Isabel has a new wubby, which she sleeps with every night, without fail. It is an off-white cable knit cashmere sweater, that was a favorite of mine until i spilled something down the front of it, and failed miserably in my attempt at removing the stain.  I learned a valuable lesson that i will not repeat – that bleach and white wool do not get along.  My attempt at spot treating the stain with a small amount of bleach only made the situation worse, as I later found out that white wool effectively burns and turns ORANGE when bleached.  Not quite ready to toss out an expensive and otherwise loved cashmere sweater, I left it lying around, contemplating whether it could be reborn as a throw pillow or something else. But Isabel soon claimed it as her own.

The old cashmere sweater is now a permanent fixture at the foot of our bed, and every night you can watch the same ritual being perfomed – Kneading the sweater, with eyes closed or sometime partially opened, her eyeballs rolling back in her head, and purring at full volume.  Sometimes she stretches herself out along a single arm of the sweater.  Sometimes she circles a few times and plants herself in the center, with the arms encircling. A few times we’ve offered to open the body of the sweater, and she climbs inside, and sticks her head outside the neck hole, as if she were wearing it.  All in all, its pretty cute. There will be no getting rid of this sweater anytime soon.

This was the scene from our living room last night. Momma Raccoon and a few of her new babies literally dropped in to say hello. Unfortunately one of her little ones was a bit too quick in hopping down off the wall surrounding our backyard before realizing he couldn’t make it back up!

Poor mom spent a while going up and down, picking up baby in her mouth, dropping her, trying to hoist him up on to the wall. All the while, the other babies remained hidden in the bushes – but making a whole lot of noise.

This little one is probably only 4-6 weeks old.

We learned a lot about various raccoon noises on the internet, because before these two even became visible, we could hear them. Raccoons make the strangest noise! I thought they were birds at first. Ch-ch-check it out.

I had been starting to wonder what the funny white growths were on our little ball cacti. Well, we found out this weekend!

This cacti is only about 2 inches in diameter – The flower is as big as it is! It only opens up for a few hours and then completely closes in a white fuzzy coccoon. We have an even smaller ball cacti that has two of these growths on it, so i cant wait to see what it looks like in a few days.

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After spending the majority of the past two weekends underwater, and a few dramatic moments, Josh and I are now certified PADI Open Water Divers! We did our certification with EcoDiveCenter in Culver City. Our instructor, Phillipe, has been awesome. He’s a great teacher, and a really cool guy. He’s really into underwater photography too, so we were lucky enough to come away with some souvenir photos he took of us during the class.

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We enjoyed the class so much that now, we are already enrolled in the Advanced Open Water Diver course – our first night dive is in a few days. Scary!

holy cow! who knew it would be so easy to create my own blog! I knew DreamHost was great (of course, i’m somehwat partial bc they are my friends) but really – one click, two clicks, and presto, chango – a blog of my own! I also installed their photo gallery goodie and plan to play around with it some

Now i just need to find something interesting to blog about…