Wednesday morning, 5am

 

Cat: WTF is this?

Me: Your breakfast. Mmmm, chicken hearts, yummy nummers.

C: Where’s the rest of it?

M: That’s it, Senor Chonkorito. The vet says you need to drop some of that pudge.

C: Sez you, fatboy! Well, this is bullshit. I need to speak to your manager.

M: The Bride is asleep and she’s totally onboard with this, so…bon appetit!

C:

M:

C: What a fuckin’ fuckstory. Everyday it gets worse around this hellhole.

M: And did I mention the change in the kibble distribution..?

C: Nomnomno…wait. WHAAAAAT..!!??

Cup Final

Meant to get back earlier, but Cedar and I were utterly waxed by the high drama of the World Cup Final...

Not my doggo, BTW; she's a friends', and a very sweet girl.

Anyway, yeah, the Final. 

I have a weird relationship with Argentine soccer. The Albiceleste are, have been, and can be, a magnificent squad that plays gorgeous, engaging football. 

I'm not exactly a Lionel Messi stan, but I respect the guy's skills and was vaguely happy that he finally got to the top step after all those hard years and disappointments.

At the same time, it's hard for me to get around the ugly things also associated with that blue-and-white kit. The Dirty War Cup of 1978 and the brutal chicanery that the junta put into ensuring that their team took the gold, including the shiking of another truly great side, the Clockwork Orange of Seventies Holland.

Then the second star in 1986, which is indelibly linked with one of the great and appalling characters of the game, Diego Maradona. 

His quarterfinal against England sums up my feelings about the Albiceleste; a moment of utter shame followed by a moment of unutterable brilliance. 

We're all a bit like that, I suppose; we can be thugs moments before or moments after being kind and gentle. The hard part is getting beyond the way we tend to save the kindness for our "own" and the brutality for "them". 

I'd like to pretend I don't share that failing. I do.

So it was with mixed emotions I watched the Argentine fans and their team celebrate, because I couldn't entirely forget the past to revel in the present. They had no such constraints, and that's what makes this game so compelling. It's the long, slow, grinding oppression of anxiety and fear as you watch your hopes teeter on the brink...

...and the sudden, wild, manic explosion of joy when they win...

...but with the lurking understanding that that joy is never completely free of the shadow of grief and loss.

Which is what gives the game whatever weight it has. It's a bit like life; sun and shadow, joy and pain, hope and fear.

Which, in turn, leads me back to what I meant to talk about this past weekend. But sufficient unto the day is this rumination on the import of a kids' game. I'll be back later to day to talk about what is bugging me about the goings on out in the unpaved parts of my crib.

Nine

This was a hard post to write, and I almost couldn't bring myself to do it, and if that seems strange for someone who writes about his dead child every year, well, life can be like that sometimes.

Because this is about losing a little cat.

This - the cat, not the woman, is "Nine".

After we lost Nitty Kitty our daughter insisted that we were a "two-cat family", and that just Drachma the Merkitty alone wasn't enough. She insisted that we needed another kitty, was the guiding force behind the search, and finally found the Perfect Kitty; a small gray-and-white rescue cat. 

Her name came from the number of the storage unit in which she had to live for years.

Nine.

She'd had a tough life. One of her former families had another cat that objected to Nine, so the poor kitty had to live in a mudroom with a cat flap. 

That was it; the mudroom, the flap, and the yard, was her world.

She'd had a horrific case of ear mites that had given her a savage infection that was so bad that it messed up her inner ear, and thereafter she lived with her head cocked to one side, as though she was faintly perplexed by the entire world.

She was a foster kitty, so The Girl brought her home in hope. 

Drachma was an utter shit, of course, but the little newcomer was so sweet and loving that everyone but the Boy was willing to tell him to suck on it. 

Small Cat - as we started to call her - was a perfectly adorable and immediately well-beloved member of the family.

She had some kind of adorable quirks. 

Dirt. She loved dirt, dry, fluffy, dusty dirt; she'd race outside to wherever there was a delightfully fluffy bare spot and roll in it until she was utterly and happily filthy. So she was thrilled when we started the excavation for the front walkway; the spoil piles were perfect.

