Little Lord Dustybutt

Life is so interesting with 4 pets and 2 people living in a small house. The kitten is now about 8 mos old and doing fine. He started out a little black ball of fluffy fur but as he has grown his true colors have appeared. Officially, he is named Midnight Smoke. But affectionately, he is called Little Lord Dustybutt. You can see why in the picture.

He reminds me of the poem about the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead - when she was good, she was very good, but when she was bad, she was horrid!

He probably has spring fever and needs to get out of the house or work up his courage and go down the basement steps and explore more indoors. So far he has only sat at the top and looked down the steps at his people and his mother when we have tried to encourage him to descend. Mamma cat has no problem with the basement. We leave lights on most of the time (energy efficient compact fluorescent) to encourage exploration and she explores there often (no more spiders, I wonder why?) but he has not taken us up on the offer yet. Instead, he waits untill we go to bed and then makes numerous noisy expeditions through the bedroom and across the bed and attempts to reach the top of every piece of furniture and door frame. Sister Beth says he reminds her of a dear 5-year-old relative we have.

The shingles have faded and are almost just a bad memory. I still have some nerve pain at times but nothing that even requires pain pills now. The rash is still visible on my arm and chest but I can no longer feel it. I read online that most people do not get a recurrence. Once is enough!

I am planning VBS crafts for this coming summer session. We are doing Jerusalem Marketplace from Group. This will be our 3rd one in this series and I expect it to be just as much fun as the other two. Crafts this year will probably include weaving, clay, scents and spices, and jewelry (of course) but nothing is final yet. I am thinking of having the children make a version of situpons to use on the hard floor during VBS and then take home with them as a reminder. One version I have read about uses old vinyl tableclothes for the outside and recycles grocery store plastic bags as the stuffing. I like recycle crafts. I am also thinking of using potholder looms or cardboard looms for the weaving craft and maybe setting up a larger weaving project everyone can work on to make a floor rug to be left with the VBS materials to be used in following years. Not sure about time constraints on this yet but I like the idea.

We are having a winter storm here today. So far there has been a layer of ice covering most surfaces, a wet slush that froze on contact, a little bit of rain, some snow, more freezing rain ...