It wasn't supposed to snow this month… (5/17/11)

Broken oak

This oak tree lost its main upright top in the previous unseasonal storm, when the leaves were still on the trees, in November. The little bit of snow in this picture highlights the break and the giant branch on the ground. The branch that would have someday sheltered the house from late-afternoon, late-summer sun...

It snowed more than this though.

photo from May 15, 2011

Or I guess I could call this post "Iris squashed each spring". 

But not every spring...

It wasn't supposed to snow this month. . . . Friday the 13th at work? (from May15 2011)

Photo May 15, 2011

It hasn't yet this year, but that year it did.

It was Sunday morning, May 15th, that it snowed. This picture is from Monday morning, with patches of snow still, including this South side balcony, and the irises down below it.

But it never pays to count ones irises (before they're hatched). I didn't have a chance to make it to the quilt show either. Or to Empire Mine park to see the irises....

I have a superstition about that, honestly come by. Grandpa used to say "God willing and the creek don't rise."

For many years I have caught the bus to the nearby grocery store, and had 20 minutes to run in, get groceries, and back out to the bus stop before it comes back. (Although with the cutbacks in bus services the last several years, I now have a 15 minute walk uphill with the groceries, instead of  a level walk past 2 houses and down the driveway.)

And I usually say "With luck, I'll catch you on your way back" to let the driver know to look for me. But every time I have said instead "I'll catch you on your way back" I have missed the bus. Every time!


So I try not to assume anything will work out, just hope.

Here's the clouds from Friday the 13th, 2 days before the snow. They mean a storm is on the way in about 2 days, I think.

Pollen Season

Large pollen cones on Ponderosa pine May 3, 2011

Pollen season seems to be over for the year. There were a bunch of small pollen cones in the driveway, only half an inch long, unlike the complex pattern on the roof last year of fallen 2 inch pollen cones, and these even larger ones from 2 years ago. Like everything else here, they vary a lot from year to year.

Light rain again today, after several warm days after the last rains.


Several years ago, on an early warm night, I had opened the doors onto the partially screened porch downstairs, and a few screenless windows, to let a bat out, (which after swooping through hall and computer room, had headed down the stairs).

And when I went back downstairs with a flashlight, after hearing a bang, I heard a skittering and a scrabbling out on that porch. And the loose screen across the doorway was down. Critters had been in the house!

In the morning, footprints in the thick layer of pine pollen on the porch.  Five toes, so not cats (or dogs). Raccoons. A couple of sizes. Not really clear back foot prints.

But something funny. Among the footprints were some large poofy-puffy, roundish-ovalish marks. Tail prints!

I already knew that muddy prints on the car were different than the ones in soft dirt shown in the animal-tracks books. Tracks in the layer of loose pollen dust are different still.

Summertime, and the living is easy

New sailboat, summer 1969

Summertime, and the living is easy......and the cotton is high.

It's easy to guess that the person who wrote those lyrics had never picked cotton.

Neither have I, but my first job was as summer field labor in an experimental barley field. That was in the pre-sunscreen era, and it took only one day for me to figure out that someone as pale-skinned as I needed long sleeves and a hat.
(Why  it took me that long I don't know, I always burned badly.) And summertime work out in a hot sunny field is not easy at all.


The year I was a freshman in college, the woman who graduated as  the valedictorian that year had earned her way through college picking fruit in the Wenatchee Valley. I was very impressed.


The little sailboat is from a few years later. That's me at 19, and our dad, and a brother behind the mast. And an article had been published about PABA (para-amino-benzoic acid). So Dad mixed up some in alcohol, and my sister and I tried it while sailing across the lake. We were amazed that we didn't sunburn at all.

And around here, the living is not so easy in summertime.

True it's not between 42 degrees F and 52 on the main floor (I used a refrigerator thermometer to check that, since the thermometer on the non-functional thermostat only goes down to 52.) Sometimes 52 degrees is a lot colder than other times…

And not between 50 and 60 degrees on the top floor. The higher temperatures are after several sunny days, or when there's been a fire in the woodstove.

And I'm not wading through a foot of snow to carry firewood from the garage to the house and upstairs after several days of the power being out, like a couple of years ago. (Normally I try to carry firewood up between storms.)

Yes, it only takes 5 minutes to dress in one layer of clothes, but more baths/showers and more laundry.

But the main thing is that it takes half an hour to go around morning and evening closing/opening curtains and/or windows morning and evening, and turning on and off fans and sprinklers. And when it's hot, it's hot.

When the living is really easy here is right now, spring and fall, in the weeks when the temperature is fine and the windows can be left open to screens all day and all night. Between rain or snow storms. Before the weather gets too hot. With fresh spring vegetables or fall harvest at the grower's market.

Except it's pollen season now, or just finished. Drifts of yellow everywhere. Can't leave the windows open to let that blow in. Can't leave them open again until I've cleaned and vacuumed window-sills, porches, low roofs. Then I will be able to see if it's really over. The recent rains might have finished it, but the pollen cones haven't fallen off the pines yet.