She was a cuddler, a real lap-kitty. After going through a series of very cat-cats (when asked whether Drachma was a "good cat" my Bride thought about that for a moment and replied that he "was very good at being a cat.") it was wonderful for the Girl to have a loving kitty who would cuddle with her.

The only snake in Eden was the little one's health. The damn ear infections just never seemed to completely go away. Every so often we've have to clean her ears, and we had to make sure that after her dirt-baths we brushed her thoroughly. But she was such a dear and loving kitty we were happy to take care of her.

So it was concerning but not exactly an emergency when her ears started troubling her again this summer after about a year and a half in our home. 

We took her to our regular vet, who told us she had "polyps" in her inner ears, and recommended a special "skin vet" who could remove them surgically.

So one morning in August I fed her her pre-op pill...

...which turned out to be a kitty-cat Xanax, and it was worth the price of admission to see the little one experiencing what must have been a goddamn amazing cat-buzz, and off we went to the vet. They extracted the polyps, returned the small one, and sent off the polyps for biopsy.

One came back cancerous. 

We scheduled a visit to a cancer specialist in January.

Then right before Christmas the Girl called in panic. Nine's ear was bleeding again. A hastened trip to an emergency vet showed that the mass had grown back in her left inner ear.

After that the end came painfully quickly. 

We tried to get her in to see a kitty-cancer doc and couldn't until after the new year. Between the holiday and January 6th she developed a palpable swelling on the left side of her head and down her neck.

I put her in her carrier and took her to the kitty oncologist in January hoping, frankly, for a miracle.

The oncologist was fresh out of miracles.

I cried in the car on the way home.

We knew it was weeks and not months, but within a fortnight she was wheezing as the cancer invaded her lungs, and though her appetite was undiminished she could no longer swallow solid food. 

We called the people at Compassionate Care. The kind, quiet vet arrived late one weeknight. The small one went quietly, first into drug-induced slumber in the Girl's trembling arms...

...and from there across the threshold of the Great Sleep.

If I ever lose my day job I'll be able to make a living as a cat gravedigger; Nine's was the third (after Lily's and Nitty's) I dug in the backyard.

The small one lay in state on the table for an hour as I dug in the cold wet earth under the drizzle that seems to be a household tradition for burying our cats. 

A final drink of sake' and candles at her head.

We all cried again when we laid her in the ground and covered her little cardboard coffin with the clods of soil that will divide her from us forever.

I told the Girl, and it was the simple truth, that for all the cats I'd known since I was small little Nine was the sweetest, lovingest kitty I'd ever known, and I'd loved her best of all.

The Girl grieved for many days. During her mourning she found a little temple bell at our Asian grocery. 

She hung it over Nine's grave.

So now the gentle chiming of her bell still reminds me of how heart-full little Nine was, and how much we all miss her. 

Your time with us was so short, little one. I wish your warm, soft body still curled on top of mine. 

You had too short a time to be happy and beloved.

Life can be like that sometimes. I'm sorry.

We miss you.

Nine Gellar 2013?-2021

Flown Away

Last Sunday I was bringing the Boy back from his first kendo class when I got the text message on my phone.

"Am at grocery store. Need you go home now. Missy just found Spots dead."

Spots Pecker Violet, as he was originally known, came home with the Girl back in November of 2013. He was a "hand-reared" blue-phase parakeet who was born in the little "BiZee Bird Shop" out in Beaverton.

Now my experience with pet birds up to Spots was limited to the Bride's companion, Oxey the Cockatiel, who blended in with me and Lily the Cat and Quinn the dog when we first moved in together back at the turn of the 21st Century, and a nastier, more snappish creature never lived.

He seemed to dote on mi esposa, clambering onto her shoulders and nibbling on her earrings, but he would hiss and bite everyone else, including his stepfather (that is to say, me...). He was grossly cagebound and nasty about it, and when he would get out of his cage he was nasty about that, too.

