A Very Bad PurrFurMance Review

It's that time of year again for our staff's Annual PurrFurMance Review. This year's review included the bonus features of a verbal reprimand and the back of disrespect. We are very disappointed with our staff's purrfurmance this year. As you can see there are only 49 posts on our blog in 2009, and we admit it looks like Mommy was just phoning it in on a lot of them. Clearly, there is much room for improvement. On a scale of one to four paws, we give her one paw...(preferably on her face while she is trying to sleep). Despite the fact that Mommy has been a real slacker this year, she claims that there have been extenuating circumstances, and she promises to do better in the future. She will be finishing grad school in three weeks, and promises to spend much more time helping us blog after that. We have decided to keep her on as our assistant, but we will be keeping a very close eye on her. Clearly she needs much more snoopervision...we are sitting on her legs right now and are not going to let her up until she finishes this post to our satisfaction.

In other news, Ambrose received a package in the mail. It's a prize from The Casbah Kitten's Halloween Contest, and it was filled with all sorts of wonderful toys and snacks. Thank you to Jane and Alice and their Momma for the wonderful prize package. Here are some pictures of us playing with the amazing spider toy. The giant spider has fancy details like really cool little fangs, stitched on beady little eyes, and a red spot on its belly. Ambrose is also lying on a couple of the catnippy jelly beans they sent him. He may think he can have them all to himself if he lies on them, but those jellybeans are so irresistible that I'm determined to snatch one away for myself...and while I'm at it I'm going to go for the spider too.






























Thanks to the lovely and talented Zoolatry for the great PurrFurMance Review graphics.

Guess What My Costume Is for Halloween?

Update:
We will be taking a break from blogging until December 10th.

Tattletale Thursday

Presenting Exhibit A...






















...and his ginormous hiney



















On the day in question (yesterday) , Exhibit A and his ginormous sixteen pound hiney were loitering around the closed door to our basement...staring, whining, whimpering, grunting, sighing, meowing, and pawing at the doorknob trying to get Mommy to open the basement door so he could go cricket hunting. Mommy wouldn't open the door for him, because it makes her sad when he plays too rough with crickets and makes them go deaded. Since our back door is right beside our basement door, Mommy looked outside and noticed that one of the feral kitties she's been feeding was on the back deck waiting for a snack. Mommy took some food out to the little introoder and sat with him until he was finished. When she came back indoors, she noticed that something was very wrong. It was quiet indoors. Ambrose is always making a racket, and he was nowhere to be found. Mommy was frantic. She looked everywhere for him, but he could not be found. Mommy figured that he must have sneaked outdoors when she went outside to feed the feral kitty. Mommy has perfected some very impressive Ninja-like moves for getting out the door without letting us out, so she couldn't believe he was able to sneak out,..but that was the only explanation. Since it was getting dark, she hurried to go outdoors to search for Ambrose, but as she reached for the back door, she noticed something was amiss. The basement door was open a crack with the chain lock still latched. Since the switch for the back deck light is right outside the basement door, Mommy had opened the basement door a crack while leaving the chain lock latched and had reached through the two and a half inch crack to turn on the outdoor deck light without opening the basement door completely. Mommy usually shuts the door completely after turning on the light, but forgot this time. Ambrose used to be able to squeeze through that narrow crack in the door when he was a kitten...about ten pounds ago. Mommy knew there was no way Ambrose and his giant hiney could have fit through that crack now. But hoping for a miracle, she unlatched the chain lock to the basement door, and much to her surprise and relief, she saw Ambrose's sweet little face staring right back at her waiting to be let back in from the basement. We don't know how he did it without hurting himself, but Ambrose and his ginormous hiney actually squeezed through that tiny crack in the door with the chain lock latched. We are very happy our little Houdini is safe. As punishment for not shutting the basement door completely, Mommy is grounded. We will most likely give her the opportunity to shorten her sentence with good behavior such as giving us extra treats, scritches, and snuggles.

Ambrose's Halloween Flashback

Halloween will soon be here, so I need to start thinking about what my Halloween costume will be this year. I'm pretty sure I can do better than last year when my mom just stuck a pumpkin sticker on my forehead. Can you believe what I have to put up with?














I had lots of fun last Halloween. Here's a picture of me going spider hunting.





















And here's a picture of some spiders going Grrreta hunting.















* Decorative spiderwebs can be hazardous to kitties. The spider webs in Ambrose's picture were put away out of kitties' reach after the picture was taken.

P.S.
Be sure to check out The Casbah Kitten's Halloween Costume Contest celebrating Jane's birthday. Entry deadline is October 25th.

The Winners of Our Cat Toy Give-Away

The three winners of our Cat Toy Give-Away are:

Cory of Cory Cat Blog
Fui and Suey of Forever Foster
Tama-Chan and Sei-Chan of The Poupounette

Congratulations! Each winner wins $15 worth of toys from The Casbah Kitten Etsy Shop.

Winners, once you have decided which toy(s) you want, please use the "Email Grrreta" button in the sidebar of our blog to send us an email to tell us which toy(s) you would like, and the address where you would like them sent.

Thanks to everybuddy who participated!

We're Having a Cat Toy Give-Away

Mommy is very excited that she is almost finished with grad school. In celebration of that, and to celebrate that I can do this weird thing with my tongue, we are having a give-away! We love our cat toys from The Casbah Kitten's Etsy shop, and think every kitty should have some. So, we are giving away to one of our visitors the Casbah Kitten toy(s) of his or her choice. The winner will receive up to $15 worth of cat toys that he or she will select from all the toys available in the The Casbah Kitten Etsy shop. (See rules below.) The winner will be announced in our Monday, October 5th post.

The Casbah Kitten's fabulous cat toys are eco-friendly and filled with organic catnip grown by Jane and Alice and their momma. The toys are absolutely adorable with stitched-on details. They are little works of art. Pictured below (sorry about the fuzzy picture) are examples of some of the toys they sell, a Bumble Bee wand toy, Lady bugs (perfect for playing kitty hockey), a Jelly Bean (super soft and fun to carry around and drop in your food bowl), and a Fat Goldfish (with adorable puckery lips). They even donate a portion of the proceeds to animal charities. (Yay!)






















Rules:
Visitors with a Catster profile or a blog URL are eligible to enter (one entry per household). Enter by leaving a comment on this post, and include your Catster ID or blog URL. The winner will be selected by the random.org number generator. We will accept entries until 11:59 PM central time Sunday October 4, 2009. We will enter the number of comments received on this post into the random number generator, then we will start counting from the top comment until we reach the comment that corresponds to the winning number. The winner will be announced in our Monday October 5th post.

(If shipping costs exceed $15, or shipping restrictions or other conditions make it unfeasible to deliver this prize to the winner, an alternate prize of equivalent value will be awarded.)

We Are Boogified !

I don't know if any of you noticed, but for years we kitties at Casa de Grrreta have been boogie-impaired. We had no boogie. We were boogieless. Finally, Mommy realized that if she got us a Boogie Mat, it would save her from having to vacuum up the loose nip after our nip parties. So after years of living in a boogie-free zone, we have undergone boogification, and we are pleased to announce we are boogified!