friday tree

Often there is a squirt of time between sunrise and when most people get up when the sun peeks under the cloud cover and brightens the morning. I love being onhand for it.

Here's the Maple tree. She still looks fully foliaged, but check the ground beneath her. Those are all her leaves.

She sheds from the inside out.

Here she is compared to the big maple trees across the street. As you can see, they are mostly naked right now. And the sun is flashing through our little kousa dogwood tree, also turning pretty colors and beginning to shed.

Sunlight, shadows, silly self-portraits in silhouette. Howdy!

I stuck tissue paper over the glass to display less of the contents of our garage to the casual passing burglar. The cats had a seat next to the glass for a while, and tore themselves a peephole that you can see at the far right. The tissue lets light through, but does obscure the view.

And speaking of cats and views, Fly now demands that I pull out his special perch while I'm working on the computer. How clever of us slaves to build such a handy cat seat.

As for life with the cats, Squirrel is still with us. She spends most of her time secure in the spare room, with nightly expeditions to share TV time with us and perhaps get a few snackies. Pepper still wants to beat her like a drum, but everyone else pretty much ignores her. And we have occasionally had Pepper and Squirrel happily lap-sitting on opposite ends of the sofa, so patience will eventually win out. What I ought to do is stick them both in the garage for a few days. Nothing like being frozen-toed cold to make your bitterest enemy look like a decent heat source.

And the CatGenie magic self-cleaning litterbox is a great and wonderful thing, but the cats still refuse to have damn-all to do with it. Now I gotta empty the litterboxes, the dishwasher, and the washing machine before I scamper off to work. Happy weekend, one and all!