It looks so peaceful here on campus this morning May 14, 2013Koi pond

Koi pond, morning May 14, 2013 8:30 am

But a mountain lion was seen here early this morning, and they have closed the trails. Including the one I walked to school yesterday morning.

I have heard that the half-grown ones disperse looking for new territories, and at night, following greenbelts and wooded areas and watercourses, all of which are here, they can get a long way into populated areas before dawn. Surprising everyone.

I can just imagine a mountain lion sitting on that big rock. . . 

Update May 20, 2013: 

The paper said it was a large mountain lion.

The bus driver said he hadn't seen the usual several groups of early-morning deer for 2 weeks.

But I heard that someone on campus early that morning had seen a larger herd of deer running down the hill very fast — much faster than usual. "As fast as they could go."

No kidding.

I'd love to see a mountain lion in the wild, but not quite that close.

Rain on the roses

Wild roses April-May 2012

Not in this picture, which was taken last year. (I turned it in for the Digital Photography class. There's a tiny spider…) But the last few days have been some of the very few "precipitation events" we have had this year since the beginning of January. At least it helped to contain several early fires.

This week the air has been very soft and moist, with full clouds and intermittent rain. Warmish down in the valley, coolish here in the foothills. And rain on these naturalized old-fashioned roses, which bloom earlier than the modern types, the end of April usually, I think, and part of May.*

This year it did snow and close down campus one day. And it took the prof an hour to get out of the parking lot! I had walked home by then. It's only a 50-minute walk.

That's compared to a couple of years ago, when we lost several Thursdays of classes to snow, and the kittens and I were enjoying fires in the wood-stove in the first week of June.

Raindrops on dogwood May 7, 2013

 The regular dogwoods, the eastern one, had already finished blooming for quite some time before these started. I think these little trees may be fairly new - I don't remember seeing them blooming before.

 *I don't know what variety the roses are. They get no water and reliably bloom each year. Don't seem susceptible to powdery mildew, like the similar naturalized one up the hill by the house, that has climbed a small tree and taken it over.

Looking In October 25, 2010

Sugar Mouse out on porch, Oct. 25, 2010 9am

What is he looking at?

The kittens have escaped! They knocked over their kitten gate.
(shown in The Kitten Gate)

I came down into this dining room, next to their pantry, and 3 kittens were exploring this room. As I looked for Little Kitten (Rex), one by one they started exploring through the glass door into the living room on the wall to the right. Spot was climbing the pile of firewood, and had to be grabbed before she started an avalanche.

And still no Rex.

Finally, I went into the living room, which was the room I fed him in. And in the chair all the way across the room, by the window, was the blanket we usually curled up in.

And in the blanket...

That little kitten, half the size of the others, had gone twice as far, to where he knew was a warm comfortable blanket, and climbed up the blanket into the chair!

And wriggled in under the blanket, making himself a warm nest.

Rex in blanket Oct 25, 2010 10am

That's my Rex-kitten.

A Mischief of Kittens 2013-2feb20

Photo taken Nov 1, 2010

Collective nouns. Traditionally there were many in English, mostly neglected or forgotten now. You may have heard of a murder of crows. Or, of course, a herd of cattle, a flock of sheep (or geese), a covey of quail.

The traditional collective noun for cats was clowder - a clowder of cats. Which happens to translate to clutter. And a clutter of cats is very appropriate as they lie around everywhere… in the bookcases, on the books… On top of my head!**

Although, going for walks with a bunch of cats, I always thought a covey of cats was appropriate for the way they eddied around my feet.

But for kittens, awake, lively kittens, boxing, or chasing each other or a bug, or busily randomizing the contents of my bedroom, (dumping over sorted boxes of papers and making a fort!) I do think a mischief of kittens is very right. (These names may not be original to me, I might have read them somewhere.)

And for innocent sweet sleeping kittens, certainly a clowder of kittens might work.

But for them all in a pile together, or next to my sides, or under my chin - a cuddle of kittens…

photo taken 2011

**Rex who still thinks he's a kitten, my kitten, insisted on sleeping on top of my head last night! (Update 2/21 — the last 2 nights.) He usually sleeps on my shoulder, leaning against the side of my face. Or under the covers next to me. But last night Buddy was with us inside for the first time, so the door to the room with the woodstove could be open. And Rex did not like Buddy's being on the bed (judging from the growling).

I was wearing a hooded sweatshirt. And part sitting up against the pillows. And Rex went up on top of my head, next to the pillow, and slept there for a long time. I think it might have been a sort of King of the Castle thing, but mostly "Mine - grrr".

Fraidy-cat Rexie

This is Rex's hiding place. 

All one summer, his first summer, he was afraid of the floor. He would walk very warily, looking everywhere for things that might be coming after him, or jump and run quickly across the dangerous crossings…

His sisters were locked up separately. And it took me a while to realize, but it was fan season. And any little bit of paper or dust bunny might jump out and chase him!

As soon as the fans were out of the windows he started calming down. And when his sisters were out with him, they weren't scared, just rambunctious.

And then he went into heat, and had other things to think of.

