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Tag Archives: cat blogging

an eclectic list of delightful things [summer 2015]

27 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in linkspam

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boston, cat blogging, family, links list, photos

IMG_20150724_184838It’s a busy summer around these parts, and while I have a lot of blog-worthy thoughts in my head I haven’t felt much like blogging. Go figure. In the meantime, I thought you might like a rather eclectic list of things which I am enjoying this summer.

1. Today’s defeat of the bid for Boston to host the 2024 Olympic games.

2. Gardening at our community garden. We have two babby pumpkins growing bigger by the day!

3. My #365feministselfie project (now on day 120).

4. Welcome to Night Vale.

5. A great deal of the Hawaii 5-0 #fanfic on AO3.

6. The Plaid Jacket latte at Voltage Cafe.

7. This list of needed words.

8. The fact that Seanan McGuire is coming out with a second Indexing novel (!!!).

9. The Farmer’s Lunch sandwich at City Feed & Supply.

10. Reading books and reviewing them.

11. Magenta. As a color one can wear.

12. @HorribleSanity‘s Twitter feed.

13. Looking forward to the release of Carol in December.

14. Having borrowing privileges at the Harvard libraries again.

15. English muffins.

16. Walking Boston.

17. Being married in all fifty states.

18. Being protected from workplace discrimination by existing law.

19. Our cats being ridiculous.

20. @EarlGrayTea’s epic Inception AU.

21. My #RelentlesslyGay umbrella.

 

new year’s eve epiphany presenting!

31 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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cat blogging, holidays

Given that the last few days of 2014 has kicked our asses, it was nice to wake up this morning feeling halfway normal and be able to walk out in the winter sunshine for breakfast at Fazenda and a visit to Harvest Co-op for groceries and Papercuts JP for a few final Christmas-cum-Epiphany presents. This evening, after naps, Teazle and Gerry assisted us in preparing hot cocoa mix to be included in some of the Epiphany parcels.

Has there ever been a prouder kitten? We think not.

Teazle wishes you all a 2015 full of muttering to yourself, eating things not meant for consumption, chasing your buddy’s tail, touching your toes to your nose while you sleep, and going out … and in … and out … and in … and out.

christmas on minden st. [photo post]

25 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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Tags

boston, cat blogging, holidays, photos

It was raining steadily in Jamaica Plain when I woke up this morning. While Hanna slept in, recovering from a long night of bad dreams and insomnia, I unboxed the gifts that had arrived in the mail. We’d left them packaged until this morning because Teazle (as you will see below) loves ribbon.

One of our neighbors had departed yesterday, leaving a small tree “gratis” out on the curb, which we rescued and put out on the back porch. We left it undecorated so Teazle wouldn’t electrocute herself.

Last night I made us tea and thumbprint cookies rolled in coconut and filled with wild blueberry jam. They turned out a bit on the toasty side, but that really only enhanced the coconut flavor.

Once Hanna had woken up and done yoga, we sat down for our eggnog au lait, corn honey muffins, and of course unwrapping of packages. Teazle helped.

Y’all are so generous! Epiphany packages and thank yous will be in the post before our Christmas vacation is finished, but in the meantime some thank you snapshots . . .

Who doesn’t need TARDIS (TARDII?) Christmas lights to adorn their houseplants?

. . . and Hanna’s face lit up when she unwrapped this adorable coloring book . . .

Having a mother-in-law continually working on spinning, dyeing, knitting, weaving projects means that Christmas is often full of new handmade things to keep us warm and our home beautiful.

My brother and sister-in-law sent, among other small goodies, this delightful tin ornament that we’ve hung on the knob of a kitchen cupboard, where it swings in the heat from the stove.

Art from my parents (right) and brother and sister-in-law (left) gave us an excuse to finally get out the stepladder and move our collection of stuffed creatures up atop the kitchen cupboards where Teazle cannot steal them for cat toys.

Yes, the rabbit print does — delightfully! — proclaim “fuck you.” And the print on the right is this whimsical Kliban.

