Three things — 5/31/12

Things I’m loving this week

1. Summer sunsets. I simply can’t stand to miss good ones, so when I noticed this one late on Tuesday evening, I made the kids get in their car in their jammies and we drove down to the top level of the Burke parking ramp at Behrend.  You can just make out the bicentennial tower in the lower right hand corner.

OOhhh…speaking of great sunsets, the Sunset Concert Series at Presque Isle start Wednesday, June 13 (and runs through July 18).

2. “Stiff.” A friend recommended this book and while the subject matter is morbid, it’s inherently interesting (hey, it’s true) and the author (Mary Roach) manages to actually make it absurdly funny in parts.  I’ve laughed out loud more than a few times.

I wouldn’t recommend this book if you’re squeamish about dead bodies or have lost a loved one recently. I hear the author’s other books—”Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex,” “Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife,” “Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life In the Void“—are good, too, and the subject matter may be less, um, dark.

3. Freshly mulched beds. I hate spreading bark, but it looks fantastic when the dirty work is done. And, my disdain for task is always tempered by my love for the season.  I <3 May.

P.S. I also love those stepping stones. I make one with the girls on their birthday every year.

 

Things I’m not loving this week

1. Wet floors & wet towels. Perpetual puddles near both back doors and wet towels constantly found throughout the house and yard are two of the few bad things about owning a pool.

 

2. Vegetable gardening.  Do we…or don’t we? Do we…or don’t we? We invested a considerable amount of time and money into building a couple of square-foot gardens last year. We were SURE it was going to work. Everyone else we knew had great success with square-foot gardening.

It failed. Miserably. Or we failed, depending on how you look at it. By the end, some kind of rodent was living in there. Whatever.

So, now it’s that time of year again, and I’m just not sure I have the energy to try — and fail — again.

I joined a local organic CSA which makes me lean toward not bothering to grow my own and yet, those boxes sit there….mocking me.

 

3. Yeah, so … I’ve got nothing. See what I mean about summer? What’s not to love?

Rocktology

Me: “Do you ever think about what you want to do when you grow up, Lauren? Like what are you good at? What do you really like to do?”

Lauren: “I think I want to be a rocktologist. Because, because …well, rocks just reach out and say to me, ‘Be a rocktologist, Lauren.’ You know, like how words reach out and say to you ‘write me into a story.’”

Worth reading: May 30

A random collection of articles, blog posts and other stuff I recommend reading:

Scary Mommy: 10 People Who Make Parenting Harder

Wendy Keller: How to Fight Fair: What to Do When People Get In Your Face (could’ve used this advice when I was at the paper)

Capture Your Summer: How to Turn Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Photographs (Inspiring stuff here, especially for a girl with a new SLR to play with

Huffington Post: Centralia, Pennsylvania Fire Still Burns

Wine & Bowties: Where children sleep (eye-opening, but possibly a little editorialized, eh?)

Just Write 28 ~ Zoe

“Aunt Heather, it’s Corey. We found a kitten at the park, it was drowning in a mud puddle. It’s real cute and mom said your cat just died… .”

He had. After 13+ years, Kayto, my gray indoor-outdoor cat had died of old age. I came home from a run with friends to find him dead on the porch. I was upset, but he had led a good, happy and long life — coming & going as he damn well pleased. He even died on his terms, sparing me that horrible decision I would have likely had to make some day.

But, I was done with pets. No more. Two kids and a guinea pig is enough.

I never could say no though. So I picked up the pitiful thing. It was one ugly cat. Kinda brownish and striped. Scrawny. Runny eyed.

“I’m going to find you a home,” I said to it as it curled up in my lap on the way to the store to buy kitten food. “I’m sorry, kitty cat, but I’m done with pets.”

I snuck her in the house and put her in the bathroom with food, water and a litter pan, still intending to find her a home.

Until the girls heard him mewing. And then it was all over. She’d found a home.

Lauren named her: Zoe, after Chloe, the other old tuxedo cat we had that had died a year before.

Despite my best efforts and the fact that I’m the bleeding heart that talked my husband into letting us keep her, she never liked me. She tolerated me, but she wouldn’t sit with me. She would, however, pester me to pet her when it was completely inconvenient for me, for instance when I was doing pushups, or trying to get a story done on deadline.

She loved Dan, who hated cats.  He came to begrudgingly like Zoe, if only because it was quite obvious she preferred him above all others. She was the lap cat I always wanted, but it wasn’t my lap she wanted.

I still liked her and when she started insisting on going outdoors, escaping every chance she got — and she got a lot of chances since we have two girls who were, apparently, born in a barn — we eventually just started letting her in & out.

My old gray cat Kayto had insisted on going outside once Kelly was born. He was first indoor/outdoor cat, and I came to love it. I loved gardening with him purring next to me. I loved stroking him poolside. I loved giving him the great outdoors and how much he seemed to enjoy it.

Zoe did, too.

I took this photo Friday afternoon.

Saturday morning I was rushing out the door to meet friends for a run at the peninsula. Dan went out to get the newspaper and came back in without it.

I’ll be forever grateful I wasn’t the one who went out for the paper that morning.

