Tag: cats and New Mexico weather

Drop Me a Line Sometime

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David asked me to stop at the grocery store after the gym this morning.

This is easy to do, because the gym is just up the road and the grocery store is right across the street. On my weight-lifting days, David usually stays home and does his own work-out. Apparently shapely thighs are not a high-priority for him.

Go figure.

Oh! And many of you have asked why there haven’t been Crazy Gym Lady stories lately. At first I stopped telling them, because I thought it wasn’t healthy to take notes on how much she irritated me, just so I could regale you on the blog. Then she got fired. Yes, she did! There has been much rejoicing in Mudville ever since. Incredible difference for us. We go to the gym, work out, nobody bugs us, we leave. Ah, blessed peace.

At any rate, this morning I paid my dues to the Gods of Shapely Thighs, then stopped at the grocery store. This woman was walking in who looked very familiar. This is our local store and we’ve been here two years, so a lot of people are looking familiar now. I knew she was out of context, wearing a shapely black skirt and jacket. But she’s very tall with tousled curly hair that’s quite distinctive. So I’m studying her as she walks in, trying to place her. She stops, just inside the door, at the greeting card carousel and starts flipping through them, frowning.

In trying to place her, I’m thinking she usually looks relaxed and happy. This morning, she was anxious, stressed. It was a bit after 7 and she looked like she would be heading into town, but had to stop to buy a card first. As I did my shopping, I thought about who the card might be for and how pleased they would be to get it. Or she was dressed to attend a funeral and the card would be for sympathy and would likely make the person weepy to read it.

Regardless, whoever gets that card likely never will think about the effort it took for my familiar lady to stop, pick one out and buy it on the way into town. A matter of minutes, but it cost her a bit of stress.

People in our lives do so many things for us, large and small, daily and annually. Some we expect. Some we don’t. But they all feed into the vast blood supply that supports and nurtures us.

I’m giving a bit of thought to that today.

Wild Kingdom

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Not the moon, but the sun, seen through the smoke haze at about 7pm.

Today we have some video treats from the wildlife camera. It’s not lions, tigers and bears, but these are some of our daily visitors.


This is a Towhee. They’re very friendly, happy birds. They love to get inside of things. If you open the garage door, they fly right in. They get inside the Jeep when we have the bikini top on it. Funny little birds.

The rock squirrel is what David really wanted to get on film. They’re difficult to photograph because they’re fast and suspicious. You can see this one watching the camera. We think they have babies because it looks like this one is filling up its jowls with water, to take back to the nest.

This looks like just a bit of Towhee, but if you wait for the 5 second mark and watch the upper right quadrant, you’ll see a lizard go by *really* fast.
Leezard!

Wild Kingdom

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Not the moon, but the sun, seen through the smoke haze at about 7pm.

Today we have some video treats from the wildlife camera. It’s not lions, tigers and bears, but these are some of our daily visitors.


This is a Towhee. They’re very friendly, happy birds. They love to get inside of things. If you open the garage door, they fly right in. They get inside the Jeep when we have the bikini top on it. Funny little birds.

The rock squirrel is what David really wanted to get on film. They’re difficult to photograph because they’re fast and suspicious. You can see this one watching the camera. We think they have babies because it looks like this one is filling up its jowls with water, to take back to the nest.

This looks like just a bit of Towhee, but if you wait for the 5 second mark and watch the upper right quadrant, you’ll see a lizard go by *really* fast.
Leezard!

Dreading the Banal Finale

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The first blossoms of spring!

So, never mind about devastating earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan, let me tell you about my fingernail. Fair warning, this is frivolous and silly.

From the Department of Banal Details About My Life, here is Exhibit A:

Okay, it’s the only exhibit. But see how my social finger has that big white mark? It’s harder to see the bruise around it. Hey – it’s really hard to take a photograph of your own right hand when you’re right-handed. Anyhoo, that white stuff is my fingernail splintering apart due to the damaged nail bed around it.

Back around Christmas I injured that finger. I thought about making up a story here, about how I was snatching an orphan, or perhaps a kitten, from the path of an oncoming train. But I couldn’t tweak the plot enough where I ended up with only a pinched finger instead of a severed limb.

So, okay, maybe I was luxuriating on my mom and Dave’s fab patio in Tucson and reached back to adjust my lounge chair and caught my finger in the mechanism. I didn’t spill my drink, but it *really* hurt.

Look – I told you this wasn’t on the scale of 88,000 people missing in Japan.

The blood blister and bruising at the base of the nail healed in a few days, but I’ve watched this fault in my nail move bit by bit towards the tip of my finger over the last two months. I know when it reaches near where the nail bed ends, my nail will break, probably well below the quick.