And the sisters could be with him all the time, since he was a she after all. So he pretty much got over it, and last summer wasn't much afraid of the floor at all.

But for awhile there, I was dust-mopping the bedroom and hall floors every day.

I usually came and went by the interior stairs, not the door out to the upstairs porch.

But once I came in that way, and found him up here hiding behind the closet door to the left. I think it was the first time he had been up on top of this eye-level bookcase.

There might have been a scary doorbell, and I might have been wearing large clumpy shoes.

Usually the closet door is not open, and this is not very hidden.

But it is still his hiding place.

Why I think of myself as a designer, not an artist - written July 15, 2011

 

Midnight Garden virtual batik - my fabric design at Spoonflower

Because one design inspiration gets used many times, in many forms, rather than being a one-of-a-kind artistic piece.

For instance, I did a stylized cat drawing in the '70s as letter paper. Then in the '80s, it became a silver pierced cat pin for my mother, then I did one for myself. Then later a smaller version to have cast, for my sister. Then in about 2002 I drew around it to make a fabric-type design to use in a color-theory class exercise. Just recently I finally scanned that and did a vector drawing, and a couple of different fabric designs at Spoonflower to go with the black-and-white fabric in a previous post. And this week, colored it as a virtual batik as one of several fabrics in a skirt design.

In the fabric above, the flowers are from a batik stamp I bought. It went through a couple of fabric-design versions. Then, for a limited palette contest a few months ago, I did this virtual-batik look with this new repeat. (Not these colors.)

I liked it, but wasn't quite happy with it. Now I know why. The flowers were lonely, They needed butterflies.

(That is, variations in scale, texture, and color. The butterflies, by their orientation, also add an effect of movement to the design.)

The butterflies were inspired by a butterfly picture outline, but I redesigned all the interior lines. I drew them in Photoshop to go with my fabric collection done from antique Japanese fabric stamps. The fine detail goes with the finely carved details in the stamps.

I did this fabric design with butterflies added for another limited-palette contest (although I left out the hot pink and orange and chartreuse). This contest was for butterfly designs. I intended to use several different butterfly drawings, but once I added this one, it was perfect.

And it just got 11th place in the contest!  My record. Lots of other people liked it too.

To see it as fabric, click the link in the title. It should be available for sale soon; I'm ordering a swatch. (2013 - now available.)

A house made of books Feb 23, 2011

I drew this back when I was just learning to draw on the computer.

I thought of the idea when I was taking color theory, and we were asked to produce a self-portrait for our final project.

I'll probably redraw it to reproduce on a t-shirt.

But the way it is now, it says almost more about me than I want to say.

Remembering Pandora

This is Pandora, through the window, out on the roof, a couple of years ago. On a windy day. In early spring.

If you look closely at the background, the wavery distortion in the flowering plum behind her is from the old float glass of the window, which has a water-type pattern.

Pandora was about 20 this last year. She showed up as a kitten hanging around the garage, about 2 years after I got Cheesecake and Fussy. Someone might have left her there... Carl, my housemate then, saw her. And it didn't take more than half an hour to coax her over to be picked up.

She liked Cheesecake, and followed him around. Perhaps because of the way Carl petted her, she liked to be petted more vigorously than other cats. And she liked guys. She always wanted a lot of attention if one came here.

After I had taken her to the vet for shots, we went by work to let them see her. And someone said, "She's such an elegant cat. She should have a name like Arabella or Isadora."

At my next small sewing group meeting, she spent the entire evening digging things out of everyone's sewing baskets. And Amy said "She should be Pandora!"

She was another in my list of cat names as self-fulfilling disasters. She liked to eat in the pantry, facing out, protected by the door. She learned to open all the cupboard doors - then she would go in and hang out in there. She learned to open the pull-down-snap-up door on a linen closet shelf with towels, and she would hop up into it before it snapped shut behind her.

She liked to be brushed. (And needed to be combed and clipped in shedding season.) She was one of the cats who invented  cat felting, with Cheesecake. They came and went through a hole in the screen of the balcony door, and their fur caught on the screen. Then, coming and going, they felted it into the screen! That was after I had taken fiber arts, so I noticed.

She never quite got the point of Buddy's greeting rituals, but was happy to sleep with the other cats or on the bed. If I was on my side, she'd sleep on my hip.

She squeezed under the wood stove, on the brick hearth, so I had to block it off when there was a fire in it.

20 years. I miss her.

A lovely bit of spring garden

I took this photo a couple of years ago in Nevada City. Must have been about this time of year, since the creeping phlox are sheets of color around town now, and some smaller tulips are blooming.

I wonder how I'd extend the season? Something vigorous, to compete with the creeping phlox, although it helps that it wants to grow over the edge, towards the main light. Re-blooming daylilies for summer, I think. Peach and wine colors... Or since this is in town, maybe no deer, (the tulips wouldn't be there if there were deer.)  Madonna lilies for late spring/early summer. A smaller-scale ornamental grass? Catmint?

What a charming visual gift to the passerby!

