Amphigouri: varnished nonsense

At least I am in our house:

(and yes, they have been known to call our names)

This should be the official mascot of the day:

[Link]

In case you were wondering why:

John Baur and Mark Summers, who have come up with a concept that is going to make you kick yourself for not thinking of it first: Talk Like a Pirate Day. As the name suggests, this is a day on which everybody would talk like a pirate. Is that a great idea, or what? There are so many practical benefits that I can’t even begin to list them all.” — Dave Barry, Miami Herald, Sept. 8, 2002.

(from http://www.talklikeapirate.com/ )

And in case you want to join in the fun, here’s a little training vid:

took_17jul07

Originally uploaded by brhine.

Taken with Husband’s new iPhone (me, I have the Phone Envy). Most evenings Took just hangs out on the floor near the entrance to the kitchen, on his back, legs out, belly up. He’s a freak.

Managed to capture two of the cats up to their usual recently. Click thru to see the larger pictures on Flickr - particularly on the 4th one to see Took sticking out his tongue in Twist’s general direction. Those crazy critters.

Well, “beads”, actually, but the heading, stolen from Crafty blog, was too good to pass up.

From Flickr:

(aside: does anyone know how to go from a link to a static Flickr image back to the photographer’s page? I haven’t yet figured out how to suss out the photographer’s Flickr info in order to do that)

CuriousJane took a full summer to gather the hair from her cat to create the 13 beads above - I can only imagine how many we could generate from our 4 dahlings over the course of a summer. I’m not entirely sure I’d want to actually wear a necklace (or other jewelry type) made of dyed cat fur, but the concept intrigues me.

Not only do we have a new cute nephew, we have cute cats.

A month or so ago, I wandered downstairs on my way to work and heard the sounds of an overly active cat in the kitchen. Peering around the corner, I was mildly amused (once I got over the “gak, we just bought a house with mice!” gut reaction) to see one of the cats trying desperately to play with a little mouse that eventually disappeared into the base of one of our cabinets. Bah. That was the last we actually saw of it, I think, and my assumption was that Escher (and the others) managed through their constant vigils in the kitchen to drive the little bugger outside where it belongs. Turns out I was wrong.

Growing up, we had a family cat who, when on our summer vacations in a very wooded area, would hunt and bring back dead (and mangled) rodents and display them proudly by our back door for us to praise. Not so much with the Escher - “Hunter” really isn’t the best way to describe his attitude of “oh, look, a mouse! Here Mouse, don’t you want to play? *poke*poke*chase*chase* Whussamatta, Mousie? *poke* No move? *poke* Bored now…” - he’s not after the hunt so much as he is looking for a new playmate. Unfortunately, it appears that this particular playmate was a little too close to his food dish for comfort. Yuck. Thankfully we were present and heard the scrabbling in the kitchen and were quickly able to dispose of the evidence. Time to get a couple traps, I guess, to be on the safe side.

In other news, this past weekend marked what we expect to be our last trip ever to the MA house. w00t! We’d managed to put all the stuff destined for the dump into the garage and shed and hired a guy to dispose of it for us which saved a great deal of time on our end; all that remained, really, was Hubby’s old motorcycle, some yard equipment, and an office desk & chair - all of which managed to fit into a Uhaul quite nicely. We narrowly avoided disaster getting the bike off the truck once back in Maine (damn, those things are heavy), but all told, this whole selling-the-house/moving process has been much less painful than I had ever hoped. We’re still on schedule to close next week, which we’re going to do through our lawyer so we won’t have to make yet another trek down there (wanting to save up vacation days, as a nephew is soon to be arriving, and we’ve got a North Carolina mini-vacation coming up in April). Will be nice to have one less major thing to worry about so we can focus more on the new house (and all the unpacking I still haven’t done!).

“Dude, it’s so on!”