Successes of 2013

New camera!

I learned to make delicious chicken pocket pies. I finally replaced my rain boots. 

I took the train to St. Louis; best decision of the year. I had gooey butter cake for breakfast; favorite moment of the year?

Louis the cat is always a success.  

Lots of friend-time (not enough), lots of burgers, lots of sangria.

Tourist icons of Chicago and Milwaukee; friends from Freiburg!

German-themed fun, Cuban-themed silliness (and more burgers). Birthdays!

A successful dinner chez les parents; an unsuccessful drive to dinner in Detroit.

 The exact bookcases we wanted, found on Craigslist; a new bathing suit!

Lake Michigan from both sides.

Cactus without cats; cactus with cats.

 We stayed in; we went out.

Our apartment was warm and cheery and boiling hot, and my hair got long.

It was a good year, and a good start to life in a new home.

Welcome to My Bathroom

Table Cat's favorite game is Shower-Attack. He'll even do it when you're in the shower.

Please excuse my wastebasket.

It's pretty decent, right? Especially by dim light at night, but also by day with the sun coming through the yellow leaves on the trees. (I pulled down the blind for the night right after I took these photos, don't worry.) But the bathroom needs some decoration other than the shower curtain (although it's doing a great job). (Maybe this or this—I love her stuff.)

Cooper and I decided we needed a serious portrait, a painting, to hang in the spot next to the mirror. Someone, you know, worthy of sharing a wall with Cooper's visage. Something serious, because it would be funny to hang in the bathroom. He suggested Margaret Thatcher, which lead to Jane's cat, Maggie, who Cooper wanted to name Gertie (Gertrude Stein), which then lead Jane to suggest an artist who does portraits of cats from photos. How about Haroun and Table, as ship captains, facing their own litter box and the human toilet? I didn't know what to suggest, exactly, but I brought up Cooper's taco-cart fantasy, even though I've already done it and I'm not into bringing majestic Table Cat into that universe. Anyway. That's one idea we have.

I also want to buy a clock. Specifically, the middle one, from Ikea. I think it's so shiny and retro in such a good way. But obviously, that sort of clock doesn't go in a living room. We already have the microwave clock in the kitchen. And it's not appropriate for the bedroom, either, though I was thinking about getting a real alarm clock (one option is on the left) so that I could put a bedroom-phone-ban into place. 

So I suggested we hang the Ikea Pugg clock in our bathroom—probably pretty high up on the wall above the cabinet. That way I could keep track of the time as I'm getting ready in the morning, and add something else to the room without buying more art (not that I've bought any art yet, sshh). But Cooper thinks it's weird. I'm not sure that it's normal, but my family had a wall clock in the bathroom when I was growing up. We still do. It's nice to know what time it is.

Another option is something small that would sit on that bathroom cabinet opposite the little Knubbig lamp, like the silly clock on the right. I think that would look okay. But I'd rather it not be so roman-numeraled and scroll-y, maybe. I don't know.

What do you think about (wall) clocks in bathrooms? Is this even remotely a thing that people think about?

Happy Saturday

This is what Saturday nights are for. Cuddles and warmth. I hope you're all relaxing cozily as well.

Can't Escape the Greeting Card Business

I started making cards on my family's computer with Print Shop Deluxe, operating under the name Marisa Cards, Inc. I used Print Shop's convenient "coloring book" setting to print them with our painfully slow black-and-white printer, then colored them in with markers. After I got my first digital camera, I switched to photo cards; but by the time I got to college, I was drawing them by hand again. Not that I'm very good at it.

Last December, I tried pretty hard at cards and gifts. Though I purchased the birthday card (what a face on that cat!), 

I included this generous coupon for my dear Rachel, with a simplified but perfect rendition of my  living/bedroom, if I do say so myself. (She cashed it in not once, but twice this year! : )

The Christmas card for Rachel and her family was simpler, and possibly an inside joke with only Emma and my brother and not with Rachel, and certainly not with her family (who can remember when I started singing these lyrics), but anyway, I got a kick out of it. And I was missing my Peepers-kitty; he'd only been gone a couple months at that point.