Remembering Tigrr (Musketeer) written June 15, 2011 8pm

Tiger (Musketeer) on my jacket - afternoon Dec 10 2009

This is Tiger in Mom's house, after I had come back from a long picture-taking session down at the beach, and a walk.

When she took him from me (1996), I had named him Musketeer, because of his gorgeous Puss-in-Boots coloring. (And he was an exhibit in my list of cat-names-as-self-fulfilling-disasters, since as he grew older he started beating up on everyone.)

I had picked him up (literally) at the feral cat feeding station, behind where I worked, after he'd been there a couple of weeks. Clearly he wasn't wild. Mom had driven down here; I offered him, but she had turned him down. And I was glad, because I was quite fond of him.

But on the day she was leaving, after I had left for work, he jumped up into her arms - and she just took him. Didn't even leave me a note. Took my cat carrier too, although I eventually, years later, got it back.

She sent a couple of pictures of him - all ruffled after the 2-day drive, and calmed down later. And a note written from his point of view.

When I got up to her place in fall 2009, her favorite cat had had to be put down, and Tiger was coming out and sitting on laps and being friendly. He spent a lot of time on her lap at the table, and then on the bed with her. She said "Tiger is trying to help". She also said, looking at her array of pills on the table"I don't know whether I'm supposed to take these pills, or give them to the cat"... Then he started losing weight, and his eyes became totally dilated, but he apparently could still see.

The vets up there and down here did not figure out what was wrong with him, but it may have been a version of the FIP that probably killed Sugar Mouse. It has been amazing that he lasted so long, as skinny as he was. He was eating a can or more of cat food a day, or when he stopped eating that sometimes, baby food.

This week was supposed to be a trip again to Camano, but it got put off. Good thing, because I needed to be here.

Once he stopped being able to walk around, and stopped eating for the last time, I locked the others out on the balcony, put a clean t-shirt on his reflective warm pad on the kitchen floor near the heater, and tried to spend as much time in the chair nearby as I could. School over for the spring, and unemployed. I slept in the chair mostly - and came to really hate that chair. (When I'm tired I get very crabby, and that thing would easily go into an uncomfortable position, but only with great difficulty into a comfortable one - and then it wouldn't stay there.)

He was mostly asleep, but the first several days, he would wake up every couple of hours, and could drink some water put into his mouth with a syringe. Then he slept for over a day, but did wake up one final time and take a little water, the morning of the day he died.

Over all it lasted about 6 days. I wasn't there when he died, but away for a couple of hours.

We should all be so lucky, going quietly and peacefully, in our own home, not thirsty, and with company nearby.

Saying Goodbye to Tiger & Pandora

Tiger (Musketeer) and Pandora in chair (with Bob pillow) - taken Dec 30, 2010

Usually I have been good about posting these. This time not.

Pandora died last summer, 2012. Although she had been going downhill, and I was trying to get her to eat canned food, at the end it only was 2 days or so. I put her in the tub, with a warm pad, to have the water drip available, since she wasn't able to hold her head up to drink out of the dish. And one morning, I put her in the room with this chair, and after her sunny spot went away, she crawled across the room. So I put her out on the balcony to get a little more sun. Buddy came over and said hello/goodby. He misses his friend. She was 20, I think.

Tiger (Tigrr, Musketeer) died at the beginning of the previous summer. It was hard to believe he could last so long, a year and a half of so unbelievably skinny - and eating a can or 2 of cat food a day. Then at the end (luckily a trip I was supposed to take was rescheduled), after he stopped being able to move around, I put him on the warm pad on the kitchen floor, near this chair in the next room. For the first 4 days or so, he woke up every couple of hours, and took a little water from a syringe in his mouth. Then he was out for 1½ or 2 days, and then on his last day, woke up again and took a little water.

I spent 6 days in this chair, to be near him, but he died while I was away. I hate this chair.

Little Kitten Oct. 2010

published 12/26/2011

This was taken when the kittens were 5 weeks old. The big sisters were starting to eat kitten chow, and Little Kitten had lost a lot of ground - you can see he was much smaller than they were. He started getting supplemental feedings of kitten formula.

They haven't been named yet, but the little kitten became Rex. The vet said he was male.

And, inevitably, when I had named Rex, 2 kittens became Spot (in front, eating) and Lassie (beside her). And the 3rd sister, I named Grey Mouse - because of what the vet calls an underbite, but I call a rodent-like profile, that they have like their father.

This was only the first time in his first 4 months of life that little Rex had a life-threatening problem.

Iris blue each spring....

This photo taken June 3, 2009. (really?)

I took photos of this same iris yesterday, May 8, 2011. It's been a warm week; the apple trees and daffodils are done blooming, hawthornes (that dreadful weed) have started. This weekend it's been cool. This iris and one more on the South side (palest lavender-white, both shorter earlier varieties, are in bloom. Along with, around town, the deep red-violet shorter, antique, early-blooming one.

Taller types, and the ones on the other side of the house have not started yet.

The title is from a haiku.

Reminded of things Japanese by a visit yesterday to Kodo Arts, an ephemeral seller of Japanese antiques. Gorgeous furniture. I found a couple of little fabric stamps - probably destined to inspire virtual batiks.

