in which I talk in pictures.

Mum sent me a care package a few days ago. it contained Hawaiian coffee for The Boy, microwave popcorn and Primeval for me, as well as some diverse candies (and comics as stuffing! yay) and these mittens, which are awesome and adorable and fuzzy and warm and now I really really really really want snow. The Kittehs also really like the mittens, as evidenced in the below photo. That's me attempting to take a photo of the mittens, and Jayne playing his favorite "sniff...sniff...KILLKILLKILL" game. I will take a better photo as soon as I lock the cats in the office. there's two cats on the backs and a fish skeleton going up the thumbs, and a little pawprint on the palm. well, pads of fingers.

This is California's way of saying "nooo, you don't want to move...you can actually grow shit here....staaaay...." my proof? Observe: Stage left, the fig that I was worried about dying, the one that didn't fruit this year, the one that only had four leaves that were getting yellowy brown spots? yeah. that's the same fig. Stage right, the tomato bush (yes, I know, they're commonly called vines, but you haven't seen my total failure of training it to the stake supporty thing. it's a bush.) below them? I took these pictures on our last rainstorm, which was....tuesday? I think? maybe wednesday. Still, it's the last week in November. I not only still have tomatos ripening on the vine.....it's still blooming. WHA?

I don't know why it's linking.
cue craig ferguson sound clip: "I know!" The blood orange mini tree is blooming too, which makes the hummingbirds (there's two now!) very happy and drives Raz absolutely bursar. Especially when the hummingbird leaves the blossom and darts in front of the sliding door, mere inches away from Raziel's chittering, frantic face. and my camellia has bloomed! it's not yellow, like the Merritt horticultural guys thought, but hey, it bloomed! the potting soil all this stuff is in apparently came from a clover field, because I have to weed it. containers! containers should not harbor weeds. bah. let's not talk about The Giant Dandilion-Thing that I came home to growing out of the camellia pot. the kittens have been thrilled that Teh Hoomans have been home and thus able to be pounced upon, and we rewarded their insanity by moving the kitty tower from the corner by The Boy's desk to the living room. (we're hoping to avoid being woken up by their fights for supremacy by the tower thudding against the wall where our heads are, and also they will now have at least a struggle to get up on top of the desks to muck about and eat the plant.) They seem to like it, although when Raz gets scared now he runs into the office to where it used to be and blinks at the empty space in confusion.

Jayne sits on Raziel. (I like how it looks as though this silver tabby head is coming from Jayne's...I don't know what his coloration is...I had a photo of them looking like The Amazing Two Headed Cat!!! but at the moment I released the shutter Jayne decided he needed to attack the lens, so it's just blur.)
Raziel sits on Jayne. (he's actually in mid-yawn in this photo; he didn't seem to care that ginormo-kitteh was squashing him.)
And then they both get into the whole post-thanksgiving-coma thing and once again avoid death by making annoyed humans go "...aaaaw...."And that's tame for some of Raz's sleeping positions. Also? Jayne is huge. he's almost as long as Raz (and Raz is loooooong.) and his tail is a bottle brush even when he's not scared out of his mind. (and when he is scared out of his mind....yikes.) Matt thinks he's a government experimental alien attack cat that was crossbred with a raccoon, which is obviously conspiracy theorist hyperbole. Jayne has clearly gotten some lizard genes spliced in his DNA, because he's storing all his fat in his tail for leaner times, which points to some mad scientist, or to their home planet moving to stage eight of the invasion. duh.