I wanted to thank everyone who sent kind thoughts Fred's way in the last couple of days. He is feeling better, free of string, and back to his usual inquisitive, rambunctious, and cuddly self.

A little while ago I was cleaning up my desk and found my partially completed December Daily album from 2011. To have completely forgotten about it is pretty bad but when I realized it would soon be time to start setting up this year's album (in fact Ali has already posted about it) I got myself working on it again. My first step was to figure out how many pages still needed to be done (most of them), find any notes I still had from last year (so glad I take random notes) and print out the photos I wanted to include (doing this in batches).

I have a tendency to make things too complicated and intimidate myself when scrapbooking. Missing my original deadline of the end of October made me rethink what I was doing a bit. I'm letting the pages be simple and I'm prepping pages to work on as I have the time and energy. Even if I'm not up to doing the journalling or committing to glue for a page I can still put all the bits and pieces I think I might use into the page protector; when I'm read to work everything I need is ready too. I also set up a small box to hold my bits and pieces for adding to pages. It stops me from rummaging through everything I've got each time I want a bit of chip board or some letters for a title.

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I'd like to ask you guys to send some good thoughts to Fred this week. He ate some string on Monday afternoon and has been feeling sick since Tuesday morning. String in cats can be pretty serious, requiring surgery and causing all sorts of complications in their digestive track. We took him in to the vet on Tuesday night but at this point there is not much they can do. We're just trying our best to get him to eat (canned salmon is working the best this evening) and watching his behaviour. With luck he will pass the string by himself.

We have a pair of salt a pepper shakers snuggled up in our living room.