Caturday!

Happy Birthday, and also happy one-month-of-new-home day, to SWHNYBN, who has in fact been named:

Lady Mara McNibbon, Duchess of the Laundry Pile, is not amused.

Here, have a video of her playing one of her favorite games, "Tear up Daddy's arms while suspended in midair", with Ozz.

Video description: Ozz, a tall, heavyset white man with long brown hair and a goatee, holding Mara, a petite white-calico-tabby cat with one arm.  She is busily chewing on his fingers as he holds her suspended over his arm. You can hear me behind the camera laughing at the two of them.  Suddenly Mara stops and lifts her head to look in my direction with a surprised "Who me?" expression.  I giggle and say "Oh hai, sweetie", then "Oh, no, back to chewing on Daddy's hand." as she decides nomming his hand is more interesting.  He extends his arm to me, Mara still dangling and chewing on him, like he's going to hand her to me.  "Ack, no, do not hand that to me.  It's all teeth."  He pulls her back to his chest; "Yeah, she can keep chewing on you, that's fine."  He turns and tries to set his little bundle of teeth on the couch, but as soon as she hits the cushion she whips around onto her back and grabs his arm with all four legs, pulling him down to keep nomming.  "Well, apparently putting it down doesn't work."  She starts trying to climb her way up his arm with front paws and teeth; he shakes her off.  Undeterred, she pounces at his hand again.  They wrestle a little bit more, until he gets a hand under her and scoops her up off the couch so she's dangling in midair again, which fazes her not even a little.  I laugh again, and she looks up startled right at the camera, then abruptly calms down and lets herself be tucked under Ozz's arm like a furry little football as I say "I guess we're done then."  Fin.

Hope everyone's having an awesome weekend!

Apologies for my absence, but LOOK IT'S AN ADORABLE KITTY!

Sorry I've been away, dearloves!  It's a bit of a long story, but the short version is, I enlisted my mom's help to do some massive decluttering and housecleaning, which took a full week of working every day at least half the day, starting the day after Thanksgiving and going through the next weekend (I swear, I think we hauled at least two dozen black trash bags of stuff out of this place, between trash and Goodwill donations!).  The reason?  Ozz and I decided to get a kitty, talked to our landlord about altering our no-pets lease, and the end result of all this work (the house needed to be made safe for a kitteh; there was far too much clutter and junk in corners that a cat could get into trouble with and which could've hid spiders or other nasties) came home with us Wednesday night:

She-Who-Has-Not-Yet-Been-Named, a mostly-white calico cat w/orange-brown and grey tabby patches, curled up on the bed with her front paws over her tiny little face

She's almost a year old but still quite petite, with a purr like a good-sized motor that starts up as soon as you touch her or sometimes even talk to her.  She's a snuggler, too:

SWHNYBN laying on her back across my lap, sleeping with her head pillowed on my arm and a paw resting on my laptop while I tried to work around her

My fiance Ozz, laying down and smiling at the camera with SWHNYBN draped across his chest looking half-asleep

So!  There's my excuse for being gone the past couple weeks.  And a very cute little excuse she is, too.  As she settles in and my routine re-stabilizes, expect to start hearing from me again - I have Things To Say about Obama's Plan B fuckery, the bullying of a Pagan child by his teachers, and a potential "atheist license plate tax" in Georgia, among other things.  Hope everyone's holiday season (if you are celebrating anything this time of year, anyway) is going well thus far! 

PS: I am perfectly open to doing regular or semi-regular Doses of Cute, now that I have a subject, but I don't want to spam y'all with cat pictures if you're not interested.  Would you be interested?  Let me know in comments!