He could fly about as well as a paper airplane, fluttering madly while losing altitude until he ran into a wall or a window, whereupon he'd float to the ground and scrabble about on the floor, hissing and biting. He was so nasty that even the cats seemed intimidated. He really was a pill.

So I wasn't prepared for how sweet and personable the little budgie was.

He loved to climb on you, just as the cockatiel had. But he never bit. He would nibble; he loved the Bride and Missy's long hair, and he like to perch on my reading glasses and pull my eyebrows, which was incredibly ticklish but kind of fun. He was very patient, and would sit with you for hours, chirping and nuzzling.

He was a good little companion, and Missy was a good caretaker; playing with him and giving him the greens that he savored. We had to be careful, because the cats were unsurprisingly fascinated by him, especially Drachma, who would have caught and killed Spots if he could have.

Rotten cat...

Spots was Missy's beloved pet all through her childhood. He was her treasure, she was diligent and kindly, ensuring he got his playtime and healthy food and was kept safe and happy.

But children grow, and sometimes they leave their childhood joys behind. Missy is now a middle-schooler, a theater kid, has interests and friends outside the house, and slowly found herself visiting and caring for her little bird less often. Somethimes Spots could go days without leaving his cage, joining us only though his voluble chatter from his cage in the far corner of Missy's room.

Too late, she said afterwards, she'd idly noticed several days earlier that his chatter seemed less animated, and his movements less energetic.

But she told herself she'd check in on him later. And later became later until finally when she did go to him she found him lifeless in the bottom of his cage.

She was bereft.

There were shared tears, and we gave her lots of hugs and kisses. We grieved over him, and wrapped him in a soft cloth, and buried him out in the side yard, under the star magnolia, in what we call "Bryn's Garden". We got flowers for him, and still are pondering what to do with his vacant cage, a sad and empty reminder of the small life that is no longer with us.

And perhaps the most difficult part is that the Girl blames herself for not being more attentive, for not checking on little Spots sooner, for not saving him when he could have been saved.

And all I can do is hug and kiss her and tell her I love her.

Because she's right.

She could have, and that's a wound of the heart she will have to carry with her always, just one of a thousand tiny agonizing piercings, like the crown of thorns around the icon of the Sacred Heart, that will linger as long as she does, to remind her of that small moment of carelessness that led to her little pet slowly dying alone on his perch in the quiet of the empty room.

We are none of us guiltless.

But it is not the guilt itself; far too many of us stroll through life careless and reckless of the harm we do.

It's the knowledge of that guilt that weighs some of us down so heavily.

Death, be not proud

It was almost six years ago when we last had to take leave of one of the cats that have the run of this place, and I still have a small empty place in my heart where little Miss Lily used to be.

Now the time we will have to pet Nitty Kitty farewell is fast approaching.

She has been getting thinner and weaker all this past year - she's well over 15 years old, which is something like 140 in cat-years - but was doing as well as an ancient cat could be expected to until this past weekend. We had a nasty, rainy couple of nights and the Nit, who loves to stay outdoors in the vilest weather, was outside, as usual. She came in looking like pure hell; filthy, wet, covered in her own wastes.

We cleaned her up, but she insisted in returning to the rain. Finally the weather turned frigid and we brought her inside for her own safety. We made up a little cat bed, filled a litterbox, and plied her with food and medicine.

She didn't improve, growing shakier and more ragged by the day. Finally my Bride and Little Miss took her to the vet and discovered the inevitable. She's dying, ridden with some sort of awful ancient-cat-cancer. All we can really do is decide how long to palliate her dying, how long to ease her with medication and love (and cat food) until she can go on in this life no further.

Nitty, being the iconoclastic cat she is, has decided to thumb her nose at death by being the most obnoxious cat she can be. After complaining vociferously about being kept indoors she proceeded to ignore the soft cozy bed that we made for her and chose to sleep in her litterbox.

Cat...

Then again, I suppose she'd doing what I hope we all can do in the end; flip Death the finger and go to hell in our own unique fashion.

Dammit.

I'll miss you, cat. You were always a goofy critter, but we will be the lesser for the loss of you.

