“Children playing with cat,” 1957, Concord, New Hampshire, USA — Ladies Home Journal Magazine — Image by © Genevieve Naylor/CORBIS
From a set on If Charlie Parker… called Shutterbug Friday #11, Genevieve Naylor (Act Two: Wee Folk in the Eisenhower Era). Genevieve Naylor was a fashion photographer and photojournalist whose work appeared in all the best magazines in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.
Today, I brought the cats to the new apartment for the first time. Continue reading
On Friday we moved furniture from my house to the new loft. It turned out that I own almost enough furniture to furnish both a small house and an apartment — if you needed an example of overconsumption in the modern age, I think that’s a fine one to use.
My cats will be spending time in Pittsburgh with me, so I took their lovely cat tree down to the loft. The cat tree is a nice piece of furniture: It’s made of hardwood, finished with an espresso stain, with segments of carpet on the surfaces for the cats to sit on and scratch.
Here are Max and Sammie on the tree, before we moved it.
The cats are up here in Butler with me this weekend, and they have mostly adjusted to having their world turned topsy-turvy, all the places that they normally sit having been moved or removed.
But Max is little lost without his tree. He keeps looking to where it should be, as though it might reappear any moment.
Think how excited he will be to reunite with the tree in the new place!
Today I learned something about myself. I learned that I am the kind of person who will pay $60 plus tax for a receptacle in which to store my kitchen garbage.
I used to stash my trash in a cheap Rubbermaid trashcan under the sink. It was a wonderful solution, until my new cat Max discovered that he could pull open the doors and get in, the better to eat whatever I’d just thrown away. I tried various means of fastening the doors, settling on a couple of elastic hairbands. But he’s a persistent little feline, and he would keep pulling and pulling at the doors and squeezing his head in until he stretched the bands and they no longer worked.
Then I resorted to sealing the doors with duct tape.
This worked well, in that it kept Max out of the trash. But at the same time it didn’t work at all, because it also kept me from putting anything into the trash. I found myself putting trash in plastic grocery store bags and hanging them from a hook at the top of the basement door, because that was much faster than peeling away the duct tape and then reapplying it.
I bought some childproofing things to secure the under-sink area, but I didn’t want to spend time affixing them — I dislike any task that requires drills — and I didn’t think they would be much of an improvement. How long would it take Max to figure out how to unlatch the childproof latches? My guess: one day.
Instead, I bought the shiny chrome trash can. It takes up little space, and it’s actually easier for me to access than the under-sink can was before Max came along. I think of it as snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Or at least, from the jaws of a clever and persistent house cat.
I finally named the new kitty. He is now Max, the Maximum Kitteh (and growing into Maximum Cat). He’s already the tallest feline in the house and looks to be still growing.
Max the Kitteh
He is also most of the time Max the Menace, for his aptitude at turning random objects into toys and either destroying them or causing them to be lost under furniture. This evening he could not settle down, persisting in playing with electrical wires and chewing on cardboard and fussing with the piano until I shouted at him.
Then he curled up against my feet and took an utterly adorable nap.
In case you missed it in the comments to the previous post, please enjoy this:
As created at Obamicon.Me by our friend Erich.
If I had undertaken NaDruWriNi last weekend, I had a terrific topic planned: the question of pet blogging. I adore my two cats, and I find their daily activities charming and fascinating, but I’m not solipsistic enough to think anyone else gives a cat’s ass about them.
Still, in looking for subjects to sketch for DrawMo, I find myself coming back to them repeatedly. They’re hard to draw, for one thing, moving about as they do. They move about even more than usual if I stare, as I do when I’m trying to draw them.
But this evening Sammy consented to sit in one spot, and to turn to face me when I called her, so I was able to make this drawing. I feel I captured both her pretty eyes and her extreme displeasure.
Still trying to catch up after missing a few days’ drawings, I also made a sketch of the embroidered Steelers logo from the fleece I wore Monday night. I had fun trying to depict the logo colors in black and white.
I did no NaNoWriMo writing today, again. My brain is fried from last night’s near-all-nighter, and I’m having trouble stringing thoughts together. I will need to make massive progress this weekend.
UPDATE: Here’s a photo that more accurately reflects Sammy’s sensibility. She is no more pleased to be photographed than she was to be drawn, though.
