A Word Has Gone Out of the World - Goodby Rexie my darling - Dec. 2022

Tiny Little Kitten, when he was being fed. Soon to be Rex.

After they knocked down their kitten-gate, and escaped. When I came in, early morning, the others were still close by, exploring. But this Little Kitten had crossed 2 rooms, climbed up into the feeding chair, and burrowed into this warm blanket.

Little Lion Rex, fully recovered from not getting enough to eat as a tiny kitten. Before they got sick.

One page in a school assignment. I thought Rexie looked like he was dreaming of being out in the grass, like Bob in the illustration.

Rexie stops to smell the roses, the year she decided the balcony was hers, and wouldn't let the others out there, where I was for hours every morning, taking rose pictures. She kept bumping me, insisting I
Pay Attention To The Cat.

Her hiding place, behind the door, on top of the cabinet. Scary noises.

In the chair with Grey Mouse, originally her friend. Now my only cat.

Is that a bird out there? Feb.2011 - 6months old. Rexie's first time in the bedroom in the daytime with curtains and the windows open to the screens. Warm sunny days in Feb, chilly nights.

First appearance. Looking at me.

Looking up at Mama. She had hidden her kittens in the drawer.

Rexie is the darker one in back. He/she has caught up in size.

Kitten soccer. Rexie is the smaller darker kitten, just peering out in the back left corner.

When Rexie invented a word to tell me when she/he wanted his/her forehead rubbed.

 First written Aug 15, 2023. Backdated.

As usual I didn't notice her symptoms early. Of course, they were different than anyone else's had been. 

I did notice when she became chubby enough to wobble. Only a few days later she was enormous.

Vets have become much more expensive since the last time I had much to do with them, and my old vet has closed.

By the time I could get her in somewhere, the week before christmas, it was a drop-off appointment. No money for more tests, or palliative care. They wanted to put her down.

But she was not dehydrated. and not in pain.

We had almost a week, sitting together on the bed, at first on my lap or chest as usual, then beside me on her pillow. Once she took a flying leap off my stomach on top of the tall bed, and belly-flopped on the floor, to go to the catbox.

At the end, she had a few moments of panic, climbing the pillows, trying to breathe. Then she became unconscious, nestling down into her pillow.

That's a lot better than the usual way...

I have seen her ghost a couple of times.

Tablet-weaving / Card-weaving

One of my first learning projects, showing how you can make many patterns with one warp setup.

A new thing I researched and learned last year, and wrote an illustrated how-to paper on. And I really fell in love with it. The weaving process can be simple and quick (a few hours or days for a band). Or it can be very complex and time-consuming. I might not tackle those - my strength has always been to learn a simple technique, and then design complex patterns for it. And I am already doing that.

The technique is ancient (at least Roman, Viking, Anglo-Saxon, 1500BCE at Hallstatt, 1100BCE in Italy are recent discoveries), and related to weaving on the warp-weighted loom (which is at least neolithic in age). The woven bands can be very strong, "camel straps", or 1 cm wide delicate silk strips used for headbands (fillets), or clothing borders, sometimes woven-in. 

My enthusiasm for this is encouraging me to get involved again with the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), which I have always considered myself part of the community of, and make some clothing. Viking, Anglo-Saxon, 12th century London. . .

But of course, current retro/boho fashions are also the perfect place to wear these decorative bands. Wish I had run across it back in the day.


One of the things I was doing while I wasn't posting. (While I didn't have internet from home)

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 http://wrwcolors.blogspot.com/2011/04/kitten-gate.html)

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.

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.

Catching up 2

This textured, no longer photographic, image should make fun fabric, maybe for curtains or cushions. I'll be getting a swatch from Spoonflower to see how it comes out.

I had forgotten what it is like to work retail during the holiday season, and didn't get any entries posted here for a long time, but I was still taking pictures and thinking of things to write about. I am going to add a list here as I add backdated posts.

Post date: 2-22-2009 Post: OK Kelvin, if these aren't interference patterns, what are they? 4-29-09

Reposted into 2018, Feb 6.

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, July 17, 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, June 14, 2011. 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.

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...

Larry & Tom at Bridgeport

My walking/photographing companions. As you can see, we do more picture-taking than walking.

Well, the wildflowers and scenery at Bridgeport California in the spring are worth a lot of attention.

These photos were taken on April 19th, 2008.

Catching up

I intend to interpolate some posts at the approximate time they should have been made. So for anyone who has been reading, and think you have seen all my posts as they were made, this is a list of newly interpolated ones, with their dates, and the date they were added.

This image is a version of my picture of the Jack Snipe miniature narcissus, blooming in the spring. I like the posterized effect of the background shingles.

Post date - Title - - - - - - - - - date actually posted:

5/3/08 Always save some film for sunset 7/14/08

4/20/08 The lupines were beautiful 7/14/08

3/28/08 Jack Snipe miniature narcissus7/14/08

12/21/07 Papercut color updated 7/6/08

Always save some film for sunset

That's one of the things I've learnt the hard way, as here. Another is always have a camera with you, because as soon as you don't, there will be a great sunset, or something.

This picture is also an illustration of another rule I often forget: always read the fine print/ schedule/instructions before it's too late. In this case, I thought I remembered the bus schedule, but it changes at 6:00 PM. And so I was not watching when the bus came back, after I'd gotten off to take some photos. And, I'd just filled up my camera card, so I didn't have any "film" left for sunset. So I walked home, because I could get home almost by dark by walking rather than waiting an hour for the next bus and walking up the hill in the dark. So I didn't even see a spectacular sunset (since I was walking through the woods), let alone photograph it.

Then I Photoshopped this picture to look as if I'd seen the sunset.

The lupines were beautiful

Yes we made it back to Brigeport in time to see the lupines in full bloom. They were beautiful.

(Well, I like blue better than orange, so I like them better than the poppies. When I first moved here, I used to fall asleep reading the Western Garden Book every night, and I memorized all the blue flowers. And I learned to store that book not in the bedroom with its light blue rug, so when I needed to look up how to plant something, and came tromping in with muddy boots, I wouldn't get red mud all over the rug.)

Unfortunately, by a stupid mistake trying to reset my camera, which had gotten changed to smaller sized images, I lost lots of the pictures i had taken. Don't count your photos...

Jack Snipe miniature narcissus

This picture is from 3-27-06, and is of the Jack Snipe on the South side, with the shingles behind it. This year that South side bunch was done flowering a week or two before that date.

I think of these and Tête à Tête as early-middle blooming dwarf narcissus. They start after Narcissus minimus and Little Gem, and about the same time as Jenny.

My flowering lawn, which includes these and other miniature narcissus, plus Chionodoxa, Scilla, Tritelia uniflora, grape hyacinths, and other miniature bulbs, is the best bit of garden I ever did. (It no longer has crocuses, because one year there was a gopher.)

It is on the East side of the house, where there was a bluegrass lawn in pretty good shape. So for several years, when I was first here, as early in the fall as bulbs were available, while it was still nice to sit out on the lawn, I'd dig out a weed and stick in a bulb. No need to "gently toss the bulbs to achieve a natural-looking distribution". And for 20 years since then, it's bloomed for more than 4 months every spring.

My more ambitious gardening attempts are long gone, eaten by deer, fat jackrabbits, or blackberries and weeds, but the flowering lawn still blooms every year.