cat tree, embellished

With our previous oriental shorthairs, we'd never seen the need for one of those tacky scratched-up cat trees, but shortly after getting our most recent pair of kittens, we realized that our breeder wasn't kidding when she said, "These, you will find, are very vertical." They weren't just jumping up on our shoulders, they were jumping to the tops of doors, cabinets, you name it—including all the way to the ceiling in our kitchen! So we did some shopping and found a vertical cat tree for our intrepid explorers.

What you see behind the cat tree is a partial view of a whole wall of floor-to-ceiling bookcases that my husband made. About my gold-and-blue collage: the background is an Oscar de la Renta design from the cover of the new United States Postal Service philatelic magazine, in honor of a new series of de la Renta stamps; the foreground is a photo of a liquid crystal diode, exploded after being exposed to a strong electrical field.