More X-Mas photos

And here are a few more great pictures taken by Helga.

Hohoho!

Coffee and cake from Pix Patisserie (yum!),

fondue 

and presents under the tree!

Merry Christmas!

Helga & Wolfgang     Jule, Juri & Soso     Michaela & Jan

Christmas tree!

Yesterday we drove to the place where we picked our tree last year and found a really nice one. They are extremely cheap ($15!) and the tree looks awesome. While choosing the perfect tree we also ran into the owner's cat - oh my, what a fat cat (think ~3-4 Abbys!!!). Poor thing.

Anyways, we found a really nice looking tree. But upon arriving at home we discovered that it was unfortunately the home of several spiders and bugs and other small crawly things (Yikes!). Well, we left it in the garage over night, gave it several really good shakes and checked it over and over again. I hope we got rid of most of them!

It's now in our house, all shiny and decorated and ready for the big day!

Never again!

So we got one of those Febreze Scented Shades a few weeks ago and put it in the living room. It's a little flickering LED inside a quadratic mount and the scented shade fits right around it - it basically looks like a small candle. Looks nice and actually smelled good too. HOWEVER, after about a week or so I noticed bald spots on Abby's front legs. We first did not even think that the candle could be the reason - after all we had used Febreze before and the cats were fine with it.

The first thought was that Abby was over-grooming because something was stressing her. We added Feliway (feline pheromones) in the kitchen and bedroom, we moved the chair back to where it was (we've seen her sleep on it every once in a while and thought maybe she was upset that her sleeping spot had been removed), we separated George and Abby during play time as George is definitely the dominant player. Nothing helped, on the contrary, she got more bald spots. Then we added fiber to her food to see if it's a food issue - this gave her diarrhea. After almost two weeks we finally thought of that candle. And - drum roll - after tossing it she did not get any new bald spots and we can now see some fur growing back. Yay! And never again Scented Shades!