It’s Monday evening — have a sleepy kitten!
from the neighborhood: sleepy kitten!
07 Tuesday Aug 2012
Posted in our family
Tag Archives: from the neighborhood
from the neighborhood: books and cats
29 Sunday Jul 2012
Posted in our family
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 perspective on this one is a little weird, but this is me looking down to avoid stepping on the cats as I try to feed them their supper. They love to get in the way when tuna is in the offing.
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.)
from the neighborhood: are you tired of teazle yet? (thought not)
12 Thursday Jul 2012
Posted in our family
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.
Teazle likes to play under hanging cloth (sheets, couch cover, curtains, our skirts … ) and occasionally gets confuzzled as happened in this video when she tried to leap up onto the couch and found herself under the couch cover instead of on top of it.
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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!)
Stay tuned for more fun this weekend and (hopefully!) a book review or two next week. Until then, you can check out my thoughts on Transitions of the Heart: Stories of Love, Struggle, and Acceptance by Mothers of Transgender and Gender Variant Children (Cleis Press, 2012) over at the corner of your eye.
from the neighborhood: MOAR kitten pics!
04 Wednesday Jul 2012
Posted in our family
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!
from the neighborhood: teazle LOVES cuddling edition
27 Wednesday Jun 2012
Posted in our family
It’s Wednesday, which I imagine means that many of you are ready for more gratuitous kitten pictures!
We’ve discovered that Teazle loves cuddling — specifically on human chests. Perhaps it’s the feel of our heartbeats and/or the sound of breathing?
As you can see this sometimes leads to things being a bit … awkward. I’ve never felt quite so well-endowed as I do now that I know a two-pound kitten can perch on my boobs!
Then, of course, we aid and abet the cute by doing things like this (we’re probably irresponsible kitty-mommies):
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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 …
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| the full-length stretch … |
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| … and the cross-legged curl. |
Stop by next Wednesday for more kittenish fun!
from the neighborhood: friday bonus kitten pics
22 Friday Jun 2012
Posted in our family
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!
from the neighborhood: cats are busybodies
13 Wednesday Jun 2012
Posted in our family
This past weekend, I happened to have the camera out and the cat was being photogenic.
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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 |
from the neighborhood: fun with friends, part 2
07 Thursday Jun 2012
Posted in a sense of place
After Friday, it rained almost continuously the whole weekend Diana and Collin were here. On Monday, before they left for the airport, we took refuge at the Boston Public Library (between Pavement Coffeehouse and Berkeley Perk Cafe).
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| center courtyard in the rain, from the 3rd floor gallery |
The main branch of the BPL regularly hosts exhibitions, and when we were there they had — among other offerings — a wonderful print exhibition called reThink INK: 25 Years at Mixit Print Studio. Here are some of the photographs I took while we wandered around:
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| an installation featuring bees |
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| one for the ghoulish sensibilities |
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| I love the gender ambiguity of these figures |
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| and these panels featuring labyrinths |
There were a lot of prints incorporating maps, architectural elements, and text. We also noticed a theme of arctic exploration. The photograph below is of an interactive piece featuring the upturned hull of a boat to which visitors are invited to tie slips of paper articulating wishes and dreams (our favorite: “I dream of Cthulhu” and also “I want a pig.” There were also a wonderfully wide variety of languages represented.
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| ship of wishes and dreams |
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| in the third floor gallery, there were lots of birds |
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| including these haunting owls |
If you’re in the Boston area and are interested in print-making, I encourage you to check it out! The exhibition runs through 31 July 2012 at the Copley Square (main) branch of the Boston Public Library.
from the neighborhood: fun with friends, part 1
05 Tuesday Jun 2012
Posted in a sense of place
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We had a lovely weekend with friends Diana and Collin, and were very sorry to see them go yesterday afternoon (if only someone would invent reliable teleportation!). It was, in fact, a lovely weekend despite nearly continuous rain and a trip to the emergency room on Saturday (to verify a strained muscle was, in fact, strained and not something worse — it isn’t, whew). We had lots of coffee and tea and good food, good conversation, and vacation-type movies (Fast Five, and the Doctor Who Christmas special!). I’m letting myself take the rest of the week off from blogging-blogging, but here are a few photographs from our Boston perambulations.
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| sailboats on Jamaica Pond |
Our one nice day (weather-wise) was Friday, and Diana, Collin, and I took a long walk up to Jamaica Plain and had lunch at Centre Street Cafe while Hanna was in Newport, RI, for a meeting.
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| judgy cat is judgy |
All things considered, Geraldine was accepting of the two interlopers — it helped that Auntie Diana brought her favorite dried fish flakes all the way from California! She was very distressed keeping track of four people instead of just two for four whole days and crashed last night (she didn’t even get me up to feed her at 3am!)
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| I spy with my little eye … |
On Sunday, we took the bus over to Harvard Square to meet up with friends Minerva and Nancy for lunch, and between coffee at Crema Cafe and meeting up with the rest of the gang, we hung out in the Harvard Co-op (where else to spend a rainy morning but in a book shop?!). I was so excited to see Swallows and Amazons on the Staff Recommends shelf — someone raised their kid right!
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| Steampunk sighting FTW! |
… And my favorite sighting of the day goes to this man from Cambridge Historical Tours, who was waiting for a tour group at the Harvard Square T stop and checking his smartphone. He was totally rocking the coat, hat, and goggles.
On Thursday, I’ll post some pictures from our visit to the Boston Public Library’s current exhibition on print-making! Hope y’all are having a good week thus far.
friends in town – on vacation until 6/11
01 Friday Jun 2012
Posted in a sense of place
Tags
Our good friend Diana is coming into town today with her paramour, so I’m giving myself permission not to keep up with blog posts and whatnot over the weekend and into next week. Look for a resumption of activities the week of June 11 (can you believe we’re already heading toward mid June??). In the meantime, I give you pictures of flowers!
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| flowering tree on the Charles River esplanade |
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| a gift from Minerva (photograph by Hanna) |
Have a lovely first week of June, and see you back here in ten days.
