Cats and other things

Well it looks like the last time I posted anything on this blog, Ziggy and Jupiter were still in separate rooms meowing at each other through the door. Now they are good friends:

 I didn't mention this in my last post about him, but Ziggy had this tendency to get overstimulated when he was petted. It was a pretty clear pattern -- if you petted him for too long or touched him suddenly on the back, he would turn around and bite (not breaking the skin though). He did this to me a couple of times when I first got him (usually when I forgot which cat I was petting or didn't pay attention to what his ears were doing), but he hasn't done that in weeks and he's been perfectly happy to be petted anywhere! Here's another picture of me and him:

I'm also very proud of Jupiter. He's been on a diet since October and lost three pounds! He is now at 11.6 pounds, which is still overweight (his target is 8-10lbs), but he is starting to look more like a normal cat and less like a fat cat. Here's a picture of him sitting at the dining room table. I don't let him climb on the table, so instead he sits on the chairs:

And this is a silly picture of Ziggy. I'm not sure there's really any explanation for this:

At the end of April, I had some surgery on my gums. They healed pretty quickly, but I ended up taking the whole week off of work because I had a reaction to the pain medication I was taking. It wasn't much fun, but I am ultimately happy that it was not the antibiotic I was reacting to! I spent the week watching TV and making origami stars. This is just a small fraction of them; I put them in an empty spice jar because I thought it would look cool. They don't actually fit through the shaker top.

The previous weekend, I went to the Cherry Blossom festival in San Francisco with a few of my friends. It was pretty much your standard street festival, although they had a giant inflatable Hello Kitty bouncy and people dressed up as anime characters. We spent most of our time wandering around Japan Town, which has some pretty interesting stores. I was surprised to find that one of them carried Moomin merchandise. There was also a really fantastic paper store that carried all sorts of lovely paper. It had a bunch of cool origami art in display cases. Apparently they do workshops and exhibits, but we weren't there at the appropriate time to see one. We took a total of two pictures. I took one of my friend because his parents had told him they wanted a picture, and then he took one of me under the same cherry tree. I tried to convince him to pose with the giant Hello Kitty, but he was distracted by the small children bouncing inside it.

Finally, here's a couple of pictures that I took for Gramma. She sent me this lovely cat tunnel, which the cats really like. I'd tried to get them one before, but for whatever reason the designers had made the supports as separate rings, so it didn't stand up by itself. Then Gramma sent me this one, which pops up into a tube:

Ziggy really likes to hide inside the tunnel and jump out at Jupiter when he walks by:

Anyway, that's all the news from California. Hope you're all doing well!