They've finally developed the boneless cat

And here he is, with Missy:

Drachma really is the sweetest kitty. He's not particularly a lapcat; I mean, he tolerates and even seems to enjoy being petted, but he doesn't really seek you out and cuddle with you in hopes of a pet.

But he's incredibly tolerant of being hauled around and mauled by the urchins. Practically every other cat I've ever worked for would have sliced the little mongers to ribbons for the stuff they do to him. Not Drachma. He simply lies quietly under their abuse until he's had enough, at which point he wriggles free.

I constantly remind the sprogs of this but they seem unconvinced. I await their encounter with a different, more typical, kitty and expect that they will be quickly disabused of their foolish conviction...

Just in case, here's the reference in the title.

It's actually sort of sad, a reminder of the time when Charlie Schultz bothered to actually cartoon and his creation was something other than a vehicle to huck insurance...

Woolgathering

No real agenda today. Slow at work so I'm stealing company time to just idle around this shebeen without any actual purpose other than maundering, so please excuse my disorganization.

One thing I completely failed to post about was that the Bride and I had a very muted (Muted? Nonexistent, more like...) acknowledgment of our twelfth anniversary Monday week; it was back in October of 2002 that we wrested legal sanction out of the State of Oregon for our mutual concupiscence.

She was utterly whacked from yet another day tangling with The Boy and I was working late and still trying to get my hands on her anniversary gift. I did get it, a couple of days later, and we had a quiet moment last Friday remembering why we then, and still, long(ed) for one another. Along with her soft green scarf and handmade necklace I gave her this:

Mistress of mistresses, mother of memories,
O you my every pleasure, you my every duty!
You shall recall our pleasures and ecstasies,
The warm peace of our hearth, the evening's placid beauty.
Mistress of mistresses, mother of memories!

Legal sanction is all well and good. But there must also be ecstasies.

Did I mention how I so don't have anything to say about politics because my growing conviction that between the idiot "news" media and the idiot 27% (and you have that pin-up of Cheney in your cubicle so you know who you are...) that we've pretty much achieved Peak Stupid, and that whatever I could say would either be superfluous or ignored?

Yep.

I'm not sure which disgusts me more, the whole "To arms, to arms, the Sunni militia is coming!" nonsense, or the headless panic over a blood-borne pathogen that has a total U.S. morbidity of three and mortality of one.

On the former that fat bastard Brecher has been right all along, and on the latter...well, I don't know how to put it better than Pierce, so I won't:

"There evidently is going to be a strong constituency on the committee for some kind of travel ban on the countries in Africa on which the disease is laying waste, even though every expert in the world is saying that this is a terrible idea. (Governor Rick Perry, whose state is ground zero for Ebola in America, apparently believes there already is a travel ban on flights from Europe, to which he has brought the Spectacles Of Wisdom to "burnish his foreign-policy credentials," which is putting a shine on a sneaker, but never mind. This is leadership? Has anyone told Ron Fournier?) There also is going to be a lot of election-year posturing and political bloviation. Fear will be mongered. Distrust will be sown. And the statistics will tell us that, throughout last year, we lost 30 people a day. No, wait. That was due to firearms. My bad."

My pal Lisa over at RAW had a good point about one of the real problems these fucking idiots should be worried about; that after thirty-some years of treating medicine as a commodity the for-profit medical community has internalized the profit-first-"customer"( i.e. patient)-service-whenever rationale of the rest of the "market". Take it away again, Pierce:

"In case you joined American democracy already in progress, this is the way it is going to work. The private, for-profit hospital in Texas completely screws the pooch. (They sent the tubes containing blood from the late Thomas Duncan through the hospital's general delivery system? This is moronic.) The CDC comes in -- admittedly, after it should have, but there are regulations, beloved of our private-sector fetishists, that got in the way -- and the privatizers and anti-government types set up the CDC to take the fall for the hospital.

(The hospital isn't a terrific place to work at the best of times, as a nurse named Patricia Lawson found out to her sorrow.)

