We aren’t quite ready to say what is under those crate halves, but we will say that Winter was unexpectedly underneath the one half when I picked it up to cover the spot…

…as her signature proves.

Anyway, here are a few highlights and the full album can be found in the gallery. There’s even a few rare pics of the critterweb humans.

Simon appreciating the chilly day from the comfort of a lap.

The mini roses all survived the winter and are getting leaves already.

Cricket also subscribes to the ’sunbathing is better on a lap’ ideal.

Last year’s parsley, still going strong.

Unbeknown to her, the huntress (Winter is on far right of pic) is also the hunted.

A photo op goes awry.

Lindsy, Chris, Simon, and Paddy

When I was taking this, I wondered if Joy was having a creepy sensation of being spied on?

Calvin had a great time outside.

There are  21 more pictures in the full album.

As I mentioned in the first post, we were a little hesitant to be optimistic about a new addition to the family, with as bad as things went with Arthur… and adding a cat was particularly dicey, given the aggression issues we’ve had with Olive, and between Olive and Winter. We’d hoped the right one would kind of balance things out, but it could just as easily have been a total disaster.

I’m happy to say that things have gone better than we could ever have hoped. By the end of the first week, we had him intermingled with the rest of the gang. The only problem we did have was him giving his upper respiratory infection to Winter, but that may have helped the transition in a way, funny as that sounds; she was feeling too bad those first few days to worry about being hostile to the ‘intruder’ in the house.

Now, over a month later, Winter treats him like a little brother – sometimes she finds him amusing and she actually plays with him, other times he’s too much for her and she gets angry. He does pay attention when she gets mad and backs off. Simon also gets along well with him — we were worried he was being too rough with Simon but Simon seems to initiate the wresting at least as often as Dandelyon does. They sleep together and Simon even grooms him sometimes.  Olive… well, Olive is Olive. She is OK most of the time but we have had some issues with her jumping on him when she’s having one of her off days. Still, overall things have gone well.

Cricket was initially kind of snarky with him (in her defense, he does treat her as a chew toy) but she’s gotten over that and he’s showing a bit more restraint with the flying tackles. Lindsy snapped at him a few times, but she hates all of the cats and we didn’t really expect she’d be any different with a new one.The unfortunate thing is we now have two cats that love dogs, and no dog that likes cats, but we’re still hoping to find the right dog to add to the family some day — though ideally not until after Lindsy’s passed on.

One thing I do need to explain is that Dandelyon is now his middle name, and we’ve been calling him “Calvin.” It just suits him more, most of the time. His full name is “Calvin Dandelyon Weasley.” Yes, not only have we confused things by spelling one name weird, but now we’ve given him a name from “Calvin and Hobbes” but not named him after the cat in the cartoon. At least the Weasley part is pretty straightforward, if you’re familiar with the Harry Potter books. His personality is very Calvinish, he’s funny, inventive, mischievous, and cheerful, but can put on a good pout when he gets tired. And he has yellow hair that sticks up all over the place.

He has been so much fun to have around, he really is like a little ray of sunshine. We really love him. He makes us laugh constantly with his antics, and he’s blossoming into a beautiful cat. The five AM wake up in the form of a five pound kitten suddenly pouncing on your face we could maybe do without, but I’m sure he’ll outgrow that.

How could anyone resist a face like this?

Angry cat on the outside, angry cat on the inside. Winter has given up on futile displays of hostility from behind the fence and has instead resigned herself to making sure the neighbor’s cat stays on his side of it.

Speaking of frozen things, our computer is still borked. So if we’ve missed replying to anyone’s emails or anything, we apologize. This post is coming from one of the two frankenlaptops as the desktop is in the midst of a second attempt at a Windows XP repair install, which appears to be hung at the same spot the first install failed at. The next (last ditch) step is a full Windows reload. I’ve already removed the video card and KVM switch, and ran memory, hard drive, and CPU tests. This is NOT how I had envisioned spending the last three day weekend we’ll have in a while.

The freezeup happens in a selective startup and even safe mode. It *didn’t* happen when booted to a Linux CD which is why I am trying the repair or reload Windows options, but my gut says this is a hardware issue, leaning towards “USB controller” but I’d love to be wrong. It just isn’t worth it to replace a motherboard on an older computer and a new one was not in our budget at this time.

