Rosie

Bold tiger. Sex symbol. Cat stud. When it came to kitty modeling, Tabs dominated. He pretty much invented the field of feline supermodelry.

I mean that posture, those angles, that uncanny ability to strike a pose anywhere.

Bam!

Look at that.

But we all know that wasn’t all. Tabs was also a business genius. He did his own books, even created his own business plan. I was his personal assistant, but he made all the big decisions.

Rosie

Rosie definitely has the smarts to run the company. She’s been a great CFO of Tabs the Cat Industries, LLC since she took over. She’s actually increased profits every quarter so far. 😊

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

Are you excited about tomorrow’s solar eclipse? Boy, I know someone who would have been. Tabs would have been fired up! He went all out for the one in 2017, made himself a sunflower cat collar, got a bunch of eclipse sunglasses and meowed about it with anyone who’d listen.

He thought it was the coolest thing ever.

Rosie is pretty excited about the one tomorrow, but where we live here in California, it’s only going to be a partial eclipse of about 35%.

That isn’t stopping Rosie, though. She’s already got her solar sunglasses ready to go.

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

Hello, friend. How’s it hopping? Hope you’re having a hoppy Easter. 🐰

Today I couldn’t help but think back to all the fun Easters we had with Tabs. That cat made everything feel like an event. Part of it was his personality. He was a boy cat, had that confident swagger. He could be calm, even around a bunch of kids, cars and other loud noises. He’d just casually lick his paw, slow blink, roll over and flash his tum. Little things didn’t phase him.

He also loved attention, which he got a lot of also because of this blog and where I was in life. We worked on the blog together. He was both my employer (hehe!) and my creative muse. For many, many years I worked hours and hours every day blogging, and Tabs was right there for it all. He loved every photo shoot, or at least he seemed to, even when I was bossing him around. “Come here, Tabs! OK, picture time. There you go. Look at me, look at the camera! Good boy!” And I’d be snapping away with my camera. He’d just meow, saunter over and flash his gorgeous tum again.

On holidays like Easter, I’d dress him up in, yes, a custom-made felt cat collar or other flashy outfit, and he’d go along with it for a photo shoot. It always took lots of pictures to get a good one, as is generally always the case for blogging or social media. The pics look good most of the time, but you know how it is. It probably took 12 shots to get one perfect one. That’s how it is.

But, I kid you not, every time I’d take down his costume box / wardrobe from the closet, Tabs would come running from wherever he was in the house. I’d hear a thud from somewhere upstairs (him jumping down from a counter or the bed to the floor), and then doomp, doomp, doomp from his paws on the floor and down the stairs. He knew it meant we were 1) going outside for a walk and 2) going to be spending time together. Two things he loved.

The personality we conveyed on the blog was his and mine. Sure, I added something to the mix. I mean, cats normally don’t maintain a Spring to-do list. 🙂 But I don’t think it was far from the truth either.

To me and our family, Tabs was larger than life. He was a celebrity to us, and he gave as good as he got. He loved the attention. He may not have been “posing for the camera,” per se, but he was posing for me.

Connor still remembers him and talks about him when she sees his pics. She knows he was her first animal friend, and I like that they have so many pictures together because of the blog. Hundreds if not thousands of pictures from the four years they had together before Tabs passed.

Rosie is our cat now and she’s our special feline family member, but I do miss the theatricality of life with Tabs. He was the perfect cat at the perfect time in my life, and I’ll always cherish it.

Thank you, buddy. Happy Easter, Tabs. Love and miss you always.

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

Rosie’s been thinking… She always works so hard. It seems like there’s just so much to do. Between managing the company and keeping up with her experiments, there’s never enough time.

Life is short, though. This weekend she decided to pull back a bit and treat herself to some meow time.

Yup, it wasn’t easy for her. She felt kinda guilty not being productive at first, but then she got into it. 🤗

She started by watching three glorious hours of her new favorite show, Girls5Eva on Netflix.

After that, a nice hike outside and some bird watching…

Then, of course, tanning…

Rock climbing…

And an at-home spa treatment.

Ah…

Sometimes you gotta treat yourself. 😊

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

There are five things Rosie wants.

Well, I mean, there are more than five, but here are five things she ALWAYS wants. 😹

First, she wants treats every morning for breakfast, and they have to be crunchies, like Feline Greenies or Chicken Temptations.

She insists on receiving eight or nine individual treats every morning, and she can’t start her day until she gets them.

She’ll meow, meow, meow, meow and meow until you comply. There’s no getting around it. She won’t relent either. She’s like a Terminator that way.

Same goes for dinner. She wants another eight or nine treats every night before bed, and she won’t stop meowing for them until she gets ’em.

