from the neighborhood: cats & kittens everywhere!
10 Friday Aug 2012
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10 Friday Aug 2012
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07 Tuesday Aug 2012
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29 Sunday Jul 2012
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I just uploaded a batch of photos from our digital camera, so have a few pictures of domestic life around Chez Cook-Clutterbuck.
Teazle is fast out-growing this basket we bought as a kitten bed the day before we brought her home from the shelter. It lives under the chair on Hanna’s side of the bed, and Teazle dutifully climbs into it every evening as we’re settling down to sleep. Not that she stays there, mind. But this is what the early part of the night tends to look like!
The other day, I happened to notice that the top left-hand corner of our fridge “art” is composed of pictures of Captain Jack Harkness (Torchwood), IKEA instructions, and two postcard ads for St. Germain beer I picked up at the local liquor store because they inexplicably featured vintage lesbian porn.
I feel somehow this picture captures a fair approximation of life around these parts.
Make of that what you will.
When we were moving everything around to deal with the bed bug scare, Teazle found an out-of-the-way spot on a bookcase in the bedroom to settle in for the evening.
Following the visit to Auntie Shoshana’s (while the exterminator was spraying the apartment), Teazle crashed on Hanna’s laptop — falling asleep to an episode of Sponge Bob Square Pants (she’s a fan; I think she understands Sponge Bob’s manic energy).
We took the opportunity of apartment shuffling to take care of a few outstanding home improvement tasks this weekend, including re-potting some plants which badly needed it. Above is a spider plant Hanna rescued from a windowless office at Northeastern, where it was struggling to survive. It’s since grown to about ten times its previous size and we decided to try letting it live in water (here blue-tinted by nutrient powder).
Turns out that spider plant roots are creepy as hell. If this blog goes inexplicably dark, you’ll know the thing climbed out of its pot and devoured us in the night.
We recently had to mount a rescue mission to Maine to rescue about eight cardboard boxes of books Hanna had stored in an outbuilding on her parents’ land (an outbuilding which had started to leak). The boxes have been living under our kitchen table, but today we spent a few hours unpacking them. Above is the sort of ad hoc shelving you begin constructing when you live in a household with two bibliophiles who have access to all of the $1 used book carts of Boston.
(Last I checked, our LibraryThing account had clocked in around ~1500 books, and only about … half? … of those are the books I left back at my parents’ place in Michigan.)
12 Thursday Jul 2012
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I thought I was going to get a review of Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care out to y’all today, but that clearly didn’t happen. So instead, here are some kitten and cat pictures and videos.
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| plus, she sometimes loses track of her limbs |
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| we’ve discovered birds in the trees outside … |
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| … and Geraldine has simply given up trying to manage the wee one! |
And finally, the video was too large to upload in Blogger, but you can check out the epic struggle of a kitten who sought to reclaim a catnip ball from the bottom of a glass bowl by following the link. I promise it’s worth it (if watching kittens be silly is your sort of thing on a Thursday afternoon!)
04 Wednesday Jul 2012
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You know you want them.
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| (photo by Hanna) |
In the past week we’ve moved from grudging toleration to a bit more companionable co-existence, at least when Geraldine is conked out and Teazle decides to use her as a pillow!
They’ve even been caught engaging in mutual grooming (although in this instance it’s Teazle-on-Gerry action only; we promise Geraldine isn’t dead, just very asleep!):
Teazle continues to fall asleep contorted in the most bendy and improbable of positions:
And when we brought home our wedding dresses from Mexicali Blues on Sunday, she investigated immediately and approved of them as suitable napping material.
For those interested, the dresses are the Batik Ashley Dress in “plum vine” and “red and green garden.” Hanna will be wearing red and I’ll be wearing the blue-purple.
Happy 4th of July everyone — hope you’re taking the day off and staying cool!
27 Wednesday Jun 2012
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It’s Wednesday, which I imagine means that many of you are ready for more gratuitous kitten pictures!
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| pocket cat! |
But even when we’re not being silly, Teazle manages to be silly for us. If only kitten-snoozing were an Olympic sport, she’d win all the medals in events such as …
Stop by next Wednesday for more kittenish fun!
