Better Living Through Literature
Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
I put my day off yesterday to good use: Cut out a new dress, made coffee cake, bought lamps and picture frames, assembled a flat-pack coffee table–and sewed a pillow to go on my newly-reupholstered chair.
And the long view: 
Don’t the chair and pillow combo just shout “FANCY!”? Gosh, it’s nice to have the space to finally be fancy.
(We’re not fancy all the time over here, though. There was a lot of this going on yesterday, in spite of all the productivity:)
I woke up feeling cynical, so here is a picture of Toby.
He was “helping” me sew last weekend and just climbed on top of the machine while I was pressing a seam. He usually sits on the machine when it’s covered, which gives him a little more room–note the paw held up to tell me, “Mama, this is too small. Fix it.”
(Don’t worry, he couldn’t have made the machine go, so he wasn’t about to hurt himself.)
There’s a lot on my mind lately: House, job, decor, money for decor, and last night I realized that I had better start planning the move, too. So to keep this from becoming a blog of first-world problems, here is a picture of Toby taken with the new camera I got for my birthday (!):
He is thinking, too–thinking of the stairs in the new place that he’ll be able to run up and down.
1. I had to wake up my upstairs neighbor and tell him his dishwasher was flooding. How did I know this? My ceiling was leaking.
2. I took my parents to see a potential house that wouldn’t have any issues caused by an upstairs neighbor, but on a second visit I decided it wasn’t The One.
3. I enjoyed some (a lot of) wine while watching my imaginary boyfriend in The Nutcracker.
4. I got some polar fleece kitty blankets ready for a kitty-blanket-tying party next week. (My work friend and I cooked up an idea to donate supplies to local shelters for Christmas.)
5. Toby helped:
Sit on it like it’s a blanket that just came out of storage.
Bonus shot, so you can see the intensity of the sitting:
Sitting on things requires great focus.
1. Brewvies has a feature on the last Sunday of every month in which a bad movie is shown and the audience is encouraged to act like the MST3K crew and heckle it. Does this seem like it would be a fun event, or does it seem like it would be incredibly awkward? The novelist in me is really curious.
2. A client has repeatedly asked for copy to be “more fun.” I am tempted to show them the next round written in LOLSpeak.
3. It’s the weekend! Follow Toby’s example and put up your feet tonight.
“Do we have to get up today?”
Baby, I wish we didn’t.
(I was counting last night and realized I’d cranked out 12 voiceover scripts in three weeks. No wonder I’m not excited to go to work!)
Toby had a brown donut that he slept in all winter, but the velour on the top was getting ratty. So I recovered the top in a plush leopard print for him.
I debated re-doing the entire cover, but there’s a zipper all around the bottom and a zipper going in a circle seemed like more effort than it’s worth. The new top does have piping around the edge, though.
He jumped right in and had a bath, so even though it’s been too hot to sleep in it, I think he likes it.
Yes, just another exciting Tuesday evening sorting yarn and vacuuming the yarn basket:
(That vacuum is Thing #8, by the way. I’d better do another quarterly report soon!)
Dear Toby,
Today is your unofficial birthday! I know you were born in June so I picked the third for you, same as my birthday. Here you are when you were a baby, before you came to live with me:
You’re three now, and you’ve been going outside like a big boy. I’m proud that you got so brave so quickly, but it hurts my feelings a little when you run away from me to go into the neighbor’s garage (or into the bushes, or into the other neighbor’s yard, or under the cars in the back parking lot, etc.).
Since you’re all grown up now, let’s make a deal like grown-ups, OK? You will stay mostly inside for the rest of the summer and I will find us a new place to live, one that has a yard with a fence and less traffic. It will have lots of rooms to explore inside, too–it might even have stairs! I know you love stairs. Almost as much as you love laundry:
Even when you get too excited by the outdoors, you are still the sweetest, cutest, and best cat. I’m so glad you came to live with me.
Love,
Mama
PS–Do you think you’d like a new kitty tower? A really tall one?