Farewell, strange summer. Hello, strange cats.

It is amazing to me how quickly summer turns to fall.  I swear I can sense a difference in solar wavelengths.  I don't need a calendar to know when it is September.  I hope we have a nice, long friendly fall, followed by a good, cold winter that kills a lot of flies and mosquitoes.

 Not TOO cold, though.  I am worried about the cats that have set up housekeeping on my front porch.  It all started during the heat wave from hell.  A golden Manx cat who was extremely undernourished and had obviously been a fight (he lost) was gasping on my porch.  I gave him a drink of water.  He was most appreciative.  I gave him a drink of water for about three days, and then started giving him food as well.  I call him Scruffy.

It was gratifying to watch him regain his health.  After a few weeks, I was plotting to habituate him and then take him to the vet for neutering when I got distracted by the grey tabby.  A petite female Scruffy showed up with one day, she is clearly from the same gene pool that produced my Hobbes.  I called her Baby and fed and watered her, too.

Then, about three weeks after that, I looked out the door and was shocked to see that she was nursing a little tailless grey kitten.  I changed her name to Mama and called the little fellow Baby.  After a few days, he was waiting for me at the door, and squeaking incessantly for his food, so I changed his name to Squeaks.  Scruffy, Mama, and Squeaks.  The perfect family.

Except, a week later, a second kitten joined the family at the dish.  Another male, grey, fluffy where Squeaks is short-haired, but altogether a handsome dude.  By now, the babies were weaned so my food became even more important.  (And it kept them from assaulting the birds.)

Now I was becoming concerned.  It seemed easy enough to fool and trap one cat- maybe even two-  but how in the world do you manage to ensnare four? I was willing to pay to have them neutered, but how was I to round them up?  And if I made a move against one or two, I might frighten off the rest and there could be a new batch of kittens to worry about come spring.  Four is a right big number of cats.

Except that they are five.  Yep, another kitten, twin to the fluffy male, tumbled out of the woods one day.  By   now I am seeing less and less of Scruffy and Mama, but they still stop by from time to time, and now there are three young cats dependent upon my largess.

And winter is coming.  I have made a shelter for them on the front porch which I will insulate more fully as the weather worsens.  Squeaks has let me pet him but he draws the line at being picked up.  I hope that will change and I can get him to the vet for shots, de-flea-ing and denaturing before spring.  His brothers still run at the sight of me even though I have been feeding them twice a day for almost four months now.  Kinda pisses me off, really.

So it is official.  I am the crazy cat lady.  I have 5 outdoor cats and four indoor cats.  (Well, only three of the indoor cats are mine.  Snoopy, the morbidly obese cat from Hell, is my Dad's.) As much as I adore cats, I just hope I can prevent the next generation of craziness.  

44 years is a very long time

The hubs and I met in high school, in February of 1967.  Our senior year.  Just after Valentine's Day.  My friend Sue Schleicher helped me stalk him.  She drove me to basketball games, as it was my habit to fail driver's ed (just the driving part) and Dave's habit to go to basketball games.  As they say, I chased him until he caught me.  I am sure there have been times when he wished he could throw me back.

We got engaged in August of 1967 and married on August 10, 1968.  He was 19.  I was 18.  NOBODY thought it would last.  Sometimes, even we didn't.  We were so young.  We came from different backgrounds, different traditions, and different religions. We didn't have a pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out of.  We set up camp in married housing on the campus of the University of Michigan where Dave was going to college and I was learning to be a wife.  

We've been through lean times and flush, hard times and good.  We've been poor, we've been well-to-do.  The birth and death of our first child nearly finished us.  The miscarriage of our second while we were still in mourning was another hard blow.  But we were eventually blessed with two healthy, a beautiful girl, a handsome boy, and now have four gorgeous granddaughters.

We are now both fat and gray and full of aches and pains.  He has gout and reactive hypoglycemia.  I have a crumbling spine and diabetes.  Our bodies make more noise than we do.  Still, we are both pretty active people in a sedentary sort of way.  He has his career.  I have my church, my woman's club and my crafts.  

So maybe it's not romantic any more.  Romance requires mystery and uncertainty and risk.  How long can that last?  Once you get to know one another, you have killed all chance of romance.  You really stop feeling romantic about a person once they start using the toilet while you are in the bathroom.  Intimate, yes.  Romantic?  Not so much.

Which is probably just as well, because romance is exhausting.  Love is easier.  Even when passion wanes, love endures.  And if friendship persists as well, life is good.

So, the hubs and I just celebrated 44 years of wedded... well, not bliss, but something close enough.  I was once asked- in a public forum- what was the secret of a long marriage?  That was on our 25th wedding anniversary, and I stand by my answer.  Don't die.

