I still have my trail cam set up behind the coop. We get lots of neighborhood cat photos. How many can you spot in the photo below?
I find five. Mr Tom, the long-haired white is mostly obscuring Mama Cat, but you can see her tail. There is a gray tabby on the step, short-haired black female is on the right, and I suspect that the two reflective eyes seen through the trees in the background is Shadow. These are the usual suspects that hang out back there.
Thor, who is not quite eight months old, technically is still a kitten, but he does not look at all like a kitten.
Thor weighed in at 12.8 pounds, which is almost a pound heavier than Izzy. He gets plenty of exercise. His tail and legs are thick, especially compared to our other cats. Big boy.
I continue to periodically spray PB Blaster on the 1907 Singer 27 sewing machine I want to rebuild. I recently had a major breakthrough and was able to remove the rod for the pressure foot and the needle bar! These rods, on a clean machine, just slide out. I needed to pick away the crust around the holders, rotate them, pick away more build-up, then I was able to get them to slide upward! Very exciting day.
I have one more internal part with a rusted screw that I want to free up so I can clean it. The main drive through the machine looks OK, so I don’t plan on removing that. Then all the parts that have been soaking in PB Blaster get cleaned. I have decided that the decals are too far gone, and it would be better to not have flaking paint, so I need to decide how to proceed with refinishing the body of the machine as well.
Like most kittens, Thor like to lay in awkward places. Half over his bed, half on the arm of the chair, half on my pillow. He really likes that I moved my computer into the closet with a nice fuzzy rug on the floor. I took this picture because it looks like he has been skewered by three posts, when really one leg is between two.
I had fun making a new holiday card design. My intention was to imitate a linocut technique, but in Adobe Illustrator, so instead of building shapes, I erased bits from the shapes. Then I applied a gradient color to the left over parts to imitate hand painting a stamp, and printed on recycled card stock. To finish off the cards, I used a rounded corner punch, and hand-stamped the greeting inside.
Critters and Craft 