For Shelter, the World

Living on the Edge

A bird dropped this on my front porch today ...

The friend who drew it said, "Kitty, you are a daredevil ... you live on the edge." That's after we discussed the fact that I went through a major hurricane and now live 30 miles from an active volcano.

Aren't we all living on the edge now? The creative edge, the leading edge, dancing on the edge ... Thanks, sweetie. ;)

A Cat's Life

A friend of mine just reminded me of this little masterpiece I wrote a while back:

Cats

by Kitty

eat
sleep
pee
wash
sleep
poop
wash
play
sleep
eat
sleep

I just can't resist ...

Here's my little garden pal, ariolimax columbianus...

After I took these photographs, I put some vegetable cuttings and refuse into the composter, and threw a little bit of the core of a bell pepper onto the ground about a foot away from the banana slug. A few minutes later, it was heading in that direction.

Something you'd never see in Mississippi

The other day I was driving in Portland, and I was stopped for a red light, looking around, and noticed a couple of high school students walking along nonchalantly hand in hand, apparently a couple ... the guy was white and the girl was African-American.

Actually, you might see that occasionally on the Gulf Coast, although certainly not in the interior of Mississippi, unless the people involved had a death wish. (I may be exaggerating a teeny bit, but not that much.)

So I kept driving and passed a high school named after Grover Cleveland.

I wasn't really expecting to see that anywhere.

Tonight I was driving to a meeting in north Portland, in an area that I hadn't been in yet, and passed a street called "U. S. Grant Place", named after the General who commanded the Union forces during the Civil War and who subsequently became the eighteenth president of the United States.

Now that you would never, ever see in the state of Mississippi, or anywhere south of the Ohio River, for that matter. I definitely know I'm in a new world now.

Important moments in history

They're predicting a serious cold snap here the next few days. Snow showers probable tomorrow evening, lows around 20 F at night, and the temperature not expected to get above freezing during the day on Friday. In my little cottage by the creek, I've got a fireplace made from native stone, which was recently cleaned out and a newfangled damper installed. Good to have in case the power goes off; which I'm hoping won't happen, but it's nice to have options.

It's kind of clichéd about the discovery of fire -- some caveman noticing that a spark could be put to use and thus provoking (or demonstrating) a quantum leap in the evolution of humankind.

I was wondering today, though: who was it who first figured out that water puts out fire? That was just as important a discovery.

What's in a name

I have mixed feelings about the name Katrina for a hurricane. On the one hand, it is uncommon enough that when you say "Katrina" nowadays, people immediately know what you're talking about. On the other hand, to me the name Katrina has a light, sparkly feel to it, which doesn't exactly fit what happened on August 29, 2005.

I remember in 1979, the first year they started using male names for hurricanes (before that, it was all female names), the very first boy hurricane was Bob -- a minimal hurricane that coincidentally made landfall on the Louisiana coast, in Cajun country.

"I'm a Katrina survivor" -- now that has a ring to it.

"I'm a Bob survivor" -- oh, I don't know, that just doesn't have quite the same impact. Unless you used to be married to a guy named Bob; but that would be a whole nuther story.

Diversity

I love the bumperstickers in Portland. Back on the Gulf Coast, the messages people "wore" on their cars were pretty much of the politically conservative and/or fundamentalist religious right variety. Here, they're much more diverse, politically, socially, and philosophically -- a reflection of the culture here in general. I'm enjoying the heck out of being around this.

Here's one I saw today:

NON-JUDGMENT DAY IS NEAR

(To which I'd reply, amen to that.)