In prepared testimony, Daniel Varga, the Chief Clinical Officer for the Texas company that includes Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, apologized to the House committee. "Unfortunately, in our initial treatment of Mr. Duncan, despite our best intentions and a highly skilled medical team, we made mistakes. We did not correctly diagnose his symptoms as those of Ebola. We are deeply sorry," Varga said.

Gee, that's awfully nice of you. Anybody get fired yet?"

As my old pal Struthers would have said, what a fuckin' fucked-up fuckstory.

But are We the People going to act with deliberate care, in light of the best information we can glean from scientific medicine?

Fuck, no, why would we want to do that when we can run around shrieking whatever nonsense Laura Fucking Ingraham, the Tammy Faye Baker of CNN, vomits into her lapel mike?

Gah. I say it's nonsense and I say to hell with it.

Speaking of insanely crazy things, how about this: Iceland - yes, Iceland, famed for herring and...well, herring - defeated the Dutch soccer team - the Oranje, the dreaded Clockwork Orange, World Cup quarterfinalists just half a year ago - 2-nil in Iceland.

Iceland! Sure, the goalscorer plays in Europe but I think the Icelandic keeper is the boxroom guy at the Rekjavik Safeway or something like that. These guys are minnows in the soccer ocean.

This was every underdog story come true. My only regret is that there was no Icelandic announcer to go utterly spastic after the victory: "Queen Juliana! Jan de Hartog! Famke Janssen! Eddie Van Halen! Hans Brinker! We have beaten them all! We have beaten them all!"

Don't get me wrong; I have always been partial to the Oranje ever since the disgrace of Argentina in 1978, when the original Clockwork Orange - Cruyff (who refused to play in the bloodyhanded Argentina of the Dirty War), Neeskens, Rep - was disgracefully robbed of the title. But I love to see these little teams upset the big, rich nations, and in soccer, Holland is very much a have and Iceland very much a have-not.

Except for this once. Wish I'd had the under on THAT bet...

There's a million tales in the naked Facebook; this one is mine.

Back when I was in college, and then later for a while when I was in the service, I had a sort-of-girlfriend.

(BTW, in case you aren't familiar with GFT conventions, people whose likeness I am neither at liberty blue to nor desire to seen blued all over the Internet are always shown from the ankles down, if possible. So this is her, over to the right there, and I should add that whilst I yield to no one in my appreciation for my Bride's attributes my old sort-of-girlfriend still rocks the black slippers...)

I say "sort-of" because I could never quite figure out where I stood with her, or what we were doing. I liked her. We were definitely friends. But we were never lovers, and I'm not sure that we were, either of us, really sure what "love" was, or how to love each other.

I know that I wasn't, and while she was, and is, a very beautiful, dear, sweet, kind, and loving woman I'm glad we didn't end up together back then for, as my first wife found out to our mutual grief, I was not then fit company for any woman of worth.

Still, we seemed to have some sort of very-close-but-not-quite relationship for quite some time that finally, as such relationships often do, drifted away when we were separated by time and space. We never even had a "breakup" in any real sense. Our association just kind of...stopped.

Decades later, while searching a completely different subject, I came across a short video clip of my not-quite-inamorata singing (and she had, and has, a lovely voice) that led me to suspect that she had moved to the Midwest and married. Several years later, motivated by a sort of vague nostalgia and curiosity, I looked her up on the dreaded Facebook and there she was. Using her maiden name, so, apparently, divorced or separated. Living in Missouri, and now an ordained minister in one of the UCC congregations there. We then resumed our friendship in the modern electronic-epistolary form of Facebook.

And from what I've seen as she was then she is still today a very good person; full of love and kindness, the very sorts of things that it seems to me to be very good for a cleric to be given the responsibilities of the job; caring for the sick and the distraught, guiding the afflicted, celebrating with the joyous and comforting the dying. She seems to me to be very likely to be a terrific pastor.

It is when I think of her that it occurs to me that one of the things that sickens me most heartily about many "religions" and those that preach them is the often-outspoken belief that having breasts and a vagina and ovaries somehow makes a person less...spiritual, less fitted for the business of contemplating, or interceding - if it is your nature to want to and try to so intercede - with the Infinite.

