OUR KITTY & A WEATHER REPORT

Summer Girl

One of the things we have been trying to do the past few weeks is get our outdoor kitty, Summer Girl, to be comfortable coming inside. She will never be a 100% indoor cat since she has lived out on our back porch for the past 7 years or so. But our indoor kitty of 16 years, Peeber (AKA Precious Baby), passed away last summer and we have so missed having a fur-baby in the house with us. We started inviting Summer Girl inside before Christmas, and little by little she has stayed in for longer periods of time. Here is a video I took of her last summer. She is such a sweetie!

I can never get a good video of her, she always gets up and moves or looks away or, as in this instance, butts me with her head. I did get a meow or two out of her but that usually isn't a problem because she is a talker! So we are now kept busy getting up and down to let her in or out. We didn't have this problem with our other cat because she was totally an indoor cat. She accidentally got outside a couple of times and she was scared to even move. But this one lets us know when she wants in...or out. And it is constant when we are sitting in our recliners watching TV. We are hoping she settles down after a while. 

Linda came up with the name "Summer" because this little black kitty, only a few months old, just showed up at our house in the summer of 2009, July to be exact. We watched her as she hid under one of our bushes. We could not just watch her starve, so we started feeding her. Actually, she and her little brother had both been eating the bread crumbs we were throwing out for the birds. Her brother was an absolutely gorgeous caramel-colored kitty and very friendly.,.too friendly for his own good because he kind of disappeared one day. She was very skittish at first, but with a lot of coaxing she finally came around and let us touch her. I guess the southerner in me had to come out because I started calling her "Summer Girl" (you know, kind of like "John Boy"), and I still call her that. Peeber was definitely a southern-belle cat, a little bit pampered and quiet. Summer is definitely a northwest cat, all brash and vocal. During the summertime, she is my garden buddy. Every time I go out to the garden, she follows me. She spends a lot of time out there hiding among the tomatoes and peppers, her favorite spot. So you will probably be seeing lots of pictures and videos of her when the weather gets nice.

WEATHER

This time of year there is not a lot happening so one of the main topics on everybody's mind is the weather. It seems like there has been a lot of weird weather all over the country. We have lots of weather here in Yakima, most of it extremely cold or extremely hot. The spring and fall seasons only last two to three weeks before spring turns into HOT summer, or fall turns into COLD winter. This took some getting used to, but I think we have adjusted. Right now we are having a warm spell, with the daily temperatures topping out around 33 degrees and the nighttime temperatures going down to only 22 degrees. This is way better than the below zero nighttime temperatures and mid-teen daytime temperatures that we had just a week or so ago. One particular weather phenomenon that we have seen several times since we moved here, but something I had never heard of before then, is called "frozen fog." This happens when it is foggy outside and the temperatures are low enough to cause the moisture in the atmosphere to freeze when it comes in contact with a solid object, coating that object. It makes the trees and bushes, and really any object, look absolutely beautiful. Below are a couple of pictures I took of the frozen fog.


We still have an inch or two of ice on top of the snow out in our yard, so it was rather precarious getting out there to take these pictures. But I wanted to show the frozen fog to everybody on the blog, therefore I risked life and limb to bring these to you :-).

We managed to take some walks around the park that is just a few blocks from our house. I took along my phone so I could get some pictures for the blog. Below are a couple of shots of the view on our walk. The hills surrounding Yakima are so lovely when covered in snow!


That wraps it up for this week, so be sure and come back next week to see what's happening up in these parts. Until then, stay warm!