Weaving with Superwash

The reason I haven’t continued with my to-be-continued band weaving post is that I am waiting on photographs. The way I sit to use my home made heddle involves me, a chair, the newel post, my right knee, my left thigh, and several hands–but I make do with two. I would need a fourth to hold the camera. I could ask Der Mann to take a picture of me, but it is dark when he comes home, and he will make me look fat, and anyway, there isn’t enough daylight in the house in winter, even when the sun is out.

Excuses, excuses! Mostly I just hate taking pictures. I have made three scarves on the rigid heddle loom in the last month and there are no pictures of those either.

Here is a preview of the most recent:

It is ugly. The only way to describe it is “clueless in 1982.”  This is the first thing I’ve woven that I simply thought: Yuck!

Ugly begins with good intentions. I received some nice superwash wool, enough for a scarf of generous proportions.  It is a beigey pink. For weft, I looked in a sack of some other gift yarn and found that it paired well with a skein of mystery natural fiber yarn in silvery white, a little pale primrose, and earthy tints. I had not been able to find anything else to go with it, so I was quite pleased.

By the time I saw that I was making an ugly scarf out of pretty yarns, it was too late to change wefts and still get the length I wanted. I decided to think of it as a chance to practice Danish medallions and inlay.  I hoped that after wet finishing it would not look so bad.

This was my first experience superwash wool. I thought it would just shrink less than normal wool. I put it through a warm handwash cycle in the machine, with an extra warm rinse. No shrinkage. Damp-dry in cool dryer. Nothing. Low heat dryer for 10 minutes. Nothing. Another 15 minutes and it did plump up a little, getting springy without actually shrinking. Planning for warp shrinkage, I had woven way too few picks per inch.

There’s more. Last night I began having horrible allergic nose runnings and itchings and hackings and sneezings that I finally traced to the scarf. Wool doesn’t bother me, nor any other animal fiber. Here’s what I think happened: when I heated the scarf in the dryer, and cleaned out the lint trap–and afterwards handled it quite a bit–I simultaneously activated whatever was used to treat the yarn and released bits of superwash fluff into the air. It happens every time I go back to it, too, though not quite as severely.

Is that totally weird? Is anyone else allergic to machine washable wool yarn? The treatment process uses chlorine compounds and/or plastic resins which are non-toxic in the finished yarn. It is even a hypoallergenic alternative for many people with wool allergies. I would suspect the mystery yarn, but messing with the superwash fringe is what really seems to get to me. (I am messing with it quite a lot because the plies of superwash yarn don’t grip one another, and I am having to re-ply a bunch of yarn that came untwisted in the wash.)

Der Mann likes the scarf. He called it “substantial.” I threatened to make him wear it. Now I am trying to decide whether to give it to a relative who who can’t tell the difference between knitting and weaving–and would like it simply because I made it–or whether that is too much of a dig to my pride. It’s silly, but I have this picture of people telling her with a fixed smile, “Oh. My. Isn’t that . . . substantial. She must be a very . . . creative young lady.”–mentally adding twenty years to my age. What do you think? Have you ever made a gift of a project you thought was ugly?

Food Holiday

So, what day is it? Friday. Right. After Thanksgiving. Yesterday evening, after some novel-reading and an aggressively long and fast walk in the cold rain to try and startle my lower back into hurting less (nothing out of the ordinary, but harder to bear that day), Der Mann went out with a grocery list of food we needed and the intention of purchasing our Thanksgiving frozen pizzas. Our town is quite a distance from the nearest real grocery store, and when he got there he found it shut for the holiday. I think that’s a good thing–fair to the employees–but somehow we end up trying buy something there every Christmas and Thanksgiving; we never remember their holiday closure policy from one to the next. They’re union. It’s a regional franchise.

Der Mann went on down the highway to Safeway. I have many food allergies, so there is only one kind of pizza I can eat: the Super Yucky brand. And Safeway stocked only the yuckiest permutation of the Super Yucky brand. Because he’d had to go so far, there wasn’t time to shop for normal groceries, just the pizzas.

While Der Mann was baking his own pizza, I denuded mine of frozen soy cheese and frozen pureed spinach by chiseling at it with a sharp slotted spoon (while swearing and raving), smeared the soggy, pasty crust with olive oil, baked it by itself to give it some backbone, then put on my own tomato sauce, covered it with real mozzerella, and baked it again. The irony was that I had proposed frozen pizza because I was too tired to make one from scratch. Frozen pizzas aren’t a habit with us. In fact, I think the last time we had them was on moving day, back in March, when I said: “Well, aren’t these Super Yucky pizzas a waste of money. I won’t bother with them again.”

It was okay, although I oversalted the sauce.

While we ate, we watched an episode of the 1978 All Creatures Great and Small series on the computer, which had confused and alarmed me the few times I encountered it as a small child.  You can watch it as a “view instantly” selection through netflix.  The overacting and the whole repetitive up-the-cow-butt thing tickles me somehow.