"Let your women keep silence in the churches..."

Fucking Paul of Tarsus really has a lot to answer for in my book.

My former-almost-girlfriend is too gentle to do that good work, but give me the Wayback set to 42AD and a good sturdy baulk of dimension lumber, and old Mister Road-to-Damascus would have been getting a solid two-by-four upside the head.

Asshole.

Speaking of soccer and patriarchal religions, I finally got to watch the Portland Pilots-Brigham Young University women's match from last week.

The game was utterly one-sided. BYU is for real; those gals are solid from front to back, and UP is gonna have trouble making the NCAA Finals with this year's young squad.

But my real thought as I was watching the play was that "Cougars" is an utterly lame name for teams from a school named for a scarey Victorian theocrat with high double-digit wives. Cougars? When the heck was the last cougar exterminated from around Provo, anyway, something like 1888? And, besides, you and I both know that cougars are not what Utah and BYU are all about, right?

It's all about the Mormons, baby.

So. The BYU men's teams really need to play as something like the "Patriarchs". "The Mormon Battalion" would be fine, as well as historical. Or how about "The Sword of the Lord"? Can you imagine the headlines in the sports section: "Sword of the Lord slays Pepperdine"? "Sword of the Lord beheads St. Mary's"? "Sword of the Lord eviscerates Bulldogs"?

Fucking stone cold awesome.

Then the women's teams, seeing how the Mormon Church feels about women in churches and all, could play as the "Handmaidens" or maybe the "Helpmeets" or the "Yeah, We're The Ones Being Fucking Silent in the Churches, You Happy Now, Asshole?"

Either that or both should play as the "Jackmormons". Except I think there's already a band named that.

Whatever. But "Cougars"? Sorry. WAY lame.

And while we're on the subject of "White People That Colonized Places" along with "Lame Stuff In General" I note in passing that the annual Columbus Day contretemps reminds me of the thing about the Admiral of the Ocean Sea that drives me more wild than anything else; his math.

Because, you see, in order to sell his expedition to the Spanish Crown he had to make the idea of sailing west to reach Japan, China, and the East Indies plausible. The farrago about the world being flat in 1492? Bullshit. Learned people knew that as early as Eratosthenes a couple of thousand years before Greek (and Arabic) scientists had figured out that 1) the Earth was a globe, and 2) that it was about 20,000 miles around, give or take a Roman mile or three.

But our boy Chris had to know that short of a ginormous expedition that Reconquista Spain didn't have the cash, the naval technology, or the inclination to outfit a fleet to sail across some 7,000 or so miles of open ocean. And he had to know that even if they had that there was no way in Hell that Ferdinand and Isabella were going to equip some sketchy Italian adventurer with that sort of fleet.

So - through a combination of ignorance, wishful thinking, and plain damn stupidity, Columbus came up with a figure of about 16,000 miles for the equatorial circumference of the Earth and a completely ridiculous distance of 3,000 miles to Sumatra. Here's a good little summary of the sort of bone-headed mathematical and navigational errors that the cack-handed spaghetti-bender had to commit to manage that.

Samuel Eliot Morison wrote of Columbus: “His calculation is not logical, but Columbus’s mind was not logical. He knew he could make it, and the figures had to fit.” Morison seems to find that admirable. I find it as moronic as panic over a bunch of raggedy-assed Arab guerrillas or a West African disease.

But maybe that's just me.

Okay. Enough meandering. I'll leave you with a couple of images:

You sleep in public in this house at your peril. This is "Drachma the Merkitty"; the thing on his head is supposed to be one of those seashall-bra things that mermaids are supposed to wear, but it wouldn't fit over his head, so its a crown. Little guy didn't wake up during the whole dress-up process, so he was pranked for hours whilst he slept.

I tried to explain that this was Cruelty to Sleeping Pets, but the small people merely laughed and continued to prank the little possum. He was quite the surprised kitty when he woke up, too.