Now there is a cake in the oven, Gerry is asleep on a kitchen chair, I have a glass of Merlot, and am off to find a broadcast of Handel’s Messiah or similar before settling in to finish a crocheting project or perhaps a bit of steampunk YA for the late afternoon.

This has been a photo post from Hanna, Anna, and the cats. Hope all is well with you and yours.

our lovely mechanical box, and other updates

14 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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cat blogging, domesticity, history, professional gigs, work-life balance

Graphic by @K8_Bowers.

Graphic by @K8_Bowers.

Last night, I rhapsodized on Twitter about how glorious it is to have the dishwasher in our new apartment wash dishes while Hanna and I snuggled down in bed to read. This morning, I woke up to this glorious meme, courtesy of our librarian friend Kate Bowers! Life is, indeed, good.

As the history of photo posts since mid-September attests, it has also been busy. In no particular order…

  • Geraldine, age six(ish), was at the dentist on Halloween and had to have two molars removed. Doing well, she — and by association Teazle — have been on vet-prescribed soft food diets for two weeks, plus liquid painkiller and mouthwash (just Gerry, not Teazle). We’ve been having adventures in oral syringes! She seems to be a bit less tetchy and cuddlier since the operation, so we hope she’s feeling better.
  • Teazle, age two, is experiencing her first autumn with access to “the out” (in the form of our back porch); she spends much of her time going out and returning with fallen leaves for us to admire. Or complaining that we have closed the window due to cold and cruelly blocked her way.
  • Hanna’s been crocheting lots, thanks to JP Knit ‘n Stitch‘s selection of Cascade Yarns. Her latest project is star scarves, which she makes out of handfuls of these guys.
  • Hanna and I met with our friend Natalie in mid-October for a marathon Boston Summer Seminar planning session, and are well on our way to planning an exciting program for the June 2015 attendees.
  • I’ve been blogging less here, but wrote two blog posts for the MHS on teen sexuality in the 1930s and trans-continental travel in the 1910s. Both were enjoyable little projects; my self-challenge is to focus on our 20th century collections, so often overlooked, and the results of that limitation can be quite gratifying.
  • Plus the Amiable Archivists project burbles on, mostly with a links list every Wednesday highlighting issues of workplace, power, and identity.
  • While illness prevented us from traveling to the NECBS conference at Bates College (Lewiston, Me.) on Patriot’s Day weekend, Hanna posted her presentation online anyway and continues to explore historical memes in Irish nationalist autobiography in her “spare” time.
  • Hanna has also been enjoying her “ultimate power” of meal planning and preparation (while I run errands and load the mechanical box) which I ceded to her over the summer — a decision that has worked well for both of us! Most recently, she successfully test-drove the slow cooker we inherited from the previous tenant with mac and cheese.
  • As co-chairs of New England Archivists’ LGBTQ Issues Roundtable Hanna and I launched the new Queer!NEA WordPress site this fall and I have had the pleasure of working with our volunteer “Q5” series editor, Brendan Kieran, to develop a series posts profiling New England scholars and archivists working in the field of history of gender and sexuality. We will be cycling out of roundtable leadership in January and are currently looking for a candidate to take over the position of Chair for 2015-2016.
  • One reason I won’t be returning as Chair for LGBTQ Issues is that I have volunteered to serve as NEA’s first-ever Inclusion and Diversity Coordinator. I’m gonna do my best to effect small-scale yet concrete change, particularly when it comes to keeping diversity coupled to issues of structural inequality and social justice. I expect to screw up, and am already practicing in my head how to respond constructively and non-defensively.

Also, I have my own freakin’ meme. So there’s that.

Hope y’ll are staying warm, cuddling cats, and looking forward to a rejuvenating weekend.

cat-assisted upwords [photo post]

07 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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cat blogging

To decompress from an intense work week, Hanna thought we could play a game of Upwords over tea and spice cake. Gerry thought this was a good idea!

wednesday cat blogging [photo post]

16 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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cat blogging, photos

On the 4th of July we had steady rain for over twenty-four hours, and I took the opportunity to catch up on some computer work while Hanna napped. The cats were super helpful as they always are. Continue reading →

cats + porch [#move2014]

04 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in a sense of place

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boston, cat blogging, domesticity, family, move2014, outdoors, photos

We continue to feel so lucky in finding this apartment, particularly on sunny Sundays in June, when our back balcony is a breezy, cozy sanctuary; a liminality between in and out, private home and neighborhood society.