Der Mann and I spend our Thanksgivings thankful that we don’t have to spend them with our relatives. Or is a spouse a relative? Now I think I will put the weaving news in a separate post, so I can delete this one later if I regret it.

Aw, Kitty is All Growed up!

We interrupt this blog silence to bring you the following fast-breaking news story:

This is what I saw when came downstairs this morning. If you are an indoor-cats-only person or a squirrel lover, set aside your disgust for a moment and marvel with me at a tenderfoot kitty whose first kill is a grey squirrel. Which he then drags through a cat flap set in a basement window over a counter, holds while he leaps 3′ down from the counter, carries clear through the basement, up the stairs, and deposits on the breakfast room carpet.

First I simply turned around and left the room. I needed a minute to decide: should I give Howl positive reinforcement for hunting, or negative reinforcement for bringing the thing in the house? Positive, I decided. Delight and pettings. Until we moved to this area where they are a filthy, fearless, overpopulous menace and a gardener’s nightmare, I never minded grey squirrels. Now I would say that the difference between a dead squirrel on the porch a dead squirrel on the carpet is mere quibbling.

My next thought was, “Shoot. Der Mann took the bus to work today. I’m going to have to pick it up myself.”

Cats usually preen at you over their kills. Ours was clearly thinking, “What the hell just happened?!” He was all big eyes and nervy mincing when I praised him. He wanted it to move again. Once he even crouched under the rocking chair and gave it a half-pounce before sidling away. It must have been bigger project that he expected. It didn’t occur to him that he could eat it.

Howl spent the first 15 months of his life as an indoor cat. (The fact that he had never seen dirt before was a tip-off.) With three months outdoor experience, he still gives a bit of the impression of Marie Antoinette playing at rustic life. He picks his way over rocks and clods then shakes off each of his feet as if to say, “Oh dear. I really must get some boots for this sort of thing.” Gawps at stuff out in the open. Is scared (thankfully) of cars, but stalks a full grown dog. Races up trees for no reason like a kitten. Courts the local cats with interest, then faces off with them and loses.

The squirrel was a first for me too. First big-ish dead thing. I called my step dad to find out whether I should put it in the garbage, or what. I didn’t want to bury it in the yard because I am still planting everywhere, and it would be gross to dig it up by mistake in the spring. I was informed that garbage can or interment is a matter of choice.

Would you like to hear the gory details? Yes? I went to the garbage and fished out some of the burlap trimmed from a nursery tree. I folded this over itself a couple of times and threw it over the squirrel, followed by the big spongy plastic bag our computer monitor came packed in. Then after a false start the first time I touched the dead meatiness of the bulge in the center of the pile, sort of rolled it all up and stuffed it in the nice thick plastic bag my husband got from the art supply store last night. Then I twisted it up and put a twist-tie on it, and tied it shut with a knot for good measure. That way, I figured if the squirrel was just in a coma it would at least expire painlessly instead of trying to get out of the garbage can. It was still warm.

I e-mailed Der Mann a picture, and he sent back these:

Bendable Chocolate

I have about enough time for a weather whine before the house gets too hot to do anything but lie on the couch and groan.  Even with my newly bulging biceps–the result of a solid week-and-a-half of shoveling dirt, compost, and gravel to complete the drainage system for our yard–it is too much effort to hold up a book.  104 degrees in this non-air-conditioned part of the northwest is as shocking as much hotter weather elsewhere.  So far we have been to the movies three nights in a row. Dumb movies. True, if I lie on the couch the cat will come lie on my stomach, but since the ambient indoor temperature is already higher than feline body temperature I haven’t been bothering to push him off when he does this. He gets down on his own after about 15 minutes anyway, and stretches out on the floor flat as road-kill. Heat triumphs over bottomless need!

Okay, it’s too hot to type already, but at least I’m distracted.

The kitty is acclimated to our house. He didn’t die–he almost died, but he didn’t. At the end of his week spent squeezed into a hidey-hole in the basement, he emerged very ill on the Friday afternoon before Independence Day. I’d noticed he was congested the night before, but now he was rasping, sneezing, and burning with fever. I took him to the veterinary hospital. The vet confirmed a dangerous fever–possibly brain damaging if got any higher–and took x-rays to look for pneumonia. With such a sick cat they’d usually have wanted to keep him there, but since it was the start of a holiday weekend they’d have had to leave him without supervision over the 4th, and they didn’t want to do that. Instead they gave him antibiotics, a fever reducer, a water injection for dehydration, and sent him home.