Once, that haiku was the cause of my being locked into the college library just before Christmas vacation!

I had it only in translation - I wanted the original in Japanese. I was reading Tale of Gengi (translated).

So, searching for the Japanese original of the haiku, I was in a back aisle on the top floor of the college library in my home town, in the Japanese written in Japanese section. Since I don't read the language, this was not simple.

I had been there for a couple of hours, sitting on the floor. (Ah, youth.) I guess I had been pretty quiet....

But they didn't make an announcement, or even dim the lights, when they closed early and left. It was still daylight.

I came out of the stacks to find myself alone and locked in. The day before vacation.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

The denouement was anticlimactic - there was a phone; I called Security.


Oh, the haiku? Slightly altered translation:

Dead my old fine hopes
And dust my dreaming . . . but still
Iris blue each spring. 

Shushiri 

(Shushiki? His name appears both ways.  
I can't find the haiku book my Dad gave me, when I was in high school, before we went to Japan.)


see haiku -  public domain file, trans. Peter Beilenson 1955,  from http://www.sacred-texts.com/shi/jh/jh02.htm

Right in front of her eyes

And right in front of our eyes, this very large bird, rising from the pond with a medium size koi.

That peaceful-seeming pond, with the koi that come over to see if people will feed them - the great blue heron fishes there too.

 Heading home with the prey.


Couldn't resist: 

Placid koi approach
Looking for food. . . . from the sky
Osprey or heron. 

Looking for fish?

Pictures taken on April 26, 2011.

Where was this? Out in the woods somewhere, near a lake? No, right on campus, over the koi pond. After class last Tuesday, this large bird (osprey, I think) was circling over the campus hill for some time. Coming lower, rising again, sometimes backwinging to stay in the same place for a moment.

And then the dive, and a splash.

Well, it seemed like a long time, but by the times on the photos, the whole thing lasted barely 5 minutes.

12/28/2011 I made a fabric of these photos, with a clouds background. I still need to make a small change, but it should become available for sale soon. I will do another version soon; I've been taking sky pictures for years - should have a good one with scattered lovely clouds that I can use for an alternate background.
http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/750650

The apple trees are blooming now

This photo is from spring 2003. It was taken with a film camera, so no handy reference to the date, but I think in early May, after all of April had been cold: snow, rain, hail, freezing. I remember the apple trees were blooming in May.

This year mid-Feb through March was all cold, while April has had a few warm spells, one is starting this week. And only token snow. The apple trees started blooming on about the 16th, may be finishing by May. Don't know yet if they are late this year - I think of them as early April. Need to check old photos.

The late daffodils are still blooming - finishing. And the English and Spanish bluebells (Scillas, they used to be called) are just coming into full bloom..

Quilt show this weekend.

Another new (old) fabric design

 Spoonflower is having a contest for black and white designs, entry deadline May 3. I made this on April 21.

I was looking at my designs wondering which would be good in black & white. I wanted a bold graphic, one without too much expanse of black background, since blacks at Spoonflower don't print really dark, and may fade in the wash.

I wanted a variation in the texture, the size of the black and white areas.

Which ones would do? The ravens? The cat drawings? The new sea turtles virtual batiks? A quilt-style combination of all of them? Hmm, that's earth, air and water, just need fire...

Although this one was drawn as leaves, long ago when I was learning to draw by playing on the computer, once I had redrawn it as a vector drawing, with a black background, it looked like stylized flames too.

I may do those others in black & white too as companion fabrics, but I love the bold graphic effect of this one. And yet it's organic, not quite symmetrical. I would buy this in the fabric store.

And now that I've redrawn it, I can do it in lots of colors, with companion fabrics in those colors.

Of course the newest design one has made is always the most wonderful design in the world....

The sky doesn't fit in my camera...

Went up to the campus hill this evening to look at the gorgeous clouds, and as I got out of the car, I said "The sky doesn't fit in my camera!"

It was such a whole circular panorama of diversity and gorgeous light and shade that there was no way to get it into a photograph or a dozen photographs.

The map is not the territory. The photo doesn't get all the shades our eyes do.

Sunsets in Seattle used to be like that, layers and layers of every shade of silver & gray, with no color at all. I came from a dusty place, and missed sunset color.

This photo was actually taken a few minutes before, from a parking lot lower down, while I could still see through all the layers of clouds to the sky.

Couldn't really tell what direction the higher layers were going, but while we were on campus, a lower layer of clouds, seemingly barely above the treetops, was moving in from the South (it was to the Southeast as well) and obscuring everything above.


We went to dinner, and when we came out it was pouring rain.

The kitten gate

Photo Oct. 12 2010.

Two little kittens inside their makeshift kitten gate, which was trying to keep them inside the pantry for a few weeks.  It's made of an expandable screen held in place by a tension rod and a couple of paint cans.

The dark tabby is on the left, with one of the light tabbies - and you can see that he-who-would-become-Rex is already smaller than his sister.

