LOOK!!!!!!!!!!

Can you believe it? Both cats on the same piece of furniture at the same time! This image brought to you by Chad, who says they were sharing the futon for hours both yesterday and today. Chad also woke me up in the middle of the night the other night to point out that both cats were lying at the foot of our bed. We are really making progress now.


And now for your reading enjoyment, the list of things that Entropy has attacked this evening (keep in mind I've only been home for ~1.5 hours).

1. my lunch bag (see picture)
2. The Kitchen chairs
3. the kitchen table
4. the railing
5. the knobs on the hutch
6. the camera
7. my computer bag
8. my hand
9. the chair cushions
10. Max

She is currently concentrating on #10. I'll keep an eye out for new adversaries.

Happy Halloween!

Oooooh, what a scary house. Also in honor of Halloween a Halloween-inspired Fritata.


Those purple things are potatoes. Not as yummy as regular potatoes, but definitely weirder looking.

We've gotten a few super-cute trick-or-treaters, but not too many. As trick-or-treating time winds to a close, Chad and I have no choice but to eat all of the remaining candy. I go for the Twix, Chad prefers the Snickers. A quality holiday overall. :)

It's almost halloween...

Which means it's time to carve us some pumpkins


Chad marked his pumpkin early in the game...


Introducing this year's contestants: Chad's scared and Rachel's happy/sad pumpkin


In other news, added to the list of offensive things that Entropy must attack: my bag of crochet stuff.


Silly kitten, crochet is for old ladies.


Well, apparently this crochet is for lunch.


Final score: Rachel's crochet bag: 1, Entropy: 0. (She got distracted before making it through the plastic).

What goes on in her tiny brain?

Today Entropy decided to attack the railing. Seriously. I don't know what the railing ever did to her.


Unfortunately the camera distracted her so I wasn't able to get any really good shots, but she went after it for a solid 10 minutes or so.


Then, all of a sudden, she decided she was finished, trotted over to the corner, and stared at the wall. Somehow, this didn't make us feel any better about her mental state...

Wedding Decoration Recycling

With all the time we've spent messing with our house, we've spent almost no effort on the bathrooms. Actually that's not entirely true - we spent considerable effort cleaning them and making sure everything was working when we first moved in. We just haven't done any decorating.

We still have a long way to go (they desperately need paint, for example), but at least the upstairs bathroom has some decoration now, inspired by the candles from Debra and Nils:

Of course our bathroom is so narrow it's basically impossible to take pictures, but whatever.

The new towel rack was far too wide for the room, but that's no problem for handyman Chad, who shortened, sanded and stained the cut end to match the rest over the course for about 1 hour. I was impressed.


Although the industrial chemist in me supposes he should be wearing safety glasses...

At any rate good bathroom progress this week. Now the upstairs one isn't quite as ugly. Don't worry, the downstairs one is still by far the ugliest room in the house. :)

Monolith

We got our doors!! After several weeks of waiting, Ikea got more giant black closet doors, so now we can close our wardrobe. Our room looks way neater without any additional cleaning!

I would like to just take this moment to reiterate how great our wardrobe is. Look! All of my clothes! Hung neatly in our bedroom!


You may ask, is it really that important to have doors on the wardrobe? Couldn't you hang a curtain or something to get a neat look without the waiting? To answer, I will show you an example of our old armoire, which we're currently using to store blankets (mostly because we haven't gotten around to removing it from our house). Please notice that even though we've tried to tie the doors shut with a scarf, someone has pried them open and pulled several things off of the bottom shelf.


But who? And why?


Yes, sensing an opportunity to get cat hair on our things, Max broke into our armoire. The funniest thing is this is not the first time this has happened (for the record, I TOLD Chad we had to tie the scarf tighter). My favorite quote about Max (by Chad):

"She can open doors! She's like a velocaraptor!"

So needless to say, I am happy we have big, heavy doors on the wardrobe that I think will even keep Max out. She's taken to walking around in there and rubbing her tail on my black sweaters before settling down for a nice nap on the shelves. No more! Now she'll have to fight entropy for her chair back. She's taken to scaling the bookshelves to plan her attack (when she's not looking at the camera, she watches the kitten. Or the TV).

Cat update

We'd like to welcome Max back to the couch. For the first few weeks we had Entropy, Max basically didn't come into the living room at all, except to hiss at the kitten. But when we came back from the wedding in Tully, things were different. The cats were chasing each other playfully (not touching, of course, but the chasing seems more mutual). They were very often in the same room. Max decided she wanted to be petted again. And is now she is willing to sit on a blanket that smells like Entropy if necessary.

Entropy is still doing well, very playful and cuddly. She purrs like a chainsaw. It's amazingly loud. Though I think my favorite thing that she does is chasing her tail. Seriously. She flicks it a few times and then goes after it. Bizarre.


