This week we decorated the house for the holidays. Those of you that know me will understand that I'm not so much into hanging gaudy things around the house as Marsha is. Throughout the process of pulling boxes out, hanging stuff all over, putting together strings of lights, and replacing all of our perfectly serviceable decorations with the seasonal kind, one thought keeps going through my mind: In less than six weeks we have to undo all of it. Indeed for many years my only contribution to holiday bric-a-brac was a pair of plastic trees that I would pull out on December first and put in the bathroom. If anyone asked they were told that those were my toilet-trees.

Soon people learned not to ask.

Anyway last weekend Marsha asked me to pull the holiday stuff out of the basement. For the last couple of years we've not done the whole thing. For one reason or another we'd not pulled everything out, (not that I minded). This year though I decided that as Marsha enjoyed it so much we'd do the whole thing, two trees, all the ornament collections, the wall hangings, the crockery, everything. After about half an hour the family room was full of boxes and the cats, that we'd locked in the bedroom could be released.

The cats have a thing about boxes. With all the moving we've done they don't like it when the boxes come out. It makes them nervous. Oddly enough Momiji seems more bothered by them than Geiger. For most of this week the cats were a bit spooky with all the boxes coming and going and finally the empties getting stacked in the garage. It was a change to their environment and they don't like change.

Once things started settling down we noticed that Geiger seems to have a thing about the tree skirts. They're just normal quilted skirts but he seems to think that the beading and applique's are a threat. There's no way we can keep the skirt flat, Geiger immediately dives underneath the branches to kill the tree skirt. He's a bit weird in some ways, but then that's why he fits in with the rest of us.

Why do I have a aversion to decorating for the holidays, I mean other than because I know it has to come down again in the near future? It's because the house is now full of booby traps. You never know when something will get you in trouble. I got yelled at this week for washing my hands. "No don't use those, they're the Christmas towels." But they were hanging where the regular towels did. No matter. I "Should have known better".

Now I dry my hands on my shirt. It's safer.

Geiger even got caught once. He'd noticed a bright glittery thing hanging on a doorknob. He looked at it every day. Finally on Thursday he decided to investigate it more closely. Apparently, I was in the other room and didn't actually see him do this, he jumped up and tried to grab the glittery thing. The first I knew of it was the loud crash of the big wad of large brass jingle-bells being batted by cat paws. This was followed immediately by the sound of a stampede of cat paws going down the hallway and under the bed. We didn't see him for fifteen minutes. He wasn't expecting all the noise.

Maybe he's taking his frustrations out on the tree skirt.

Doug & Marsha

On Saturday we took a drive to Victoria for my work.  We stopped on the way to see the view.




Marsha got a chance to wander around downtown. She came across that candy store that really knows how to do candy apples.


She saw this baby sleeper in a store window.


And then there was a seagull that was not afraid of anything.
Marsha was about 4 feet away when she took this picture.
She continued to walk along and passed within a foot or two of the bird.
It didn't pay any attention to her.