According to the vet this happens all the time with shelter cats. Something like one in four locally! I had wondered why the shelter gave out a flyer on Feline Upper Respiratory Infection with the adoption packet. It seems the disease is almost impossible to get rid of once it infests a shelter, and a very large number of animals get sick. Naturally the shelters don’t play this up to potential cat adopters. It makes me wonder what they do with the ones that start showing symptoms IN the shelter. Cats sneezing gobs (pardon my bluntness) of green snot are not good PR. I suspect they put them down immediately. Rule of thumb: don’t abandon your pet to a shelter thinking it’ll get adopted because it’s so cute. Cuteness doesn’t cut it. It’s chances are even worse than you think. It makes me glad we got our cat when it had only been in the shelter a couple of days before it had a chance to get sick and get euthanized.

After that we nursed him for a week, poor critter. In order to keep him on hand for dosing we had to block off his access to the basement with boxes, which turned out to be a good thing. His trauma was the kind that required firmness. He didn’t really want to be in the hidey-hole; it was more of a compulsion. What he really wanted was for us to spend all our time coaxing him out, reassuring him of our devotion. During the hidey-hole week we had a strange ritual: every evening at about six he would start meowing faintly from his hole; we would answer back to him down the stairwell, he would meow, and after about 15 minutes of this–during which we advanced down the stairs and into the hidey-hole room–he would finally worm his way out of the 3″ crevice behind the seats taken from our minivan and lavish us with desperate affection. Then he would follow us upstairs. I’m pretty sure he would have liked to perform this ritual all day long, not just in the evenings, because occasionally I would catch a meow or two just on the edge of my hearing when I was working in the kitchen. There were probably a lot of other times I didn’t hear him. I would always answer encouragingly, but I couldn’t devote the requisite 15 minutes to begging outside his hidey-hole. The adjustment process went much better when the basement was off limits, and he was able to follow us around the house during the day. Exploring by himself at night had just been too overwhelming.

Dot was so right that he is a people cat. I am beginning to think that we made a mistake getting just one cat, because the two of us are not enough to relieve his ennui. Even the out-of-doors hasn’t helped. He is so easygoing that I think he would do well with another animal. He is not so much possessive of us as he is our groupie–our bored groupie, because as cat entertainment goes we are hardly rock-stars. He follows us around starting conversations that go something like this:
“Hello. Hello. Sit still. Sit down.”
“Mm hm. You’re a pretty cat.”
“Hello. Hello. I’m coming up. I’m coming up as soon as you sit down, you know. So you should sit down.”
“Yes, you’re beautiful.”
“Hello.”
“Mm.”
“Hello.”
“Mm.”
“That’s right. Now devote all your energy to my happiness. Though I have no idea what I want.”
“Yes, you’re sweet. You’re lovely. Such a soft kitty.”
“Not like that! One stroke on the head is just an insult!”
“Mm hm.”
“Sit down. Sit down. Make a lap now.”

We named him Howl. For this novel by one of our favorite authors:

Not for this movie by one of our favorite directors, which really has nothing to do with the book:

Our cat has a lot in common with the Wizard Howl in the book (or Howell, as he is known in his home dimension of modern Wales), being young, vain, lazy, prone to loud complaints and elaborate baths.

One other wizardly thing about Howl is that he changes size. You remember I called him huge? Well, sometimes he is and sometimes he isn’t. He was close to thirteen pounds when we got him (if they weighed him right), and seemed bigger. He has lost a lot of weight since then, but he is absurdly long-bodied. When he sits down he looks normal. When he stands up on his hind legs or stretches out on the floor he looks like a boa constrictor or a sinuous dragon. He could honestly tie himself in knots. I’ve noticed he’s also a bit clumsy with his back legs which, after watching him closely, I credit to the fact that they are so far away he tends to forget what they’re up to! I’ve never seen a cat like this; everything else is normally proportioned, there’s just extra length in the middle. Before we settled on Howl, Serpent or Wurm or Slinky were the obvious choices, but those seemed a little undignified.

 

Dignity is my middle name

More Boring Cat Stuff, But Interesting To Us

It’s like having a Christmas tree with a particular (you hope) longed-for present underneath, and you are lying in bed at 4AM on Christmas morning unable to sleep.

That is: having an enormous grey-brown tabby crouching in misery under the wardrobe while it gets used to your house.

Sorry for another animal post. I like to keep on with with a thing once I’ve started it. As I said, the pregnant kitten has moved on to greener pastures, literally or figuratively. I have been spending every waking moment doing chores connected with the dirt around our house. In the midst of my zombie-like adrenaline push, I found myself looking at the cat profiles on craigslist and the local shelters. Der Mann was just as bad; he got me to the Petsmart for visiting hours with some shelter cats. You know, for fun–we thought. As Pooh says, it was terrible and sad. We are too empathetic with animals in cages.

So we got serious about craigslist kitties. By day I was putting in full days of standing in the sun with our new excavator, hauling around concrete post footings, filling bags with unearthed drainage rock, uncovering the sewer line with a shovel. By night I was all about search terms. “Big cat -lost” “brothers cats” “large cat” “litter mates.”

