressure on the cats to use them all so I feel appreciated.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen anyone napping in the house on the condo. So long, in fact, that I wouldn’t have seen Oliver if Obi hadn’t been so desperate to play.

After about half an hour of thumping on every side of the condo, Obi gave up and went to watch OutTV.

Poor brown kitten.

***
Yesterday was Oliver’s 12th birthday!
Yesterday was Obi’s 6th birthday!

Happy birthday, Kitten Thunder!

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Kittens in the Kitchen

The Boy and I have a pretty good arrangement for presents: I tell him exactly what I want and where to get it, and he goes and buys it. Since we both work downtown and I shop downtown, that’s where his purchases usually happen. On Friday, we met for beer and dinner – but he needed to put “something” in my trunk in the parking garage.

After dinner, we went home and Kitten Thunder opened my birthday present for me.

A bag AND a box? Boy, you shouldn’t have.

The Girl’s birthday is happy for everyone.

 

Sweet Dreams are Made of These

Today is my friend Harvey Deselms’ birthday. He and his dog, Dot, have a big birthday party every year at their art gallery so all of us artists can mooch food and hopefully sell stuff to the people with money.

This year there was a balloon artist. When I arrived, Dot – who is much cuter as a four-year-old than she was as a bitey jumpy puppy – was harassing the balloon guy. She wanted his marker, his scissors, his HEY IS THAT A BALLOON CAN I HAVE THE BALLOON!?!

Later, I got this.

Kitten Thunder was not impressed.

The weird thing is that, on Saturday at the 17th Street Arts Festival, a little boy gave me a balloon flower. So we went from no local balloonists to two. The lady at the arts festival made this.

That’s Salvador Dali, in case you were thinking Groucho Marx.

And what does any of this have to do with the cats?

Nothing. Here’s this week’s story:

Oliver, as you know, loves breakfast. He loves the word breakfast. Just whispering “breakfast” in his ear while we’re snuggling will make him purr. So it should come as no surprise that he dreams about breakfast.

Yesterday, Oli was napping on the loveseat. His toes curled up. Then his lips started smacking. Smack smack. Then, from all the way across the room, I heard the purr.

The breakfast of his dreams.

Obi was not so lucky. Today, the brown kitten was snuggling with me (don’t tell him I told you that) and he’d settled down on the couch with his head resting on my stomach.

He was settled, but my stomach was not.

My tummy gurgled and growled for an hour. Eventually the sound worked its way into Obi’s dream. At first he was merely snarling whenever my stomach gurbled. Then his ears twitched as his lip curled up. Finally, he’d had enough of whatever dream creature that was full of big talk in his dream.

He growled back.

I laughed.

Dream over.

Ten Four, Kitten Thunder

Yesterday was Oliver and Obi’s birthday. The grey kitten is now ten. The brown kitten is four. Sniff – my babies are growing up.

They had a can of salmon last night for their birthday dinner.

Haters Gonna Hate

I’m done with my Christmas shopping. My final order went in about an hour ago.

Mwa ha!

***

On Saturday, Obi helped me wrap a birthday present for a little boy.

“There’s a dog on this book. I thought it was a present. Who would want a dog?”

I’ve told you this before. I also told you that we didn’t attend the birthday party full of happy five year olds because I had a headache. So the present has remained in our living room.

I set it up against the leg of the coffee table, sufficiently in the way that I will remember to take it with me on Wednesday when we see the little boy’s mother. Every morning the package is laying down in the middle of the floor. I set it back against the leg.

This evening, The Boy and I were eating dinner in the living room. Obi came in and knocked the present down. He stretched over the top of it. Then he kicked at the corner. “Obers,” The Boy said. “Stop. That’s not yours.”

Obi’s ears went flat. He stared pointedly at The Boy. He glanced at me.

Teeeeeeaaaaar.

Obi started to unwrap the present.

The Boy intervened. The present is now in his office on the bookshelf.

Where it will undoubtedly be forgotten on Wednesday.

***

We made a sale on our Zazzle store! We’re so excited. It inspired a whole bunch of new products, uploaded today. Check it out.

B is for Boy. And Birthday.

