Wow –it’s hard to believe a whole year has gone by and it’s National Hairball Awareness Day again. I’ve barely recovered from last year’s extravaganza and now here we go again, I’m my brushing the fur of my eight cats with a FURminator deShedding tool and collecting it to glue it onto a piece of cardboard shaped like a handlebar mustache to make light of a very serious problem – hairballs. That’s right, the folks at FURminator have come up with yet another fun way to spread awareness about what a hairball is and how we can help prevent our cats from getting them by asking us cat bloggers to take a picture of our cat(s) wearing a mustache made out of their own fur… This isn’t weird at all, right? Of course not, all of my friends are cat lovers or bloggers, so to us, this is all perfectly normal and just another day in the life in the cat blogosphere. Read more

When you need an idea for a blog post, I highly recommend you reupholster your dining room chairs. Sure, it requires planning, time, money, tools, and the ability to know how to recover furniture, but once you have all those bases covered and throw in eight curious cats, well, the post practically writes itself…

It started several weeks ago when I had finally decided to stop ignoring the fact that our dining room chairs were covered with permanent stains and were practically disintegrating from age and looked absolutely atrocious. Since we don’t actually eat in the dining room more than a couple times a year and the chairs are only about 5 years old, it remains a mystery why they are in such bad shape, but I vaguely do recall a time when I was using the sewing machine at the table and an adult beverage that I had next to me in a pretty bright pink color got knocked over by Zoey and Peanut who felt compelled at that time to chase one another via the table top and the liquid spilled into my pin cushion that was next to my sewing machine (a  family heirloom with a needlepoint design that was made by my late Aunt), the fabric I was sewing to make some throw pillows (that had to be thrown into the washing machine), and all over the beige chair I was sitting on.  Read more

I meet a lot of people when I attend blogging and writing conferences and I also have a circle of friends via social networking channels like Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter. Some of them actually know who I am, as in Deb Barnes, but the vast majority of them know me as a visual image they associate with “The Leopard Lady” or Zee and Zoey’s human. Not sure how THAT happened says the lady in cat ears, but this is called branding and because so many people think of me in those terms, I get a lot of fun emails and Facebook shares sent to me with stuff that instantly reminds people of me, the brand! Read more

I don’t know about you, but I find it impossible to look at Kizmet’s sweet and precious little face without my heart melting. Our darling boy who could never do wrong turned 8 months a few days ago and he is the most endearing and intelligent cat I have ever known. We don’t know his lineage, but he has the wise mind and soul of someone who has seen other lives and traveled to faraway places. Read more

Years ago, doing taxes was as simple as an EZ form, declaring my two boys as deductions and crossing my fingers I didn’t owe any money back to the government. Today things are a bit more complicated and Dan and I use the assistance of a CPA to help us out. We have used the same guy for several years and the routine is pretty basic – he comes to our house with his computer and we plug in all our information while sitting at the dining room table. It takes a couple of hours in total and after he leaves we don’t see him again for another year, which happened to be a couple days ago. Read more