This is our new 6-foot multi-level cat condo. I won it from eBay a few weeks ago. I’ve been eBaying like mad lately. I’ve purchased more things from eBay this year (remember, that’s how I purchased my phone) than I have my entire life. I think it’s all because of the sugargliders. That’s what got it all started.

But I digress.. We decided to get the cat condo for the cats because we’d been buying various things for the suggies and we didn’t want the cats to be totally left out. So they get one big present this year. The cat condo.

These things are actually pretty expensive. For a hundred dollars, you can usually only get a small one at the pet stores. How fun is a small one? Not much fun especially with three cats who will be fighting to use it. So I looked to eBay to see if I could find any good deals on cat condos.

I found the going rate on the auctions to be about $100 to $160 with shipping. That’s over a hundred dollars in savings compared to the pet store prices. So I started bidding.

I lost several of these because I missed the auction close or the price just went above my budget. I was getting really frustrated and thought I’d never be able to win one.

I decided to visit the vendor’s web site to just try to order it from there but the price of the model I wanted was $159. I had seen some of these go on the auctions for as little as $100 so I wanted to try to get a better deal. Thus, I continued to try to win auctions.

The last auction I bid on had an ending time of around 9:40 on a Monday night. I couldn’t focus in class because toward the end I was just watching my auction. With about a couple of minutes left to go, I placed my final bid. Just as the class was being dismissed, I received the auction ended message and I won. Everyone in the class thought I was strange because I was jumping up and down with glee. My cat condo only cost $115. If you got that good of a deal, you’d be jumping up and down too!

Anyway, the cat condo arrived about a week later and Brian assembled it as soon as it was delivered. He said the cats started climbing all over it as he was putting all the parts together. They were playing with their condo even before it was completely assembled. He said he had to keep pushing them away so that he could assemble it and he felt bad for doing so because he didn’t want them to think that it was off limits. He just didn’t want to keep getting interrupted during the assembly process.

Brian said that putting the pieces together was pretty simple and the cat condo was fully assembled in minutes. The cats were all over it, jumping between the tiers. They were playing with the dangly toys and even broke a couple of them off even before I got home. Okay so the quality might not be that great on the dangly toys, but the rest of the condo itself is pretty sturdy. Brian and I figured that we may need to re-upholster the tiers in a few years when the fuzzy covering wears out but we figured that wouldn’t be too big of a deal because the parts are easy to assemble and disassemble. We figured we’d just go to a carpet remnant sale.

Anyhow, I’m happy to report that the cats love their new condo. The only disappointing thing is that after almost two weeks, they’ve yet to try the hammock. I purposely chose this model because I thought they would totally dig the hammock and fight over it. Our cats have yet to figure out how great it is. They have not gotten past the shakiness off, I guess. I think once they figure out how awesome it is, they’ll be spending most of their time sleeping in it. I don’t know how to get them in there, though.

The other day I tried to pick Oscar up and put him in but he wiggled away from me as soon as one paw touched the shaky hammock. I’m tempted to put catnip in it just to get them to try it. The crazy thing is I could’ve gotten a cheaper hammock-less cat condo. Had I known that they would not like the hammock, I would’ve been able to save some more money!

Anyway, I think we’ll give it a few more weeks before we intervene. Hopefully our cats are smart enough to figure this out.

Remember that Visa giftcard that Brian gave me over a month ago? Well, I totally forgot I had it. Then Brian remembered it the other day.

He’s like, “Whatever happened to that giftcard?” I go, “I still have it. It’s here somewhere.”

It was next to my computer monitor under some bills. I had totally spaced it out.

Anyway, I’d been thinking of what to use it for and I just couldn’t come up with anything. So today, I told Brian that we could use it to buy a tent for our suggies.

While at the store, we ended up getting a sleeping bag (for the floor of our tent), a couple of soft fleece pillow and a couple of fleece throws to furnish our tent. We ended up spending about $60 (we only got a small, two-person tent) so we had to pay some money from our checking account. Most of it was covered by the giftcard, though.

Of course, I had to point out that whenever I get a giftcard it usually goes toward something we both will enjoy but when Brian gets a giftcard it usually just ends up getting spent on video games. Naturally, he just pouted and said “It’s my giftcard dammit! I get to spend it on whatever I want!”

It’s a shame I can never think of what I want when I have money and I always seem to want everything when I’m broke. Why is that?

In keeping with my promise to share with you cool new internet discoveries, I present to you stamps using your very own photographs through a company called Zazzle. Zazzle has partnered with Flickr to make this new feature available to Flickr users. If you are living under a rock or you are just not cool enough to have a Flickr account of your own, then this is yet another reason to get one.

I mean, real stamps that you can mail bills with using your own photos and designs. How cool is that? You could even take a close up picture of the hand of someone giving finger and use that to stamp your credit card company payments. How fitting!

On a more positive note, you can use these personalized stamps to spice up your holiday cards. So it has more uses than just saying FU to your creditors. This has got to be the greatest invention since sliced bread. It takes stamp collecting to a whole new level. Kudos to Zazzle for making my best of 2005 list. I love it!

File this under neat gadgets and gizmos. Who needs a laptop when you can browse the web using your PSP?

Brian is totally thrilled because now he can play Ogame anywhere he goes. If I have ever given the impression that I didn’t think PSPs were cool before, I hereby rescind my stance. The whole idea of the web on your PSP rocks! It will totally phase out magazine racks in bathrooms the world over!