A Belated Merry Christmas!

These are a couple of pictures from our Christmas morning. Dave's radio controlled Jeep was a big hit. Apparently he never had a remote controlled car that didn't have a cord when he was little. He promptly ran the battery down. :) Georgia FINALLY got to open that bone she has been checking on every day it was under the tree. :)

We had a great and very busy Christmas. I hope everyone else did, too!

I'm really looking forward to 2007. The plans? Well, in addition to celebrating our third anniversary (Yay!!), we hope to find a house of our own and maybe a new car for me. We both have a couple of personal goals that we seem close to acheiving. The law practice is doing great, even if he has had a couple of scary encounters recently. I'm so very proud of him. He really seems to be growing into his role as a lawyer, and it's a great thing to see. At his request, I gave him a couple of Spanish workbooks for law enforcement personnel for Christmas. With such a large Mexican population in our county, he would be at an advantage if he knew some courtroom Spanish. One of his goals this year is to learn some.

I'm loving my job as much as ever, and I'm looking forward to a couple of business trips in the near future. A business trip means a fresh, new project, and I'm ready for one. There's been a lot of weirdness in the office recently, so I'm really looking forward to a new year here in the cube farm. :)

Happy Birthday to ME!

The pictures above show what my cube looked like this morning when I got to work. My co-workers love me. :) I had to rearrange some of the streamers and balloons because I kept ducking under them to get to my chair.

My sister operates on the theory that you should celebrate your birthday for a week; I have never done that, but I'm getting close this year. This is my third day of celebration. Saturday night we went out to a Japanese restaurant with the family. I got clothes and pajamas and cake. Then Sunday morning, the entire church sang Happy Birthday to me (that was slightly embarrassing), and Dave parents came down and took us to lunch. They also brought me more pajamas and a photo album (I've been quickly filling photo albums since Dave gave me a digital camera for Christmas last year). Sunday evening we had dinner at Daddy's, where I got money and cake. :)

Dave gave me two hand-thrown coffee mugs that I fell in love with at a little pottery shop in Mentone and a coffee table book of 70 years of Life (magazine) photography. The book also included a print of the V-J Day victory kiss (the sailor and the nurse) that we will be framing. Years ago Dave inadvertently started a collection of kissing pictures for me; he's given me two poster sized pictures of couples kissing. When I saw the picture of the sailor kissing the nurse on V-J Day, I knew I wanted to add it to the collection. I think he's been looking for it for a while, and he finally got it with this book because it's a Life magazine photo. The book itself is really cool, but I can't wait to get that picture framed.

I also finished my Christmas shopping and wrapping this weekend, and that's a relief! I bought cat and dog toys for Christmas (since they are my kids) and I left the bag on the dining room table. I kept finding one of the catnip toys in the floor, but I didn't know who was stealing it. Sunday morning, I watched as Squirt dug around in the bottom of the bag for the feather balls I bought for him (he LOVES feathers). Three of them come on a piece of cardboard, so he stole the whole cardboard and ran with them. I confiscated it and gave him one ball to play with, and he played and played. When he got finished with that one, he came back to the bag to find something else to play with. I had to hide it from him. :) I told you he's a Christmas kitten.

I also wrapped a bone and put it under the Christmas tree for Georgia. Now, every time she walks by the tree she sticks her nose deep into it to smell her present. :) She thinks she's very special right now because I started feeding her fish oil capsules Saturday. She's been very itchy with very dry skin since we turned the heat on, and the fish oil is supposed to make her stop itching. She was hilarious when I gave her the first one. She kept picking it up and spitting it out - trying to figure out what it was - until she finally bit into it. Then she LOVED it, and wanted another one, of course. She gets one a day, and these fish oil capsules have been elevated to Very Special Treat status because she takes them to another room to eat them - that's what she does when she has something especially good to eat. :)