On craigslist I found a grey mother-daughter pair. The people who own them live an hour away. After a couple of odd reschedulings (one time they called and asked if we could let them keep the cats another two weeks “because the kitten was just at that really fun stage,” then called back and allowed that we could take them immediately if we wanted), we went to see them.

It was an old country neighborhood, the kind with 60’s ranch houses and pet goats and little vineyards on 1 and 2 acre lots. The family gave off an air of ruddy Elizabethan prosperity. The mama cat was only a year and a half old, this kitten was the whole of her third litter. “We meant to get her spayed, but kittens are just so much fun,” the father explained, jolly and unapologetic. He showed us his backyard chicken coop. It slowly became clear that they were disposing of their kitten factory because she had exiled their older male cats from the house. She was a tiny, reserved cat, totally wrapped up in her kitten. But we like reserved cats, and what can be better than a kitten? We couldn’t figure out why we weren’t more excited about them.

I believe the problem was that it was hard to visualize them being our cats because they were so clearly someone else’s. It felt like trespassing to offer a home to cats who so clearly HAD one they liked very well, thank you. More like cat theft than adoption. Certainly from the cats’ perspective.

Before we said yes or no to the grey ones, we thought we ought to look at the shelter cats. When Der Mann got off work last night, we went to the small local one.   The cats were in an even smaller cement block room with cages three high. We were allowed to open the cages and take the cats out as we pleased, but it was impossible to focus (much less compare and choose!) in that atmosphere, and we didn’t like to add to the creatures’ misery by invading their space. I was attracted to a year old male they were calling Kajiji, for his large head and stillness. The shelter volunteer said he was new, opened his cage, and gave him some head rubbing, which the cat warily accepted without leaving his corner. He took a sniff of our hands, stood up, looked us over, allowed us to pet his head purely out of politeness. Then he was done with us and with the stress of having his cage open, and said so by going back to his corner and lying down.

We hurried off to the big, new fancy shelter across the river. It has “play rooms” where attendants will bring you the cats, some of which are displayed in big shop-window cases with perches and stage-set suggestions of furniture. To our surprise, it was hard to find any cats that attracted us there.

But we managed to pick out two. The play rooms are claustrophobic triangular booths with cold floors and a bench. Either they are a very bad idea, or we have an eye for neurotic cats. The first cat ignored us and spent the entire time trying to get out of the room, scrabbling up the walls. The second cat peed all over the attendant as soon as she was brought in, then proceeded to jump five feet straight up in the air, over and over, trying to get a hold of the blind-cord and presumably out the window. I have never seen such terror.

Scratching a mutual itch, we shot back to the smaller shelter for a last look at Kajiji, even though it was too close to closing time to adopt him. Der Mann has an obligation that requires the car this weekend, so we asked if they would hold him until Monday. They said they couldn’t. I tried to think of a way to get back without a car (no bus runs on the weekend), and I think that made them take pity on us. “Just fill out an application and we’ll see how it goes from there.”

So, the nice shelter employee squeezed us in before quitting time on a Friday night. The huffy one gave us dirty looks and pointedly started turning off lights and drawing blinds as we waited for our cat to be brought out.

Here’s the funny thing. The cat seems to be more scared of our house than he is of us. We set him up in the guest room/office and left him alone to come out in his own time like the books say. At the end of the evening he started crying for us. We went in and sat down, he marked us with crazy head rubbings, purred, collapsed, and was petted–all while staying extremely wary. This went on until Der Mann (I warned him!) committed the venal sins of Standing Up and Transporting Wicker Objects. The cat hissed and was back under the wardrobe until we went to bed. Then more crying. He even worked up his nerve to come into our bedroom and jump up on the bed, which because of Der Mann’s allergies is going to have to be off limits. Plus, it was kind of scary to have a huge cat we don’t know twining around our bed in the dark; we don’t have a headboard at the moment, and our bed is pushed into an alcove under the slope of the roof. There are a few feet of dead space between the knee-wall and our heads there, and the cat seemed to want to occupy that area, crying, and standing up on his hind legs to with his nose at a level with our faces. Extremely unnerving. In the end I got him to follow me out of the bedroom. I petted him a little more in the hall, went back in the bedroom, shut the door, and went to bed–too exhausted for any more cat therapy. I could still hear him crying on and off through the night.

I wonder what his old family was like. They say he was left behind after a move, and is used to children and other animals. He was only at the shelter for two days. Maybe he is looking for the rest of the people and pets who should be here.

By this morning he had disappeared. He is probably under the basement stairs behind a stack of boxes. I am letting him alone, so no picture.  Do you think that is an okay strategy?  Should I try to draw him out?

We think his name may be Owen (or Ulf, or Knut), though we are not sure, not knowing his character. If things go badly we can name him Owen Mistake.

