Tag Archives: cats

Do They Know It’s Christmas?

I’m scheduling this in advance and this is the forecast for my destination. Looks good, huh? Luckily there will be lots of food and fine company, plus puzzles and books. It’s going to be good.

60s Christmas. Are those bathrobes epic, or what? Going to be celebrating with my family again this year

There is a trio of elders in our neighborhood who walk every morning.

One morning we were going for a walk and as we made our way down our street we noticed a large number of cats lurking at the curb and watching. We were half joking about it and half creeped-out.

Then lady walker came around the corner with a little bag. She gives treats to all the cats. It’s very cute. Yesterday I was up early and I looked out the window and I saw two yellow safety vests and a third figure wearing several red blinky lights giving one of the neighbor cats a treat.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and may the new year be filled with people bringing you treats.

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The Mystery of the Missing Cats

I thought I wrote about when our next door neighbors’ cat disappeared during the summer but I guess not. Noah vanished. They even put out fliers.

At the time, the rental next door was empty and there was someone over there cleaning and had a couple of kids there. I was convinced the cat must have gotten stuck in the house or maybe, since he’s such a sweetie, the kids took him.

Guess who we found in our basement days after this all started?

I felt terrible. When I water, the garage and back doors are open and the cats have gone into our garage before and always run away when I come back in.  I actually checked when the cat was lost but the basement door is usually shut and it never occurred to me to take a look downstairs.

In our defense, the cat was hiding. Bob just saw him for a second before it ran away to hide. Of course all this happened at 6am. I told Bob it was too early to call but he texted and the neighbor was at work and woke up his wife, who came over immediately and coaxed him out.

They were convinced that he wasn’t at our house the entire time. He escaped one bad situation and ran in our garage door in a panic an ended up freaked out in the basement.

And this is probably exactly what happened because last night Bob was visiting with a different neighbor whose cat disappeared at the same time. She was worried and walking back and forth on our street and she spotted her cat in the window of the rental. Remember? Empty.

The cat started jumping around when it saw her. She walked around the house until she found the cat door and stuck her hand through and ZOOM! her cat came out.

Poor Noah must have gotten stuck over there as well.

Not so luckily, people live there now. Update to come.

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Valentine’s Day Miracle

I finally retrieved my wedding ring. I dropped it in the couch last weekend and I either haven’t had time or haven’t been in the mood to deal with it. I had all my tools assembled in the living room.

Sheesh. I feel like MacGyver. The crevice where it was stuck was too narrow for almost anything. It was so tight that once I got my flashlight in there so I could see what I was doing, I couldn’t do anything else. I tried a piece of sturdy wire. I tried the vacuum. I tried feeling all long every corner of the couch to see if there was a way in. I finally moved it from the wall and tried tilting it back and forth.

Did I mention it’s a giant heavy couch that dual reclines using a motor? When the kids delivered it they told us it was the heaviest thing they had to deliver. I unplugged the motor so it wouldn’t turn into a sad Darwin award story. But then I started rocking a heavy couch back and forth to tip it on its side. Then I crawled underneath it. Apparently it wasn’t my day to die from something completely stupid.

I’ll omit the long boring details but I finally found that it had dropped to another couch level underneath but still no way to stick a hand in and grab it. Also, because of the angle I could either point a flashlight at it, or try some tool to grab it, but not both at the same time. There were a couple more rounds of couch rocking. I eventually used my sturdy wire wrapped around an extra long chopstick (I have no idea why I have these and what they would be used for — maybe a wok? Which I don’t own) I managed to scrape the ring to a corner where I could grab it. Yay!

I have not learned my lesson and will continue to fiddle with my ring.

I also found my glasses! But first: I used advanced Google search to find the post so I could link to it and got this:

HA! It’s like Google knows me. Here’s the post where I lost my glasses in a wind storm.

But probably I didn’t lose them in the wind. There’s one area of the yard that gets very little rain or sun and has lovely dry soil that the cats can’t keep out of. I had raked up a bunch of leaves and debris around that area and I checked it yesterday to see if it was working and I found my glasses. I was probably leaning over the debris and they fell off my head or I sometimes wear them with one arm stuck in my shirt. I washed them off and happy to have them back.

And my plot against the cats appears to be mostly successful. There is one little area where it looks like they found a work around. Cats are evil.

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Summer Weekend

Still not in the mood to sit here and do the Montreal update. Also, photos still out of control. I must stop taking them.

I always expect to lose the dinner plate dahlias over winter because I hate digging them up and they seem a bit more delicate than some of the others I have out there. I was so happy to see these blooming out there.

This is the neighbor cat following me around while I took pictures of dahlias.

This is a different pink one and just for fun, no Photoshop tweaking except for cropping.

