Halloween Greetings From AOW's Cat Family

(With much gratitude to Stogie of Saberpoint for the graphic below)

Back row, from left to right: Cameo, alpha cat of the household and surrogate mother to the new arrival in the basket; and Mysti, still pouting a bit about the new arrival.

In the front: Amber, the sweetest of all torties, born on March 13, 2012, and still in her kittenhood.  She  tears around the house night and day as if possessed.

Best Friends

(Click directly on the photos to enlarge them)

Cameo, true to her Siamese heritage, is certainly the alpha cat in this household. Nevertheless, after several days of hissing and establishing the pecking order, Cameo has fully accepted Amber.


Cameo and Amber first began to bond by playing with the new toy. They stayed on opposite sides of the Turbo Scratcher:

A few days later, the two bonded.  I managed to take a few photos of the two best friends sleeping on the cushion behind the recliner before Cameo got sick on September 30:

Mysti, also a tortie, is very jealous of Amber. I doubt that the two of them will ever bond. In the photo below, Mysti is furious that an interloper lives here now:

Fortunately, there is not an ounce of aggression in Mysti's body!


Amber is very contented here in the AOW household and disregards Mysti's jealousy:

Amber Joins The Family

(I took the photos in this post from September 14-September 22)

Obviously, Amber is happy here:

Amber, showing off her spay scar the day after surgery:

What is Cameo thinking about?

Without any hissing or growling, Amber and Cameo interact with the latest toy, the Turbo Scratcher:

New Addition To The Family

Amber!
The pictures below were taken at Amber's foster home, where she was living in a luxury van in the cool shade of the mountains of West Virginia.

Goodbye, Dusti

Dusti, named Cinderella by the rescue group who found her in a litter of kittens in an alley in D.C., turned 15 years old on May 5. The photo, which I call "Dusti Greets the December sunrise," was taken when she was quite young.

Today, the vet found a tumor in Dusti's left kidney.  This mass (not present two weeks ago), in combination with my beloved Dusti's recent dramatic weight loss (over 2.5 pounds since March to the point of emaciation) and a decline in general health over this summer, are almost always indicative cancer.

She is the first pet that we've ever lost to cancer.

Rather than subject Dusti to torturous procedures and the inevitable metastasis that rapidly follows no matter what, Mr. AOW and I opted for euthanasia, which the home-care vet did here in our living room.

Dusti will be cremated today, and the ashes returned to us.

I will miss Dusti so much!  I will miss her trademark chirps and trademark tuck-and-rolls. Also, she was the only cat I ever had to talk with her tail.  And I do mean talk!  That tail of hers was so expressive.

Goodbye, Sheba

[Click on each photo for a larger image]
July 15, 1988 - December 1, 2008

We had our Christmas 2007 miracle and many more months of good quality of life, thanks to our home-care vet, truly an animal talker. But advanced age took its inevitable toll, and yesterday came the dreaded time for all pet lovers — the time to say goodbye.



Recent pictures of Sheba....
In June 2008:


In August 2008:

Some Redecorating

Over the past twelve months, this old house has been getting a long needed face lift!

The interior hadn't been painted since 1982 because, for at least a decade, we thought we'd be moving. The house is so old and outmoded, without central air-conditioning and with only one bathroom, that developers considered the house a tear down. Once our sales contract fell through in September 2006, Mr. AOW and I decided that it was high time to stop living in a dump so bad that I don't even have many "before" photos. But I do have several "after" photos.

OUR NEW BATHROOM!
In December 2006, we redid the bathroom, the most hideous and the most dangerous room in the house. The floor ominously creaked every time I stepped into the bathtub, and it was only a matter of time before I ended up, tub and all, in the crawlspace!

Here's what the bathroom looks like now, complete with a window made of glass bricks and all new fixtures, including a bathtub with whirlpool jets. The walls are lavender, my favorite color:





Check out the medicine cabinet in the above photo: an authentic antique, with a black-walnut frame.

Of course, once the bathroom was so lovely, we couldn't stand looking at the dining room, despite all the beautiful antiques therein. We converted the dining room into another kind of room.

MY NEW PIANO ROOM!
In spring 2008 I bought and moved in a Yamaha upright, thus finally having a piano room, with gray walls and white trim:



In this photo, the piano is decorated for Christmas:



The "cat table" below is made of black walnut. My father cut the tree from his father's farm and milled the wood at this own sawmill, which Dad operated on Granddad's farm. He took the wood to a cabinetmaker and had this "telephone table" custom-made for my grandmother, never mind that she hated and rarely used the phone:



This three-cornered china cabinet, complete with Grandma's Bavarian dishes, graces the northeast corner of the room:



On the east wall next to the right side of the above china cabinet is a Queen Anne's sheet-music cabinet, with bow front and beveled mirror:



Yes, the piano room is crowded. In the above photos, you can't even see the wine cabinet and the mirror from a brothel in Georgetown. But the piano sounds like a Steinway, and that's what counts!

OUR NEW LIVING ROOM!

This room got a new face just a few weeks ago. I have one "before" photo, which shows the contrast between the old color and the white primer. This is the corner by the front door and the coat closet. The door furthest to the right is the one leading to a hallway:



Below are the "after photos" of the living room. The first is the same corner as the above ugly picture:



Note the antique mahogany banister, which looks beautiful against the damask-rose accent wall going up some 50 feet:









The big mirror opposite the banister and above the fireplace captures the reflection of the accent wall:



When I'm blogging from my laptop, I sit in the corner of the love seat under the floor lamp in the background of this photo:



Every year, I string Christmas cards from the banister posts to one of the high-placed windows:



Our Christmas tree sits in the southeast corner of the living room:





Now that the living room has such beautiful walls, we'll have to get some new curtains and a new recliner!

Vacation 2007

In late August and early September, we traveled to Indiana to meet, for the first time, some people whom I'd met on the Internet. We had such a good time on this vacation that we seriously considered sending for our stuff and moving there!

THE OHIO RIVER IN INDIANA

Panorama views:





The sandbar for the party animals:



Barge traffic on the Ohio:









Riverboat casino:

I'll Be Back

With all that's been going on lately, I haven't had time to dedicate to this site. But I haven't forgotten about posting photos and will do so when I return from vacation on September 9.

My Flower Garden

In May, the sight and fragrance of peonies fill the air of the walkway to my front porch. Although the joy is brief, we look forward every year to the blooming of the peonies.

All of the peony blooms pictured here are from bushes which have been in my family for at least a half century.

The white blooms are our favorites because they are the largest and the most fragrant:






Some of the blooms are smaller and of a different type. The following picture is slightly out of focus, but gives an idea as to what the pink blooms look like:



This year, we had fewer and smaller blooms. I must remember to feed and water the peony bushes this fall.