charmed, I'm sure

I was cleaning the bathroom tonight and found, coiled in one of the wooden cigar boxes that hold my mothers jewelry, something I haven't seen in years. Something that I'm so glad I have of hers. I can still remember how it looked against her neck.

It started out as bracelets. Charm bracelets. Someone - Mom? - put them together and created a necklace, a chunky, fun piece that she wore with many different things. There were charms bracelets filled with charms from Grandma Gebhart (my great-grandmother) my grandmother, my great-aunt, my mom, and a small, uncluttered piece that held the few I remember from trips we took when I was small. A silver horse and carriage from Mackinac Island. A tiny flag from the Bahamas. A hoop-skirted belle from My Old Kentucky Home.

My great-aunt Alberta had great charms - even a tiny silver cocktail shaker that when pressed, opens and a little devil head pops out. (Bertie lived through Prohibition.) There is a wee class ring from my mother's alma mater on her string, and my grandmother has a fantastic spinning top. I love telling the stories to Rosey and wondering with her about the ones we don't know.

There are a lot I'll never know about, since both Mom and Bertie are both gone.

Tonight, though, is no time for being wistful for the past. Tonight is also eleven years since I took Bear's (slightly damp) paw and promised to love and cherish him. So I have some celebrating to do!

Goodnight!

do something little, help something big

Go here to see how Energizer and Evergreen are teaming up to make our world a better, more sustainable place.

slipping in the snark

It's hazy out here, where I've been lately.  The weather is foul, murky-green shot through with bilious colours, and the footing is decidedly treacherous. If you ignore both the pond-stink of old water and whatever that was that just went squirming and shrieking off through the underbrush, it still looks sorta normal.

Kinda normal, anyway.

Ever get caught up in a relationship you look back on and know with a sick twist to your gut that you ignored your feelings, stuffed down the slightly-hysterical voice inside you that was giving you warnings, the i told you so i told you so i told you so clawing rampant under your skin? And then the ooze buuurps under your heels and you realize you're far too deep in to abandon ship now.

We bloggers get invested in each other. Hazard of the beast, really, when talking about our lives and families and children and carpool and work and work again. Then Facebook came along and catapulted us all into each other's laps, and I now know more about people I've never 'met' than some of the ones I've lived near for a decade now.

What do you do when you realize that someone you've looked up to isn't who you think they are? Someone who you've read for a few years, whose stories you've looked forward to and whose children you can call by name?

What do you do when the mask cracks and falls away and what you see beneath takes your breath away with revulsion - all the pretty stories sworn up and down to be truth exposed and crumbling in daylight, groups and websites sprung up to hammer home the point that you've believed a lie, a lie with a wide colourful bow, yes, but still a lie - what do you do?

I kind of wish I still was clueless. Because now? I gaze at my family in the light of the waning sun and know that I've lost something through this revelation, that the blogging community for me will never be the same again.

I mourn, yes.
And then I turn my back on the toad squatting in front of me and look towards the sun, clear at last.



**This has been bubbling for awhile, but I need to get it out and on the page before it festered from simple grief, disbelief and pity to hate**

purrs and mews

Surprise! We adopted the kittehs. (You never saw it coming, did you?) They had their booster shots yesterday (and a feline leukemia test and a squirt of revolution) and were perfectly behaved, and now they're officially part of the family.

They're lovely and playful and fierce hunters of toes and a lot of fun. They spend less and less time under things (Jasper still freaks them out a bit) and more and more time with their motors running full-throttle, being petted and flopping with all feet in the air for belly rubs. Wish I was that comfortable with people! (Well, maybe not. I think rubbing my belly might be a definite mood-breaker during committee meetings.)

They've also taken over the sunny windowsills in the living room (Fine, huffs Lucy, lashing her tail, I'll go out to the one in the kitchen) and do a fine job of napping, little bodies all wound up together like a jigsaw.

Now we need to figure out the great de-clawing question. But that can probably wait for a bit.

We're busy enjoying all the purrs and mews.

black and white redux

Boy, things are quiet here when the kids are gone! B and I just rattle around...

The two are having their last adventure of the summer - a weekend at a cabin on a lake with fun aunt, smores, and no parental supervison. and I'm trying to keep B from going dotty over the fosters.

It's not easy. Just look at the wee faces!

 This is Cirrus. (But we call her Boo.)

And the handsome fella is Nimbus (but he's Inky 'round here*.)

