All Summer In a Day, Seattle Style

Kerria flowers in bloom in garden.

"It had been raining for seven months; dozens of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Seattle, and this was the life of the men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives."

With deepest apologies to Ray Bradbury. But really, after a Seattle winter, one feels an awful lot like Margot locked in the closet.

So it was with hopeful and astonished delight that we soggy, mossy denizens of the Pacific Northwest saw the sun rise and yea, verily, shine upon us starting on Friday and continuing pretty much nonstop through Easter Sunday.

This makes us stop and take pictures of blue sky and the sun shining on things because we just can't believe it's true. Plus it might not happen again any time soon. (Indeed, the gray is back today.)

Sure felt good.

Tulips for sale at local grocery store.

Django enjoying the sunlight.

Luna likewise basking.

Pebble gets her fair share of sunlight, too.

Happy Valentine's Day...That's All

Valentine's Day Roses from a past year

Luna Lovedog, birthday Feb. 14, Superhero

Heart of a Dianthus flower, spring 2012

Roses, neighborhood steps, 2011

Django the Art Cat, with 'heartwork' in bowl, date unknown

   

Yours truly, Valentine's Day dress, 1967

In Which the Naughty Cat Decorates for Autumn

We gathered on the last day of summer, the lovely women in my monthly craft group and I, for a morning of knitting, felting, stitching, and chatting. Tea and coffee flowed along with the conversation. There were pastries. And chocolate.

Autumn would start the next day, though that was just a chronological fact; summer lingered, lolling in a beach chair, putting on its shades to block out the sight of any turning leaves. (Indeed, summer only just packed its bags and left town three days ago.)

All too soon, needles were safely stowed in a pincushion, skeins carefully tucked into bags, and cups and dishes stacked on the counter.

The dog pranced around, begging for a walk, as soon as my friends left. I put on her leash and off we went, after I remembered to weigh down the stack of orange paper napkins left on the table beneath a heavy book.

But my precaution was useless because when we returned, this is what we found:

The culprit wasn't hard to figure out. Or find.

Not only did he have no regrets, he also bragged about his work.

Django tried to convince me that he hadn't chewed up the napkins and strewn them about the floor merely to be naughty. No, this was just another one of his art installations, one in which he was celebrating autumn and was going to call "A Scattering of Leaves." But I found a big wad of napkins stuffed into the dog's water bowl, as usual, so I suspect he's just trying to veil his addiction to immersing paper in water.

(The age-old excuse "the dog ate my homework" will never be true for my daughter, because the dog is good as gold, but "the cat drowned my homework" would be 100 percent fact. The same blue geometry worksheet, for example, ended up in the drink not once but three times the other day.)

Of course, after all this hard work and creativity, he had to rest for another 23 1/2 hours.

Sox and the Kitty, Continued

Django the Art Cat, as regular readers of this blog (all 2.4 of them) will know, does not consider the day officially underway until some article, preferably something highly absorbent, has been placed in the dog's water bowl. In a pinch he'll dunk hair elastics, but he really prefers paper, particularly paper towels and napkins.

Socks are a recurring theme, mainly because they are not only very portable for a cat but also because there exists a reliable source of them: the laundry basket of clean clothing in the hallway that the resident teenager is supposed to take upstairs right away.

Said basket actually sits in hallway for weeks unless thunderous ultimatums are issued. The result is that we actually have about a dozen socks that never, ever are worn in between washings. They go from the dryer into the basket, where the cat seizes one each day and transports it to the water bowl.

There it soaks up water and, if not retrieved and hung to dry in time, eventually becomes a magnet for dog/cat hairs, crumbs, and other debris. Then it is flung down the basement stairs to go into the washer again. Such is the cycle of life for these footloose socks.

There is a long sock striped in emerald and lime green that often ends up in the drink, but right now it's hanging out somewhere in limbo-land between hallway, water bowl, washing machine, and dryer, so I couldn't get a picture of that. Hence, I've substituted Django's installation entitled "The Cat-tain and Chenille: A Study in Pipecleaners, Hair Elastics, and Water."