We enjoyed brunch together last weekend, along with a little light reading.

Repotted some happy plants…

… and got creative drying the week’s laundry in the fine weather.

The porch is a new experience for the cats, who are practicing giving their mother attacks of the nerves by exploring the top of the (second floor! far from the ground!) railing without a net. We feel they should could equipped with safety tethers.

Geraldine seems largely content to chill in the shade or sun and survey her surroundings.

The clean laundry is obviously the best place for a black cat to settle in for a nap.

Meanwhile, our next door neighbors M and J have gotten a head start over us in the gardening department, with lots of promising seedlings that spent the weekend drinking up the sun and water they were afforded.

Hope y’all are finding ways of being in this early-summer moment. Happy June.

twenty minutes of hypnotically adorable

28 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in Uncategorized

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cat blogging, fun, web video

Here. My two half-finished posts aren’t writing themselves so have twenty minutes of hypnotically adorable kittens to tide you over.

#move2014 in photos [what it says on the tin]

14 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in a sense of place

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Tags

boston, cat blogging, domesticity, family, move2014, photos

So we’ve moved.

I’m headed back to our old place one more time today to pack up the fridge and a few left-over things so the cleaners my parents are paying for can come and do the final scrub down. Then, hopefully, new people will come along soon and find Old Number Twelve a good place to live, as we did for many years.

Meanwhile, I promised pictures — so here they are!

This is a lot of what the last ten days have been about.

The cats liked all the piles of clothes and bedding to sleep on.

I think they were worried we would leave them behind, so kept trying to get us to pack them!

There was a lot of turning around and finding this.

How did we fit all this stuff in one 535-square-foot apartment?!

The BEST THING about the move was when the movers — Patrick, Mike, and Damian — arrived.

They took the things away and packed them so swiftly!

While Hanna waited with the cats at our new place, I was left to “supervise” the departure by drinking my latte and taking pictures of the emptying apartment.

The last box…

… Of serials, naturally. We’re librarians after all!

Books will be our biggest logistical hurdle. Here they are stacked up in the Inner Sanctum (what will eventually be Hanna’s meditation/yoga space (and our guest bedroom! … plus books).

These bookshelves (and three more) are already filled.

This is the new living room space (with a study nook to the right of the frame).

As predicted, Teazle and Gerry LOOOOVE this long hallway for chasing one another (particularly at night). I’m standing in the living room, and the room at the end of the hall is our kitchen. Off the hall to the right are the master bedroom, bathroom, and Inner Sanctum.

The movers put our bed back together, people!! It was the first room we made usable, after the kitchen.

Our kitchen has a table for eating! And gorgeous appliances.

Hanna found this photograph in the back of one of the cupboard drawers. Worrying? Charming? You decide! It now lives on our fridge.

We share our second-floor porch with the next-door neighbors and their cat, Jelly, whom Gerry and Teazle have only met through the window so far. Our plants are very happy outside, and we can dry out laundry out there as well! There are five huge maple trees shading the back lawn (And sheltering our house from the worst of the summer sun.

And not to brag or anything, but THIS is our new walk to work…

More house-proud pictures once we’ve actually had a chance to settle in and Teazle has finished the unpacking and investigatin’.

teazle knievel [photo post]

30 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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cat blogging, domesticity, photos

Time for Wednesday cat blogging!

I had the camera out on Sunday and Teazle was very interested.

This is her EEEEVIL CAT impression! (aka the time I accidentally took a photo with the flash on)

Little Miss Flirtypants.

The Joan Crawford look.

The “why have the petting hands gone away?” look.

Gerry maintained a stolid indifference to the proceedings…

But later settled down on the top edge of the book I was attempting to read.

(You can see that the petting hand returned to scratch Teazle beneath the chin.)

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"the past is a wild party; check your preconceptions at the door." ~ Emma Donoghue

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