I don’t seem to take pictures of our cats very much. Lee and I were out working on the front porch and the cats were keeping an eye on us. Since I had my camera handy I figured I would keep an eye on them instead.

Jack had been forcibly ejected from our bed a little bit earlier. So she is still feeling thoughts of hopefulness in these pictures about her chances of reentry of the house for some more snoozing. You can really notice her bum eye in these pictures. Her butt is growing to amazing proportions due to her biscuit addiction and her strict exercise routine of sleeping on our bed. It has been about six months now since she was abandoned on our property.

Jasper is feeling quite grumpy because Jack decided to pester him. Jasper will be 16 years old this year. We adopted him when he was 10 years old. Lee felt sorry for Jasper because he didn’t think anyone would adopt an old cat. Jasper has never forgotten that. In turn Jasper has an intense deep love that follows Lee around, much to Lee’s dismay when he is trying to accomplish something.

Our English Shepherd Aggie doesn’t have any sheep to herd, so she makes up for it by using Edgar as her own personal practice toy.

Here she starts out all innocent and full of love.

Then she acquires her target…

She starts to suggest that her target get a move on…

…or there will be repercussions.

The target’s ears shoot up in horror as he tries to declare he is not a sheep.

The target then tries to stampede…

…with little success.

Then the sweet little face comes back. The sheep have been put in their proper place.

It’s that time of year again. Edgar managed to grow his hair out and needed a trim. Only, due to an unfortunate series of events he managed to get the worst haircut of his life. He doesn’t know it thankfully. Here he is posing with Aggie before I slaughtered his hair.

I left his nice dog clippers outside when we had all the renovations going on and I never took them back inside. Then when I went to go get them there was rust on two of the blades and the clippers didn’t want to work. Lee got the clippers going again thankfully, but the blade I usually used on Edgar wouldn’t cut. So I poorly worked around that. Then my thinning shears went kaput and wouldn’t close due to some weird issues. The poor dude looks like one patchy wreak. Best not to have a full on body picture of him or you might embarrass him by your laughing. The front is bad enough.

Jack has decided to take her life into her own paws and start using the dogs for pillows. She is becoming obsessed with the dogs and circles around waiting for them to lay down. Then as soon as they are laying down she snuggles in. Sometimes she gives herself a bath and other times she decides to play with the dogs fur. For a one eyed cat she is becoming quite brave.

The weather here has been a bit wild. First it’s warm and sunny and then it turns cold. Add onto that we have had a lot of rain. Two days this week we have seen almost an inch a day. I think Fall can’t decide what it wants to do. Something about the weather this year has made a huge crop of mushrooms sprout up all over the property.

In the first picture the mushrooms are huge. They are a little smaller than a dinner plate. Then in the second picture a puff ball looking mushroom grew up next to the dinner sized plate ones.

The first picture here reminds me of the coloring in some snails. The second picture I thought was neat. One big parent mushroom and little baby mushrooms gathered all around.

When I look at this first picture I see a floating sting ray. Lee said he thought it looked like a jelly fish. The next picture looks like a sea shell to me. Like a Sand Dollar.

There were quite a few of these little yellow headed ones. My camera decided that it was going to pretend that it couldn’t take the color yellow. The second picture reminds me of a snail shell again.

I loved this little mushroom. It reminded me of summer and blowing dandelion seeds.

Of course I had Jack and Jasper following me around while I was trying to take pictures. Jack is getting much bigger. Her eye we think is also getting a little better. I feed her some Lysine mixed in with soft food. Lysine is supposed to help herpes infections and is what we used with Jasper and his herpes eyes.

Our holly tree is in full berry bloom. I like how many birds it attracts but I hate all the spiny leaves that it sheds. Too bad I couldn’t use it’s berries for something useful. I could make a berry jam that would cause extreme diarrhea but I suppose but that doesn’t sound fun. With the weather being so wet we haven’t got a good fall color in the leaves this fall. The rain and wind knocked them off early along with stunting the glorious color. Last year the leaves on the ground were awesome color. This year not so much…

I couldn’t help myself. Really, I tried to resist the urge for over a week. Edgar’s doggie mohawk was just begging for a punk color. I did restrain myself and didn’t do pink. He is very thankful for that.

I was bored, what else can I say… Edgar needed shaved due to pitch and mats he acquired in his fur during the house project. So I decided to give him a new hair do. I think his mohawk fits him as Edgar ‘thinks’ he is mister tough stuff.

We had a new stray show up a week ago. We were out by the chicken pen and Lee made mention that he thought he heard a cat meowing. I told him that I didn’t hear a cat. Then I walked over to look in the barn and sure enough there was this little black cat meowing it’s head off. After a little coaxing it came over and I was able to pick it up. The poor thing was all bones and was light as a feather. We weren’t staying in the house at that time so we put out food and water for it every day when we came over in the evenings.

The little black cat we are guessing is around 4 to 5 months old. It is also blind in one eye and a female. I decided to call her Jack after the pirate called One Eyed Jack of course. My sister complains that I call all my girl animals boy names. I’m just lousy at girl names though and can’t seem to help myself. Jack was at one time someone’s cat as she is beyond friendly. Stray cats just don’t get that way unless someone spends a lot of time handling them. I’m also at a loss on why someone would dump her since she is so sweet. I guess their unwanted loss is our unexpected gain. In just the week that she has been living in our barn she has put on a lot of weight. I plan on letting her be an inside/outside cat if she wishes. Next week I will bring her to the vet to see if she has feline leukemia along with getting her eye looked at.

I decided to hug Ruffle Bob the last two nights. I took her out of the chicken coop to chill with me. I’m just sure she was loving it and not freaked out of her little mind. Really! Lee says that I am just trying to relive my memories as a child when I (and my siblings) would swing on the swing set with our chickens or ride around on our bikes with them on the handle bars.

Here you can see the ruffles in Ruffle Bob a little better. It’s only on the back of her.

So after much petting and poor little Ruffle Bob trying to figure out what she did to deserve this I decided to put her back and get another chicken to hug. This one is the chicken that we think might be a boy but aren’t really sure. He looks really thrilled to be hugged also don’t you think?