Thursday we finally had our office installed in our house - it's custom desks and shelves and such things as would be required for two computer nerds.

The cats find this newest addition quite fantastic. This means there's lots more open space (desk tops) to sprawl and shove things on the floor with their paws (accidentally, of course. I would never be so bold as to accuse them of doing this deliberately).

The shelves, however, are the best part. As I'm sitting here typing this, there are at least 3 cats in shelves - Rosemary, Azrael, and Rebecca. They can get to the middle tier if they work at it - and there they perch, peering down at me like fuzzy vultures, or else just lounging with one paw dangling nonchalantly off the edge. Allegra has discovered that from the new position of the scratching tree, she can lurk in the top shelf and peer around the corner and actually see down the hall without the other cats seeing her. Overall, the new office has been roundly approved....and okay, so Richard and I are pretty happy about it too.

We'd been putting off unpacking most of the office things and our books (of which we have a LOT) in anticipation of the office - mainly because yours truly didn't want to have to repack them all when they came to install everything. So the last few evenings have been spent digging books out of boxes and figuring out where to put them. Poor Richard gave up and let me at most of it since I decided we needed to try to organize them somewhat by topic. All the science fiction/fantasy and horror are now in a huge shelf in our room; the hardbacks downstairs; the non-fiction in the office; the children's books and humor in the guest room. And amazingly enough, despite the fact that both of us together have several tons of books, not only did we find space to put them all, we've got empty shelves left! I'm not worried - I'm sure they'll fill up in no time, and we've got intentions of adding some paperback shelves to the office at some point. And as long as they stay empty, there's somewhere - other than directly in front of the computer monitor, or on the mouse pad - where the cats can sit.