I’ve been keeping nail polish on it, to fortify the strength of the nail. Now, I am not the kind of gal who keeps her nails polished. Special occasions, sure. In college, I used to go around saying “Show me a woman with a perfect manicure and I’ll show you a woman with a lot of time on her hands.”

Yeah, I didn’t have a lot of friends.

I put polish on again last night, after I took this pic – which is why I didn’t retake it for better focus. All you’d see is pink. But I can feel the instability on that side of the nail.

It’s like this slow-motion mini-disaster. The tension builds over two months, reaching back to the moment of that initial injury, foreshadowing the ultimate breakdown. Now, finally, after following this story for weeks, I’m reaching the end and I’m dreading the finale. The blood, the shredded nail. How I’ll have to walk around with my social finger sticking out so that it won’t catch on things.

Maybe that part will be kind of fun.

Ducklings

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This morning we hit -20F. Our little adobe house isn’t meant for these temperatures, but we’ve gotten by just fine.

I find myself worrying about the birds and the wild animals.

It’s silly, I know. I should worry about the homeless people. About the poor living in poorly heated places and the kids going to school with too-thin jackets. But I have this thing where I fret about the animals. I wonder how the birds make it through the night and I’m relieved to see them in the morning, puffed up with indignation against the cold, clustering around the feeder. They know how to make it through the night.

It’s not like I can do anything to save them anyway.

Another feature of the Las Vegas strip are the rows of people handing out the little cards advertising the hookers. They have this technique where they pop the cards against each other, making loud clicks that draw your attention and they hand you the card. You have to get good at tuning out the sound – and the row of dour-faced men offering the cards – or you never get anywhere.

They mostly tried to hand them to David, though they’d give ’em to me, too, if I let them. As we walked down by the Mirage, enjoying the warm sunshine, I asked David what was on the cards. I’d so carefully not looked at them, that I then wondered. Pictures of girls, he told me.

We stopped by the fountains at the Mirage to admire the many kinds of palm trees in their landscaping. What? We like palm trees. Paddling around in the water was a duck and two very new ducklings. David was surprised they’d hatched in January. Some tourist guys tossed bread at the ducks, laughing as the little things tried to gobble the stuff down.

I confess I fretted about them. Did they hide when Mirage does its volcano effects? Would some idiot feed them something poisonous or try to play with them? I blew out my breath and let it go. The ducklings lived before I knew about them and I can’t sweep in and save them anyway.

As we got near our hotel, David started accepting the girlie cards. Like a wave, the grim-faces turned to smiles and the guys happily handed him cards. Within seconds he had a handful. I asked why he started taking them and he said “I thought you wanted to see them.”

So, we drank wine in our pretty hotel room, watched the sunset and flipped through the nearly 50 cards he’d acquired in the course of crossing the street. We talked about which girls were pretty and which poses looked sexy and which not. Then one card caught my eye. Kari, thin, red-head pale and with a glassy-eyed, lost look on her face.

“She looks way too young to me,” I commented.

David took the card from me. “She looks strung out on drugs, is what she looks like.”

She probably is. And she might be legal and she might not. I wondered where in all that tumult of noise and lights she might be. And I realized I fretted about her like I worried about the ducklings. There’s something about the small, the young and the weak dealing with a frequently harsh world that tears a little piece from my heart.

I meant to save Kari’s card. David threw them all away and I formed the idea that I should write about this and go dig the little card out of the trash. I could scan in her picture and tell this story. I fantasized that someone would recognize her, save her, perhaps. Then we checked out before dawn and I forgot in the flurry.

In the end, I suppose, as for all of us, it will be up to her to save herself. As it’s up to the birds to survive the cold snap and the ducklings to enjoy their bit of tropical paradise and avoid the dangers.

Still I remember Kari’s face and send hopeful thoughts her way.

Everybody Has One

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I thought about posting snow pictures, but with an arctic storm covering 2/3 of the country, I figure we pretty much know what snow looks like by now. It’s a very chilly -6 in Santa Fe this morning. Very cold for us!

The other day on Twitter, an aspiring writer mentioned that she finally saw Avatar. She noted that the plot was weak, but the special effects were good.

This irritated me.

Avatar may be many things that one wouldn’t like in a movie. The 3-D thing gives a lot of people headaches. You could say the plot is a recapitulation of many other stories. You could be a biologist like me, and pick apart whether the whole “plug-into-each-other” neurophysiology is at all feasible.

Yeah – biologists can geek out, too.

But don’t go around saying the plot is weak. The plot of Avatar is classic. It runs like clockwork in the movie. It hits every emotional note perfectly and plays into a number of classic themes. Sure it feels cliché in places. You know the saying that things become cliché because they’re true? Exactly.

It’s really the perfect plot.