Zoe was on the road. Dead.

She never went out there.

Disbelief. Tears. Guilt.

Guilt.

Guilt.

It’s my fault. I let her start going outside.

We live in the country. Most of the cats out here are indoor/outdoor.

She was on the front porch with me Friday night. I was reading and watching the thunderstorm as it rolled in. I stroked her back as she nudged my hand and I wondered why she wasn’t spooked by the thunderstorm, considering where she had came from.

I was sure she had went in the house with me that night. I found out later she had. Dan had let her out when he took the puppy out at 3 a.m.

Now she’s buried in the growing pet cemetery at the edge of the woods in our backyard.

And it’s my fault. I know outdoor cats have shorter lives. It’s a dangerous world out there.

But, given the choice I think Zoe would have taken short and free versus long and captive.

Three years spent lazing on the patio furniture, eating real grass, and soaking up the sun has to beat twelve frustrating years indoors watching birds from behind a screen.

It doesn’t really ease my guilt though.

____________________________

About Just Write
“What ends up revealing itself when free writing is that everything has meaning. That is a magnificent gift of writing. If we write from a free heart-gut place, our souls start speaking.”

My weekend in photos

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Words to Start Your Week: We remember

All we have of freedom, all we use or know -
This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.

~Rudyard Kipling, The Old Issue, 1899

Friday Funny: Bill Posters Beware

Three things — 5/24/12

Three things I’m loving this week

1. Memorial Day weekend. The pool will be uncovered, the hammock is already hung, and the mulch is being delivered. The patio furniture is cleaned off, there’s a robin’s nest on our porch light, and all the summer fun is just beginning. Forget December, this is the most wonderful time of the year. So much to love and so much more to come.

2. Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All about Birds website. Lauren and I heard an usual bird the other night. It sounded like a cat in a tree. I figured it was, as it’s mew would suggest, a catbird.

I dashed a message off to Toni Kelly, a friend and avid birder, and she sent me a link to the Cornell site where I could listen to recorded catbird calls, see photos and learn more about the bird.

You don’t have to know the name of the bird you saw because you can search the site in several ways — by entering a description, shape, or just browsing through the most common birds in your area.

And, yes, it was definitely a pair of gray catbirds.

3. Poppies. It’s too bad each bloom lasts only one day because the “pop” of color these pretty plants give to a garden is stunning.  I love poppies because the plant has the good sense to die after it blooms so it’s not hogging up garden space like the Irises do (another short-lived bloomer):

Three things I’m not loving this week

1. Fuji apples. I’ve been ruined by the Pink Lady. No other apple compares. I guess you could say (wait for it)…Pink Lady is the apple of my eye. (ba dum bum).

2. Cutting a mango. I’m sure I threw away half the fruit trying to cut my first mango. Then, I did what any wise person does — I “Googled” it and found simple instructions and even a video.

3. Um…um….um…. Hmmm…. I can’t think of anything else. It’s late May and life in Erie is good. Honestly, I anticipate this feature being a little top heavy for the next couple of months. 

Creek talk (Meet Jerry!)

Boots and bikinis. Yep, that’s how we roll down at the creek.

I really need to carry a notebook when I walk with this child because every single thing that comes out of her mouth is blog worthy.  She is an endless source of material.

A few snippets from our creek walk in the backyard on Monday night:

Me: “Do you have any homework tonight?”

Lauren: “No. Our teacher hasn’t been giving us much homework. I think she’s trying to win a Teacher-of-the-Year award or something”

 

Lauren: “Oh, oh…this is it right here. If I were a salamander, this is exactly where I would live.” 

Lauren: (After discovering no salamanders under the rock) “Now that’s just too bad. They’re missing out on a great house.”

Lauren: “You know, this creek needs a name, Mom.”

Me: “Well, it’s called 4 Mile Creek.”

Lauren: “No, no…like a real name.”

Me: “What would you suggest?”

Lauren: “Jerry.”

Me: “Jerry? You want to name the creek Jerry?”

Lauren: “Yeah, it’s a good name for a creek.”

Me: “OK, Jerry it is.”

Lauren: “Now, that you showed me how to make an exclamation point (on the computer), I’m going to use a lot of them.”

Me: “Well, you don’t want to use too many or people ignore them. You know, when I was at the paper, we were never, ever allowed to use them. They call them ‘bangers’ and editors take them right out of your story.”

Lauren: “Well, that’s just stupid. I actually think every sentence should have an exclamation point at the end!”

Worth reading — May 23

A random collection of articles, blog posts and other stuff I recommend reading:

Literal Mom: Yep. I Do Judge and I’m Not Sorry for It

Telling Dad: You Gotta Know When to Fold ‘Em (You know darn well those clean clothes in the kids baskets will never be folded, right?)

The Extraordinary Ordinary: Before (Ode to the good old days)

Danoah Unleashed: You Said What to your Kid?

Purpose Fairy: 15 Things You Should Give Up to Be Happy (Solid advice here!)

Treading Water in the Kiddie Pool: The House at the End of the Block (Holy crap)

Glen Pendlay: I’m pissed (I am, too, Glen. It’s all been a big fat lie)