Any name ideas? How did you name your pets?

No Man’s Land

I owe you good people an update. I’m not sure how to go about it. I’d like to blog about cheerful things, but the cheerful things are thin on the ground right now. In fact I’d have to crawl around our wilderness of gouged clay with a magnifying glass to find them, and I am too tired. My granny has a habit of saying, sonorously and self-mockingly, “This too shall pass…” Which is the frame of mind I’m in. In my better moments.

First, we do not have a cat. We had a cat (officially) for three days then she left and didn’t come back. It’s been two weeks. We think she went looking for a more secluded hidey-hole to have her kittens in and didn’t survive the birth.

Second, the yard is now a mess far, far beyond our ability to fix ourselves. After his two men on bobcats were here for 4 1/2 days doing terrible work slowly, the contractor left. By then we were happy be rid of him before he did more damage. Der Mann missed a day and a half of work to supervise the tail end job and try to get him to fulfill the most important terms of his contract. When final check-writing time rolled around and Der Mann refused to pay more than the contract specified, this contractor, who’d been jollying him along all this time (taking Der mild-mannered Mann for the Good Cop) accused of him of being a shyster and, basically, evil. “You just wanted to get me over a barrel,” were among his choice words.

This was more disturbing than all the rest of the mess, crushed gutter and all. The last thing we wanted to do was to make an enemy in the small town we just moved to! My aunt’s take is, “He was a skunk, and when he was cornered, he did what a skunk does: he sprayed.” If you can believe it, until that moment we were still going to get his bid to complete the unfinished work we’d hired him to complete in the first place, treating it as a second job–provided he drove the bobcat himself instead of having his balky crew do it. The horror show was making us that crazy!

Yesterday I found 3 negative Angie’s List reviews by someone who’d had pretty much the same experience with this guy as we did, only worse. I was so embarrassed. We subscribed to Angie’s List specifically to help us choose an excavator; I hadn’t figured out that you had to look up each contractor by each separate category of work he does, in order to see all his reviews.

So, now we have to find another excavator. The ones who’ve come so far look around with big, round eyes and estimate another 4 days of work. It’s kind of funny. We can see them making an effort not to badmouth the colleague who put us in this fix. They scratch their heads and ask things like, “And what kind of machine was he using?” Before we had anyone out Der Mann and I spent about 11 hours (collectively) digging trenches with a pick and a mattock to show where the final soil levels are supposed to be on various slopes. It’s impossible to dig through the pure clay with a shovel alone. In the back, where the really bad fill from the previous owners is still in place, even the mattock bounces.

I also made a point-by-point typed list of every place we want dirt taken away, and put out a forest of beribboned stakes to show them exactly what areas we are talking about. I gave a copy of the list to each excavator “to use when you’re making up your bid.” I went out to see one of their job sites, and talked with the woman who was having the work done. If I’m going to play the fussy bitch, I figure I might as well play it to the hilt. I also watch to see if they talk to me or Der Mann or both of us, and when they talk to me, whether they do it in fatuous way or a businesslike way. I am fed up with the Male Pattern Deafness, and Der Mann can’t take more days off work.

My dad and mom and made a special trip to see the mess. My dad wants to be here when we have the rest of the work done, which is probably just as well. Then we hosted my aunt for the weekend.

Actually I am thinking of starting a business. I’m going to call it “Rent-a-Male.” That way, women whose spouses, fathers, sons, or male friends can’t make it to the job site will always have someone on hand to stand on the porch with his arms folded and spit in the dirt, menacingly.

The Blur of a Rushing Fool

It’s official as of last night.  We are the proud owners of a pregnant cat.  I keep wanting say, “Pregnant-but-it’s-not-our-fault!”

Since we realized she was pregnant, Der Mann and I had been hashing out the issue of cat ownership in constant, exhausting little conversations that went nowhere.  The decision was wearing us out even more than a strong-willed cat could have done, and I suspected part of not being able to decide was not wanting the finality of saying no.

We tend to be excessively responsible when it comes to animals.  That’s why we are so careful about acquiring them.  Finding out the cat is pregnant makes everything so much harder and yet we both had the response: “Well, now she needs a good place to have her kittens. And at least we would get them all neutered and farm them out sensibly, unlike some people.”  Suddenly we are running a home for unwed teenage mother cats.

In fact, it all seemed like such a bizarre project and such horrible timing, I guess we couldn’t resist making our insanity complete with a basket of kittens–like the banana-covered turban on the exotic dancer.  Our yard looks like No Man’s Land.   In about a month, my dad and sundry family members will come tear the basement apart.  They will need the basement workroom with the outside access door.  They will be sleeping in all the rooms and clomping around with heavy shoes.

Nonetheless, we are going to steer the cat toward having her kittens in the workroom.  She’s already appropriated a basket.  We’re going to install a cat door and start feeding her and making much over her down there.  I’m hoping the kittens will be old enough to move by the time my family comes to start the demolition.

