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Oliver is our brand new gray and white tiger kitten. We brought him home on Saturday. We had been looking for a playmate for Finnegan for a while, but it had to be the perfect little gray kitten. I hope we found him! He's spent the past two days climbing our pants and crying when we put him in the bathroom to go to sleep. (We're not being cruel– he has his food and water and bed in there, and we have to keep him separate from Finn for a week or so.) Still, he is the cutest little thing you ever saw, and he jumps and pounces on everything. Kittens are so fun; they need to stay small longer.

My poor little old computer is a bit sad these days, and has even been giving me the dreaded BSOD on occasion. Twice when I tried to restart it it tried to tell me there was a disk in the disk drive, even though there wasn't. Yesterday, however, it worked fine. Depending on whether I can keep it working or not you may not see many entries from me for a while.

It's fall, well and truly. R and I went on a picnic last weekend, and the trees and tundra were all beautiful shades of red and orange and yellow. We drove out along the Chatanika toward Cicle and Circle Hot Springs for maybe 30 or 40 miles. The views out there are nice. The buildings, however, are incredibly creepy. We stopped at an abandoned ski area and were too chicken to even get out of the car– it was that creepy. R had her bear spray, but I still think that was a good choice.

Speaking of fall, our yard has many, many more trees than are really necessary for a property this small. Consequently, the yard and driveway are covered, completely, with a 3 inch carpet of leaves. We'd rake, but it's been raining every day for the past week. Our neighbors have an interesting solution– mow the lawn and then empty the bag of cuttings (and leaves) into trash bags. They did it with their riding mower and filled 3 big bags after only mowing a very small area, but it seemed to work. R said she'd try it if it's nice out and there's nobody to watch her. It's worth a try, anyway.

In case you haven't visited the link, I revisiting the 100 words challenge yet again for 2005. I've done it for the month of September for the past 3 years. I don't really know what the appeal is, but it's tradition now– and isn't that how most traditions begin?

Polychrome Overlook, Denali National Park. (More photos here.)

My mom came and went, and for the most part her visit was quite nice. I'm sure you'll understand what I mean if I say it was just…long…enough.

Denali was incredible. We drove down on a Friday morning, and spent all day inside the park. We took one of the park shuttle buses into the park for about 4 hours, and then back out. We saw amazing views and all sorts of wildlife. There were moose (even a young male with his antlers in velvet and bleeding), caribou, bears (a mom and 2 cubs), ptarmigan, a marmot, Dall sheep… Much better wildlife sightings than I had when I was in the park 3 years ago. We didn't see Mt. McKinley while we were there, but that's not unusual.

We took my mom to the other Fairbanks hot spots, too, what there are of them. We went out to the Tanana overlook on Chena Pump Road, went by Creamers Field and saw the geese migrating, and saw all of the beautiful flowers at the Georgeson Botanical Gardens. We also went up and saw the pipeline up in Fox.

I took my mom to school with me for two days (she wanted to come, really,) and had her help with reading testing. She also helped put up posters and bulletin boards in our room (my desk is in the reading room) to make it look less bare. In between that she laminated things and made copies. I swear, she gets more done in one day than I do in a week.

So, that's my mom's trip in a nutshell. She waited two years to come up here, but at least she got to see a fair amount of stuff.