I've Been One Poor Correspondent
36 degrees, overcast, rain
A very sodden 2 inches of snow on the ground
What depressingly gray and damp weather. Only the lack of towering fir trees reminds me that I am not on Puget Sound but in Alaska. Rain is so prevalent a feature of Western Washington winter that my most persistent memory of the Christmas song, "Silver Bells" includes the image of rain trickling down the windows of the family car, refracting the holiday lights of Tacoma's Sixth Avenue as the song played on the car's radio.
I seem to owe everyone I treasure emails, letters or phone calls. *sigh*
Truth is, my daily life follows a regular pattern of work, sleep, cat care and house-cleaning that I have very little "news" to inflict upon my family and friends. Many of the little landmarks in my daily life--"Frieda's not puking so much any more and her diarrhea has cleared up"--are of no interest to anyone but Denny and the vet.
In dreams and in waking life, I feel close to old friends and family members that I haven't seen in years. They are in my thoughts quite often, especially in this reflective season. Yet I seem to have a real writer's block when it comes to actually sitting down and writing them or picking up the telephone. I can find time to update this journal (and that time has been curtailed so that I am scrambling to keep up my daily entries...) so I should be embarrassed that my mother keeps dropping hints about how she'd like to hear from me.
And it's time to compose the annual holiday letter. Which makes me realize that for as busy as we always seem to be, not a whole lot has happened this year that would interest anybody but us.
But this is the first year in a long time that we end the year with the same cats we started with. I guess that's something.
Maggie
The link will take you to photos of Maggie but since she is one of our cats who hasn't had her page finalized, there isn't much else on her web page yet.
I guess Maggie is about seven or eight years old. She started her life in a neighborhood of Anchorage known as Muldoon and enters on the scene as an abandoned cat, a young mother who was raising her kittens under a trailer in a mobile home park where my brother and his family was living. My sister-in-law and nieces took pity on the poor cat and rescued her and her kittens. The kittens had no trouble finding new homes but, as is so often the case, an adult cat without the benefit of kitten-cuteness is not as sought-after as a pet. So my brother's family kept "Momma Cat" as their own.
A year or two passed and the family was moving out-of-state. So--you guessed it--we took in "Momma Cat." I met her for the first time when Denny pulled into the driveway with the fluffy tabby cat sitting on the front seat of his pick-up truck. She looked very composed for a cat who had just had a 220-miles road trip. That quiet self-composure is a hallmark of the cat we re-named "Maggie."
Maggie is a great cat. She doesn't pick fights or force her attentions on people. She is smart and pays attention and tries so hard to understand what we ask of her that she reminds me of Newt in that respect. Her fierce little Persian-type face makes her look forbidding but it masks a sweet and compliant personality that any cat-owner would cherish. I am glad the long road from Muldoon ended at our house.
She lives in the shop right now and I can't recall quite how that happened except that there were strong personalities involved and she was being terrorized by one or more of the established house cats. Moving her into the shop seemed the best solution for all concerned at the time. The dynamic in the house seems to have mellowed lately, and we are slowly trying to reintroduce her into the household social group. As she is a very low-profile kitty, I am optimistic that she can find a place in time.
She has a happy life in the shop--sitting in the window or outside in the cat run, sunning herself or looking for errant shrews in the straw carpet of the cat run. Like many of the more self-effacing cats, she doesn't demand attention but I suspect she would enjoy having more. I hope we came make that our holiday gift to her.
A very sodden 2 inches of snow on the ground
What depressingly gray and damp weather. Only the lack of towering fir trees reminds me that I am not on Puget Sound but in Alaska. Rain is so prevalent a feature of Western Washington winter that my most persistent memory of the Christmas song, "Silver Bells" includes the image of rain trickling down the windows of the family car, refracting the holiday lights of Tacoma's Sixth Avenue as the song played on the car's radio.
I seem to owe everyone I treasure emails, letters or phone calls. *sigh*
Truth is, my daily life follows a regular pattern of work, sleep, cat care and house-cleaning that I have very little "news" to inflict upon my family and friends. Many of the little landmarks in my daily life--"Frieda's not puking so much any more and her diarrhea has cleared up"--are of no interest to anyone but Denny and the vet.
In dreams and in waking life, I feel close to old friends and family members that I haven't seen in years. They are in my thoughts quite often, especially in this reflective season. Yet I seem to have a real writer's block when it comes to actually sitting down and writing them or picking up the telephone. I can find time to update this journal (and that time has been curtailed so that I am scrambling to keep up my daily entries...) so I should be embarrassed that my mother keeps dropping hints about how she'd like to hear from me.
And it's time to compose the annual holiday letter. Which makes me realize that for as busy as we always seem to be, not a whole lot has happened this year that would interest anybody but us.
But this is the first year in a long time that we end the year with the same cats we started with. I guess that's something.
Maggie
The link will take you to photos of Maggie but since she is one of our cats who hasn't had her page finalized, there isn't much else on her web page yet.
I guess Maggie is about seven or eight years old. She started her life in a neighborhood of Anchorage known as Muldoon and enters on the scene as an abandoned cat, a young mother who was raising her kittens under a trailer in a mobile home park where my brother and his family was living. My sister-in-law and nieces took pity on the poor cat and rescued her and her kittens. The kittens had no trouble finding new homes but, as is so often the case, an adult cat without the benefit of kitten-cuteness is not as sought-after as a pet. So my brother's family kept "Momma Cat" as their own.
A year or two passed and the family was moving out-of-state. So--you guessed it--we took in "Momma Cat." I met her for the first time when Denny pulled into the driveway with the fluffy tabby cat sitting on the front seat of his pick-up truck. She looked very composed for a cat who had just had a 220-miles road trip. That quiet self-composure is a hallmark of the cat we re-named "Maggie."
Maggie is a great cat. She doesn't pick fights or force her attentions on people. She is smart and pays attention and tries so hard to understand what we ask of her that she reminds me of Newt in that respect. Her fierce little Persian-type face makes her look forbidding but it masks a sweet and compliant personality that any cat-owner would cherish. I am glad the long road from Muldoon ended at our house.
She lives in the shop right now and I can't recall quite how that happened except that there were strong personalities involved and she was being terrorized by one or more of the established house cats. Moving her into the shop seemed the best solution for all concerned at the time. The dynamic in the house seems to have mellowed lately, and we are slowly trying to reintroduce her into the household social group. As she is a very low-profile kitty, I am optimistic that she can find a place in time.
She has a happy life in the shop--sitting in the window or outside in the cat run, sunning herself or looking for errant shrews in the straw carpet of the cat run. Like many of the more self-effacing cats, she doesn't demand attention but I suspect she would enjoy having more. I hope we came make that our holiday gift to her.
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