We also engaged in our traditional holiday vet-fest – Dandelyon went in yesterday, for his upper respiratory infection that he came home from the shelter with, and Winter today, for the probable same infection. She’s got a 103.5 temperature and a voice like a woman who’s been smoking two packs a day for at least thirty years. The URI wasn’t totally unexpected; with Joy working at the shelter, me volunteering there, and the new kitten, someone was bound to come up with the crud. What was unexpected was the previously undiagnosed heart murmur that Winter apparently has that the vet discovered tonight.

Ah, never a dull moment in the critterweb household…

Happy New Year to all! If the posts are few and far between in the next little while, it’s our computer’s fault. We’re still out here, drinking hot tea to stay warm.

The animals almost nixed the whole plan with that entire weekend we spent at the vet’s, consuming about twice what we’d intended to pay for the camera in one sweep. What we ended up doing instead is selling some gold jewelery we’d been intending to sell at some point anyway, and put the money towards the camera. I’d had this stuff, which was near-24 carat gold and came from Thailand,  for a long time but had no attachment to it, neither of us wear gold, and it wasn’t valuable enough to hang onto as an investment or anything. It was enough to mostly pay for the camera, though. Ironically the camera also apparently came from Thailand, according to the sticker on the bottom.

We poured over the review sites one last time, being really hesitant to mail order a camera since the one we’d been looking at isn’t available locally. Somewhere in the course of this, Joy wound up clicking on sample pics for digital SLRs and we realized how much sharper and more accurate they were. She’s actually the one who looked up and suggested the Nikon D3000 that we ended up getting, which we were able to buy locally. I think she’s been working at that computer shop too long and the ‘geek’ has rubbed off on her. We paid more than we were going to for the other camera, and I didn’t get my ginormous zooming capability (for now) but it’s a far superior camera that will be able to do anything we want it to and more. A zoom lens will have to wait a while, but since it’s a DSLR it will support all sorts of different lenses… maybe even a macro lens to really get up close and personal with my spider friends?

It’s taken a bit of getting used to to once again look through the eyepiece and not have the live view on the LCD (this model doesn’t have that, nor does it shoot video but we never used that feature anyway) but it’s a lot like my old Nikon N4004 in most aspects and very intuitive to use. I am including a few photos below that we’ve taken so far, and the Halloween pics were done with the new camera. No more washed out indoor pics of Olive with her eyes blinded shut.

If I have any criticism at all, it’s the noseprints that you can’t help but leave on the LCD when taking pics, and that seems to be pretty universal for digital cameras. I also find the pictures a bit oversaturated, but Joy thinks they look good so that might be just a personal preference issue.

Fall in Marion, NC. The burning bush hedge in this picture really was that brilliantly red but the grass seems a wee bit bright to me. I brought the camera along for the day when I went to Newland for a service call but unfortunately it was really dark and overcast all day.

Mini rose close-up (all three roses are still blooming their hearts out, don’t they know summer is over?)

‘Wildcat’ in the bushes.

Olive on mole patrol.

Cricket on the couch. The house was pretty dark, this was taken in the evening with low light and flash. It did really good with her eyes.

The color really came out  really pretty here. Her eyes are closed from the sunlight, not the camera.

Note: the weird line on the right side of the portrait oriented images is something our upload program is doing to them, nothing with the camera. Its been going on a while and I keep meaning to research that and fix it but never get around to it.

Anyway, those disclaimers aside, I now present the holiday costume pet torture 2009 edition:

Meet Count Catula – we made Simon’s costume ourselves this year, Joy did all of the actual sewing by hand since I quicky discovered that flannel is not sewing machine friendly.

Simon loves dressing up, and particularly seems to like capes. If you click on either of his pics, there are a couple more in the gallery we uploaded. He paraded all over the house. Taking pictures at night of a black cat in a black cape was a bit of a challenge though.

Initially, Winter’s flapper costume produced spontaneous paralysis and caused her to fall over dead…

She did, however, eventually recover the use of her limbs long enough to pose for us.

Olive has a bad leg so we let her off easy and she got to wear Cricket’s costume briefly. She was most unimpressed.

Lindsy, also being old and creaky nowadays, wore a Halloween party collar in lieu of an actual costume.

Cricket wore her costume to the vet’s for her recheck and X-rays, which we thought was pretty funny. She had a blast showing off.

Well, that’s it for another year… hope everyone had a happy and safe Halloween!