crafts, cats, and Christmas presents

I worked on a couple ATC swaps over the last couple weeks, and had some leftover painted paper... this turned into backgrounds for a couple more cards featuring cancelled postage stamps. Below is one with a Gambel's quail postage stamp (that is now for sale in my Etsy shop); the other ones are on my Flickr page.

I also whipped up a few Thanksgiving cards the other night. They were pretty simple to make, using printed scrapbook paper, a couple stamps, and artificial fall leaves from the craft store. The hardest thing about them was keeping the leaves stuck to the card until the glue dried; I used E6000 adhesive, which is strong, but quite smelly! (I apologize in advance to anyone I sent this card to, if it still smells by the time you get it.)

On the cat front, Butters and Pandora are getting even more used to the house... we still shut them in the laundry room at night and while we're at work (to avoid disasters!), but other than that, they have the run of the place. Sedona has started to play with them a bit (till she gets a little too carried away), and they're starting to find some hanging-out places in the house, like in this pic- they're behind the TV, on the TV stand... hard to see them back there, unless you know they're there! (last night I thought Butters was lost, till Tom managed to find her behind the TV... of course, this was after I had opened every drawer, cupboard door, and even looked inside the piano!)

And now, to Christmas... it came early at our house! We decided not to buy each other presents this year, and get something we both have wanted for quite a while, instead. This is our combined Christmas present, a Celestron C8SE telescope. I'm not even going to attempt to describe the specifics of this thing (telescope language is still foreign to me!), but I do know that it has a "NextStar" computer system, which has 40,000 celestial objects catalogued. So, once you align the telescope and tell it where you are, all you have to do is push the button for a particular galaxy, star, etc. and the telescope goes to it automatically.

We spent a few hours outside on Friday night, starting to get familiar with it. It's pretty amazing, the things that are up in the sky, that you don't really ever think about... okay, I know that's sort of geeky, but it was really cool! I had my laptop outside too, so when we were looking at something thru the telescope, I also was looking it up on the internet... we did see a few galaxies, Mars, the moon (check out my Flickr page for a couple really amazing pics!) and are starting to get familiar with some of the constellations. When I was young, I loved reading about Greek and Roman mythology, which goes right along with the constellations, so that's also cool for me (also geeky, again). We're hoping to make it mobile, and take a few trips out into the desert with the sleeping bags, eventually...

so, that's what's been going on here; the rest of the afternoon I'm going to be watching the last Nascar race... I know Jimmy Johnson is probably going to win the Nextel Cup, but I have to watch it anyway. Tom is on his way to the airport, for a quick trip to St. Louis and Kansas City, so he'll miss it. (no loss, because neither of us really like either Jimmy Johnson or Jeff Gordon, who is the other potential Nextel cup winner.)