I took this picture of her playing football with Dave Sunday afteroon. She is obsessed with footballs. She finally got her own real football last weekend (her granddad gave it to her). She's never been allowed to play with Dave's football, so that makes footballs extra special. She somehow stretches her mouth around it to pick it up, but when it's time to release it, she has to use her foot to pry it out of her mouth. :)

Mr. Li Zard

Last night I was working late in Dave's office. It was quiet, the lamp was on, the overhead light was not, Gypsy was circled up in the other chair. I was working away at my computer and the business cards on Dave's bulletin board kept falling, and the papers kept shuffling around. I thought the vent was blowing them. I was wrong. A movement finally caught my eye and this is what I saw.














Mr. Li Zard had taken it upon himself to rearrange the bulletin board for Dave. I'm not sure how he got in, or how he lived long enough to work in the office with me. I tried to get good pictures of him, but it was hard since he camouflaged himself to match the walls. :)

He played on the table next to the desk the whole time I was working, then he posed for the camera. He started to get frustrated with me while I was taking pictures, and he would turn his head this way and that. I left him there, turned out the lights, and went to the shower. I cannot say what happened after that, but he somehow attracted the attention of a cat because when I got out of the shower he was only half alive. Gypsy and Jewel had relocated him to the living room and were torturing him soundly. I had considered catching him and putting him outside when I first saw him, but I hoped he would have a better chance to survive if he stayed in the warm house. He just made too much noise and got caught. This morning Dave said, "Your lizard friend was dead in the kitchen floor." Oh well. That's the lizard life in my house. They don't live very long here; lizard killing is my cats' favorite past time.

Christmas Cats

That is my sweet Squirt Man under the Christmas tree. He LOVES Christmas time and will spend the majority of the season under the tree. I put it up while he was playing outside Sunday, and when he came in he ate (as usual) and went straight for the tree - like he has Christmas tree radar. He stayed under it all night long.

The other kitties and Georgia have behaved themselves around the tree, so far. Jewel is famous for jumping into the top of it and knocking it over. We cannot have a real tree because I think they would all lose thier minds from the sheer ecstasy of having a real tree in the house (this is the same reason I don't have house plants). It's been up for 2 1/2 days now, and there haven't been ornaments on the floor yet. They all love to steal the ornaments. The first year we had the kitties (no Georgia yet), they undecorated the tree so much (by stealing ornaments and just knocking the whole tree over so they fell off) that after Christmas we basically just had to take the lights off to pack it up. We also found a ton of ornaments under the couch several months later when we were rearranging furniture that year.

We also cannot have glass balls on our tree because balls are too irrestible for furry beasts. Shiny ones attract cat attention so they knock them off the tree, then Georgia gets them because they are balls (duh!). The first year we had her, she crunched a glass ball into a million little bits with her little puppy teeth. Amazingly, she didn't swallow any of it and she didn't have any cuts in her mouth.

This kittens have been very funny in this cold weather. I open the door for them, they go running toward it, feel the cold air, and stop. They ALMOST prefer using the litter boxes to going out in the cold to potty. Georgia, on the other hand, loves the cold weather and would stay in it as long as I would let her.

About the people:
What can I say? We just aren't as interesting. :) Dave and I had our annual Christmas shopping lunch date over the weekend. I always enjoy that time with him. We got a lot done, but I've still got a few more things to buy before I'll be finished. We gave ourselves a small limit for each other this year because what we really want is a car (for me) and a television (for him), so spending a lot of money on a bunch of other things just seemed dumb. The car and the television will come in good time; what we have now will work just fine for a while longer.

Just a little something that I find interesting: http://tulgeywoodlabs.com/pages/Chance.html. This link tells the story of Chance, the swimmer puppy. A swimmer puppy is one that spends too much time on it's stomach so that its legs become deformed and unusable. This puppy was turned in to a Lab rescue and placed in a foster home. The foster mom is helping it through rehab so it can learn to walk and have a normal dog life. I'm sharing it because it amazes me.