Sparkles, Critters, and other nonsense

This is actually yesterday's post. I was having trouble getting photos to upload, so here goes.


One of the few cool things about it being this cold out (1 degree at 8 AM), is that it makes for a really beautiful frost that covers everything in fine sparkly crystals that look like diamonds in the sunlight.

If you can't tell, I'm a little obsessed with up close nature photos. Especially stuff that holds still. And ice crystals are so cool!


I finally remembered to take my camera out when I fed the cats in the morning. Here's your opportunity to meet Henry and the new kitten, (who now has a name because she has stayed almost a week), Sally. As they seem to have an aversion to looking directly at me when I have a camera in hand . . . all I got was a picture of them eating:

Henry on the left and Sally on the right (this photo does not do justice to the size difference, Henry is at least twice as big as Sally).


And lastly, the nonsense . . . on Saturday, we thought our indoor cat Kiddo was just really enjoying posing so nicely with the nativity scene under the Christmas tree:

But then we noticed that Checkers was also completely obessed with the Christmas tree as well, i.e. constantly circling it, trying to climb up in it etc. It took us a while to draw the line between the mouse chasing that had obviously went on in the kitchen the night before and all this attention bestowed upon the Christmas tree. So evidentally a mouse had at one time been in the tree, though with the lights on and using a flashlight, Ryan couldn't locate the critter.


Later on, we were sitting on the couch eating a snack, and Ryan says look! There at the end of one of the Christmas tree branches, a few feet above the ground, a mouse, sniff, sniff, sniffing . . . trying to figure out how to get from this tree to a nice safe place under the couch, while avoiding the crazy meat hungry predators that inhabit this territory. It gets some help from Ryan, who runs over and knocks the critter and a couple of bulbs off the tree . . . but lucky for the mouse, none of the "fierce" critters were fast enough to catch it. So the mouse lives to see another piece of cheese. And all of our pets are obessed with the fact that there is still an edible rodent somewhere in our living space.