Adds Panache To Any Room!

Pictured above: Cat Throw Rug in Stripey Orange. Available only in the summer months. Call 1-800-4PANACHE.

You will notice the small black furry thing in the frame. This is one of the boys' furry mice. You may notice that it does not have a tail. Why? you might be wondering. Our cats like to pin down the mice and chew off their tails. Isn't that disturbing? While Matt and I were in California, the boys stayed with Matt's parents. And Geronimo caught a mouse on the porch. A real one. Dispatched it pretty quickly, apparently, and ran down to the basement with it. My mother-in-law noticed that Geronimo was acting oddly, moving from hiding spot to hiding spot behind furniture, and got my father-in-law to relieve Geronimo of his prey. No one saw the actual capture, though. Later, Geronimo and his cousin Hektor (actually, his uncle, I think, since Hektor belongs to my mother-in-law) were seen in a particular location on the porch, staring intently at the wall.

In other Cat Adventures, Mirando hangs out on top of the tall dresser.

This dresser must be 4, 4.5 feet high. Mirando gets up there by: 1. Hopping from the bed to the desk. 2. Hopping from the desk to the windowsill. 3. Hopping up to the dresser. Then he jumps back down directly from the dresser to the bed, from a height of 4, 4.5 feet and over a 2-foot gap. First, he usually changes the time on the alarm clock to Mirando Standard Time. Pretty impressive, isn't it? He's always very proud of himself after he jumps down.

Edited to add: Marie, I think the Las Vegas flight the pilot was on was delayed and the LA people didn't notice that it hadn't come in yet. Still pretty unbelievable :) Did you get a bunch of Rowanspun at WEBS? I have bags and bags of it, too!

Knitting: Back almost to where I was on the baby sweater. Thank goodness it wasn't a bigger project (like the T-Twist, which I STILL haven't frogged.) I'm caught up on my blog reading (I think), and I'm noticing that while I was gone, everyone decided to make the flower washcloths from Weekend Knitting. Now I really want to make some, too!

Writing: Still revising.

Reading: Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit by Carole Nelson Douglas. It was an impulse buy at Barnes & Noble--I loved the title (which, at the time, I read as Cat in a Hot Pink Pantsuit, which doesn't make any sense, but I thought it was hilarious. Hey, the title's in fancy script. Hard to read). It's apparently the 17th title in a mystery series. I have no problem with cats solving crimes (I have all those Rita Mae Brown/Sneaky Pie Brown books), but I'm having trouble with this one. Usually, you can jump into a series at any point and not feel completely lost. This one started out with five pages written by the cat, Midnight Louie, summarizing a whole bunch of stuff from the previous books. It didn't make that much sense, and I really didn't remember any of it. I'm getting a lot of entries to add to my What Not To Do In My Mystery Series List (not a real list--how scary would that be?): 1. Have your protagonist show up BEFORE chapter 4. 2. Don't have every paragraph include an unnecessary reference to past crimes solved. 3. If you're going to have a weird mystical magician part, ease the reader into it. Don't just start talking about some group called the Synth and their powers in chapter 3. 4. Maybe cozy mysteries shouldn't be 440 pages long--ask your editor! 5. Don't take 100 pages to get to the setting of the book (yeesh!). Anyway, the premise is interesting enough for me to slog through the first rambling, disjointed part. Temple (and her cat) is going undercover on the show Teen Idol, a reality show that has all the contestants holed up in a mansion for two weeks during the competition. Can I just say how irritating that American Idol guy is who sings on the Ford commercials? He's up there with Taco Bell commercials. Seriously. I don't actually watch reality TV, and I had no idea who that guy was until my little brother told me that he was on American Idol and was supposedly my age, which I find hard to believe unless he's majorly prematurely grey. My husband and I did watch the first Joe Millionaire (I still feel guilty about that), because it was on after something we usually watched and we got sucked in. But no Survivor, no American Idol, no People Eat Bugs (otherwise known as Fear Factor). I'm not sure if the people on the shows are being exploited, or if they just want their 15 minutes of fame so much it's worth the embarassment. They are, after all, adults, which is why the Teen Idol show in the book is extra disturbing--stage parents. And I guess if people want to eat bugs on TV, there's no reason to protect them from themselves. But isn't it a little sad when someone thinks they can sing, and they go on TV and people make fun of them? I don't know. It might be that my mom always roots for the underdog, and was the one yelling "Good try!" at my brother's Little League games when the more intense parents were booing some poor eight-year-old who couldn't catch the ball, and she never ever rubbernecks past a car accident. Or, more likely, maybe I'm just overthinking what's meant to be popcorn entertainment. Note: I know lots of lovely people who watch this stuff, so I'm not judging. It's just not my cup of tea. Oh, and I promise not to start a pop culture critique section of this blog. My Inner Philosophy Major gets carried away sometimes.

Cooking: Are you kidding? It's too hot. And the Farmer's Market was out of berries and squash by the time I got there :(