Here's Mr. Pepys, my dearly departed golden tomcat.

Then we have the masterpiece, conceived of almost a year before it was created. Haroun's taco truck.

Many of us true cat-lovers believe fervently in elaborate facets of our felines' personalities that are, well, impossible. (Like Holly's tricksy French cat, Charlie, who told her husband "Mazel Tov" was French for "Happy Birthday!" Hilarious!) We have rich inner lives. 

My boyfriend insists that Emma's younger cat, Haroun, is a taco salesman. On many a late night, he has wished for a plate of Haroun's tacos.

"May all your dreams come true," read the card. (Yes, the close-up drawing is a bit freaky.)

This year is different. This year, Rachel opened her mail to find this puzzling piece of paper.

Merry Christmas! Happy birthday! You live in Florida now, so I am drawing cute-but-bizarre flamingos all over! Happy Fourth of July -- I only have red and blue pens in the office!

Rachel called this card "fantastic," "truly one of the best." Still, I hope to do better next year.

I Need More Friends, Feline or Otherwise

 Yesterday I stopped to visit my kitty friends on my way to Nickels Arcade, where I intended to and did enjoy a pain au chocolat. (Side note: how can anyone get anything done at Comet? The baristas were chat chat chatting away with the customers, and there were so many people going back and forth, that I couldn't stop listening and watching. It was great, but I didn't get a lot of reading done.) I met with early success—the mother cat retreated to under the porch, and the kitten, lulled by my flicking-leaves-with-leaf-stems ways, allowed me to pet its head and its chin and its back. It didn't quite get that it was supposed to enjoy it though. I tried to pick it up, but the mother's head popped out, hissing ferociously, so I gave up.

She hates me.

Give Me a Home Where the Catamounts Roam

Today, when I got out of work at the law firm, it was snowing. Not the weird pellet-snow that it started with, but actual snow, wet snow, and I had a broccoli to buy and a bike to ride. (You may be noticing this is a theme in my life. I mean the bike and inclement weather.) The only problem with the broccoli is that it is so sad to stop biking and go into a warm, dry place, and then have to leave it to hop back on the bike and get your glasses and pants wet some more before you get to be home. Also the broccoli at the co-op, surprise!, was sort of brown-y and weird on top and also in huge huge stalks that one person cannot eat fast enough when she has two super-long-have-to-eat-at-the-greasy-restaurant days in the next four, so I didn't buy any, and they also had no reasonably-sized potatoes, and then I just had bread and cheese for dinner. With some orange juice, but no pulp, so I will die unhealthy. (That will actually probably be true, when it happens.) So it seems I could have skipped that tragic stop in my tragic ride in the light snow—it wasn't tragic, it was so much better than yesterday's pouring rain.

The point is that I was looking forward to being in my warm home with its overactive radiator and its coat rack newly on the wall (!!) and everything mine mine mine, everything in its proper place, because I tidied up last night or whenever it was. It's such a good feeling to sit down on your bed and take off your coat—okay, normally you probably want to take off your outerwear before you reach the bedroom, but my bedroom is my living room, so not a lot can be done—and put the important pocket-contents (keys, bike light, phone) in their proper places next to the other things in their proper places.

But it's not as good a feeling to look down at the carpet and the computer cord snaking across it and think how a little furry black head would be turning the corner and rubbing up against your legs if you'd just give him the chance. Well. The image is a little off. Haroun would be sleeping on the bed, and probably not get up. Table Cat would have been waiting at the door as soon as he heard feet coming up the stairs, so he would have followed me from my door to my bed. Living in a studio—no, let's call it a 2.5-room apartment—would probably intensify his need to see what's beyond the door—so he might have darted out into the so! exciting! bone-white painted! brown carpeted! weird-smelling! (that's why he'd do it) hallway.