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Garden Update

Here’s the crazy neighbor cat. Running over the second I step outside. I was there to take photos of the flowers and garden stuff.

Demanding. She was all whiny and trying to climb up my leg.

“You don’t even live here,” I pointed out.

Later it punished me by ignoring me. Sure, ouch, dummy.

I love this white dahlia. So elegant.

More dahlias. They aren’t quite as pretty as last year. I’m not sure if it’s mild weather or my lazy watering.

Check out one of the prettiest pumpkins. I have a decent pumpkin crop although the fauna has made a gouge in almost every one.

Does this look close to ripe to you? Looks close to me. I think this is the first time in my history that I didn’t get a tomato before September. At this point I’ll settle for anything.

Also: I learned how to make animated gifs today: Bright Dike back flip!.

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2000! 2000! 2000!

This is a Karuk-style basket start that’s on the wall at basket class. I should probably put a photo of a finished basket up so you can see where this is going. Try this.

Hey! Great news. This is my 2000th post since I started blogger which was February 2001 if my archives are to be believed. This is going to be a rambling post filled with history and random tidbits that I have scrawled on little pieces of paper and post-its all over my desk. I was going to wait until I had time to write a really good 2000th post, but then we’ll never get to it because my entire life is on hold until I have time to do it better and who knows when that will be?

I started a website in April 1996 (check out the Wayback machine) and some of that stuff survives in the ancient archives and some of it is stashed in a folder on my harddrive.

I’ve always wanted to bring back the Delta Sucks post and the responses including the one from the crazy lady who told me: “Your stupid!”

If I ever have money to burn I’m going to hire an assistant and that person’s job is going to be to surf the Internet and visit comment threads and any time a person posts some version of “your stupid” or “your a moron” my assistant will reply with: I think you mean “you’re stupid.”

But I’m getting away from my planned rambling. I actually have a huge page of notes for a different post to be titled “The Internet is Ruined” which I thought would be perfect as a 2000th post but I’m not in the mood today. Someday.

Last weekend I went to California to hang out with the family. This is Minky.

Does anyone ever intentionally set out to get a cat or are cats something that people just end up with? It seems like every person I’ve ever known with a cat(s) ended up with them.

Minky’s original name was Wink and Wink lived at the house next door where they already had bigger cats and also dogs. Wink was small and timid and a little overwhelmed trying to get a good meal with these other critters around. So Wink wandered the neighborhood and found my parents house. I’m not sure if she was nibbling on Shy Boy’s food or what but Dad fed her and that was the beginning of the end.

The owner retrieved her cat from my parents’ house several times but she always snuck back in. One night my Mom got up in the middle of the night and there was Wink hanging out in the hallway. She found the cat door. When the owner moved, she left Wink to live with Mom and Dad.

Wink became Winky and because she has such soft fur: Minky. But it’s a great name. You can say: inky, stinky, rinky dinky, finky, pinky, drinky. I made up some limericks for her but she just gave me this same bug-eyed stare so I stopped.

In this photo she has made a nice nest in my big warm coat. She was able to spread her fur around to all of my clothes. She’s a very sweet kitty.

I have a follow up to the Verizon story. They sent me a response to my customer service email that starts off by saying that they’d call me to walk me through my problem except that they received my email too late and due to industry regulations they can’t call me.

Because it would be a shame if any of this wasn’t all my fault. Why not have your workers on the job during the time that industry regulations allow you to call?

But that doesn’t matter because I already fixed the problem myself by doing the simple steps of canceling my autopay and then restarting it with the new credit card number. They also mailed me a notice thanking me for enrolling in autopay and welcoming me.

Your welcome. (intentional mistake because I think its funny)(that was intentional to)(that too).

I had another milestone last week — it was 20 years since I started working as a paralegal in Indian Affairs. I don’t know what to say except its nice to feel competent at a job. I did not feel that way for a very long time. I remember reading legal cases and it would take all day and then I’d read them again and again. It’s like you have to train your brain how to think a certain way and I was not a natural. 20 more years and I can retire! (sigh, geez)

Watercress harvesting. I’m sure my family is thrilled that their butts are on my website. That was the angle I had.

I have one of those dinky iPods that’s as big as a postage stamp. I have a gadget so I can listen to it in the car but I’ve only used it a couple of times because normally the only places I drive are the park-n-ride or the grocery store and those trips aren’t worth plugging in the iPod.

If you’ve ever used one of those tiny ones, you know that you can’t work it while you drive. Well, you could but you’d probably crash into something. So I had it all set up with mega-long playlists and I would get it set up and then pause and then once I got going I could listen. I had a 100 favorite song playlist that I could shuffle and an audio course and a bunch of podcasts.

