Cat, bird, seat

Christmas in Ohio was a tad dreary, what with the weather, and the usual sad and nostalgic memories piling up all over the house like so much dust. But it was nice to relax with Mum, burn a few logs (and cancelled checks dating back to the 70s, which I found while cleaning out the attic) on the fire.
Mum's cat has the pretentious full name Valentino Provenzano. I forget his middle name. To me, he responds to "Schmootie" or any other epithet said in a falsetto. We think he's gay, since he prefers to cuddle up to men. He's a funny little creature who knows enough to chase after a tiny stuffed mouse when it's flung at him, but fails in the retrieval department.

He also likes to sniff and park himself right inside the piles of clean laundry as I fold it on a bed. And since he's mostly jet black, a few times, I nearly sat on him when he was sleeping on my mom's desk chair. He constantly craves a trip out on the porch, or thinks he wants to run outside whenever the front door is opened, then scurries back in after discovering how wet and cold it is outside. He also likes to snoop about in the attic, but since I hung some fox scent odorizers, which smell a bit musky, he gets a little freaked out. I bought them at Fur, Fin and Feathers, a mini-mall of hunting equipment, with camoflage everything, and up on the cathedral-lodge walls, dozens of mounted deer, moose and other animals, shot and stuffed. They even had a full-size bear above Aisle Three (the knives department).
The fox scent is used to keep out the squirrels, which once again made a makeshift nest up there behind the plastic tubs of childhood books and toys. One had died. That wasn't a fun experience, scraping the dried flat carcass of a squirrel off the attic floor (Sorry, no photo of that.)

Since Mum, as usual, shopped for food for more than the two of us, I made the medium-sized turkey without any hassle. I'll never understand the fuss made over cooking them. You just oil it, stuff it, baste it and voila! dinner for two, plus days of leftovers. Now I have weeks of gym-going to burn off the few pounds gained.
So, that's my last cutesy self-indulgent post of the year. No round-ups of media Top Tens. I'll leave that to other blogs, which do a better job.
Here's to a Happy New Year, in which the neocon criminals are once again ousted from power, or perhaps stuffed and mounted, and the troops are withdrawn from the miasma of Iraq.
One can hope.