He wasn't getting enough to eat; I had just started to try to feed him. He went to the vet on the 14th, very weak and dehydrated, and started getting kitten formula supplements. He had a little respiratory thing.

Sugar Mouse in exile

Photo Oct. 8 2010.

Sugar Mouse sleeping out on the porch. At least it was still fairly warm at first.

But sadly, chased out here into exile, he became very shy again, no longer pettable. 

Latin class, Fowler CA 1944-45

This photo was sent to Grandpa (John Hubbard) by the teacher, in 1944 or 1945. She folded it to put it in the envelope to send. I Photoshopped it for class a few years ago - the original version is below, folds and all.

The students' names are all on the back. (I'll add them when I find the original again.)

I am publishing it now partly because I have been meaning to get around to contacting the school, if it still exists, to see if they want a copy. And partly because Erin at Dressaday gave a link to a project collecting fashion images of women of color, who are left out of the histories. (Of Another Fashion by Minh-Ha Pham)

And if you look at the names, there's not an anglo in this class.

So this is what high school girls and boys were wearing in 1944-45. I don't know if these were everyday clothes, or if they knew she was going to take the photo, and they're dressed up a little. I do know that school clothes were more formal then (judging from my experience a couple of decades later).

New (old) fabric design - 2 Papercuts

I have been designing fabrics all along, just not posting about them. I just uploaded this design to Spoonflower about a week ago.

It's a new version of a papercut design, of which I just recently have been doing some new ones. But this one I did about 10 years ago, the first time I was doing this type of design, which is related to Hawaiian and Tahitian quilt designs, snowflakes, and Baltimore Album quilts. But my inspiration is often a tiny bit of a William Morris design.

This larger one, though, I designed in my head while walking to work, and when I got there, cut it out of a page-a-day calendar - the kind with graph paper on the back.

This layout has an interesting wavy effect, because I did the 2 elements in a slightly different size. Click on the title to see it as fabric.


Before Spoonflower, I never could do more with it than cut it out of colored origami paper and make a section divider page in my design class notebook. Now I can get fabric from it in any of a dozen or so colors I set up, and on several weights of fabric. And make something!

It wasn't supposed to snow today....

It often does in early April. But the forecast was only saying scattered rain showers.

Yesterday it was sunny with scattered clouds (cumulus?), and colder than it looked because of the wind.

This deer is sitting in the lee of a tree ( and a Ponderosa which was mature in 1917 provides significant shelter).

Do you suppose that s(he) was surprised by the snow, or knew it was coming?

Picture taken Apr. 13 2011, 11:09 am. It was still snowing then, but is melting now.


It wasn't until I looked at these photos large size to decide which one to post that I could see the head injury. Car? Falling branch? Do antlers when they come off leave a wound?

Waiting for Mama

 These pictures were taken Oct. 4 2010.

About this time, after a few days in the cupboard, Patches started moving the kittens into more and more inaccessible places. And finally into this drawer which she couldn't get into herself. She got them out again to feed them.

And she started chasing Sugar Mouse away, and beating him up.

So after a bit of that, even though I didn't suspect him of any ill intent, I locked him out on the screen porch for several weeks.

Poor Sugar Mouse - all I ever saw him doing was looking curiously towards them.

(I didn't know until I photoshopped this picture that one of the kittens had a scratch. She might have gotten it from being moved around.)

And what are they looking at up there? Mama Patches, getting ready to come down to feed them.

The kittens' first appearance

The kittens first appeared Sept 29, 2010. They were 3 weeks old. Mama cat, Patches, had been hiding them in another cupboard, (purring and squeaking from inside the cupboard). She brought them out to this cupboard in the pantry. This picture shows 3 of the four kittens: one dark tabby, looking at me, and there are 2 lighter grey tabbies, and one grey tabby with white.

And she fed them on the floor just outside the cupboard. Only you notice that the dark tabby is not eating like the others.

The dark tabby is the one who became Rex.

Tiger, Pandora, Buddy (and Bob)

Tigrr and my 2 remaining cats, Pandora (in back) and Buddy together on the chair with a pillow from Cafepress with the image of Bob on it.

Picture taken Dec. 30, 2010. (It was easier to use a good picture of the cats and Photoshop out the cover on the chair than to get a good posed photo in a clean chair.)

I only put them together after Tigrr had been to the vet, and we had still not figured out what was wrong with him. As it turns out, probably a bad idea. But he and Buddy do the friendly greeting ritual, and they all 3 sleep together, so they are happy having company.

Tigrr is even skinnier than this now; he feels so light he seems hardly there. Hard to believe he's survived almost a year and a half like this.

Patches' reflection

Photo of Patches taken in the living room window, Nov. 4, 2010.

I think we were out there that day to feed Rex his kitten formula, and because I didn't want him to miss any mama-feeding-opportunities, Patches was with us.

The only Photoshopping I did to this image was to remove distracting areas of putty etc. on the window frame. The lighting was just right for the reflection, and Patches was posing, looking out.

The texture in the window with her reflection was the fall foliage, seen through one of the best float-glass windows with its wavery distortion, at an extreme angle, which gives the most effect.

