KITTENS!!!

Interrupting your Canadian trip reading experience, we announce the return of cats to our humble abode!  We adopted from the Nine Lives Foundation, our local no-kill shelter.

Here's Iain with Freya on Friday at 9 lives when we'd picked them out.

 And here's Ria chatting with Freya's sister, Oreo, also on Friday.

We couldn't bring them home right away, as they needed to get spayed and their final check-up....but we got a call today (Sunday!) that they were ready to pick up!  So here they are piled on William's lap, Freya and Oreo, our new kitties!  (Their coloring isn't quite that dark in person.)

Their estimated age is about 14 weeks old, just over 3 months.

Yay!  Our house is a proper home again!

We're home! We were gone?

Hi!  We're back from 2 weeks and a bit in Canada....we had a lovely time.  I'm going to try to actually post some pictures from this trip -- not that you have anything from LAST year's trip yet! -- here we go!

First major activity - Niagra Falls.

The falls on the left is the "American" falls - the "horseshoe falls" on the right is the "Canadian" falls.

We took one of the boat trips - We from the Canadian side got red garbage-bag rain coats.  The American boat folk were in blue.  The people doing the walk to the falls on the US side were in yellow.  Not sure, but we think the folks doing the walk on the Canadian side might have been yellow as well.  We looked like packs of marauding gnomes -- Here's the red team/gang from our boat:

And William kindly models the red gnomish fashion:

The gnome experience was funny enough as it was - but then we hit the crazed water from the falls.  The boat tour has been run by the "Maid of the Mist" tour boat for years (though in recent years the Canadian boat has been switched to Hornblower).  Once we felt the "mist", we settled on "Screaming Harpie of the Mist" as a more appropriate description of the experience. ;-).  It was fun!