He appears to be celebrating St. Patrick's Day. Did he actually foresee this holiday? Is the cat known amongst my daughter's friends as "Fat Looie" and "Mr. Stupid" actually smarter than he lets on? Unlikely, as he's not only mostly colorblind but also illiterate. Heck, it took every speck of his gray matter to become litterboxerate.

Socks and the Kitty

Django the Art Cat has been experimenting with some new materials as he continues to embellish the dog's water bowl with artifacts to create installations in the kitchen.

Recently, he has stuffed an entire black yard-waste bag into the bowl (no doubt a commentary on water pollution) and padded it with a whole section of the daily newspaper (interestingly, at the same time that I was making papier-mache while helping my daughter make a costume--coincidence? I think not).

One day last week, he draped half a beach towel into the water, then lay on the dry part of the towel sprawled alongside the bowl.

His current obsession is socks--usually whole ones, but sometimes just the cuffs that have been cut off of old, worn-out ones and repurposed:

"I call this one Cuff Lynx."

"And this one is White Sox/Wet Sox."

"This work, jarring in its loneliness, is
'Sock: Lost in Dryer, Now Wetter.'"

He made a valiant effort to add unmentionables from the laundry basket to the water today but was thwarted in this endeavor by the resident bipedal philistine.

Hell O'Kitty

I love my cat.

No, really. I do.

Honest.

Most of the time.

Django the Art Cat in Action

Rare documentary footage of Django the Art Cat creating his critically acclaimed work "Crumple/Agua."

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Loopy Cat and Rainbow Swirls

Django the Art Cat seemed to go into a bit of an artistic decline over the summer. Perhaps his "mews" had departed for a vacation; perhaps he just succumbed to the laziness and inertia to which he is so supremely adapted. Or perhaps he'd just wearied of the media he was forced to work with--paper towels, hair bands, receipts, and the like. It was time for something new.

But first, something old.

Back when my daughter was in her final year of preschool, a favorite activity involved encouraging the kids to draw and then soliciting information about the drawing from them. This would be dutifully written down and the artwork slotted into the children's binders.

For some reason, my child decided that this was an ideal opportunity to just scribble. Scribble, scribble, scribble in loop-de-loops in multiple colors all over the page. Well, OK, that's fine. She's five, she's playing with color and pencils, plenty of time to stay in the lines or draw recognizable objects in the future. Or just scribble. Think of all the scribbly canvases anointed as Great Works of Art hanging on the walls of museums and in expensive lobbies and mansions.

Anyway, this was a preschool co-op, where a "free to be you and me" atmosphere reigned. Unfortunately, sometimes this meant "free to be a little self-centered monster" and "grown-ups should be all-accepting ciphers," but I digress. It was a fine atmosphere for encouraging creativity.

However. The loopy scrawls, which came to be known as "rainbow swirls," began to test the patience of even the heartiest of the "aren't children precious and amazing at absolutely all times?" portion of the parent squad. Because not only was my child producing page after page of swirls--many other kids began to churn them out, too. The swirls swept through the class like a rotovirus.

Even the teacher--the calmest, most stoic, long-suffering, and unflappable woman I'd ever met in a childcare setting--tilted her head during "sharing time" and suggested that my child try her hand at drawing something else. (Which she did, producing a tedious series of works entitled "Rainbow Swirl in the Grass," "Rainbow Swirl in the Sky," and the like.)

If I were really in step with the parenting atmosphere of my fair city, I suppose I would've crowed about the latent talent exhibited in the swirls: the intuitive sense of balance and form! suddenly jarred by a jagged streak of maroon! pent-up energy contained, yet unleashed but respectful of negative space! Like any sane parent, I just uttered things like "Look at all those colors" and "You sure used a lot of colors."