 We were happy that day; Little Kitten was surviving and thriving on his supplemental feeding, and it was warm and sunny.

It's been warm and sunny for several days now, the first time in more than a month. Larry helped me move wet firewood up from the driveway to the house and garage yesterday - much easier to use the car than my carrying it all myself. And I was almost out. Still have to carry it upstairs, but I'm set now in case we get another big snowstorm (entirely likely in early April) and the power goes out again.

So far Patches and fat Mousie, who I think has the disease, are healthy-seeming. The kittens are living separately with me, busily randomizing the contents of my rooms. Tigrr, Pandora, and Buddy are unfortunately together, but all right. Except it doesn't seem possible that anything as skinny as Tigrr could still be alive.

Autre temps, autre fleurs

Different years, different flowers. Some, like the paperwhite narcissus, which don't need cooling, flower at about the same time each year (Jan through Feb).

Others are very variable in when they flower, especially the flowering fruit trees, which have cooling requirements, like the earliest here, the flowering plums.

The winter iris, Iris unguicularis, flowers for about 2 months, sometime between November and April. It provides enough blooms to cut a few for a vase every few days - except this year the deer (probably) have discovered it, I have to get there before they do.

We usually but not always have several weeks of warm weather with cool nights in Jan & Feb. The years we don't things are off schedule.

This year we had snow in mid-Nov 2010, very early. Leaves still on the trees, lots of broken branches and fallen trees. I lost the vertical top to the oak west of the house, the one that might have shaded the house in late summer someday. On my south slope I usually don't see the first few frosts to take the leaves off & ripen the fruit of the persimmon until Thanksgiving. (Other microclimates are quite different - Grandpa knew where to build a house.)

Planting weather (like for lawn seed) is usually between mid-April and mid-Oct. One year that I was doing spray-dyeing out in the yard, we had warm weather until the end of October. (I'm not sure if that was the year it snowed on Nov 2 or not. I think so.)

It almost always snows in March and early April. The first year I was here, the April Fools day storm dumped about a foot and a half of snow. The year my sister died in March, after I got back here, all of April it was cold, snow, hail, freezing rain. Things were a month late blooming. Apple trees were blooming in mid-May.

I'm planning to do a five-year gardening/weather calendar, with pictures of what's in bloom each week in several years, and places to write temperatures and notes for each year.

This photo was taken in 2006 on March 9, but this year the flowering plums are almost done Feb 23, the leaves are emerging. Last Thursday it snowed enough to close campus; we've just had several partly sunny days with snow on the ground, in the next few days it's supposed to snow 1-2 ft above 2000 ft. It probably won't look like this. 

PS April 14 This year, starting Feb 17th, it snowed almost every Thursday/Friday all the way through March. The one week it didn't snow, it rained. The power went out for days the week I posted this. The first warm weekend was April Fool's week, warm and sunny enough to go for a wildflower walk at Bridgeport.

Sugar Mouse

A picture of Sugar Mouse from last summer, when he was happy being able to be out on the screened porch, along with his friend Patches (when she wasn't in heat).

You can see that his brown stripes had darkened up a lot from his half-grown color, showing the siamese part of his lynx-point coloring. And this picture shows nicely the dark-grey-stripy coloring on his head and tail. Narrow "mackeral tabby" stripes which he shares with the dark-gray & white tabby Mousie. And that cute little white tip to the tail.

That little curve to the end of the tail is characteristic. Once he started being pettable, in late spring, he would sit on the kitchen floor facing me in his "pet me please" posture, with his tail stretched out behind him, curled at the tip. At that point he was a chubby cheerful little cat.

In the summer out on the porch, he started sitting on laps, Larry's as well as mine, as well as walking by the chairs to be petted, over & over.

And it was only then that I noticed his receding chin. The vet calls it an underbite. I call it a rodent-like profile. And I named him Sugar Mouse months before I noticed it.


He died yesterday morning. Liver failure. I only noticed something wrong the evening before, and he was in very bad shape all night. The vet says it may have been one of the dreadful viruses, like FIP. In which case, his kittens and all the cats have it. 

He probably wasn't even 2 years old yet. 

I am not usually on the roof in December (12/29/10)

Or January or February*, but today I was. I had swept part of the roof before the first big storm came in, but didn't finish because the rain started. And I didn't have a metal brush up there with me to clear out the screen in the chimney cap.

Yesterday, the wood stove started smoking dreadfully; I had to lock cats in the kitchen or outside in the rain, wherever they were, open all the windows wide and close the doors. It was so smoky I couldn't even go back in there.

The large piece of wood I'd put in smouldered all night, and was still there at noon, today, still warm, although it wasn't smoking anymore.

So I swept my way up onto the roof - this sloping roof on the North side is the access route. Since Mom had the roof taken off the stairs, I hadn't been up there, except the once last fall. It feels kind of steep, without anything to catch myself on... But it wasn't really wet, despite all the rain last night.

After I had used the metal brush on the screen in the chimney cap, and was spending some time doing some more sweeping, the chimney started to smoke a lot. Apparently when it had a draft, the fire started burning more again.