My favorite place to be

Welcome to my favorite place:  Dragonfly Arts

A whole lot of neat things get made in this room.

A view into Dragonfly Arts from the entrance.  There are three zones:  scrapbooking/crafts; sewing/machne embroidery; and computer/business.  You can see two of the three zones in this shot.

This view is from the sewing zone into the scrapbooking zone.  The beautiful wall hanging was made by Sandie Simms- the fiend who introduced me to scrapbooking and then abandoned me for quilting.

This is my Original Scrapbox, one of the best purchases I ever made.  If the drawers look like they are bulging a little, it's because they are.  The shrine to my past life as a pirate can be seen on top of the Scrapbox.  When fully opened, as now, the Scrapbox is nine feet wide.  Mine is seldom closed.

Here you can see the sewing/machine embroidery zone.  The mannekin is wearing my latest apron design.  I have a Janome sewing machine that I love.  On the cabinet is one of my favorite lamps, and 16 drawers of buttons, assorted by color.  Yes, I actually sat down and did that.

My Brother embroidery machine.  Too cool.  I like having the ironing board set up all the time.  And, as you can see on the sideboard, I have the one absolutely indispensable tool for all crafters.... a coffee pot.


My cousin Valarie came for a visit after Christmas, and I am afraid I put her to work.  This layout is her design and it works like a dream.  Val is a professional seamstress, among many other artistic gifts, and her advice has been invaluable.  Thanks to her, I may actually be able to launch my scrapbooking service this summer.

I guess now that I have two machines I'm just an old sew and sew.

How can this be sibling rivalry when he's a cat and I'm not?

I have no luck with my parents' pets.  They don't like me.

The feeling is mutual.

When my mother was alive, she and my dad had a brindle cairn terrier whose fur was a weird shade of purply brown.  He was so tiny as a puppy that he fit into my brother Pat's shirt pocket.  Full grown, he was the size of your average cat.  His real name was Spartacus, but we called him Sparky and my folks adored him.  My mother fed him hot meals.  He slept in their bed.  They fought over who it was the dog loved best.

I hated the little shit.  Where was all that adoration when I lived at home?  They took more pictures of that dog than my baby brothers.  He traveled with them.  Dad took him in the car whenever there was banking to do or fast food runs to make.  Sparky rode shot-gun.  If you happened to be invited along, Sparky still rode shot-gun.

He was the favorite.  He knew it.  He rubbed our noses in it.  My folks had five kids they didn't particularly care about and one majorly spoiled dog.  Whenever Mom fed him, he'd look over his shoulder at me and sneer.  He was having beef tips.  I was having peanut butter and jelly.

I used to feed him gummy bears just to watch him try to open his jaws.  Until Dad caught me doing it.  After which I fed him marshmallows.  He would drool and foam at the mouth when he ate them.  I tried to convince my folks he had hydrophobia but they were on to me.  "Poor Sparky", they would coo, "did that bad person give you (fill in the blank) to eat again?"  He would look at me malevolently and nod. Snitch.

Twice he pooped in my shoes.  Once I was wearing them at the time.

But he's dead now, so I got that going for me.

Except my Dad now has a cat.  Snoopy.  Snoopy weighs 480 lbs.  He looks like Puss in Shrek Four, only Puss is orange and Snoopy is black and white.

Dad is killing him with kindness.  He lets Snoopy drink out of his milk glass.  He hand feeds Snoopy all sorts of people food, along with the cat food he gets too much of, and bribes affection out of him with high-calorie cat treats.  Snoopy looks like a tick about to pop.  He's so fat that no one can lift him.  Also, he hisses, bites, scratches and generally demonstrates his assholery if you even try to pet him.  I don't even have to do that to get hissed at.  I just need to exist in his presence.

I am currently visiting with my dad, where I usually sleep on a rollaway bed.  Dad  is in the hospital, so I decided to sleep in his bed for tonight.  Snoopy would have none of it.  He picked a spot on the bed and defended it against my interloping ways as if I were the antichrist. 

So I beat the crap out of him with a (very) soft pillow and claimed the bed.  Then I felt so guilty I couldn't sleep.  Snoopy is curled up with his favorite toy, looking pathetic.  I am on my way to the rollaway now.  

Mom (and Dad) always loved him best.

Thomas Jefferson was right... we need a revolution every 50 years

   I am so completely disgusted with our "Congress" that I am ready to fire them all and replace them with people whose names have been drawn from a hat.  I mean, think about it.  What harm could it do?  Even the mentally disabled could do a better job of husbanding our resources than the bozos in Washington now.

