i was happy to get home from my vacation because i missed my daily routine, although i was sad to end the vacation. and i am back in my routine, but now i have to accept the fact that heather has left me and moved far away (sad pathetic mopey moan). she left me some exciting presents - here is some lovely yarn that i was admiring at imagiknit when we went there together. it looks like an eyelash yarn made of out plastic, and that's exactly what it feels like. i think it is wonderful. but it makes me think of me and heather shopping at imagiknit. oh, i'm so conflicted.



she also gave us a fancy cat toy that she didn't want anymore, the pump n' run. she brought it down when the kittens were little, but they didn't seem very impressed by it. now it is a different story - you are supposed to squeeze the pump to make the little mouse move from one hole to the other, but after i did that for about two seconds the kittens just went nuts and played with it for about an hour with no pumping necessary from me. the perfect lazy person cat toy.



another thing she left me was a creation of mine and bryan's that she was so kind as to house for the last two years - a gigantic cat playland that we built while we were in tucson (it's all taken apart and kind of jumbled so you can't appreciate its full crazy cat peron glory in the picture). i didn't have room for it when we got a housemate and had to clear out the second bedroom, but we spent so much time making it that i didn't want to get rid of it yet either. it was very nice of heather to give it a home for a while - her two kitties enjoyed it. but now i don't know what to do with it. it would be a squeeze, but we could fit it into out office-y area, but we were thinking we would be something new as a fun project for 2005. i guess i could call the milo foundation and see if they could use it there.



since it's covered in about ten thousand square miles of carpet, i need to do something soon so that it doesn't just degrade into a soggy, mushy, pile of moldy berber and particle board pieces. it's the rainy time of year right now, dontcha know. while i now have the agony of my decision to deal with, the up side is that heather and patrick stapled their lovely ocean themed shower curtain to the side of the porch to help protect it from the rain.



the reason that this is so wonderful is because i have been jealous for many years now of my neighbor's many tarps. he's a little obsessed with tarps - we found the kittens in his yard under a big couch that was under a couch-shaped tarp. he has a million things in his yard and they're all covered by a custom fitted tarp. we especially like the way his house extension load-bearing tarps snap and flap in the wind tunnel that exists between our two houses. don't you just love how the tarps match the sky perfectly?



but now i'm the one to beat on the block, because i have a tarp with fish on it. a whole aquarium/ocean theme. so there! keep up with that, neighbors.