Now, I understand if a writer’s aspirations are not to write a story with a classic plot line. Stars above know I’m terrible at sticking to a classic plot line. But it would be foolish of me not to recognize a strong plot when I see one. That’s part of knowing my craft. If I were to pick apart the craft in writing the Avatar screenplay, I’d likely go for characterization. The characters are arguably not complex or well-rounded. They have simple, strong motivations. They are there to drive the plot, not to reveal the subtle nuances of human nature.

This reminds me of my brief stint teaching writing at a local community college. I should say straight out that I don’t think I’m a very good teacher. Patience has never been my forte. I like teaching writing workshops just fine, because everyone is there to learn. I’m really quite terrible at convincing someone to learn when they don’t want to.

Thus only one semester.

At any rate, I was given a syllabus and pre-determined reading list, which consisted mainly of Best American Short Stories from several years before. Now, we all recognize that the “best” is a matter of opinion. They’re stories culled by mainly academic literary magazines from thousands of submissions, then nominated from a year’s worth of issues by the editorial staff, whittled down by a group of newly graduated interns, usually from MFA programs, and finally chosen by a “celebrity” judge, Famous Writer Person. A lot of opinions in play there, with a very particular set of filters.

One of my students was terribly upset by one of the stories. No, I don’t remember which one offhand and I don’t think it matters. She pronounced the story garbage and said she could write something better. I pointed out that her strong emotional reaction indicated that the story had accomplished something powerful, even if she didn’t enjoy reading it. She insisted that, no, it made her angry because it was so badly written. I tried to explain how many people had assessed this story. It might be many things, but badly written was not one of them. She finished with “that’s my opinion and you have to respect that.”

Well, okay.

Sure, everyone gets to have an opinion. We live in the age of easily shared opinions. For better or worse. What I did not say to her was, while I recognized her take on this story, that I didn’t have to respect it. I didn’t particularly enjoy the story either, but it wasn’t valid to say it was garbage. An opinion based on nothing more than emotion is, well, just spewing.

I walked out of Avatar wishing I’d written that movie.

Not just because of the money, which would be lovely, but because of the reaction of the people around me. The movie had been out for months by the time I saw it and the theater was packed. We streamed out in a mob with people in tears, shouting, exclaiming, waving their hand. Rarely have I seen an audience so moved.

It’s easy to disdain the successes. To cry pandering, to make snarky comments about the sparkly vampires or silly blue people. More difficult is to see what they did and how. To recognize why they touch people instead of complaining that people shouldn’t have liked it.

That’s my opinion, anyway.

Long Night Moon

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Last night was the solstice moon, the Long Night Moon. And you also likely knew, unless you live under a rock, that there was a full lunar eclipse also.

No, I didn’t get any photos of the eclipse. We had a fair amount of cloud cover last night. I got up at 12:45 to see, but to no avail. It’s funny here – the clouds will lay low and flat over the top of us, but the horizons will be more or less clear.

So I caught the moon here, rising full on the longest night of the year.

And here she is again, over fourteen hours later, after a long, leisurely stroll across the sky and through the earth’s shadow, to set into the pink of sunrise.

The long night is over. Now we turn our eyes to the east, and the first day in our steps towards summer again.

Looks pretty glorious to me.

Tao of Kitty

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Bougainvillea from Thanksgiving in Tucson. No need for autumnal tradition there.

Every day my cat Isabel waits for her chance to go outside. It’s her very favorite part of the day. She loves to stalk the birds, roll in the dirt sit in the sun. With these short days, she has to wait longer and longer to go out, because I won’t let her until the sun is high enough that there are unlikely to be coyotes hiding in the shadows.

Fifteen minutes ago, just after 7, three coyotes trotted by. Well after sunrise, but the shadows are still long. Isabel wanders into my office, mewing with charm, coaxing me to let her out.

Not yet.

Because it’s colder now, and sometimes blustery, she doesn’t stay out long. She’s spoilt with me working at home. Ten minutes after I let her out, she’s outside my office window, asking to come in. I don’t mind – it gets me out of my chair, after all. I’ve threatened to tweet every time I let her in and out, with cheerful encouragement to bring it on.

And they say Twitter has no real substance.

Every morning, though, Isabel seems to head out with supreme confidence and joy. Sometimes a cold gust will hit her and she’ll crouch down, flattening her ears. Other mornings are still and she’ll venture out with tail high, but come in sooner to warm up.

I wonder what she understands of the seasons. Does she have a sense that we’re just heading into winter and that there will be a long cycle of cold before her hot summer days return? Perhaps every day is new and immediate for her. She could be expecting to walk into flowers and heat any day now.

