Random - 2010

Latest "potential" addition to the family, and I do emphasize "potential." Over the last couple of days, I kept hearing meowing, but could never pinpoint where it was coming from. Since both of my cats were inside or otherwise accounted for, I would look for a few minutes, quit hearing it, and give up, thinking I must be imagining it. Last night, I was hungry and didn't feel like fixing anything for dinner. (I'm a bad cook, anyway.) Went out to eat, dropped by the church for a minute and came home. This time I managed to find the source of the meows. She was high, high up in a tree. How she managed to climb that high I'll never know. After much prayer and coaxing from me, she managed to inch by inch and foot by foot get close enough for me to reach her. She was very hungry, is especially affectionate, and has the sense of adventure that only a kitten can possess. It's difficult to get a good picture because she keeps jumping, running, climbing the Christmas tree, etc. She appears to have been taken care of up until her treetop adventure, so I'm hoping I can find her rightful owner. Meanwhile, my other two cats aren't very happy about sharing "their" house with a new cohabitant.

There's a local saying- "Kudzu is King." From these pictures, I'm sure you can see why locals have adopted that phrase. Fighting kudzu is a continual process, and were it not for temperatures eventually dropping below freezing each year, it would be a battle we'd eventually lose. I recently met someone who said something about our "footnight" here. I asked them what "footnight" was, and they pointed to the kudzu and said where they came from everyone called it "foot-a-night" because it seemed to grow up to a foot a night. I concur. --- After taking Kristin shopping for a dress for a friend's wedding, Kristin, Kolton and I spent part of a Saturday driving around taking pictures of abandoned places. It seems we've always found abandoned things in smaller towns and rural areas, but now we're seeing abandoned buildings in heavily trafficked areas of larger cities in the area. (Some of these pictures were taken just down from busy mall areas on 4-6 lane highways and other heavily traveled roads.) Since traffic was quite heavy at times, we worked out a system where I would stop the car, Kristin would jump out, snap a few quick shots before any cars came up behind us, and then we'd take back off. Because of the position of the sun and because of our rush to snap the pictures, not all of the pictures came out as well as we had wished. Still, the main thing was to be able to get a few shots while still keeping ourselves safe, so I guess we did manage to take care of the most important thing- ourselves. :)