Most cats I have known hate upheaval more than anything and would have disappeared for the full duration of the mess.  This one was gone during the day, but in the evenings she would come right back and settle on her canvas chair, unworried by the changed landscape and the rotten boards, rusty deck nails, and rescued plants cluttering up the porch.  Last night I was walking around the piles of dirt to show Der Mann all the places the excavator ignored the markers his boss set out.  (Der Mann is going to stay home from work this morning to have a word with the boss.  The digging his crew does today it is our last chance to save ourselves days of  backbreaking labor with a shovel to clean up the places they went wrong.)  I was not in a happy mood.  Suddenly the cat trotted up to me as if to say.  ”Well, here I am.”  Expecting me to be pleased.  And I sort of was.  We let her in the house and went over to tell our neighbor that we’d take her.

Note to Self

Note to self:

Next time a misbehaving half-grown cat tries to adopt you, get her spayed immediately, even though you’re not sure you want her and she is far to young to have kittens.  She may turn out to be one of those, “but in some cases as young as 4 months” cats you’d never heard about.

Prodigals

I made two discoveries soon after we moved. First, that I had lost my laundry stick and second, that I now had only five handwoven napkins where I used to have six. This bothered me. I could make a new laundry stick, but it wouldn’t be the one my granny gave me, twin to her own. I could make another handwoven napkin, but it wouldn’t be part of the set. I kept the napkins rolled up in the top kitchen drawer, so I was pretty sure one must have rolled out the back of the drawer and was sitting in the bottom of the cabinet with the sawdust and spider webs.

What really bothered me, though, was the thought of it staying with my former raw-vegan-musician-nudist landlord.

This individual was such a trial there was no question of going back to ask if we could fish the napkin out of the cabinet or the laundry stick out of the laundry room. The goal was never to see him again. At all. The only thing more upsetting than the thought of my napkin remaining in his toxic (though unwitting) clutches was the thought of having to wake him up in the middle of the day in his white rajneeshi pyjamas and hear how the universe was ordering itself for his convenience because of how wonderful he was–a deeply held truth he inserted into most conversations–except when the universe wasn’t doing it’s part, which made him scared and mad.

Der Mann and I bore up by joking about him. Der Mann more than me, because I was around him more and tended to find him more scary than funny. Scary and pitiable. With an emphasis on the scary. Because a) he was very big and tall, and b) he was one of those guys who always has a toothsome groupie-girlfriend, and oozes a preening sexuality, and c) I grew up around mental illness and therefore have a very low tolerance for crazy people.

It’s interesting. The same situation that gave me a very low tolerance for crazy people gave me a very high tolerance for eccentricity. I tend to take what people say at face value, then analyze. When you are a kid in the care of a crazy person you can’t just get away from the craziness, so you become an expert at sorting it. Not everything a crazy person says is crazy. You have to assess situations individually. For instance, when an adult tells you that if a stranger ever tries to drag you off, you should yell “You’re not mommy!” as loudly as you can, because if you just kick and scream people will think you’re throwing a fit with one of your parents–that is actually pretty good advice. But when that same adult tells you that no, you can’t have any gum this time because Bad People might have replaced all the white chicklets in the gum machine at Sears with Ex-Lax, followed by an explanation of what Ex-Lax is and what it does–that is not really something you need to worry about at the age of five. (And I did not worry, but I did spend several years marveling over all the Ex-Lax f@tishists who went through the world scattering digestive mayhem. Oh brave new world, that has such people in it!)

So, I often find myself nodding earnestly as people tell me completely crazy things–like my landlord telling me about the apocryphal Gospel of Andrew, which is where he got his nudism–while I weigh the merits of their ideas. When I have collected enough opinions and soaked up enough vibrations, my intuition processes it all. It says either something like, “Huh. This guy has arrived at some uncommon beliefs in a fashion consistent with his personality and values. I wonder if he first encountered the Gospel of Andrew when he was a Hotshot Evangelical Youth or a Fundamentalist Christian Dad, or when he chucked his family and started hanging out with the Humorously Out-of-Date New Agers. His dome tent sounds cool, although I wish he would stop referring to it as a yurt.” Or my intuition says: “Something is very wrong here. Internal inconsistencies. Grandiosity. Strong whiffs of narcissism. I still feel unsettled days after talking with him. Yep. It’s the old allergic reaction. Once a bedbug-crazy zealot, always a bedbug-crazy zealot.”

The irony is that I attract crazy people. Since I am noncommittal, polite, and take their ideas seriously, they are on me like flies on honey. (See my allergic reaction in my metaphor!) I know a clinical psychologist would be more inclined to see craziness as a continuum rather than a yes / no thing. They would also have a lot more interest in someone like my landlord. I can only plead that what I mean by crazy is someone who is not in treatment and who actively indulges their craziness to the detriment of others, and that I am aware the line I draw between crazy and not crazy is subjective.

