Three reasons that I can't make my bed in the morning:

On Saturday, we spent the day in downtown Geneva. It was a cold day to be walking around a lakeside city, but we were on a mission. My mom had a ton of souvenirs still to buy for the family back home...and she leaves Monday morning!
So, we got busy helping her choose chocolates (free samples, FTW!), t-shirts and suchlike items.
While the twins and I helped out Mom, Valentine, her boyfriend and Severin ran over to the Apple Store to try to clear up an issue with Tya's iPad (it never really has worked properly!). They were promptly given a brand new iPad and sent on their way.
How's that for customer service?!
After our labors, it was good to sit down to a nice lunch in an adorable Swiss-style restaurant:

Deliberations over the menu were long, but the three older kids finally decided on...fondue!

We were all pretty tired by the day's end and glad to be heading home!

Bob was happy to see us all.

As far as we can tell, anyway.

My mom's visit here in the lovely Haute Savoie continues well.
As you can see, a good time is being had by all:

(Daisy apparently feels really relaxed in my mom's company.)

On Friday, we picked up Tya from school a bit early and went shopping!

We were in Annemasse, a nearby town that has some good shops. What's a trip to France without a trip to the Monoprix? Amirite?

The town square in Annemasse is quite pretty most of the year.
It's a bit barren in January...

...but it was still fun taking pictures to commemorate our outing!

January 2011 was not so bad, in retrospect.

There was this:

Nice, huh?
That was during a weekend in the Val d'Illiez, Switzerland.
It was all cute and stuff...

And there was this, too:

I has a fun weekend with a girlfriend who works as a translator each year at the big Solothurn Film Festival in Switzerland. It was fun to watch the movies from the booth and get the insider's view of everything...
And Solothurn turned out to be a very cute Swiss town:

Come to think of it, I spent a lot of time in Switzerland this last month....
I guess there's worse places to be.

At any rate, Valentine had no time for gallivanting pointlessly around foreign countries.
She stayed home, working hard:

What a good girl! And so talented! And lovely!

And finally....our cat, Daisy, who spent the entire month of January working assiduously to become even more gloriously porky.

Well done, kitty!

Very early on Saturday morning, we drove an hour in the snow to get here:to take these two lazy, yet adorable creatures:

to compete in this cat show held by the Cat Club of Lyon in the city of Aix-les-Bains.

The two green cages belong to our cat breeder pal who took us to our first show last September. The one on the end is ours, lovingly decorated with frilly curtains sewn by yours truly...

It's not well known, but even the fancy cat clubs allow common house cats to compete in a special category... and it's lots of fun.

Our friend, of course, has no common gutter cats. She shows skinny little naked expensive cats... I had to show this one to the judges for her, as she was busy with another cat being judged at a different table...

Here's our Dexter being checked out by the judge. Dex was a good boy and the judge really liked him... "Nice, big, quiet boy" was the final verdict.

Daisy did well, too....sort of.
She was extremely well-groomed, as my girls have been working on her for weeks. And she was nice to the judge....didn't do her strange growling thing that she does when she gets crabby.
The judge's final verdict was "lovely but bizarre".
But he was Polish.
Maybe "bizarre" means "adorable" in Polish?

But despite her bizarreness, our Daisy won, big time!

As did our handsome boy

Here's Mal standing beside our award-bedecked display cage:

Our happiness was only slightly marred by the fact that there were NO other competitors in the class. At all.
This actually kind of ticked Mallory off.
"It would be much better if other people were competing. I'm sure our cats could beat any other ones! I know it!"
She was really ready to bring it, cat-wise.

Her only consolation was that, even in a class with only one entrant, the cat won't be nominated for the prize if it is not up to standard. It needs to be healthy, good-looking, well-groomed and have a good temper. Competing cats have to be handled by judges and their assistants, so difficult, shy or mean cats need not apply.

That made our Mal feel a bit better. ...but she'd still rather see some seriously cut-throat house-cat competition the next time around...

There are two new household members chez moi and it's about time you all met them.

This is Dexter:

(Don't worry, he is not a serial killer. As far as we can tell.)

And this is Daisy:

Shortly after our beautiful Cleo was killed, I drove the girls down to the local animal shelter. We stood in a room among about 20 lovely cats, hard-pressed to choose only one.

So, we did what any decent people would do: we chose two.

Daisy was sort of a wretched specimen, really. She was quite thin and her fur was scruffy and matted. The eye passed right over her...well, mine did, anyway. But she caught Mallory's attention.

"This is a good one, mom!" she insisted.
And she was right.

Dexter also kind of blended in at first, but when Valentine picked him up the first time, he put his paws around her neck and gave her a big hug. And who could resist that?

As you can see, Dex and Daisy really enjoy the new addition to the house. (nice transition there, no?) The little blue sofa is cosy and Mallory loves to curl up there to read. But the cats prefer it when some unlucky soul leaves his jacket on the coffee table, as that provides a perfect bed/cat fur repository.
The left corner of the room is nice and sunny- perfect for the huge ficus plant that used to loom ominously over our dining room table. It was a little....overwhelming for the space it occupied before - but now the giant plant is out of our way, safely tucked into a bright corner.

So, you can see that the room finally has a real floor and actual furniture.

And even better- it now has fancy decorations:

We picked up this old mirror at the thrift shop on Saturday.
So, we've got that whole "shabby chic" thing working for us.