22 Friday Jun 2012
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As I put this post together, we’re in what I hope is the tail-end of a three-day-long heat wave that saw temperatures in the high 90s, lows in the 70s, and high humidity here in Boston. Hanna and the cats are crashed on the living room floor in the air circulating thanks to our four household fans.
Our “isolation room” strategy only lasted about 36 hours, given the size of our apartment and the evidence that Gerry was mostly just pouty rather than openly hostile.
This was what their coexistence looked like as of twenty-four hours ago. They’ve been dancing in closer and closer circles ever since. When we got home from lunch with a friend this afternoon, they were actually nose-to-nose for a brief moment, before Teazle decided Gerry’s tail was the ultimate toy and Gerry gave her a swat upside the head.
So we went back to sleeping at respectful distance — at least from each other; as you can see Teazle likes being right near the humans. (Last night, this was me and the kitten. Although I was on my back and the kitten was draped very warm-and-fuzzily across my collarbone.)
And for those who haven’t seen them, Teazle vs. Bottlecap:
And Teazle vs. Bookshelf:
Happy Friday everyone, and more videos to come next week!
20 Wednesday Jun 2012
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…because who doesn’t need adorable kitten videos on a Wednesday?
Hanna and I have been talking, pretty much since we adopted Geraldine two years ago, about bringing a second cat-child into the household as a companion for Gerry — particularly since we’re both gone for significant periods of time during the work week. This past weekend, we decided to visit the adoption center at the MSPCA Angell Hospital in Jamaica Plain, and while we weren’t actively seeking to adopt right now we went prepared to do so if the right match was made.
Well, it was. In the form of a two-month-old foundling whom we’ve named Teazle. It was clear within moments of Hanna picking Teazle up (and having the wee one fall asleep against her bosom) that this was love and we’d do everything possible to take her home.
“Everything possible” turned out to include a last-minute vet appointment for Geraldine on a Sunday morning (she needed her shots up-to-date) and coordination with a buddy who lives near the shelter to make sure we got to the adoption center the moment it opened that day and snatched the paperwork so that no-one else could claim the kitten we were already thinking of as “our” wee one.
She was spayed yesterday morning and I went to pick her up yesterday afternoon. You would not know from this video that she’d been under anesthesia and/or had abdominal surgery a few hours before!
Geraldine is not impressed with us right now, but to be fair she’s suffered the indignity of a visit to the vet, ear drops for an infection, and now a small-n-squeaky addition to the household — all in the short span of forty-eight hours! So we’re trying to give her lots of love and normalcy and introduce them slowly.
And, like with Black Cat Rescue (the folks we worked with to adopt Geraldine), we were super impressed with the MSPCA as both a hospital and a shelter, and will gladly give a shout-out for their services and facility for anyone in the Boston area looking to adopt and/or seek care for their non-human family members and/or need a place to surrender foundlings, etc. They had tons of volunteers, everything was clean and animal-friendly, and all the animals were alert and getting lots of positive attention.
13 Wednesday Jun 2012
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| Geraldine loves the open windows of our apartment |
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| although sometimes she prefers watching us to watching the street |
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| and sometimes more than watch (needless to say Gerry won) |
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| although sometimes her tail got in the way |
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| and obviously no responsible cat would let her humans go without a cat-shaped paperweight for long! |
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| hope y’a’ll are well |
08 Friday Jun 2012
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Yesterday, Diana sent us this photograph of Geraldine on Diana’s carry-on suitcase. Gerry did reconnaissance as soon as Diana and Collin arrived, decided that was going to be her bed of choice for the weekend, and spent 90% of her time there while we were home (the other 10% was begging for tuna, per usual). The cat-shaped dent in the suitcase top suggested she spent 100% of her time napping there when we were out on the town.
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| photo by Diana Wakimoto (June 2012) |
Hope everyone has a brilliant weekend, and see you next week for more fun with The Act of Marriage, actual wedding thoughts and plans, and more.