Our little Christmas tree

Since we're not going to be here for Christmas, we decided not to go to the trouble of getting a big pine tree for our house this year.  Instead, I dressed up our little Meyer lemon tree with the smallest ornaments we had and some singing lights that we got at a garage sale this summer.  Joe has fond memories of his trees singing to him back in Kansas, but I don't think that this configuration managed to tap into his nostalgia like I thought it would.  Probably the singing lights have to be strung around a sapling pine, freshly hewn from the surrounding lands of the family homestead.

Anyway, a very merry Christmas and happy holidays to all!

Potty training / The least fun scavenger hunt ever

First of all, I have a bit of an apology to make to dog owners.  I've always maintained that cats were better pets since they had little kitty instincts that made housetraining unnecessary.  Just give them a box of sand and they're good to go. So I'd never want to have some pet that would pee all over my house.

Well, we've found out that once you mess with those little kitty instincts, all doesn't go according to nature's plans.  And it turns out I do want some pet that keeps peeing all over the dang place.

But how could you be mad at a Moff like that?

We've been trying since probably September to train Moffa to use a human toilet with a kit that Joe got.  It starts off with a tray of litter on the toilet, then a tray of litter with a hole, then a hole with a ring of litter, then no litter at all.

So the good news: she's now on step 3 out of 4, with 4 being just a normal human toilet.  She still needs help knowing what to do most of the time, but she's done it completely on her own once or twice in the last few days.

Bless her heart, she really does want to make us happy.  It's just really hard for her.  Between that and the fleas, it's been a bit of a tough ride for Moffa this summer and fall.

A couple of days ago, while I was still in bed, Moffa just brazenly walked over and peed in our bedroom!  I was pretty shocked.  I knew from watching My Cat From Hell on Netflix that cats like to pee wherever they smell their own pee, so it's pretty important to clean up anywhere she might have gone when I didn't happen to be in the room.

Luckily, Jackson Galaxy taught me another useful trick:  CAT PEE GLOWS UNDER BLACKLIGHTS.

So of course now that we have our very own American DJ Black-24BLB light, I now get to go around the house searching out Moffa's "hidden treasures"...

X marks the spot!  Well, more like blob marks the spot.