It started to snow a little, just at sunset - glad I got the chimney clear enough for a fire.


It is supposed to start snowing again tonight or tomorrow. Feb. 16, 2011 



* The Ectoplasm Incident
Once, years ago, in February, the tenants were complaining that their chimney was smoking.

The chimney sweep had the flu, and I had reason to believe that the blockage was at the chimney cap:

During the night, when I had not been using the wood stove, a long streamer of smoke came out of the stove and traveled horizontally across the room to exit at a slightly open window. The flues only connect up at the cap, under the screen.

And thinking of those complicated Victorian chimneys, which climbing boys were sent up to sweep, I thought an experience of something like that might have originated the concept of ectoplasm.

So I was up on the roof, on a sunny day in February, and from 3 stories up, I could smell the old-fashioned violets in the lawn, strong as wine.

And in the chimney cap, there were a few leaves on the screen, and there was also a small round dented area, just about small-cat size - and I realized why my little shiny white and gray cat, Fussy, had a few days ago, suddenly been all gray...

Rex discovering the daylight world outside

This is Rex. He's a kitten. In fact, he is a kitten of Mom's cats, Patches and Sugar Mouse.

Unfortunately all my early kitten pictures, from when Patches was hiding them in the cupboards and drawers, and when they started to explore, are inaccessible on an external drive which stopped mounting. So I may tell early kitten stories later, when (if!) I have those pictures.

Including the reason he's named Rex, and his sister's names.

Rex has been sleeping with me for some time, curled up under my chin or on my chest next to my face, kneading and purring. And the lined curtains were all closed, keeping the room cozy during the night.

Now we've started having our frequent run of warm days in Jan & Feb, when I can have some windows open during the day, and passive solar heat on this south slope warms the house.

And this was (Jan 17, 2011) the first time he had been in the bedroom in daylight, when the curtains and windows were open.

And Rex has discovered that there is a very different, interesting and scary world out there during the day.

(He's not going to get to explore it much for a while; I heard the great horned owl again recently, and the red-tail hawk several days last week, and the kittens are still small enough to be swept right off the balcony/low roofs.)

This picture from Jan. 17, 2011.


Tonight it's raining and very windy, and getting cold enough to snow tomorrow. Spring-in-the-middle-of-winter is over for now. 

The lantern casts a shadow - going forward

Last year casts a shadow of light as well as darkness. Of enhanced attention/understanding, as well as turning away from things I don't want to look at.

Instead of trying to write about things from last year, first, before this year, I am going to interleaf posts from now and posts from/about last year ( and even before in the case of one funny story I did not want my mother to see). I will date them when I post them, and in the text indicate when/or about when they were written.

Even more so because I just got off the phone with tech support. They are going to try to recover the data from my firewire/USB2 external drive, which just stopped mounting. Even though it still works as a hub, I can't see any of the photos on it. So some posts, like Mom's cats, and kitten pictures, would all be sadly unillustrated if I tried to do them all in a hurry now.


This picture from 12/9/2009, 11:06 am.

Catching up

This picture is from 12/5/2009, 11:02 am.

The last 19 posts were pretty much all written, and the pictures were chosen in December 2009 and January & February 2010. But I only finally got back to them to finish photoshopping the pictures and posting them in Jan 2011.

Now maybe I can start catching up on the rest of last year...

Between every two pines...

"Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world."
(John Muir)

This picture is of Mom in 1946, a few months after her marriage, taken by her father.

It was her Celebration of Life today; it was beautiful. RevAmanda was wonderful, Mount Baker out the window was as beautiful as anyone had ever seen it. I had found Celtic music to play (Turlogh O'Carolan played by Patrick Ball & Aine Minogue), since she had wanted one Celtic piece for herself among my sister's country music at my sister's memorial service. Many people got up to light a candle and tell Juanita stories.

My stories:

- When my brothers were young, to ensure fairness, she used to weigh the bowls of ice cream. And being Juanita, first she weighed the bowls, then the bowls plus ice cream.

- I live in the house she was born in, in the Northern California foothills. It is surrounded by tall trees, Black Oaks and Ponderosa pines that were mature when she was born. They dwarf the 3-story house. Once when she came to visit, she got out of the car, looked around, and said "You need more trees". At first I thought she was joking.

- In her last weeks, when she didn't really remember people, she would always ask "Have I met you before?" But if you were wearing purple, you were her friend instantly.

- When she was perhaps pregnant with the elder of my brothers, and I was barely tall enough to see over the counter, I had asked the 'where do babies come from?' question. Maybe in the form "Is the new baby going to come out of Mommie's tummy?" The answer I got involved diagrams of cell division, and I swear, when I got to the subject long later in biology class, the words 'meiosis' and 'mitosis' were strangely familiar...


For 'going away music': the Huron Carol, played by John McCutcheon, and Farewell to Stromness, by Peter Maxwell Davies, among other nature themed songs.

I had spent the time since she died finding photos & writing a memorial booklet about her life, and found these two John Muir quotes for the covers.

"Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees."
(John Muir)