It’s likely more that she has no expectations. If animals live in the moment, then things are what they are. Yet, I know she misses us when we’re gone and she remembers good hunting spots. I watch her making the rounds of places she’s caught mice and gophers in the past. From the moment the alarm goes off, she’s prancing around, excited to start her day. I believe she understands past and future.

Some people say you should never let cats outside at all. That if you never do, they can’t miss what they’ve never experienced. I’m not sure I believe this. The world is the natural habitat for all of us. We retreat to shelter, for warmth, for safety, but that’s not where any of us belongs, cloistered for our entire lives.

So, I wait for the sun to get bright enough – not yet, and it’s almost eight now – and I watch her go embrace the world for what it is.

I try to do the same.

Sister Sally and Brother Chuck

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A very chilly 8 degrees frozen solid here today. Unusual for us. But then, even Tucson got a hard freeze.

Arctic air, paying us a visit. Just a little reminder that it can.

Besides, it’s sunny and clear. Already the solar energy is warming the house.

I’m an only child, if you didn’t know. My mom didn’t really plan it that way. In fact, I’m sure she would have loved to have more children. But it took five years of trying for her to get pregnant with me and then my dad died when I was three. She was a widow for four years and, when she remarried, my stepfather didn’t want more children.

(In many ways, he didn’t really want even me, but he loved my mother and we were a package deal. Don’t be sad – things got much better once I was an adult.)

At any rate, as a wildly imaginative kid who often played by herself, I enjoyed the company of many imaginary friends. One was a ghost I called Casper, along with a little girl in a red dress named Jill. I remember seeing them quite clearly. They were vividly present to me. Sometimes I wonder if imaginary friends aren’t some kind of non-physical entities that small children have the non-busyness to talk to. Of course, there was also a magazine rack shaped like a cat that I remember told me stories when we lived at my grandparents after my dad died.

Fine lines, I suppose.

I never felt the lack of siblings, except that people were forever asking me if I minded not having them. People being grown-ups, of course. Other kids never asked me if I minded. In fact, they always said how lucky I was, usually when an older brother was tormenting them or a younger sib was being a pest. As I got older, nothing I saw in my friends’ families made me think I was really missing out on the sibling experience.

Except that people kept on about it. People even sometimes hinted that I might have psychological problems because of it.

So, at one point, I invented a little sister. I couldn’t see her as clearly, but she was short, bouncy, and had blond ringlets. I named her Sally. She was an ideal little sister because she was available to play or gaze at me in adoration, and also conveniently disappeared when I lost interest. She didn’t last very long, but I do think of her, from time to time.

I thought of her a little while back, when my mom’s friend, Jan, was dealing with her aging mother and all those awful decisions about nursing homes, etc. Jan, also an only child, said to my mom over drinks: “I keep wondering – where the hell is Chuck?” When my mom looked blank, Jan explained that Chuck was the brother she never had, the one who should be there to help her make those decisions.

My mom just got a new kitten. This sounds like not a big deal, but it is. Since her last cat died, over a year ago, she’s gone without. For pretty much the first time in her adult life, she hasn’t had a feline companion. So about a month ago, she finally went and got a rescue Main coon kitten.

And named her Sally.

It’s significant, I suppose, because my mom had to take into account that it’s possible Sally will outlive her. She asked me if I’d take her in, if it came to that. I said of course I would, though I don’t like to think about that.

Sally is a bit skittish yet, from her traumatic start, but we played with her all of Thanksgiving. She became the main entertainment. By the end of our four-day visit, she’d let me rub her ears. But David won her heart by teaching her that couch pillows make great tunnels.

So, now I do have a little sister named Sally. One who lives in the immediacy of the moment, who forgets her fears in the spirit of play.

A lovely addition to our little family.

Hunters Moon

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Our weather has finally turned. Gone are the hot, dry baking days.

The last week has been cool. All night long the rain pounds on our flat roof, a soothing sound that makes me want to tuck deeper into the warm covers.

I thought I might not catch the rising Hunters Moon, but then it crested the cloud banks over Tonto National Forest, in all its radiant glory.

We lead fortunate lives, that we don’t worry about hunting for the winter. We may fret about paying the credit card bill or defaulting on the mortgage, but we aren’t watching the descending long nights with trepidation, wondering if we’ve put enough food by to last all the way though deep winter and spring blizzards. We don’t look at our children and wonder which won’t be around for the next summer.

Perhaps worry is worry and the subject doesn’t matter.

It’s human nature, I suppose, to take the blessings for granted and focus on what we don’t have. We angst about what people might think of us, whether we can win the lottery and get that million dollars, if that agent will request a full manuscript. It’s not that these concerns aren’t important. If they weren’t meaningful to us, they wouldn’t occupy our attention.

But we’re not counting on the full moon to give us a little more light to hunt by either. Instead, it’s just a beautiful orb, illuminating the night.