If only my intuition worked faster! See, what happens is I am still smiling and nodding, collecting information, when someone else would have already said to themselves, “Oh my god. My new landlord has just told me that in the near future no one will wear clothes. And I have affably pointed out that I like clothes, handmade clothes can be an art form, and that I would like to make handwoven garments. In reply to which he has smugly informed me that come Nirvana-on-earth I can still weave blankets. This guy is so full of shit!“

Or more likely, someone else would have just skipped the whole hour-long conversation that led up to the blanket exchange, in favor of an immediate, “This guy is so full of shit!”

(The upside to my attractiveness to crazy people is that I also attract eccentrics–although they tend to be shyer than the crazies, and so not as many. This has studded my life with fascinating LONG conversations and a few very interesting friendships.)

To proceed.

Not long ago, Der Mann and I set out for our evening walk and discovered that our tiny town’s “First Friday” event was in progress, with an art-and-craft show set up in the community center. We wandered in. It was crowded and noisy and there was loud, re-verbed droning New Age music in the background. I figured we’d make a full circuit of the booths in a spirit of community support. Suddenly Der Mann stopped in his tracks and whispered, “I think that’s K___!”

“Where?” I said.

“The live music,” he said.

Like spies in a spy movie we had ducked behind a partition and were whispering. Der Mann ducked out, trying to get a sight line through the crowd without the man who was possibly K___ noticing him staring. The music swelled and droned in majestic digital excess. I said I was going back to wait in the other room where the naughty art was. I was really taken with the brash oils of sports cars and shiny gold human figures (a painting of a statue?) engaged in an act with a name which will not appear on this blog. They put that one at ceiling level. As if kids don’t look up.

Der Mann rejoined me after some reconnaissance. “I still couldn’t see, but it’s the hair. And the pyjamas.” We were both very giggly. We skittered outside feeling more like teenagers than we had in a while.

“And the car,” Der Mann added, pointing. At first I was willing to believe that someone else with a Volvo of that vintage and color was attending the art show, but it had the bumper stickers: Simplify. Begin Within.

We joked about our near miss all the way home. That awful music made me feel quite light about the whole messy business of extracting ourselves from the duplex. (I haven’t told you about the problem with the check he wrote us to refund our deposit.) Our former landlord is a skilled acoustic musician who could play anything he liked, and yet that is what he composes. That is what sounds good to him, and what he plays at paid gigs. Amazing. Those white pyjamas lost some of their sinister brilliance out in the fresh air, amid the pet-themed stained glass and homemade soap.

Further closure came with the napkin. A few days ago it fell out of Der Mann’s Homesar T-shirt. It had been in there since the last time it was washed, before we moved. I sang, I danced, I killed the fatted calf.

And when my granny told my grandpa I lost my laundry stick, he made me a new one.

Moral Dilemma With Cat

I only seem to write when I want something. Washing machine advice, exclamations of horror. You’re so nice about giving them to me! However, you’ve probably given up on checking my blog by now, and I know bloglines doesn’t register my new entries until a month or two after I post them.

If you do come across this, maybe you will have something to say. Remember the gamboling wild kittens I mentioned in my pros and cons post a while back? Well, one of them is making a pitiful effort to socialize itself and has decided that we belong to it.

(Dog exclusivists will be bored by what follows. There’s no weaving in it. I’m warning you so you can stop reading and avoid that uncomfortable annoyed-by-the-stupidity-of-a-stranger-on-the-internet feeling.)

I once read a sort of natural history of domesticated cats by a vet, which did a lot to explain why cats relate to humans in a way unlike dogs. A happy, properly-trained dog thinks you’re its alpha pack mate. Cats don’t have packs. A cat (animal behaviorists speculate) thinks you’re its mommy. The kneading, the purring, the seeking of comfort, the lap sitting, the fixation on food when you’re around: infant behavior. Also the playing; you’re it’s teacher. I wouldn’t wonder if the wheedling and manipulating and leaving you in the dust when there’s something more interesting to do isn’t also a part of the metaphorical parent-offspring relationship–rebellious teenaged cat behavior as it leaves the nest and stakes out its own territory.

Well, I’m thinking that if a cat is going to enter into a successful social contract of protracted mama-cathood/kittenhood with its owners, it has to know what the relationship is about. It either has to have had a mama-cat, or a human who stood in for one.

Hence the problem with adopting feral cats, and the really weird behavior we noticed in the local kittens. I am used to kittens that interact with humans, that notice what you’re doing, what you want them to do, and so on; then they court you or evade you. The kittens around our house raised each other, so that while they had no fear of humans, they treated Der Mann and me as walking hurricanes–a collection of natural phenomena–rather than creatures. They would come right up to us to see what was going on, but they wouldn’t let us touch them. They would chase string without ever realizing we were pulling it. They would come in our house to explore if we accidentally left the door open without any sense of wrongdoing or any effort to be sneaky–just curious, as they were about everything else in their territory. We were weather to them because we were not cats.