   If they allow our nation to be globally humiliated by a default, they better not show their faces to their constituents ever again.  You remember the concept of constituents, I assume... the people the bozos are supposed to represent and protect.  Congress doesn't seem to have much of a memory of the concept.

   I want to know how this present Congress can be said to be representative.  Where are the businessmen, the educators, the doctors and scientists?  Where are women, who make up 51% of the population but only 17% of Congress (17 /100 Senators, 74 /434 representatives)?  Where are the social workers, the sales clerks, the manufacturers?  In a population of 124 million workers, only 6% are lawyers, but 45% of Congressmen are lawyers.  Where are the young people?  The median age of the US population is 32.9 years.  For Congress, the median is 53 years.  Where are the African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Pacific and other groups that make up respectively 12%, 9%  and 3% of the population (24% in total), while Congress is 87% white males?

  We should fire them all immediately. Failing that, we should repeal their right to set their own wages.  Force them to use the same health care system the rest of the country must endure.  Slash their pensions- put that money back into Social Security and take Social Security out the general funds.  AND DO NOT PAY THEM FOR THIS TERM!  The lazy do-nothings owe us ALL their back wages.  And while I do not agree with Dick the butcher (Henry VI Part 2 Act 4, scene 4 71-78) that we should "First, kill all the lawyers, I DO agree with the following quotations.

"The people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution".   Abraham Lincoln



"The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn't get worse

every time Congress meets".  

"This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as

 when the baby gets hold of a hammer".

Will Rogers

"Congress: Bingo with billions".  

Red Skelton



"We have the right as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money".   

 David Crockett

"You can lead a man to Congress, but you can't make him think".  

Milton Berle

"Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one's friends".       

  George Will

"Talk is cheap - except when Congress does it".   Cullen Hightower

"Members of Congress must live according to the same laws as everyone else". 

 Bobby Jindal

"Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress.

But I repeat myself".  

"There is no distinctly American criminal class - except Congress".  

 Mark Twain

And now, representing thinking women everywhere...

I say throw the buggers out. 

Kate Lapczynski

Back to school... in JULY??!!

I did not get to spend any time to speak of with my granddaughters this summer.  I feel frustrated and cheated about that.  And all the "Camp NeeNee" things we had planned to do are not going to happen because, for my grandgirls, summer is over. 

My summer ends on August 30th, when my general biology class meets for the first time.  My girls will have been in school a month by then.

I can't imagine trying to learn in 100 degree heat, or when the bright sun from outside distracts me from my books.  My childhood summers were too long- out from mid-June until the day after Labor Day in September- but my girls' summers are too short.  

The weather was against me this summer.  Though my pool was opened on May 23rd, our first swim did not come until early July.  I remember summers past when my girls and I cavorted in the pool like the dolphins we are.  This year, only Emily and Delaney have been in the pool with me.  Twice.

Granted, I have been spending a lot of time in Michigan, caring for and visiting with my Daddy, who is 87 and failing.  Granted, the pool company opened my pool and then did NOTHING to it until my return home in late June, at which I fired them and hired someone who has turned out to be a miracle worker.  (Her name is Rhonda Loop, with is pool backward).  Granted, I have been puny on and off this summer.  Granted, my girls have spent most of their time with their other grandmothers.  (Apparently the equal time clause has lapsed)'

But if the summer wasn't so !$^#%*%#  short, none of that would matter.  Sigh.

So, here I am, all geared up for fun in the sun, chock full of ideas for things to do with my girls, chomping at the bit for some QFT (quality family time) and it is all for naught. 

Sending kids back to school in July.  Whose bull-shit idea was that?

My world...and other stuff

   After the tornados, and rains, and snows of this Tennessee winter, the weather has finally turned lightly to spring.  So what do I do?  I head north, where it is still winter and where there is still snow on the ground to visit me Dadums over my spring break. Wish I could convince Daddy to move South.  (Excuse me a moment while I get over this fit of hysterical laughter at the thought of convincing my dad to do anything.        Okay, I'm fine now.)
   I really don't like going to Michigan.  There is no easy way to get there and I must leave my cozy little home, my family, my friends, my church, my sisters in the Order of the Daughters of the King, my beloved GFWC Tullahoma Woman's Club and all the wonderful women who are a part of it, my cats, my grandkids, my bed, and, this semester, my job.  It means a lot to my dad though, so I go.  And it's only for a week this time. (Next visit will have to be longer- and hopefully, I won't go alone).
   I hope when I am 86 that three things are true:  that my mind is still sharp (unlike Dave's mama), that my body allows me to be relatively mobile with relatively little pain (unlike my Dad) and that my kids are as good to me as I am to Mama and Dad.  I am taking odds on each of those, if you are interested.
   I will post again from the pleasant peninsula, as soon as my fingers thaw out.