I should add that our housecats have a long tradition of that kind of thing. When Maxine was a toddler she would announce a cat-sighting with a noise we called her "cat-scream", a loud squawk that was Maxine-speak for "Aha! Strange furry creature unlike anything ever seen in my orphanage, I shall pat you now!" and would precede a round of violent head-slapping that was her version of "petting the cat".

The calico, Lily, was smart enough to grab a hat at the sound, but Nitty (a.k.a Few Kibbles Shy Of A Full Bowl) would hunker down on the principle of "if I make myself REALLY small she can't see me". Which worked about as well as you'd think it would.

And this:

...is a mural from Honolulu. Naiad sporting with vicious aquatic pandas? Wahine frolicking in the surf with hairy racoon-like menehunes?

Your guess is as good as mine - I got nothin'. But I liked the image, so there you are.

I should really finish up my Panama stories. Soon. Promise.

Drachma the kitten on a bathrobe

Whilst I'm trying to find the time to continue my Panama tales, I should mention that we have a new little fellow in the Little House:

This ia Drachma. Yes, like the Greek money; the Boy is a great Percy Jackson fan and a mythology buff in general, and it was his idea to get a little kitten. So we headed out to the Cat Adoption Team in Sherwood for "Kittenpalooza" and, sure enough, found an adorable kitten; this little guy.

He's very sweet and playful, so much so that he's won everyone's hearts except for Nitty Kitty, who sees him as a pest and a nuisance and hisses at him every chance she gets. Which he totally doesn't get; he thinks the Big Kitty is cool and wants to investigate her and, therefore, really is a pest and a nuisance...

So we're trying to mollify poor Nit whilst trying to conceal the existence of Nitty's cat-flap from the little guy. We just don't want him getting outside yet; he's too little and the neighborhood raccoons and stray dogs (and coyotes and who-knows-what-else...) are too dangerous. We'll see how THAT works out.

I should note in passing that this season has been a terrible one for my Portland Timbers. Right now we're sitting dead last in the MLS West and our playoff hopes are pretty much dead. So this season has become one of those sorts of seasons that try the souls of true supporters. It just doesn't feel right not to sing and chant for the team...and yet, it's hard to deny that the team is truly bad. Players that had terrific years last year have regressed to their mean, while newcomers haven't worked out. The team as a whole is just a hot mess.

On the women's side the Portland Thorns have had their troubles, as well. Not as bad as the Timbers, but with several of the game's top players the Girls in Red are scrapping for the last playoff spot rather than crusing to a defense of their 2013 title. It was lovely to enjoy a 7-1 thrashing of the visiting Kansas City Blues this past Sunday, but the win left me with a real conundrum.

I am one of those idiotic fans that have irrational superstitions about games. I have a beloved Timbers jersey from the minor-league years I wear to every home match in hopes that the tiny spark of individual mojo will spur the team on to victory. On the Thorns side this season has been a shuffle through a series of team scarves.

I started out wearing my season ticket-holder scarf from last season and the result was a cascade of losses and draws. So I retired that scarf and turned to the red-and-black striped scarf of the "Rose City Riveters" supporters' group.

No luck.

So the whole connection between that and this post is that Sunday I unfurled the comical gimmick "Too Balls Is Too Many" scarf that the Riveters doped up to help a local cat charity. The "Feral Cat Coalition" is an outfit that specializes in catching these wild moggies and snipping out their girl- and boy-bits. The scarf itself is kind of a hoot, with a lurking cat face at one end (with a rather evil expression that pretty much says without words "you bastards, you cut my balls off..!") and the Riveters logo at the other,

And the team responded with a seven-goal outburst, hammering the visiting Kansas City Blues 7-1; who would have ever thought that describing a soccer team as "...just like watching Brazil!" would be a huge insult?

So. As much fun as it was, I'm stuck in my superstitious bind with my ridiculous cat scarf until we defend the championship or the season ends.

Mee-ow!

Pom-pom

Posting has been very sporadic lately largely because of this little guy:

He's a one-year-old beagle-something mix, and his new name appears to be "Pom-pom", both for the jaunty little fuzzball on the top of the old-school matelot cap as well as the rapid-firing light cannon. It's also a corruption of his shelter name, "Pomegranate" (he was imported to the Portland Humane Society from a shelter in Merced County, CA, and the intake volunteer seems to have had a taste for whimsical fruit, because he and his brothers and sisters were all named things like "Pecan" and "Mangosteen") but all in all it seems to fit him.