The other day I was holding Entropy on the couch, and max jumped up, and I petted them both at the same time. No hissing. No break in the space-time continuum. They just sort of ignored each other (or rather, Entropy watched Max ignore her) and accepted some petting. If that's not progress I don't know what is.

Though I will say, when Entropy is with us on the couch, Max's preferred position still seems to be watching us from next to the TV. This way when she gets bored of us she can just turn around and watch the daily show (which she does sometimes).


At any rate, yay for continuous progress. I am still waiting for the day when I come home to find them both sitting on the chair, but for the time being I'll take the same room. :)

Debra and Nils, the weekend. Part two.

The actual wedding. Of course, being in said wedding I don't have many formal pictures (the above was taken by Monroe), but will try to describe the day using my behind the scenes shots and stealing wedding pictures from mom and Sue. :)

Having a wedding takes lots of primping. We had some expert hairstylists among us.















We wore fishnets at Debra's request. What a lovely group of girls!

Man, Marie is tall and the rest of us are short!

Oh wait.. maybe her shoes had something to do with it. Second only to Debra's white boots.


It was a beautiful wedding, and Debra was just stunning. Here she is posing in the light with her beautiful dress, and Ari, who made the beautiful dress.


And here's a shot to show both how awesome Debra looked and what a good photographer either Mom or Sue is.


The happy couple (also stolen from Mom and Sue's pictures) during the toasting. This wedding only one has a mowhawk.
Even though it was a one-mowhawk wedding, it was still lots of fun. Everyone got into the spirit. Nice hat, Grandma. :)


What a wonderful weekend. Congratulations to Debra and Nils again.
(and more pictures can be found here).

Debra and Nils, the weekend. Part one.

Here is the story of the weekend. After a bit of a long long long ride to get the Pytels and Holmbergs to Tully, we set in for a day of decorating on Friday.


However it was cold in the garage. Luckily Dad and Melanie have a well-stocked liquor cabinet.


We decorated the front of the house, the huppa, the windows, and emptied several pumpkins. And because Lenore is a planning genius, we were able to produce the corpse bride and her groom as a decorative surprise for Debra.


I think Debra liked the decorating. :)


Once the rest of the family arrived, we had bbq for dinner and some serious pumpkin carving.


Here are Debra and Nils in jack-o-lantern form.


We also had enough smores to feed... well.. never mind it was exactly the right number of chocolate bars. :) It was a great party, with fun for...

Lunatics,

World Travelers,

Midwesterners,

and Geeks.

An excellent evening. More pictures here, and stay tuned for Saturday's recap

We still exist

Sorry I've kind of lapsed on the blogging lately... I'm going to try to amend my ways and be more like the bleisenblog starting next week. :) In the meantime, I'll just say we had such a great time at Debra and Nils's wedding number 2, and were delighted to come home and find both of our cats in the same room, in close proximity. Unfortunately, we weren't quick enough to get a picture, but there has definitely been progress.

More details, including wedding pictures, to come later. :)

House Progress

Since we didn't go out of town this weekend we were able to make a little more house progress. Allow me to introduce you to our new living room.


Looks pretty sweet, huh? We now have a giant high def TV so Chad can see every detail of the world poker championships. Also lots of bookshelf and cabinet space. And having Entropy pose in front of the furniture highlights how big it is. Overall, I think we've been able to arrange the furniture in a way that we have plenty of seating without making things look too crowded.


We also re-arranged the dining room such that the table fits better and the space is more open.


We put the top of the hutch in the basement since we don't really need the display space anymore... but now we need some artwork for that wall behind the table.

So anyway, good progress this weekend. One more kitten picture for the road:

Kitten Pictures!!

And other stuff. :) Entropy is doing great - we've had her out much more often, and she's relaxed enough to do a bit of playing with the string on a stick.









Max is still somewhat skeptical about the new kitten, but she's willing to be in the same room without hissing for an extended period of time now. She likes to keep a close eye on Entropy though....


Today we let Entropy explore the living room on her own a bit. She seemed to enjoy the opportunity, but we were reminded of just how small she is.



Also, you may be wondering, what was that brown thing Entropy was sitting on in earlier pictures? Our new sofa! We are finally the proud owners of a real (leather!) sofa, like grown-ups (instead of our previous couch, which was a futon, like college students). We even have a chair to match. Here Chad and Tammer enjoy the new living room.


I don't know why they're both in exactly the same position - maybe it's a thoughtbot thing.

I am also happy to announce that today we finally had a bbq and played bocce in our back yard. Which is perfect for all-terrain bocce, especially since we haven't mowed in a while and the leaves are starting to fall.

So thus far it's been an awesome weekend. Sorry for not so much posting lately, my life got really crazy this week. Hopefully it will be less crazy soon so I can sit at home, take pictures of the cats, and post them to the internet. :)