A Quiet Thanksgiving

Mrrrrr Friends,

What did you do today? We had a quiet, fun day at home. The morning started out bright and sunny.

Alex started out bright and sunny too.

By the time we went out to play, all four of us, the sun had gone behind big, grey clouds.

Alex and I each found some fresh growing nepeta.

And she explored the natural spring run.

Why is the grass green? I though we moved to a cold and snowy climate?

I zipped up this cool Cypress tree over in the neighbors yard.

And I made a bold, walking ascent of the Linden.

The birds got their thanksgiving seed - we decided this was a good day to start up the feeders.

Then of course I had to take a nap.

Soon, we're all having a fragrant Persian dead cow stew with lentils and spinich over rice. Alex will enjoy the rice part. Me, I might sample a little beef. I'm really looking forward to the nice Italian 2004 Toscana, and there are signs of cream whipping for later; nothing like three fingers of cream in the evening while watching a good flick with your people.

Hope all your dead turkey birds were plump and tasty and that you saved room for pie!

Turkey Day Eve 2009

Mrrrr Friends,

After a stunning first ascent of the maple in our back yard and a thorough check of the brook, I enjoyed a couple minutes of sun today while playing with Oom.

We took a few minutes to sit under our big white pine tree and ponder the coming holiday. I'm a big fan of Thanksgiving. Oom and Boo are usually home, making good smells, different foods for me to taste, and friendly people come to visit. Cats sometimes get extra kibble during all this, I guess because people feel a little guilty, so they share the wealth.

Some years, the folks get bundled up and head off to someone else's house to eat dead bird. While we miss them, it gives us time to enjoy some catantics and, when they do come home, they're usually pretty pent up and ready to hang out and play, so it all works out.

This year we had an early Thanksgiving dinner with my Uncle Joel, my number two male human. I love Uncle Joel big. He is big and furry. As a rule, he is very serious, but he can get tremendously silly when he is with Boo who he is really old friends with - like beyond an entire cat generation or two - ancient. Most important, he loves me big too and gets very silly with me. Indeed, if Boo and Oom die because they finally just eat and drink too much one day, or get lost on one of those crazy hikes they take without me, Uncle Joel becomes my guy. Now, I don't want that to happen, but it's nice for a cat to have a back up plan.

Anyway, Uncle Joel and his mom came over and talked a lot then ate lots of steamy hot food and drank wine, talked more, and ate more food. Alex and I got to taste lots of stuff if we wanted too. Me, I mostly stuck to kibble that night - I'm a purist. Alex, she seems to like cranberry sauce and really had a bit of an affair with the apple pie - we've been instructed not to discuss it. We all fell into sated, sleepy heaps late that night....after more talking.

It's a good holiday. I like the presents and the tree of the big human holiday that coincides with catsolstice, but this holiday is very warm. I'm thankful for my humans, for my cat-pal Alex, for healthy kibble, my babbling brook, our new house and the wonderful forested world around it, and for my Yeowww! catnip green fish. I'm also mindful of all my furry pals who aren't as lucky as me. My good human friends at the Sauk County Humane Society and the North Country SPCA have helped a lot of cats and kittens find good homes. I'm thankful for the dedicated people who make places like these safe and hopeful way stations and for folks like you who support them.

Happy Turkey Day.

Diesel's Brook

Mrrrr Friends,

Just sharing some brook time with you on a fine day.



It's chilly but not icy...quite a fine drink!

I pioneered climbing White Ash today...nifty little 8' foot ascent with a long run up through brush. Very exciting! Oom was very impressed.

Cosmic Cat Stuff

Mrrrrr Friends,

Alex and me, we’re all about the Leonid meteor showers. Every night during the past week we zipped from window to window (they’re on all sides of our house) watching the sky.

You’re wondering why two cats with healthy, busy lives are fixated on meteors aren’t you? You’re thinking: it has something to do with cat vision.

Nope.

Read this from MSNBC:

“The Leonids are known to be made up of cosmic litter from a small — 2.2 mile — dusty comet discovered by two astronomers in the late 19th century and christened Tempel-Tuttle. The Leonid meteors are thought to be the dusty legacy of comet Temple-Tuttle because the dust is moving around the sun in virtually the same orbit as the comet.”

Cosmic-litter! Now how cool is that? An environmentally sustainable option that would be incredibly pleasing to humans.

The way we figure it, if we poop into cosmic litter, basically there will be no poop. It’d be zapped by the magnetosphere or explode into fragments or radiated into oblivion.

Cosmic.

Me and My Shadow

Do you think the fish look up from the water and see their shadows in the air?

Not today in this neck of the brook I guess.

Spiky Frosty

It was spiky frosty this morning – a form of hoarfrost. A mild case, by full-blown winter standards, but still amazing. My photographer was not well organized this morning, so we did not get photos.

I call it spiky frost because this hoarfrost sticks out from the sides of everything it forms on. So (a) a blade of grass is stiff with icy cool frost, and (b) there are little spikelets all over it going every which way, mostly in right angles. The result: it feels very funny under the paw…little frozen spikys coming through the fur and in between the pads create quite a fascinating momentary sensation. That is until your next pawstep.

