In early December 2011, I bought a digital SLR.

In mid December 2011, I bought a cat.

You can see where this is going.

Styx is a Sphynx, one of the hairless breeds. (Wow! Just like Dr. Evil’s cat! I have never heard that before! You are so clever!) Mel already had a sphynx, Twigs, and he pretty much sold me on Sphynxes being the best cats ever. Though I think Styx might have more of a Devon Rex personality and body shape, based on Mel’s cat breed book.

I’ve accumulated a mountain of cat photos, but only a few of them have seen the light of day. Let’s fix that! And please do pardon my shoddy attempts at composition and framing and white-balance and post-processing and otherwise trying to take photography more seriously than Instagram.

Look at this sweet guy Mel got custom-made for my birthday. There’s context here, but it’s big and complicated, so let’s just say it’s a life-size stained-glass Chandelure and is totally fuckin rad. (That’s an official life-size Eevee, for scale.)

Having a bit of trouble finding a place to keep a three-foot-tall plush, though. He’s got a hook near the top of his flame, but hanging him from the ceiling doesn’t really help since he hangs down to chest level.

While I’m at it, my collection expanded considerably after our two-week vacation in Japan, and I finally got around to adding a new shelf to hold them all. So, here’s what my room looks like now…

I’m not too proud to admit that I might have a problem: where can I possibly fit more shelves?

So someone hit my car last week.

It was parked on the curb, right in front of my house. (We have four cars and a packed garage, so.) I heard a super loud smack, but thought someone had dropped a large appliance on the sidewalk until Mel appeared in my doorway with someone hit your car.

Outside I scurried in pajamas and slippers (working from home is awesome) and I beheld the scene you see inset. The driver was very apologetic, and luckily unharmed. She’d been fiddling with something on her dashboard and wasn’t even looking at the road, so she hit my car at full speed. The photo is framed as it is because my car had been parked with its rear wheel on that grate, and with the parking brake on. That’s how far she knocked it. (Speed limit on this street is 25, by the way.)

I felt kinda bad for her, but at the same time, that this even happened is terrifying. I don’t know if a human being would have survived the same impact. She said she’s “normally such a safe driver”—I guess she’s only a dangerous driver sometimes, then, and it turns out those are the times when you hit things.

Called 911; couple police cars came to direct traffic around her and file an accident report, and a flatbed tow truck took her car off. I had to leave my car “parked” in front of a fire hydrant overnight, because the rear axle was bent so much that it doesn’t move at all.

My car was towed to a local shop the day after; they called me back earlier this week with an estimate around $7400. The driver’s insurance is paying for absolutely everything without question, though, so I shouldn’t be out a dime over this. I have a rental in the meantime.

This is actually the second time this has happened; early this year I was street-parked on the other side of the street, and I awoke to find a conspicuous dent in the driver’s side door. And when I say “dent”, I mean it spanned the bottom of the door up to the window; looked like a shopping cart had hit it at an angle while going 40. I’d only slept for a few hours the night before, and Mel had been awake through the night, but neither of us heard or saw anything. Don’t know what happened or who did it. I thought it would be a simple fix, but the shop had to replace the entire door, I had to pay a few hundred deductible, and my insurance went up. Super.

I’ve never hit anything, never gotten a ticket, never even been pulled over. I live in a fairly sleepy town, not on a major road. And in two years my car has been hit twice, while parked at home. I’m just gonna start parking on the lawn.

Below are some photos of my poor darling car. Consider this a test of this fancybox plugin gallery plugin.