He's a cocky little bastard, and he's got a lot to learn about getting along with people, and other dogs, and Nitty the Cat. But he seems to be a very gentle and happy little fellow, too, so we're hopeful.

But I'd forgotten how much bloody work a new dog is. Fixing up the fences around the yard so he stays in the yard, trying to arrange the house to cat and dog don't collide catastrophically, if you will. Training wives and kids who have no experience training young dogs. So I apologize in advance for the light posting over the next week or so, but you see how it is.

Here's one last snapshot:

Sit. Pom-pom! Stay!

Sleep!

The funny thing is that this is a typical morning for me when my little girl gets into the bed.

Like the pup, she is a compulsive wriggler and loves to play as soon as she gets up.

And, like the kitten, I just want to sleep. So she flips around and kicks and pushes and rolls, and I growl "Damn it, either go the hell to sleep or go back in your bed!"

But at least I don't bite. Not hard, anyway.

The turnabout is that with a lover I'm the puppy; I enjoy a kiss and cuddle - or more, if there's the chance - in the first hour of the morning. And almost without exception my beloveds have been lovers of sleep, not lovemaking, in the small hours. Mojo, especially, loves her morning slumber; her reaction is along the lines of what you'd expect from a grizzly disturbed in mid-January.

Anyway, I just enjoyed inventing the dialogue for this filmclip:

SPARKY: Ooh! Ooh! C'mon, Puff, let's play!

PUFF: Wha...the fuck? Are you nuts? G'wan. Knock it off.

SPARKY: Awww...c'mon, l'il buddy! Play! Play!

PUFF: Faaaa...leave me alone, you idiot.

SPARKY: C'mon, let's play! I'll let you chase me! Oooooh, let's wiggle!

PUFF: I'll wiggle your ass. Go the fuck back to sleep.

SPARKY: Ooooh! Gotcha!

PUFF: Okay, biting you now. Sleep! Why can't you fucking sleep!?

The Rains Come to Stay

So Mojo gets out her grow-light to keep off the wintertime blues.Little Miss loves Mommy's bright light and wants to sit with her every morning. Mojo reads and does the bookkeeping, Missy draws wonderful ovals and squiggles that she says are "Max", "Mommy", Shea-Shea", "kitties" and "Daddy".She couldn't resist showing off for the camera though.Big brother Peeper spent some time playing nicely with his baby sister today, for which he received many a hearty spanking.After the kids get up and about it's time for Fat Nitty and Miss Lily to take possession of the bed. Here they are engaging in competetive loafing.I think that Nitty's winning.

In case you're wondering - and I'm quite sure you're not - the title of this post is from another post, that is, a short story, from a collection of stories called "Comrade Don Camillo" that was written in the 1950s and 60s, along with a bunch of other Don Camillo stories about a little town on northern Italy and the characters that lived in the imagination of the Italian author and journalist Giovaninno Guareschi.

I was introduced to these stories when I was very young - I think I read the first one sometime in junior high school so, say, about 1970. I had no idea what the Cold War meant to Europe, where the hell the Po Valley was or anything else about the people in the stories. But they were wonderful stories, full of strange humor and characters I'd never even thought of thinking of.

Oh - just to break in here - Missy has figured out that the massaging shower head is even more fun that flinging the water out of the tub by hand. Cunning girl.

Anyway, I think I titled another post sometime away back "Blue Sunday". Why, here it is. Another Don Camillo story; you can see my mind is like a pack-rat's nest. It never throws anything away, just hoards it in some crevice until it wants it again.

So if you have a moment and feel the urge, spend some time with the big priest and the big Red mayor from the little Tuscan town. You might find you're glad you did. I hope so, anyway.

It's late and time for bed. But I'll drop in tomorrow. Saw an odd little movie and it's been on my mind; got some things to say about it.