The Boy’s birthday was on Saturday and came none too soon. For one thing, I found out during our trip to California that he hates the toaster oven I got him last year for his birthday. So I needed his birthday to hurry and get here so I’d remember to get him a different toaster oven for his birthday this year.

Romance, we has it.

I found the perfect toaster oven and hatched a plan to have it waiting for him to make something toasty on Saturday morning. This meant opening the box, unwrapping everything and setting it up…then putting it back inside the box until Friday night when The Boy went to bed.

Let me help you guess where I’m going with this: I opened a box. I closed the box. I covered the box, in my office for ease of access, with Obi’s blanket.

Obi was going absolutely nuts over this. He spent all day Friday digging at the box. On the box on top of the blanket. By the box. On the box. Under the blanket on the box – and that time I swear he actually got IN the box.

Then, Friday night, I changed my mind about how to give it to him. So I didn’t put it out.

Saturday morning I decided that would have been a fine idea. Luckily, The Boy doesn’t toast things for breakfast so much as he toasts things for lunch, so I set up the toaster oven before he came back from the Saturday train meeting. I couldn’t find any bows so I put a classy yellow post-it on the front that said “a toast for your birthday.”

Then I gave Obi the box.

Oliver came to check it out for a while as well.

 

Then The Boy came home and made Obi into a box monster.

Box monsters do not like the flash. They attack the box in retribution.

 

The Boy likes his new toaster oven – complete with a higher ceiling and a timer. Also, it matches the microwave in both style and size so it has moved out to the breakfast nook. This frees up valuable counter space and we’re both excited about that.

Happy Boy’s birthday to the whole Thunder household, I guess.

 

 

The Oli-mpics

Friday was Kitten Thunder’s birthdays. Oliver, whose birthday we know for certain was July 27, turned nine. And Obi, whose records gave a best guess at July 27, turned three. This is further proof that Obi was put on this planet to be with Oliver – he was a birthday present that just took eight months to deliver.

Of course, the whole world celebrated their birthdays with a big ceremony. I have no explanation for why they held it in London. Weird. Oliver feels bad that they haven’t changed the name of the event to include Obi; it could be the O-lympics or the OliandObimpics. But we understand that they’ve been planning this party since before Obi was born, so maybe it was too late to change the letterhead.

In addition to Friday’s big show – where some jerk named Bob seemed set on insulting every country that showed up – there are games! Games for like ten days! Obi has enjoyed some of them. Tennis, swimming, soccer and volleyball are interactive if you are a brown kitten. But there are others where he lays down and takes a nap.

We humbly suggest some new games for the next Oli-mpics:

Triple floor jump
Marathon snuggle
Sprint snuggle
Synchronized snuggle
Speed bathing
The deCAThalon
Fuzzy board
Condo climbing
Fence watching

Also, The Girl has been working on a project that we think would work quite well for those medals they give out.

And, if we might suggest one more change…

The winners should get to nap on that top tier.

Happy birthday, ya old coot

Today is my birthday. Aside from the desk, which is still awesome, I got a very important life lesson. And that lesson is this: if you have a migraine all day long, attending a birdwatching class is not a good idea.

Slideshow.

Recordings of birds chirping.

Ow.

The coot is what pushed me over the edge from mildly unpleasant twinges in my general head area to I AM GOING TO RIP OUT MY EYEBALLS AND DIG AT WHAT IS BEHIND THEM WITH A SPORK TO STOP THE PAIN!!!

But, other than that, good day. I started it out hiding from the light under a blanket on the couch. This always results in an Oli snuggle. BUT…I also got a snuggle from Obi. A real, honest, fervent snuggle from the brown kitten. He even kissed me on the chin.

When I braved a glance at the Book of Face on my cell phone, I saw this:

Put together by friend Ashley. Friends with Photoshop for the win!

Then I got to eat free lunch at a meeting. Free food for the win!

Then the pain went away long enough for me to actually get some work done. While on a client call, I had this:

Her name is Betty Davis and she is a pear and strawberry infused martini at Suite 1901. And, though she is pink, I love her. Though, in retrospect, I should not have had a martini because hey, lookeethere, my headache came back!

