Knit Rats, Hair Color, and Turtles

My aunt Rosie is a wonderful knitter. She does some amazing stuff, absolutely beautiful work. I would post photos here, but I'm not sure how she would feel about me putting her pic up, so just trust me when I tell you that she does beautiful, intricate work. She also does some filler stuff, like fun scarves and shrugs, knit dish cloths, AND...rats. She makes fuzzy knit tubes with eyes and tails and fills them with what she calls cat pot -- homegrown catnip.

She has sent two here for Cosmo. He loves them; he hugs them, and kicks his feet at them, rubs on them, and drools. Unfortunately, the dogs love them too, which is why I asked for a second rat for Cosmo. The dogs have completely emptied the first one, but I still find it in unexpected places around the house.

Here's a pic of the newest one, hardly touched by the dogs, and artfully arranged in the sunshine on the rug:

And here's a photo of the empty one, left on the bathroom rug, artfully arranged to scare the wits out of me in the middle of the night:

Hair...I've been coloring mine for 20 years. I truly started back then to add body to my hair, which is baby fine, and rather like having a head full of feathers. Because it is so fine, getting a perm caused more harm than good, so I began coloring. I got to really like coloring my hair because I could make changes to my look, and it was fun. No matter what color I do, however, as it fades out, it turns some shade of red or has red highlights. Considering the number of redheads on my mom's side of the family, that's not a surprise.

Now I color for fun and texture and because I'm about 30% gray. I like to color my hair, and have been playing with highlights, doing blond wisps around my face, and keeping the rest of it a light warm brown. I've had years before the highlights, however, of embracing the inner red, and had toyed with going back to it. Then I got a copy of More magazine, with an article about the new rules for hair color, and it stated that women over 40 shouldn't do red. SO...I went back to light auburn. That's why I'm reposting a close-up of the back of my head from yesterday.

Take that, More Magazine!

Here are two more pix of the turtle for all you identifiers. I don't know much about turtles, and I'm wondering if this is normal, this lifting of the plates on the back?

And then I did get a picture of the underside...kind of a deep orange with a pattern that looks like an oak leaf.

That's it for my random day!