from the neighborhood: books and cats

I just uploaded a batch of photos from our digital camera, so have a few pictures of domestic life around Chez Cook-Clutterbuck.

Teazle is fast out-growing this basket we bought as a kitten bed the day before we brought her home from the shelter. It lives under the chair on Hanna's side of the bed, and Teazle dutifully climbs into it every evening  as we're settling down to sleep. Not that she stays there, mind. But this is what the early part of the night tends to look like!

The perspective on this one is a little weird, but this is me looking down to avoid stepping on the cats as I try to feed them their supper. They love to get in the way when tuna is in the offing.

The other day, I happened to notice that the top left-hand corner of our fridge "art" is composed of pictures of Captain Jack Harkness (Torchwood), IKEA instructions, and two postcard ads for St. Germain beer I picked up at the local liquor store because they inexplicably featured vintage lesbian porn.

I feel somehow this picture captures a fair approximation of life around these parts.

Make of that what you will.

When we were moving everything around to deal with the bed bug scare, Teazle found an out-of-the-way spot on a bookcase in the bedroom to settle in for the evening.

Following the visit to Auntie Shoshana's (while the exterminator was spraying the apartment), Teazle crashed on Hanna's laptop -- falling asleep to an episode of Sponge Bob Square Pants (she's a fan; I think she understands Sponge Bob's manic energy).

We took the opportunity of apartment shuffling to take care of a few outstanding home improvement tasks this weekend, including re-potting some plants which badly needed it. Above is a spider plant Hanna rescued from a windowless office at Northeastern, where it was struggling to survive. It's since grown to about ten times its previous size and we decided to try letting it live in water (here blue-tinted by nutrient powder).

Turns out that spider plant roots are creepy as hell. If this blog goes inexplicably dark, you'll know the thing climbed out of its pot and devoured us in the night.

We recently had to mount a rescue mission to Maine to rescue about eight cardboard boxes of books Hanna had stored in an outbuilding on her parents' land (an outbuilding which had started to leak). The boxes have been living under our kitchen table, but today we spent a few hours unpacking them. Above is the sort of ad hoc shelving you begin constructing when you live in a household with two bibliophiles who have access to all of the $1 used book carts of Boston.

(Last I checked, our LibraryThing account had clocked in around ~1500 books, and only about ... half? ... of those are the books I left back at my parents' place in Michigan.)