So. Fast forward nearly a decade, and right now the living room is a rainbow swirl of potholder loops. My daughter and a friend are an absolute hurricane of potholder-making activity, weaving loops on small metal looms while watching TV or listening to music. Stray loops are fair game for Django. They've encouraged him to try his paw at water-bowl installations again. And the results are looking a lot like Rainbow Swirls.

Sadly, his most colorful piece (which incorporated about a dozen loops) was destroyed by a well-meaning individual who cleaned it up and then refilled the bowl with fresh water before it was photographed. Perhaps Django intended for that to happen--maybe he was making a commentary on the brevity of life, the ephemeral nature of water, or something.

But here's a work in progress. You can see how the rigors of giving birth to a new concept have worn out the poor cat, who needed to have a little lie-down mid-production.

Django the Art Cat

Once again a stream of water flows across the kitchen floor. Thankfully, it's not due to a leaky pipe under the sink or an overflowing dishwasher. It's just a sign that Django the Art Cat has been hard at work.

Django is a big, fat, lazy, tuxedo-clad cat who spends most of the day snoozing in ridiculous postures in various parts of the house. He's an easygoing, mellow fellow--doesn't mind if the clumsy yellow Lab licks his face, doesn't think twice about sleeping flat on his back with his paws curled over his white-cummerbund tummy, doesn't object (and, in fact, purrs happily and closes his eyes halfway in contentment) if my daughter dresses him up in hats, frocks, and underwear.

He does have one passion in life, however, and it's called a bowl of water.

For the first two years of his life, he indulged his fascination with water by playing in the ceramic water bowl shared by all three of our cats--Pebble, the tortoiseshell female with whom he grew up, and Ceilidh, the ancient calico who resented him and Pebble with equal distaste.

When we got a fountain-style waterer to encourage the elderly calico to drink more water, Django thought he'd died and gone to heaven: now here was a waterplay park most cats could only dream of! Not only could one scoop water out of the bowl with a paw, one could also remove the lid, extract the charcoal filter from the reservoir, and leave the mess on the floor for an unsuspecting human to step on early in the morning.

Then Luna the Lab arrived. About 75 pounds of thirsty dog, requiring a stainless-steel water bowl large enough to bathe two guinea pigs in. Django was quick to see the artistic possibilities offered by this enlarged canvas.

Throughout the day, he dabbles in drowning, floating, and soaking objects in the water: paper napkins, dish towels, paper towels, pipe cleaners, pompoms, wire fasteners, ribbons, receipts carelessly left on the sideboard, ponytail holders, flowers, and candy wrappers a certain person has not thrown away (you know who you are). For Django, it's a great day if an ice cube is placed in the bowl: he bats at it, gazes at it, licks it, and then reclines by the bowl, leaning his head on its rim, dozing as he fondly remembers the good old days, before the ice cube melted.

Greatest coup: pulling the dangling paper towel at the bottom of the roll so that all 9 remaining sheets came off and stuffing the entire wad into the dish. Yes, all the water was absorbed. (Bounty's the quicker-picker-upper, after all, though I doubt the manufacturers ever imagined their product would be used in this manner.) Yes, the dog was puzzled when she returned to the bowl for a drink, though I think she's learned to expect the unexpected, having found so many items floating in it in the past.

There's little we can do to contain his activities except mop up the mess (which often sends rivulets of water into the cabinets and under the bookshelf, especially if he's draped a paper towel over the bowl's edge so that it siphons water out for hours). A waterhog-type doormat placed under the bowl helps, as does a jelly-roll pan.

And hey, perhaps he's not just canoodling with toys. Perhaps Django is living up to the artistic standards set by his namesake, just in a different realm. Perhaps he's the Andres Serrano of felines. Perhaps he's actually arranging the disparate objects in the water to make a Statement. Perhaps the ephemeral nature of his work is a commentary on...something or other.

He's not sayin'.

Anyway, here's one of his latest works, which we call "Chrysanthemum." It had the added benefit of dyeing the water pink.