I've got plenty more pictures for you...mostly from our kitchen remodelling project. I hope to get them up soon. I don't seem to be doing very well with my blog lately, though. Lots of stuff going on here, blah, blah, etc. ...
But luckily Tya is taking up the slack. In contrast to me, she's blogging more than ever.
Go check her out!

"Well, plastic has to come from somewhere", Alexa told me, displaying a philosophical resignation far beyond her years.

I'd been complaining about the location of the cat show we attended this weekend. Instead of a cute town like Annecy or even Lyon, we had to go to Oyonnax- an obscure little town that bears the proud nickname "The Valley of Plastic".


Luckily, we were there for cat action and not charming tourist photos.
And cat action is what we found:











When my pal Nat had initially suggested that the girls and I accompany her to a show, the idea was that we would enter our housecat, Cleo, in a competition. I thought it would be fun for the twins and they would enjoy showing off their sweet little cat.

Sadly, she was hit by a car on Sept 5th and died.
I won't go into details, but it was bad.
Very bad.

We ended up going to the show anyway, but just to help out Nat, who is a big-time breeder of short-haired orientals, siamese and Cornish Rex. They are all sort of strange and thin and don't have much hair...but they have their fans and are very, very valuable.
And they aren't too ugly, once you get used to them.
In fact, over the course of the two-day show, I went from finding them vaguely repellant to actually finding them rather handsome.
They sort of look like bats and I have nothing against bats, really.....

At any rate, those little bat-cats managed to beat out the competion and come home with no less than five trophies.

And it was an interesting opportunity, anthropologically-speaking. The cat show circuit has its own culture and definitely bears exploring. I look forward to finding out more when we go to the next big show at the end of November. ...

Thanks to everyone for all the kind comments and sympathy.

Your support really does make me feel a bit better!

As you may imagine, we're not too cheerful around here, but we are getting on with things.
JP got the sign hung over the door of the new addition to the house. It's a piece of wood that an elderly neighbor carved for us when we first moved here. He's a lovely old fellow and has fashioned signs for many local people and businesses.
Ours says "Welcome to La Corbiere" :

The rhubarb is coming up nicely and JP even repainted the rabbit that stands guard over it.

Now that I read back over what I've written, it makes it look like only JP has been keeping busy.
Au contraire!
Severin and I were out in the garden today, putting in the potatoes and a few more plants.

There's only a bit of space in the middle now for the green beans.

It's been so cold lately, we were waiting for warmer weather. But as it's the middle of May already, we decided that we'd best get cracking...

Not far from the garden, just to the north, is the spot where we buried our Mr. Darcy:

Mr Gaspar Darcy died today at 3pm. He was a Good Cat and will be greatly missed by those who loved him.

It's been raining for the last few days and I haven't been able to resist torturing my kids with a very bad joke that I first heard back in the halls of Lakeview Elementary School.
Why don't I inflict it on you, too?
Q:If April showers bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring?
A:Pilgrims.
OK, possibly the worst joke ever- but I figure that kids need to be exposed to this kind of stuff in the home so they have a good resistance to it later in life...

The kids all have a day off school tomorrow. The older ones are even getting Friday off. I just hope the weather improves so that we can get some gardening done. We have to get our potatoes in soon or suffer the shame of having to buy all of our potatos in the fall.

And now the bad news. It's the bad news that is probably going to turn into very bad news in the near future: Mr. Darcy had been looking much improved, but is now getting worse again. I'll take him to the vet again on Friday, but I'm afraid that they've really done all they can for him. Cats are supposed to live a long time, right?
Ours is only eight years old.
I am SO not ready for Mr. D to go.

The first bit of news I have is that our Mr. Darcy is looking a lot better. The meds have eased his breathing and he seems to enjoy life again. It's a pretty calm life, as he spends most of the day in a chair by the fireplace. He gets up for the litter box and food and that's it.
So, he's not the cat he was. but we're glad to have him around for as long as he can stay with us...
I was very relieved to see Mr. D feeling better, as I had a busy weekend planned.
Today was the day I'd promised to help a friend (single mom) clean the junk out of her yard and garage. My two eldest elected to help out, too. And the twins came along to play with the cats there. As the friend is a cat breeder, there are plenty of them.
We ended up filling a huge bin:


This was only about a quarter of what needed to be thrown away (And no, I'm not including Tya, Sev and their pal in that statement!) but we only had the one bin.

It only took us about an hour to do it, which was good, as I still had sewing to do back at home.
Yes, we're going to yet another Faire and I needed to get a cloak sewn for Tya. This Faire is tomorrow in the village of Cluse, which is celebrating the 700th anniversary of the town charter. Should be great fun!
I might even dress up myself!

I have blogged quite a few times about our two cats. We have our Number One Principal Main Cat (AKA Mr. Gaspar Darcy) and our Number Two Adorable Back-up Cat (aka Cleo/ Meeper/ Girl Kitty)

This is Mr. D in happier days.

The days are less happy now because he's very, very ill.

He'd been under the weather for about a week when I took him to see the vet last Thursday. The vet thought it was pneumonia, but the antibiotics didn't help. By Sunday, things seemed dire and on Monday, I was pretty sure he was going to die.

The vet that saw him on Monday quickly determined that our Gaspar had no infection of the lungs... In fact, his lungs were full of water because his heart is diseased and has congestive heart failure.

And that is just as bad as it sounds.

He's on medications now and is at home with us, but the prognosis is bad. Most cats with his condition and symptoms only live an average of 92 days after diagnosis.

It's crazy how bad it feels even just to write that....