This orange cat has been coming to the door for the past few weeks and getting our kitties all worked up. Until today, he would run off when I opened the door and tried to talk to him. When I opened the door this time he ran down onto the deck and stopped. I kneeled down and talked to him, and he got close enough to sniff my hand, but kept me at arm's length. When I got back outside with my camera, he was getting ready to head down the road, but then he turned around when I called him, and was very good about posing for me. In the very low light of dusk, my shutter speed was down to 1/6 of a second on some of the shots, so he's a little soft round the edges. Since he looks skinny, and keeps coming to the door, I put out some food for him and named him l'orange.

Fragrant Apricot

Cuts you like a knife

Altisimo

Fragrant Memory

A pigeon is not happy that we are tearing up the roof and she was letting us know what she thought of it.

While removing old vents from the roof in preparation for having a new roof put on the office, the workers cut into a conduit running under the roof deck, and cut a wire that supplied power to the front of the office. The contractor got his electrician out, and he determined we would have to cut the power to the downstairs portion of the office to run new wires to the breaker box. Since I was able to run power to the front of the office using a large extension cord from the dedicated circuit for the copier, we scheduled the wire repair for Friday. What everyone thought would be a fairly straight forward job of putting in a junction box under the roof deck and running new wires to the junction box beside the breaker box, turned into a major ordeal that took three days to complete. On top of that, our normally dry, sunny weather turned to rain, so between having to open the roof up for the electrician to install the junction box and attempt to run new wires, the places that usually leak (the reason for the new roof), and some of the areas where they had removed vents and put temporary patches also leaked, resulting in a lot of water inside the office.  Jim and I spent Sunday helping the electrician with the last wire pulls and cleaning up water from the various leaks. We then helped him trace the neutral wires and map the circuits after all the splicing was done. What we thought would be a simple job that would be finished by noon on Friday, was finally completed with all the power restored at 7:00 pm Sunday.

New junction box and "Tuff-Seal" dam around the hole to hold back the deluge.

Junction box that feeds the breaker box. The 1 inch conduit at the top of the box proved to be too tight to pull all the new wires through. The electrician ended up getting half the wires through the old conduit and then installed new conduit for the other half of the wires.

Water running into the office from the opening in the roof.

After we got the water vacuumed up off the floor in the library, it was still a mess of wires, ladders, tools, connectors and conduit from the table all the way out the back door into the alley behind the office.

A mess of wires.

The electrician splicing wires in the new conduit he had to install after several failed attempts to pull all the wire through the original conduit.

Diné

Spunk trying to play with Guildenstern

AAAaaahhhh!

Chomp!

Rosencrantz

Spunk

Lola getting ready to swat at Spunk

Najar

Najar pestering Spunk

I discovered our first iris and Austrian Copper had bloomed when I got home last night. Our wisteria got zapped by the hard frost last week.

A 25,000 gallon containment tank was installed in the hole behind our office as the cistern to collect runoff to water the roof garden when the building is complete.

Yes! Spunk you're cute!

Najar working on some abstract choreography

"If you want to live much longer, Paparazzo, get that stinking camera out of my face!"

Spunk thinks Najar is a little lax on her kitty hygiene

The lick fest continues to get Najar cleaned up

"Okay! Enough already!"

Spunk is one cool cat!

Betty Boop is our second rose to bloom this year. A parrot tulip getting ready to bloom looks like it could be in the "Little Shop of Horrors", and one of our white tulips with red strips had a nice soft effect backlit through a slit in the fence.

Laurie got a rather anxious looking audience while she was cleaning the kitties' food dishes. The trinity of terror temporarily halted their destructive behavior in full anticipation of getting food in those dishes.

Spunk making the most of a lazy afternoon.

Spunk left his tail in the middle of the floor to play hide and seek in a box.