Of course you weaver folk guessed correctly about my letter opener. I’ve been using it to weave a pick-up band. I don’t have a band loom, and there were a couple of false starts before I worked out a shedding and tensioning arrangement that suited me.

My first mistake was a vintage bead loom. This belonged to my aunts when they were children, but they never used it, probably because the impenetrable instructions made it look like work, which it was.  I used it once to bead a cuff bracelet. I was good at things like that as a kid. I had a strange talent for completing self-imposed projects I had come to hate. (The hideous printed-yardage-kit rag doll plus accessories and the dolls house come to mind.)

I didn’t exactly hate beading–I just found the end result rather frail and useless. It didn’t justify the finicky work.  I didn’t know how to tack the finished web of beads to leather (didn’t know where you even got craft leather at the age of eleven), and wasn’t much interested in Indian jewelry or belts or hatbands in the first place. But I loved the little loom! I had a notion I could weave cloth bands on it, if only I had some directions. I clearly remember finding some Scandinavian needlepoint patterns in an ancient copy of Workbasket magazine around that time, and thinking “If I knew how to weave, I could weave sewing trim or narrow tapestries with motifs like that!” Much more exciting than seed beads, to me.

I kept the loom all these years not for band weaving, but because it was too cute to get rid of and no one else in the family was likely to want it. As I was contemplating the problem of tensioning my current band warp, I took it out and had a look at it.

It is too small to use with the Beka rigid heddle I bought from Earth Guild, so I made a continuous string heddle, like this–

–and prepared to beam my warp. I meant to treat the the wire spacers on the back beam as a kind of raddle, then cover the breast and back beams up with little rolls of card to keep the wire spacers from catching the threads while I was wove. But the spacers (intended for fine bead thread) are too close. My linen and cotton warp dragged and caught, and inevitably popped right out of them. I might have managed to carry out my plan with a single ply of embroidery floss or something equally fine, but even so, the loom is really too short to allow much of a shed or much room to ply the pick-up stick. Nix on that.

I threaded the heddle, sighed, got out my backstrap sling. I don’t like the whole tied-to-a-doorknob thing much, besides which the doorknobs around here–where they remain–are a hundred years old. They have been taken out and put back in the wrong doors, with the wrong screws, in stripped holes. They are rickety. Tie the warp to a doorknob, and I was liable to pull the knob right off and find myself locked in.

I looked around for something else to tie myself to. The newel post is a part of a modern prefabricated stair-and-banister kit someone put in when they ripped out the original staircase. I don’t like it much, but it is great for weaving. All the little turned bobbles allowed me to attach my warp at whatever height I wished.

I had used internet resources to learn how one does this kind of work. They made it sound really complicated, and I spent a lot of time earnestly trying to comprehend the whole process before I had begun it, which didn’t work. Happily, once I understood the threading principle (ground, ground, pattern–regardless of holes and slots) and had the loom in my hands, it wasn’t that hard to figure out pick-up technique.

I soon saw why clever folk put a second set of holes in their traditional rigid heddle tape looms. From what I read it is strictly a Norwegian innovation, though it is such an improvement on regular tape looms, it’s hard to believe it wasn’t taken up elsewhere!

Speckled background bands are a pain but doable with a normal rigid heddle. (That’s when you let the unused pattern warps go up and down as they please to make specks in the plain weave ground when they are not skipping up to make part of the design, as shown in this nice article on the Weaver’s Hand site, and this older entry on knotted pile weaver Sarah Lamb’s blog.) But I didn’t want to make speckled background bands. I wanted monochrome backgrounds as shown in the second part of Sarah Lamb’s tutorial–which means you have to pick out all the pattern warps from the all ground warps all the time, not just select and lift the few you especially want on top.

With a second set of holes in the heddle, to carry the pattern warps just a tad over the ground warps, the pattern warps are always easy to see and pick out, even when they happen to be on the bottom side of the shed. You can see how this double-holed Norwegian loom is threaded in a 2008 article in Weavezine (“Scandinavian Tape Looms”, by Grace Hatton), which I have to admit I only really understood after I had tried weaving with an normal rigid heddle and found it unnecessarily difficult! I unpicked the bit of weaving you see here, plus a little more, and decided to make myself a new loom.

to be continued….

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.

Can you guess what I’m making with this? If you’ve been reading Dot’s Fibre to Fabric blog, you probably can.

Last year Granny was cleaning out her sewing drawers and found yet another stash of sewing/knitting notions that had belonged to her mother. Great Granny was such a pack rat, it took Granny about a year to clean out her small house after she died, and she’s still finding pockets of Great Granny’s stuff that she hasn’t had time to sort and disperse–things that weren’t valuable, but were somehow so infused with Great Granny that she couldn’t bring herself to throw them out. I have happily taken some of them, like the collection of bobby pins and various kinds of toothed 1920’s-1940’s metal clips that Great Granny used to set her hair for pin-curls and marcel waves every morning. It was amazing to watch how nimbly she did this; it was her signature hairstyle most of her life. The way it fell in place when she combed it out was sheer magic. Now I use the clips to hold back the layers when I cut Der Mann’s hair. For a long time they smelled of her.