And Bear is a big puddle of goo over both of them. We're fostering them, I say, but I'm beginning to think I'm speaking a language he doesn't understand.

Lucy is aghast that they're still here and mutters quietly while giving them a wide berth. Since they spend their sleeping time under the couch and she prefers the luxury of a whole! kid's! bed! to herself! they haven't met much. She's not actively hostile - I predict that will come when they wend their way upstairs and flounce into the above-mentioned kid's room - but with them losing timidity by the day it seems soon Lucy will have to lay down her paw and assert herself.

I haven't had wee kittens like this (and they're three and a half month old, not teeny things) in years. They are awfully cute.  And sweet. And one of them licked Bear's foot today.

We're just fostering them, I say again. Really.


*The kids were all hot to name them. Great! Go for it! Then Cass rattled off a list of Greek gods and Rosey decided the boy should be named Sparkles.

Perseus and Sparkles. I figured the first chance they got they'd pull a MacGyver, slit a windowscreen and thumb their way back to town. Nope. So a couple of easy names (for the foster kitties, the ones we're not keeping) were decided upon.

And so it begins....

black and white

We have been watching the sofa intently for the last few hours, with breaks to go jiggle toys behind the couch and shake treat bags.

No, honestly, we haven't gone insane. We're fostering two wary kitties.

 They were found in a port town near here, and were not socialized as tinies, and it shows.  They came today from a foster home where they learned to trust enough to jump up in people's laps and be petted, but tonight is a whole new ballgame and they've been using the underside of the couch as homebase. Now that things have quieted down (I sent the kids to bed - of course, they're back down here now, but it's calm at least) they've been weaving in and out around the floor and taking tiny bites of food.  In the last half an hour they've progressed to jumping on the couch and checking out the windowsill, and I'm sure they'll be in the litterbox tonight.

Lucy is decidedly unimpressed but we expected there would be a few days of outraged shrieking before the order of things is settled.

They were named for clouds when they came. The girl is white with a grey smudge on top of her head, and her brother is coal black with flashy gold eyes. 

I say we're fostering (it's something I believe in whole-heartedly) but I've got a sneaking suspicion that while I went over and over the concept with Rosey and Cass until they understood that these kitties were temporary, I was having the conversation with the wrong person.

Yep. Bear might be a problem. He's been the one most actively gathering them up and ooh-ing and aah-ing over how little they are, how sweet, how their purrs are so loud....

('Course, now I'm remembering when Lucy came to stay, and how she picked Bear out within hours of her arrival, and sealed the deal with a big rumble purr and a lick on the cheek.)

And, of course (no fool them) they've been turning their volume controls up, cuddling, playing when he tosses the toy, etc.

I'll try to get some pictures soon as they don't run when they see me coming. But the house feels good tonight, warm and full.

pontificating

Waiting for Irene...(and feeling a little wordy)


I was darn near late getting back from my lunch break on Friday - I was listening to a great report on CBC radio about technology and 'unplugging'. (The interview is here - it starts at about 14:00) Fascinating stuff. There have been studies done that say that when you read a computer screen, if there is a block of text (much less a picture) that doesn't have anything to do with your reading, it shoots your comprehension of what you do read by 50%.

That's scary, thinking about how much of what we read is broken up by fancy, shimmery ads and different fonts and scrolling texts with coloured backgrounds.

Our brains use different pathways to process things - even things as similar as reading off a screen and reading off a page.Read all your stuff off a screen, and the pathways used to comprehend words off a page? Begin to shut down.

Getting all the news about this incoming was-a-hurricane-but-is-now-a-tropical-storm? Is like waiting for Godot - the bad news is still there, and you can look for Jesus' co-conspirators if you like,  but it...never...comes. Yesterday we ran around frantically tying down the tractor and tidying everything away, doing the storm checklist: Do we have food? Can we cook if the power goes out? Does everyone know where to go if a tree falls on the house? and then today.....we waited.
It's spit rain and misted a lot, and there have been some interesting gusts of wind, but listening to the forecasts and forecasts and forecasts is really just stressing out the kids and making them punchy.

So today we've been watching movies and reading books (we made a run to the library earlier) and treating this like any other rainy, might storm, y'know, day.

And I wonder if exposing them to two days of news broadcasts and footage of roiling waves and flooding streets is good for them. If they might not be better off not having so much to think about. So much lag time before the actual event, so to speak.