In the last month or so the three black kittens have taken to making fewer and fewer appearances right by the house as they stake out their adult territories, while the Siamese-looking one seems to have made it’s territory here. Right here. Central command is our front porch, which it defends against full-grown neighborhood cats. Recently it started meowing and scratching at the back door, peeping in the windows. When we go outside it makes a beeline for us. It has learned about petting, though not well and not about laps. It seems to want something we can’t give it. Instead of sitting down and allowing itself to be petted, it frantically rubs its head against our hands while standing on our knees and gets more and more agitated. If we stop, it starts climbing our chests, kneading us, and sticking its nose in our faces.

It’s well fed, so that’s not the problem–more that it’s little kitty wires are crossed. My unscientific theory is that its sociable Siamese genes are struggling with it’s lack of upbringing. Instinctively it knows that humans are good for something, it knows that the door into the house is a portal to delights, but it can’t figure out what they are beside food, which we never give it.

Several days ago, Der Mann talked to the neighbor we thought these kittens belonged to and found out that they had been abandoned in a box in the vacant lot between our houses. The neighbor fed them but didn’t let them in her house or interact with them, except for the one she adopted. She hasn’t gotten around to taking the others to the pound. I guess she wanted to find homes for them, although she doesn’t seem to have been trying very hard because they are about 7 months old. Now it’s not likely to happen. Their kitten appeal is gone, and they haven’t been taught any of the things they need to know, like not to scratch the furniture or jump up on counters. Worst of all–like most of the pets in this town–they haven’t been fixed.

When we heard about the impending impoundment, we had already (shame on us) let the needy Siamese it in a few more times to see what it would do. Each time we were forced to put it out–immediate, unrepentant claws to the new sumak rug, etc. If (we concluded) it’s possible to train this particular cat for indoor behavior (which I doubt), it will take someone (not us) weeks and weeks of lifting it down from the counter every fifteen minutes, by which time all their furniture will be in tatters (not ours).

And yet the first thing we said to each other when we heard about the pound was, well, should we save the Siamese?

It’s not that we don’t want a cat. We do, especially Der Mann, but Der Mann is allergic. Not severely allergic, but the kind of allergy that has to do with those numbered enzyme thingies most cats make (too lazy to look it up), but which a few fancy breeds or mutants make less or none of. Basically, second hand cat-spit makes him itch. If he doesn’t have any cuts on his hands, and doesn’t touch his face, and washes his hands right afterward, he can handle a cat without too many ill effects. But living in the same house with a cat would be a different matter.

If we took responsibility for the Siamese, it would have to have a cat door and bed down in the basement workroom, and not be allowed in the house. It would be an outside-only cat–not only because of it’s allergens, but because of it’s wildness and naughtiness.

Here are the elements of our dilemma:

Cat is going to the pound where it will probably be put down.

Cat is pretty. Cat is unusually smart. Cat has worked its evil wiles on us. We like the cat.

Cat is dysfunctional. Cat claws everything in sight. Cat is high energy. Cat sheds copious amounts of whitish fur. Cat is bossy. Cat is probably untrainable. It is not a desirable house cat.

Husband is allergic to cats. Even a desirable house cat is a bad idea.

Because a house cat is a bad idea, we’re not likely to go looking for one.

But one found us.

Only, it can’t be a house cat, it can only be a basement workroom and porch cat.

Our question is: is it right to take responsibility for an animal without really giving it the home it wants?

To put it another way: is it better to let the Siamese take its chances at the pound, or to give it food and outdoor companionship without taking it into our lives?

Several things muddy the issue. Since the pretty Siamese has better chances of being adopted than its long-haired, flat-faced, rusty black siblings, shouldn’t we save one of the ugly ones? And if we are only concerned about rescuing cats from death, why not fix and start feeding all four? And if we did let it in the basement workroom, can we absolutely promise ourselves we would not let it in the house, which would be terrible for Der Mann’s health and my sanity?

Aesthetically, I’m gaga for this cat. Stubby legged, small, and sausage shaped, she is not my usual favorite flavor of kitty–but that just makes her look all the more like a panda. The sharp contrast of her dark brown ears and legs and face and tail are incredibly expressive, like a mime in whiteface. I often want to laugh at the transparency of her gestures.

But cuteness can’t make up for a bad personality. The cats I knew growing up were the easy layabout kind. They never clawed the furniture. I couldn’t stand the kind of cat that jumps on your keyboard, bothers you, nags you, demands constant interaction, is deaf to the word, “no.”

I want this cat, but I don’t want this cat. We can have this cat, but we can’t have this cat. It’s very confusing.

Central Command