This particular stash had some knitting markers and gauges, a celluloid tracing wheel that belonged to my Granny’s granny, Nanny, and this handmade copper letter opener. Granny didn’t know anything about it except that her mother had always kept it in her desk. It seemed the sort of thing someone might have made for her when she was a girl in rural Idaho, but Granny couldn’t say for sure that her mother had been its first owner. As Granny was telling me this I was turning it around in my hands, and found the initial at the end of the handle.

Great Granny’s name was Kathleen, so it was definitely hers. In normal light the embedded copper is nearly the same color as the wood. I’m not surprised no one spotted it. I can imagine one of the old coots who came to her father’s general store making it, or her mother sending it to her at boarding school, or picking it out for her in a souvenir shop someplace like Yellowstone in the 1910’s. I’ll never know.

I love this tool. Aside from loving the look of it and the way it’s put together, with the little copper wedges holding the blade into the handle and the braided copper wires binding it, it is almost perfectly balanced, and I like the way it fits in my hand. As soon as I held it I knew immediately what I was going to do with it.

But that’s not the only project I’ve got going. I’ve also warped up the Spear’s rigid heddle loom for another scarf out of scraps of Great Granny yarn, padded with a bit of Goodwill yarn from the same era. Perhaps you remember the three scarves I made last year for my aunts and mom? I’m not sure who this one is for. Maybe one of my sisters. The urge just came on me to use up ridiculously small scraps of yarn. Maybe because it’s autumn. Waste not, want not. The past. Family. Dissolution. Time.

When I had the warp on I the loom I remembered something about weaving on the Spear’s. It turns me into a moaning hunchback. If your rigid heddle loom doesn’t have blocks, that means you will be holding up the heddle with either your left or right hand, at arm’s length, against the tensioned threads, for every other pass of the shuttle.

I knew I would regret it if I put off making heddle blocks any longer. Milled 1×2s are the wrong size to make proper attached blocks, which need to be a true 1/2 inch thick for this loom, so I made some free-standing ones. (Again the scraps!) They don’t hold the “down” shed in place as attached blocks would, but that doesn’t really matter: the Spear’s heddle holds the down shed by itself if you just let it dangle. It is heavy enough for that because you can’t weave at very tight tension anyway on a Spears, due to the bolt-and-wingnut mechanism it uses for advancing and securing the warp.

I was going to tell you about the hellish spring-summer-fall that accounts for my blog silence, but it isn’t over and I’m not in the mood. Maybe later? I’ll leave you with a genuine out-the-window picture. Yes, that is is a Fisher Price McDonald’s playset circa 1978. It was buried four feet underground. If plastic could talk…

Season of Shreds and Patches

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:

Elsewhere on my site, Susan Berlin asked the question, “How can you tell a bench that was made by Mr. Bergman?” I thought the answer deserved a post of its own.

First of all, there were at least two Mr. Bergmans making looms, Margaret Bergman’s husband John and her son Arthur, who eventually took over the family business. Other family members may have worked in their shop at other times, and the Bergmans may have had employees, so I can’t tell you anything about whether a bench was actually made by a Mr Bergman himself, or made in his workshop by someone else. If you know something about the Bergman workshop drop me a line; I would love to hear about it.

I realize this amount of detail sounds ponderous. As if I were discussing real Hepplewhite chairs or something. When in fact The Bench is just a very nice, sturdy little wooden bench with a hinged lid. Mine is from 1936. I know the Bergman looms started to be made out of different woods and had some alterations in design over the next 40 years they were made, so it could be that the later benches were different too. I suspect the basic proportions stayed the same, because the basic proportions of the looms stayed the same. The main feature of my own Bergman Loom bench is that it was made to straddle the 3″x3″ bar to which the treadles hinged at the front of the loom, and that it will also fit completely inside the loom when you’re not weaving (between the two wooden storage boxes for shuttles on the insides of the front “wings”).

So, I can’t tell you how to tell a bench made by Mr. Bergman in general, but I can tell you about mine. It is made of straight-grained fir, with an old looking brown-honey colored varnish, and the measurements in inches are as follows:

22 5/8 tall
35 wide x 11 1/4 deep seat
32 wide x 11 1/4 footprint

The mousehole cutouts in the side panels that form the legs:
5 1/2 wide x 9 5/8 tall

The compartment inside the bench:
30 3/8 x 9 1/4 x 3 1/2 deep

I’m showing the underside so you can see how it’s put together. Prism-shaped pieces of wood reinforce the construction at either end of the bench, as you can see next to the cat’s head.

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

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?

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.

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:

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.