Kitten Thunder and I also turned on smell-o-vision and watched some sparrows beat the crud out of a squirrel trying to eat out of their feeder. The squirrel totally lost this battle.

And Obi and I played burrito cave monster until I was wearing more of his fur than he was.

Other than the lightning bolts of pain, I should mention, the birdwatching class was a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to part two next week. I am also looking forward to the field trips – though I fully suspect I won’t think they are such a good idea at 6 a.m. on Saturday. Hopefully I suck it up and go anyway.

Thanks, Grandma and Grandpa, for the well-timed birthday check that paid for my class. We’ll think of you next time a nuthatch comes our way!

***

It’s Thunder Thursday! This is about the cutest picture I’ve seen this whole month. Of course, everyone who HAS a cat knows the cat on top is trying to get the other one out, not in. But funny, nonetheless.

How many supervisors does it take…

…to help an engineer build a desk from IKEA? We had one girl and two cats. We hoped it would be enough.

My birthday is coming up at the end of the month. Since I’m tired of sitting at my tiny desk, staring at the corner, I asked my parents for a new desk so I could look at the room or out the window. Since either The Boy or I will be busy every weekend for the rest of the month, today was the day to drive down to Denver to the IKEA store.

I had picked out my desk online so I didn’t realize that this is one of those build your own dealies. I mean, I knew we (The Boy) would have to assemble it, but this desk wasn’t sold as a desk. It was two desk tops (many finish options), a cupboard (options), a shelf (options), legs (options!) And a monitor shelf that was nowhere near the rest of the pieces. Oy. I’d show you a picture, but I left my phone in the car.

Here’s my desk, waiting to be loaded in the car.

Here’s my desk, through the miracle of IKEA and Subaru design, in my compact car.

We had a delicious lunch and headed home. The boxes were unloaded as far as the hallway so we could rest, do some chores, and unwind a little bit. Kitten Thunder inspected our purchase.

Then, the building began.

The desk is huge! We bought the smallest desk tops available and I still have enough room for both computers, the printer, my work and two cats. Of course that doesn’t mean I expect the cats to lay anywhere but on my work…

Thanks, Mom and Dad, for the groovy new desk! And thanks, Boy, for driving me back and forth from Denver and assembling my desk for me!

Stay tuned as we go to work tomorrow.

Sheri’s Cafe

There is a handsome man outside watering my plants. His name is The Boy and Obi thinks he makes for excellent OutTV programming.  Much better than “Roofers on the Neighbor’s House” which preempted his afternoon of Thunder Cafe. Roofers are loud and they don’t flutter or peep.

As awesome as Thunder Cafe is, my mother owns the best cafe in the state. Birds come from miles around to eat at Sheri’s Cafe. All sorts of birds…

The cafe is an open feeder that seats about six sparrows and features a variety of cuisine from bird seed to bread crusts. The feeder is mounted on a post on top of a three foot high fence – the fence that used to divide the yard into a cat side and a dog side. Customers at the cafe line up on that fence and wait patiently for their turn.

Excellent OutTV for Spade and Gracie.

On occasion, this programming turns very dramatic. Once in a while, a hawk will hear about Sheri’s Cafe. And for about three days he’ll have easy pickings, swooping down and snatching a waiting customer from the fence. No one really appreciates that the hawk will then sit in the birdbath and pluck his lunch, leaving feathers and the occasional head or leg to remind the world who is top of the food chain.

Hawks on OutTV make the kittens hunker. Down low.

After a couple of days word gets around that Sheri’s Cafe is in a bad neighborhood. The sparrows stop their patronage. After all, they want to eat lunch, not BE lunch.

A few days after that the hawk leaves. No one likes a restaurant where the cook glares at you and the waitress refuses to bring you more chips.

Slowly, very slowly, the cafe starts to get a few customers back. They survive and spread the word that the positive atmosphere of Sheri’s Cafe has returned. And the line on the fence is long once again.

***

Today is my mom’s birthday! Happy birthday, Mom!

Here’s Oliver doing present inspection before these pictures (that’s Spade in them) made their way to her house via special delivery by The Boy as he drove across the state last weekend.

"These are okay. Next time, consider expanding your pallet to include grey, lavender and peach."