I cried the day I took the tree down (and other random things)

Well, I changed the background on our blog. It was a winter evening scene with a pine tree decked out in beautiful Christmas lights. When I took that background off to put up this one, it sort of felt like taking down a Christmas tree and Christmas decorations. Then I recalled the title of a song called "I Cried the Day I Took the Tree Down". I don't profess to be a fan of this song. In fact, quite the opposite, but I had to chuckle as I copied and pasted the html for this background into the layout page.

On another random note, I vowed that I would never be one of those people who talked about their pet like it was their child. Nor did I ever think I would purchase a Halloween costume or other attire for my pet. Now, as you are about to see, not only have I done the aforementioned things, I'm posting pictures. Here are some pictures of Hugo: Asleep in the Olympic Dive Position, in his necktie and collar, and in his purple wig from Halloween. I even tried my hand at a little Photoshop to crop the pictures and blend some backgrounds-it's a very good thing that there's no option to zoom in because my lack of expertise would be readily apparent to all.

You may notice that he doesn't look happy in the wig pictures and one of the tie pictures, and rightly so! I guess that we justify this by the fact that we feed him and clean up his messes-and he makes many. His worst messes come from the fact that he likes to tip over cups of water, if left out, so that he can drink the water once it has spilled. If the water is high enough in the cup, he just drinks out of it. He also likes to scratch the tops of our books, so we have set out strips of duct tape, sticky side up, so that when he walks on the books to scratch them, he gets the tape stuck to his paws. It has worked quite well and he has learned to stay off the books. He's a good cat and really soft (very important) and we figure that if he were a person, he'd be an older and distinguished British gentleman. OK, enough about Hugo, whom we don't treat like our child, buy crazy things for, or post pictures of on our blog.

On the pictures of Hugo in the collar and tie, he's sitting on one of his favorite things-plastic bags. We were cleaning our room and found the tie, hence all the stuff on the floor around him.

Here's the wig, and he's not happy! Jon had to hold him because he doesn't hold still for a second when he's wearing his wig. And yes, it's a girl cat's wig. We just couldn't resist purple braids, even though Hugo's a boy.

Hmm. Nice bangs.


This is one of his favorite positions to sleep in. It looks like he's about to come out of his tuck after having completed some spectacular dive off the highest diving board. Maybe we can convince him to join the Olympic diving team. Maybe not.