The ride down worked great. I’m not sure what I did on the way home but somehow I managed to make it so it would repeat the item. After I heard the same song 3 times I realized there was a problem. I had a pitstop and I fiddled with it and thought I fixed it but I did not so it was completely aggravating. Then I tried tapping on it a bunch of times so then I was skipping all around which made the audio course a bit confusing. I’ve got it sitting here so I can figure it out when I’m feeling frisky.

Another funny technology story is that I always forget some cable that I wish I had so this trip I put every single cable and charger that I have into a plastic bag and threw it in with my stuff.

Then I forgot my laptop.

I very carefully made sure it was charged and I use Dropbox and I made sure it was synced. Bob said I left it on the couch which is pretty random because why would I put it on the couch? I think it was all subconscious. But, I had my notebook with me and wrote longhand every day so the streak (which has been going since Oct 31 2011) lives!

Goodness, are you still reading? That’s enough of that. Signing off Post 2000!

Get excited because Monday starts Timbers pre-season!

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Wild Kingdom

It’s been animal kingdom in the backyard tonight.

Toes has been spending so much time back there I should start charging him rent. Every time I go out there I hear his whiny meows and he takes his time crawling out from a shady spot and stretching a bit before coming over and demanding attention. On Friday he got bitey when I wanted to stop.

Also tonight we had squirrely squirrels, Mr. Oranges and Bunny. Bunny lives next door but I think it has a crush on Mr. Oranges because it followed him around my yard and gave me the stink eye when I pet Oranges. Oranges was frisky tonight, too, and doing the bitey thing.

Then there was a dog running around.

I keep hoping I’ll look back there and see something exotic like a white stag or a capybara.

I lost one of my spare pairs of glasses. I have several cheapo pairs that I leave around the house in the kitchen or on the nightstand so I never have to look too far to find glasses. I misplace them all the time and normally I find them right away, usually under my butt. But this pair seemed to have wandered off.

I needed to use advanced search methods. The first thing I did was take apart the bed and while I was at it I vacuumed in all the nooks and crannies. Sure enough it was wedged down between the bedframe and the nightstand and tangled up in the cord for the alarm clock.

My sweetheart is gone for a couple of days and I have the house to myself. Usually when he’s gone, I sleep on my side of the bed out of habit. Last night I decided to sleep in the middle. I woke up in the middle of the night and I was almost horizontal and taking up pretty much the whole space.

Best not make that a habit.

Those are the updates. Thrill a minute around here.

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Here’s My 10 Second Check-In

I thought I would make an apple pie for dessert because I had some fantastic apples last week but when we got to the farmer’s market there were still so many peaches and berries I changed my mind. I made a peach-blueberry-strawberry pie. I very highly recommend this combination. I used lemon zest and nutmeg with the filling.

Mom came up last Thursday to see Ursula Le Guin interview Margaret Atwood for our first lecture of this year’s season. It was really good and supposedly will be broadcast on Oregon Public Radio but it’s not up there yet. They talked about writing and spec/sci fi writing and went off-topic and cracked each other up. Highly recommended for fans of these writers.

I wanted Mom to meet the nextdoor cat Toes since she is a friend of cats. We went outside to putter around and he ran right over and the minute she sat down he jumped into her lap.

We’ve spent the last couple of days running around doing all kinds of stuff but mostly book and food/kitchen oriented things. When we got home on Friday Bob asked what we’d been doing and I said it would be easier to tell him what we hadn’t been doing.

We took her to a couple more fun stores this morning before feeding her lunch and sending her on her way.

I took a better photo of the pumpkin patch and have helpfully made arrows so you can see all the loot. There’s one more big one in back that you can’t see in the photo.

I’ve got a long day tomorrow and Tuesday I’m off to Atlanta to visit Kira and maybe fix her blog so she can post what’s been happening since February.

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Flower Power





I just realized that I didn’t crop those the way I intended. Oh well.

I haven’t bought any new dahlia bulbs for two years because i already have so many and I’d shifted my attention to more spring bulbs. Last summer I noticed I’d lost a bunch of my dinner plate dahlias, probably during the winter wonderland of December 08, so I grabbed highlighter and post-its when my catalog showed up. I’m going to be restrained but will buy more than just replacing my dinner plate collection. There are a bunch of new ones but the bulbs are up to $23 a piece. Yikes. I’m a lazy gardener. I don’t need luxury flowers to fret about.

This morning I saw an unfamiliar cat jumping around in the backyard and I realized it had a mouse. I leaned up on the kitchen counter and yelled, “Bob! There’s a cat and mouse in our yard.” That made the cat look at me and the mouse tottered around in the grass. The cat went back to bashing on the mouse and Bob came in and said, “Yeah, there is a mouse.” So then the cat looked at us again and after a long pause the mouse scampered under the deck. The cat jumped around the deck but couldn’t get at the mouse. We laughed. That mouse better not start a family anywhere inside this house.

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