 Early
November 2000
We've now lived at Andy Wolf for a month, and still haven't managed
to put the mailbox on a stick out on the road at the bottom of the hill.
This means that Postie never delivers mail, so we never get any nasty
bills... Painting our name on the mailbox was one of my evening projects. And what a long time it took. Note that I didn't bother with the opposite side. I figure Andy Wolf is a dead end road, so Postie will have to come past the box on his way in, so he'll see it then. (The blue strip at the bottom is masking tape). Maybe *this* weekend we'll get it up. |
 The
"dining room" ...or an extension to the kitchen. This is where
we sit in the mornings and sip coffee and watch the sunrise.
Actually, what a lie. We don't get to do anything of the sort, except at weekends. During the week we get up at 6:15 and are in the car by 7:25 latest in order to drive the hour and 15 minutes to work. You can see Grizzle's cage in the corner. While we were doing our fencing this weekend, she was peering out of the window and whistling at us hopefully. She was miffed that we were out there, obviously having fun, when we should have been indoors entertaining her. Every time I came indoors to get sommat, she'd fly over and land on me, hoping to hold me captive. Poor neglected creature. And you can just see Anna-cat in the foreground. All the cats like to sit on the window sills, especially when the windows are open, and look out at the world. This is an excellent cat house, with lots of interlinked rooms to run round and round through. On Saturday, I hung a hummingbird feeder under the deck outside the window on the left. I'm not sure they've found it yet, but they are definitely still around. I thought they went south for the winter, but it seems that there is enough to keep them going in the area. Turn 180° and you'll see: |
 The
wood stove, my bill-paying desk (sigh), and some nice wooden chairs. We
lit the stove once when the gas man hadn't come, as promised, to fill
our propane tank and we were scared we'd run out. It didn't seem to kick
out huge amounts of heat, but the house heated up nicely, which was
quite good (as in, we didn't have to bake in the living room to get a
warm house). We have a large fallen dead tree in the front that we could
cut up for firewood at some stage should we be so inclined.
Our furniture (- actually, pft's furniture, I had to leave all of mine in England when I came over -) looks much more gooder in a nice house. The chair in the back has a dodgy leg which falls off at inopportune moments. I'm sure we'll fix it any day now (she lied, unconvincingly). Turn 90° to the right and you'll see: |
 The
living room. We have one of those spinny fan things on the wood ceiling,
which helped drive the heat around the house very nicely when we lit the
stove. We don't spend much time in here, mostly because we don't spend
much time sitting down at the moment (unless we're sleeping).
The TV isn't really attached to anything, so you don't really get any channels. There are, allegedly, about six available to us, but you have to get up and wiggle the piece of wire stuck in the back of the TV and balanced on the sofa for each one to get it "just right", so you really have to *want* to watch TV. We don't, so haven't seen any in weeks. The orange sofa was so badly mauled by the wicked bad cats that it is now permanently covered by a multitude of fleecy blankies as a disguise. The blankies are actually better than the orangeness, so this isn't a bad thing. The evil cats have now given up on it and transferred their attentions to the blue sofa (hidden behind the rocking chair) which came with the house. We have some leftover carpet from carpeting the Sacramento house, so, when we get a minute, we're going to make some irresistible-to-cats scratching posts. Let's hope that these are more irresistible to cats than is the "anti hairball petromalt" that they refuse to eat. The cats have discovered that the blue blankie in the rocking chair is prime real-estate. Except I spoilt that by borrowing the blankie the other morning when we went to work in the FIAT, thereby covering myself in cat fur. |
 Quickly
run to the doorway in the picture above and turn back 180°:
The living room from the opposite direction, in which you can see the mysterious blue sofa. We hope this is a sofa bed. We think it is, but haven't actually opened it up to see for sure. Unfortunately, we lured pft's relatives to stay over Thanks Giving based on them sleeping on this, so I hope it is a real bed. Yet more blankies draped over this sofa. I probably do need more blankies, though, seeing as I had to borrow the blue cat one. |
 Grungy
pic of our bedroom, showing the other spinny fan, which makes me think
of sultry summer evenings. Except it's actually quite ugly, so we just
lie in bed and wonder at its ugliness.
You can see Pooka on the bed, shedding fur on it. It was a great relief to get our real bed back again, finally. We slept on the double bed for about three weeks. But with pft and 678 cats it didn't leave much space for me. Now we have our real waterbed back and life is good. |