Next, she insists that her food bowl is NEVER empty… Actually, it should be full.

It’s non-negotiable.

When she even sees a bit of white at the bottom of her bowl, she starts to low-key freak out.

After that, she wants cheek scratches, and she’s very insistent about it.

She loves, loves, loves having her cheeks rubbed, aggressively. She wants you to get your fingernails in there.

Next, Rosie wants to have whatever you’re having.

Simply put, whatever you’re eating, she wants. She wants some of it.

She’ll take it if she has to!

Heck, she’ll even take it if she doesn’t have to. 😹

Lastly, Rosie wants to go outside.

She loves going for walks, just likes Tabs did.

She loves exploring the neighborhood, loves hanging out in the front yard, loves soaking up the sun in the Tabby Command Center. She just loves being outside.

All things considered, Rosie doesn’t want a lot…but what she wants, she REALLY wants. 😊

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

Spring is only a few weeks ago, and you know what that means.

Planting season!

At least that’s how Rosie sees it. She spent the better part of this weekend toiling at her drafting table, making her plans for this year’s garden.

Certainly, there will be tomatoes (because there are always tomatoes), but this year Rosie is also thinking about leafy greens, zinnias and gerbera daisies, with a smattering of catnip thrown in for good luck.

The only thing is…she still has to figure things out from a garden security standpoint. Every year we have to contend with the usual rabble of squirrels, deer, turkeys and neighborhood cats. Plus, moles and voles, of course.

Rosie is trying to decide between beefing up our security cameras or going with a cat scarecrow… Or maybe both.

Tabs would have known what to do. When he was in charge, the annual garden was always a hit. Yup, that tabby sure had a green thumb.

He must have come from a long line of farm cats.

We’ll see what Rosie decides to do. I’ll definitely keep you posted. 🙂

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen

Finally! We got SUN this weekend, finally, actual honest-to-goodness sun. I think it was actually the first sunny weekend in months. Mind you, everything is still wet outside, which has Rosie mildly purr-turbed, but the abundance of green also means all sorts of life, and consequently lots of things to explore. That reminds me… Tabs loved weekends like this. Here’s one from back in his day.

Not even wet paws could keep Inspector Tabby from doing his rounds this morning. He thoroughly inspected every inch of the circle looking for perpetrators and infiltrators, neither of which he found.

He did detect something skulking around one of the houses nearby…

I don’t know what it was, but he perked up, pointed and hissed to show it who was boss.

He checked every nook and cranny this time, too. It was pretty early, like about 6:30, so the birds were chirping like cray, but none of the humans were out.

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Hello, friend. Prepare to have your mind BLOWN.

I know that’s a strange intro, but today is a strange day (in an amazing way, though).

Are you ready? I’m serious — I hope you’re ready, because this is INSANE.

OK, here it goes: this blog post is volume 800 of this series. Yup, this is the eight-hundredth installment of Sundays With Tabs.

800!

There are 52 weeks in a year, so that means we’ve been meeting here to marvel, fantasize, elucidate and pontificate about cat life in general, and one cat in particular, for more than 15 years!

😮

To that end, for this installment, Rosie would like to honor her predecessor’s groundbreaking achievements in STUFF (Science, Technology, Unicorn, Feline Fashion).

I’m sure you’re familiar with STUFF, right? I mean, it’s a big deal in the cat world.

The ‘U’ in STUFF stands for ‘unicorn,’ of course 🦄, a term in the venture capital industry to describe a startup company with a value of over $1 billion, just like Tabs the Cat Industries, LLC.

Now, as accomplished as Tabs was, Rosie is also pretty incredible. In fact, she dedicated her 2020 Nobel Cat Prize for Problem Solving to Tabs.

The prize was for finding a shortcut to the bottom of the Tabby Command Center, a problem Tabs struggled with for much of his adult life…

It was a problem Tabs was never able to figure out, but Rosie is super smart.

Now that she runs the company, we’re making great progress on many of the product lines started by Tabs, like our awesome robot assistant.

The first generation was great, but the new one will be even better!

Rumor has it, it’ll have a massage wand for a hand — a free upgrade for owners of our original robot assistant.

Yes, we sure miss Tabs around here, but Rosie has also been doing big things. Obviously, she’s a different kind of leader. She doesn’t have Tabs’s charm or flair, but she has drive, and she’s a smart cookie.

In the world of feline fashion, however, that’s an area where Tabs really shined. Rosie can’t really compare.

Miss you, buddy. Happy 800th Sundays With Tabs. ❤️

Your friendly neighborhood beauty addict,

Karen