Kitten Update

Time for a feline paradigm shift: Baby Louis is a fiend for chasing a ball of crumpled paper (as well as every other kind of potential game or trouble-making opportunity, like leaping through a big drawing while I'm holding it up, just like a tiger through a flaming hoop) and last night, while I was endlessly throwing this type of paper ball for him to retrieve, 15-year-old Archie half-lunged as the tempting ball buzzed past his head. The next time I threw it, Archie leaped spectacularly from Larry's pajama-clad lap and chased the ball around in a spirited fashion - something I've never seen him do in fifteen years! All of his postures, of leaping and pouncing on the ball of paper and staring pointedly at me afterwards to throw yet another ball of paper, were totally new, and look exactly like the way that Louis moves in those situations, looking to me as if the behaviours are newly learned, like from a how-to video on How To Be a Kitten.

HERO OF THE DAY

Jackie Turnbull was a student in Cut Paper and Collage classes at the Winnipeg Art Gallery and she made work in a number of different modes. She made many surprising collages of her own pet birds - a lorikeet, many budgies, and a number of other small parrot-family birds - often using their own feathers from recent moults. She made series of collages depicting the hard-to-believe camping trips she and her husband made each summer, travelling in a camper-trailer with numerous exotic birds, visiting green parks in rural Manitoba. Jackie also worked on a reworked book project, working on each page with collage ideas and cut paper approaches also, adapting her own biography to interact with the fictional story in the second-hand hard cover book. Some of her most memorable artworks dealt with strong experiences of disappointment and anger, and her exhibits in the Student Exhibition that summer, peppered with swear words, were unforgettable.
YAY - JACKIE TURNBULL - AN ADVENTURER WITH A BIG SENSE OF HUMOUR!

I Remember Mama

One of my happiest memories about Siamese cats involves my mother in part, just as so many of my best remembrances do. Her best friend, as I remember it, was a woman named Ev who had two Siamese cats, a Seal-Point named Cork and a Blue-Point named Riley. This was the fifties, and I think the fifties in North America had a popular romance with Siamese cats, stemming in part from the evil yet glamorous pair in Walt Disney's Lady and the Tramp. But in the fifties - at least in my neighbourhood - having cats that were of a particular type, and more importantly, a particular type that required a cash investment - and two of those cats, not one . . . made you eccentric to the neighbours, and maybe even more than eccentric. The household of my mum's best friend was truly eccentric, it's true, almost more than you could hope for. Where everybody else I knew had a house that was squeaky clean and well-organized, Ev's house proudly sported the evidence of the family's special obsessions: Ev's baking and sewing and gardening and poetry, and her sons' model trains, handicrafts, tropical fish aquariums, photographic equipment, sports gear, fishing gear . . . And for me - the best thing: all of this stuff was NEVER put away where it belonged! It was always right there, just where somebody left it!

The Worst Thing

"The worst thing", I said to Larry, "is that I let you talk me into stuff like this." He had told me that I should have a Blog, so that I could share my random thoughts with the world. "Why?", I asked, "Was I blathering?"

I had been telling him that I was remembering an old library book from my childhood, "Doris Bryant's Book of Cats". This book talked about various ways to introduce one cat to another, and said that sometimes, cats will not be best friends but will merely tolerate each other, and not suffer stress from the enforced coexistence.

I guess we were talking about this because we were celebrating the harmonious introduction of the new Glorious and Sacred Kitten, a 5-month-old Blue-Point Siamese Cross named Louis Vuitton - by his previous owners! - to our Much Esteemed and Venerable 15-year-old Red Point Siamese cat, Archie. Within a week, the total strangers had become bedfellows, even tenderly touching each other in their sleep - see the beautiful pictures, taken of course by Larry.