Leaves, trees, boulders, sticks, our bench, and bits of dross in the brook all had spiky frost this morning. It was a wonderland of glittery, spiky, tickly fun.

It was super humid (over 100%) and clear last night I guess, and the surface temperature of the grass and the bench must have gone well below 32 degrees. What is dew in the summer, becomes hoarfrost in the winter. My research indicates that hoarfrost can sometimes look like this morning’s spikes, or like ferns, or raised scales, or even little cups. But I wouldn’t mistake hoarfrost for rime!

While I enjoyed my frosty outing, though my paws got a bit chilly, it made me wonder at the difference a few days can make.

Just this weekend, we were frolicking with temperatures in the 50’s and 60’s. Boy, did I have fun playing in the leaves.

My people have not chewed up the leaves with the stinky growling grass eater machine like other folks. Thank goodness! A cat's gotta frolic!

New Living Room

Mrrrr Friends,

In my last post, I forgot to include the nice picture of the finished product.

I didn't want you to think that my people didn't finish what they started!

That's Alex in the corner, cleaning up after a particularly fine round of full tilt chase boogie. Given we all spent the evening on finishing touches, the two of had to wake up bright and early the next morning to fully test all the angles and ensure the new arrangement lived up to all our expectations. We gave it the cat paw seal of approval.

Furniture and the Art of Cat Boogie

Mrrrrr Friends,

I’ve scratched before on the importance of upholstery decisions, but I may have neglected the value of human furniture in a cat’s life.

Furniture provides a domestic haven for cats – space to sleep, groom, luxuriate, look cute, meditate, ponder quantum physics... Also, a station from which to tabulate human visits to the bathroom - correlated, of course, to beverage ingestion.

But this is only half the equation. A cat’s physical health also depends on quality furniture strategically placed in the home, in ways that encourage and enhance exercise and cardiovascular health.

Around here, we call this full tilt boogie. It’s something Alex invented, and a delicate balancing act. The furniture needs to be out of the way in the long stretches so a cat can reach blistering straightaway speeds, but perfectly placed to maximize leaping, rolling, ball chasing, and launching.

Our living room is kinda small, but it holds enormous potential for full-tilt boogie. Cats bounding up or down the stairwell have a real opportunity—if their style isn’t cramped by poor furniture placement. The room is essentially a throughway. Cats can run in racetrack style through the room, into the kitchen, and back into the living room, and then go round again. (Oom has been known to do this as well, but that's a topic for another blog.)

Alex and I just assumed our people would note this potential and set up the furniture accordingly. Unfortunately, they missed the boat first time out. Besides not even following the basic tenants of feng shui, their first layout simply did not maximize cat boogie.

But they soon saw the light, and the other night, we had a furniture-moving extravaganza! The goal: to create a quiet spot for relaxing, thinking and hanging out with others that can augment a feline’s capacity to chase, bound, skitter and zip at full throttle.

Initial explorations of couch placement inhibited full-tilt-boogie. Here, you see my concern, and Alex trying to demonstrate for Boo the lack of boogie in his layout.
Then, after an unusually daring shift, Alex demonstrated the enormous potential of a radical new couch positioning in front of the staircase.

Granted, her favorite round table would have to go. It was sacrificed to a higher cause - cat and human access to the back porch.

The finished product is a pleasure for our humans but also great leap forward for cats everywhere.

The Hill and the Wall

Mrrrr Friends,

We don't have any more leaves. On the trees, that is. We have them on the ground! Nice and crunchy for the most part. Very fun to play in...

This means we can now see up the hill behind my brook.

Very tempting. Very tempting indeed. I've been all over the property on THIS side of the brook. Now I want to go to the other side! There is no clear scramble across for a cat. Even a game cat who doesn't mind getting his paws and underbelly moist.

I've tried to get across from my usual crossing to my rock midstream. No go...big water just on the other side, too fast and deep. I've tried another approach from the neighbors' yard: nice big tree trunk more than half way across, then a big pool. But there are so many trees to be scaled over on the other side.

I'm drawing up plans for a cat bridge.

Speaking of engineering feats...

Look what we've been doing for the past few days.

Oom and I have a natural proclivity for walling: building walls from stone without mortar. We've been inspired by the wonderful wall at Storm King by Andy Goldsworthy.

Okay, to be frank, I prefer standing and running on top of stone walls. The whole laying stones thing is more Oom's fascination. But I was very supportive of Oom throughout this wall building enterprise. I pushed boulders, criticized placements, and considered strapping on a harness to haul in some material.

Turns out that walling is a pretty boring process for a cat. There's a lot of standing and looking at stones, figuring out if they fit, trying to get them to not wiggle. The guys who do this all the time probably aren't as boring as Oom, but she's a beginner.

The end product was nice, though. The base of much of the wall has been there well over 100 years. We built on that. It contains our blackberry farm quite nicely. And I look good up there, don't you think?

Now I need to get her focused on my bridge.