Today’s Philip
Category: Philip
Regal
Shadows
Philip is suddenly obsessed with shadows, he has been chasing them all over the house for about a week now. His favorite is the shadow I make as I’m leaving my office. He can jump about four feet in the air to try to get my wiggling shadow fingers! It’s so funny how pets can obsess about things just like people do, ha.
Decorations
On the Saturday after Thanksgiving I decided to put up the Christmas decorations, so I brought the black and white things down from upstairs and had The Hubs bring down the tree.
Philip was very interested to assist with the decorating, so he inspected the tree:
And got an even closer look and a good sniff:
Then he checked out the box to make sure all the important things had been removed:
The Girl wasn’t feeling well so she supervised from the couch. While we were decorating, we put on a video of a Christmas scene that played Christmas music:
Here are the finished results — the tree:
Here is the front entry:
And the living room:
Philip and I wish everyone a festive and peaceful Christmas and holiday season filled with love and joy!
Hike – Silver Falls State Park
Kangaroo chose to hike at Silver Falls State Park yesterday because the teacher she works with was planning to do the Silver Falls Trail Run 7 Miler and she wanted to cheer her on. The Silver Falls Trail Runs include a 5K, the 7 Miler, a half-marathon, a marathon, and a 50K, in the main park and the backcountry of the park (where there are cougars and bears 😮). The longer races are qualifiers for other races like the Boston Marathon! The trail we took follows Silver Creek and is very scenic. It is called the Trail of Ten Falls, but we didn’t see all of them. We saw South Falls, Lower South Falls, Drake Falls, Middle North Falls, and Winter Falls on this day.
I present here the first video I have ever edited! It shows us going behind South Falls and Lower South Falls, and a video of Winter Falls.
Here are some photos of our hike. We just got drizzled on a couple of times (we needed our rain jackets more going under the waterfalls) and the rain didn’t really kick in until right after we got into the car to leave. We are blessed that that is the norm for most of our hikes in rainy weather!
We stopped in the park gift shop on our way back but I didn’t get a photo of it. I should have, it is a cute log building with lots of fun stuff to buy! The log buildings in the park were built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. For more info on the buildings and the park, go here. The store had a whole section of mushroom-related items, a t-shirt, a mushroom identifier card, and books, and other things. They have some cute stuffed birds that make authentic bird sounds. I picked some up and we heard two different kinds of woodpecker sounds and another bird I don’t remember the name of. They also have lots of stickers and other souvenirs.
On our way home we happened to see a sign for the Willamette Valley Pie Company and I suggested we drive over and try to find it. We had never been there and I had heard they had a nice store and, of course, pies! The Boy’s choir in high school sold Willamette Valley Pie Co. pies for their fundraisers for a couple of years and I knew that the pies were delicious. The store featured a lot of kitchen things and Kangaroo bought some towels and a spoon rest for the new travel trailer she and her Hubs just got. I keep telling her she has to think of a theme for the trailer so I can buy her things for it! Anyway, we each bought a cobbler to take home, I got marionberry and Kangaroo got peach.
I baked my cobbler when I got home and ate my serving, and as expected it was super good. As I was eating Philip was very interested, and when I was finished he came and licked the plate. I bet you didn’t know kitties liked berries! He is unusual in that he enjoys sweet foods sometimes.
The tape is Leukotape, I use it to tape up my feet before hiking to avoid hotspots.
We had missed most of the fall color at Silver Falls, but there were a few pretty leaves left. It was a good day and we had a fun hike!
Just keep walking!
Ninja
The Hubs and His Cat Baby
The Bench, Phase 2
Don’t forget to read the first part of the bench saga!
Here are some before photos of the bench again:
Today I finally got out my sander and primer and started on the bench. I sanded it all over with my little Mouse sander, wiped it down, and then started priming.
I used this primer that I got at Lowe’s awhile back. It didn’t work great for the kitchen chairs, but I found it worked just fine for the bench. It is interior primer, but like I said in the last post the bench is going to be under the porch roof, and any “rustic-ness” will be fine anyway. I beg to differ with their statement “Hides previous color in one coat”, though, although it may be that the statement just applies to walls and not wood furniture.
While waiting for the primer to dry, I ate some of one of my favorite Fall snacks, Mellocreme pumpkins!
At this point I still wasn’t sure what color I wanted to paint the bench. I had originally planned to paint it a sort of off-white to go with the other things on the porch, but after priming it and seeing how many flaws showed up once it was white, I thought that might not be such a great idea. Then I texted Marnie and she said use brown and white, and I thought, “I’ll paint it brown and dry-brush white over the brown!”
The primer dried quickly because the bench was sitting in the sun, so I went back out and got my container of Sherwin-Williams Urbane Bronze in their sample formula. I bought a sample of Urbane Bronze and a sample of Priscilla, a nice pink, the other week. They are both colors I’m considering painting our house with, if we ever get to paint our house. I figured I’d buy samples and paint them somewhere on the house so I can see which one I think would look better. Right now I’m leaning toward the Urbane Bronze, as mentioned in my last bench post. It’s a grayish brown or a brownish gray. So modern!
I painted the bench all over in Urbane Bronze and let it dry for a couple of hours. Then the Hubs came in and said he had welded a triangle on my shepherd’s hook that I got at the estate sale a couple of weeks ago. The triangle gives you something to pound on to get the hook into the ground.
When I found it at the sale, it had this bird feeder on it. The feeder contains a suet block, a chunk of suet usually with seeds and other things for birds to eat. I had gotten 3 nice new suet blocks at the same estate sale, and The Hubs chose this one to put in the feeder today.
Hopefully the birds will discover it soon even if it is in the sun a bit!
Another thing I did while I was waiting for the paint to dry was this:
Philip came and snuggled up on my lap for a little while. I couldn’t resist showing you this adorable photo of him!
So here’s what the bench looks like with one coat of Urbane Bronze.
Because the paint is just a sample formula, it doesn’t cover extremely well. Also, you can see some start/stop brush marks. Note how I put the feet up on boxes so I can paint the lowest parts of the feet without getting the brush in all the icky stuff that fell off the bench when I sanded and cleaned it. I used the same boxes for the kitchen chairs when I painted them. I mean, how often do you find four boxes that are the same size to use for this application? I’ll keep them as long as they hold up! I went back and painted the back leg and went over some of the brush strokes and it was much improved.
I was planning to do the dry brushing in white today once the paint dried, but now it’s like 90 degrees out and I do have work-work to do, so I’m waiting until tomorrow morning to do that next step. Progress, though! Stay tuned for the next porch bench post!
Adventures in Eating
When I was at Copper Creek Mercantile the other day buying cat food, Jen told me that they had something new. When she showed it to me I knew I had to get a can for Philip to try.
Here is what the food looks like:
Now, I don’t know if Philip’s mama kitty ever brought him a mouse to eat when they were still living outside, but Philip didn’t want this. He would barely even get near it. He jumped down and went away until I got out some of his regular, non-pâté food. He likes his food to have chunks, like real chicken or fish, and he has never been a fan of the pâté style. There really isn’t any way of knowing whether he rejected it because of the mouse, other ingredients, or the style of the food, but Philip says no, thank you.
every day's just like starting over 