If we should have unplugged.


I am so grateful that all my friends and family are safe from the effects of this storm. Please do not think I am negating the good things that having an early-warning system does.

the third act

When I moved to Nova Scotia from Michigan, I brought three cats with me. (Hey, noone ever accused me of packing light!) Panda, Katie, and Chumba. Panda died some years back, Chumba last year, and Kate....

well, we put my sweet old girl down today.

Last night she had (we think) a series of small strokes, leaving her blind, unable to walk more than a few feet, and with a permanent head-tilt.

It was time.

Bear took her in to the vets, and now she's buried up on the hill at the edge of the blueberry bushes where the sun warms the grass every morning, next to her best pal Chumba.

We'll miss you, Katie-baby.

Katie was the first one to greet both kids home from the hospital, the first to accept Bear, the first to bound on the bed in the morning and let us know it was time to get up! and see what the new day had brought! She moved across Michigan several times with me, enduring several different roommates and boyfriends, and then staked out Bear as her very own once she was settled in here at the house.

Tonight was spent in quiet cries with the kids. They both seem to be doing okay right now, since they knew she was frail and elderly. Lucy is lost, though.

I'm sure soon there will be the tiny feet of kittens running around the house, because remembering your summer as 'The summer vacation my cat died' is just awful. And seriously? Our house with just one cat?

Perish the thought.

under cover of the night

Did I really not tell y'all about these? But they're so awesome....




We have four. Flossie, Freddie, Bert and Maeve.

They live happily downstairs (I think the main nest is towards the back of the coat closet, although last fall they were in the pantry under the cold storage for a bit) and seem to enjoy pilfering mittens and the odd sock or two. Maeve used to come upstairs (she's the most social of all of them) when the children were small (I think she liked the taste of Wet-Naps) but now stays down with the rest.

We don't really see them (they're a quiet pet to have!) unless we've been out of peanut butter for awhile, and then there are mini, ankle-threatening stampedes, and much loud bickering over territorial rights and whether the cat food bowl should be considered necessary and therefore captured rations or not.

Oh, and they eat tinsel off the bottom of the tree.

The North American House Hippo. Makes you want one, doesn't it?

the cusp of the weekend

I hate how the edge of Sunday bites deep with the incessant chant of 'You have to work tomorrow'.

Whispering in the back of your head, tainting all the joy and fun of the last day of your weekend.

Can we do something after supper? Wow, that looks like a great show. Should I stay up and watch it?
A meteor shower? Sounds great! But....

I have to work tomorrow.

Blech. And Urgh.

Today is my Sunday - tomorrow I work at the hospital. I'm torn between making the absolute most of it (Wanna dye your hair with Kool-Aid*, Roseyroo? Cass, bet I can make soap turn into snow.** Wanna bet?) and floating, lazily and limply, in the pool.

Tonight we're having a great meal - stuff I've been waiting all week to cook, and dessert, and then...

and then the pool is mine.


*We may repeat this again some other day. It either didn't work or R's locks are too dark to show.
** Really? YES.

this is planet earth

I'm watching 'Planet Earth' (no, not the Duran Duran video, the BBC series) and listening to David Attenborough talk about baby polar bears and wondering why, for God's sakes, why, I watch these (admittedly gorgeous and interesting) nature programs when I know there's going to be at least one baby animal that doesn't make it.

Tonight's cute and cuddly snack du jour  (well, so far, we're still not sure if the polar bear cubs will survive) is a baby caribou.

And now it's on to birds, which are almost as sparkly and purty as my husband today after Rosey got after him with her Glitter Barbie makeup. (He said I could blog about it, but drew the line at photographic evidence, sadly.)

Crap. The wild dogs are after the impala. Y'know, I understand that this is real life and not a Gary Larson cartoon, but I still can't help wishing that the impalas could just catch a break.

Elephants swim, did you know? I mean, all four-feet off the ground swim? And how joyous they look, carrying their trunks over their heads and 'creek-ing' at each other.

So many creatures, all of us, inhabiting the same space.

This film makes me wonder what Lucy is thinking when she chews off the zipper pull on my purse (does the leather make her think she's hunting something?  Or is she just....delusional? However far back her 'hunting memories' go back, I have a hard time believing any of my calico house-cat's family brought down a cow.)

But then again, all things are possible here...on Planet Earth.


(And yes, I'm humming the bah,bah,bu-bah from the Duran Duran song. Of course.)