Few Days in Photos

Jon's Dad is evidently feeling lonely at the moment; he insisted that Jon, Emily and I eat a Chinese meal with him last night. Which would have been OK if it weren't for the fact that a) we had no choice in the matter and b) Jon's confidence and positivity following his recent course has yet again now been destroyed, largely by the atmosphere created by his father and direct put-down comments. So I wasn't all that enthusiastic, shall we say. But I'm good at acting.

Moving on, before I depress myself even futher, let's the change the subject. We've taken quite a few photos over the last two or three days, so here are some for posterity.

Lots of Romeo with the kitty babies. Romeo has now adopted the babies well and truly and is absolutely lovely with them, washing them head to tail whenever he gets the chance and playing with them. It's so funny to watch; he holds them down to wash them with a huge great big paw on their heads or tummies, and the force of his licks almost knocks them over, but they're purring loudly the whole time, it's so sweet. He does swipe them gently occasionally to remind them who's boss, but never with his claws out. I think they absolutely look up to him in awe and always come scampering up to him mewing when they see him. :-)))



Meanwhile, JuJu is still being rather snotty with the babies, but has at least mostly stopped hissing at them. So I don't have any pictures of her with Severus and Voldemort, but she did consent to this regal looking pose on Emily's bed:
Cassie-Cat is largely indifferent to the small black things, being a very large black thing herself. She declined to join in the photo shoot ;-)

In between running around after people and trying to catch up with business work, Emily and I have a brief early Mabon celebration yesterday. We read the Mabon, Son of Modron myths and talked about the symbolism of the festival, as well as getting to grips with the science behind the seasons and the equinoxes or whatever the plural of equinox is (!). Emily decorated the festival tree with apples, autumn leaves, owls and black and white flames of light and darkness in balance:

...and she decorated two little wooden figures in clothing of the God and Goddess - light and dark in balance for the God, with sequin fish scales and feathers to represent salmon and eagles/owls; autumn goodness cloak for the harvest Goddess. These two little figures are ones I bought recently, thinking they'd be a lot bigger than they turned out to be. However, my Dad has now made us some much larger ones, so we'll be using those in future, as Emily wants to make a new festival tradition of dressing wooden figures to be God/Goddess each time. Finally, we made five lovely catnip pillows for the cats, out of autumn leaf material, and Emily attached an initial to each one so we could see who they were for. Not wanting to leave our beloved Merlin out, we also spent some time out in the pouring rain sprinkling cat nip on his grave.

There was a lot more we wanted to do, but we didn't have much time before we had to start getting Grandad's Chinese meal ready. Yes, I know, I'm so negative. I'm trying not to be, but it's very hard not to be just now. You should see me when I don't bother trying to hide it; it's not a pretty sight.

And finally for today, this lovely photo of an orb over one of our vegetable patches late last night, taken by Jon who was out there in search of solace. There's something spiritual going on here underneath all the mess; we just have to cling onto it harder, I think, to stop it being swallowed up.