So I imagined my closest kitty friends being in my life today, and you might say it hurt my heart a little if you were cutesier than I, but I've mostly hardened myself to the thought. I've met some kittens a block over, kittens and their little cat mother and sibling from another litter, kittens who live under a porch and need homes for the winter. I know the people in the apartment below me have cats; I've seen them peeking through the gap in the curtains and said silly cat-things to them in my silly, high-pitched cat-voice. I can't help it. I say hi to my kitten not-friends every time I bike past their porch, even if I can't see any of them. Even if I could convince my landlord to let me, though, I can't adopt a cat.

The practical: The apartment is small. A kitten needs space to bounce off the walls. Table Cat would need space to feel like a panther. Haroun might be content to waste away in near-constant indolence, true. But there's also no place to put a litter box, unless I wanted to smell urine and watch Haroun dig for treasure (maybe you don't want to hear about Haroun's issues?) while cooking my meals six inches away.

The crazy: I care too much about the cats I've already lived with. I was torn when I felt my childhood cats falling behind the college cats in my affection, but it was too late. Haroun and Table were my day-to-day life, sometimes the only living bodies in my apartment with me. When I get my next cat, I give up my claim to Emma's cats, whom she really didn't want to let me name (I got Haroun at least), whom she really didn't want me to have. Who aren't mine. But I don't want to let them go.

The considerate: I'm often gone. I work two jobs, and I go to my boyfriend's, which is just far enough across town to make lazy me want to stay put, and I'm only one person. Emma's cats were outraged when I left for the weekend. Heck, I think they were outraged when she left for class while I was at work. I don't have any big future plans right now, but if I did, I wouldn't want to abandon my cats for six months or a year. My parents wouldn't want to take them. Ali's dog would eat them.

But the biggest thing is that they wouldn't understand. You can't tell a cat you're going away for a while, but you'll come back for him. You can't call him up on Skype and have a really good purr-fest together, then catch him up on all the cheeses he hasn't licked while you were in the bathroom. Sane people tell me that cats don't remember. But I know they recognize me. You should have heard Haroun meow at me through the screen when I would go see them in the summer while Emma was in Poland, and they lived across the street from me. If you heard him, you'd swear he was in agony and only I could save him.

And Isabel. My Isa-kitten, who made a mess in my parents' bed the day we got her and was subsequently banished to the bathroom, who I rescued from her mewing solitary sadness and ever since, she slept next to my head, taking up half the width of the bed. Until I went to college, that is, and stopped coming home on weekends and for the summer. When I did come home, she ferociously bit me. Then looked sad, worried, ran away. Came back later, all love and purrs. And bit me again.

I have suffered through this relationship for years. And I will not have any more of my kittens turn to vengeful little she-cats in their middle age if I can help it.

Animals understand more than we think. Some sense our moods, and act accordingly. Their lives may be mainly in the present, but some of them rejoice when we return to them. And not just the dogs. As soon as I walked in the door—well, until she almost completely gave up on me—Isabel would bound up the stairs to my room and meow for me to open the door so we could hang out together in the sanctuary I'd stolen from her with my absence. Animals care more than we can be sure of, though they obviously understand less than we might like them to. And that's why I think we humans have such a responsibility. I'm not going to adopt and coddle and spoil another kitten with all this crazy affection bubbling up inside me until I know that I can continue to coddle and spoil it all through its life, because that is what it will expect.

Unless Emma trains Haroun to use a toilet. Take away the litter box argument, and all bets are off in terms of my dearly-missed feline flatmates.

P.S. Let's just have an unspoken rule that the label "cats" comes with "crazy" attached, okay?

P.P.S. Anyone know anyone in Ann Arbor who needs a cat sitter or dog walker, not too far from Kerrytown? How about a cat walker?

Catching Up with the Cats

After two months apart from the kitties, I saw them tonight for a little while. Aren't you happy to see me, Table Cat?

Don't worry, he was. Unfortunately, the "Cat Preserve" is a basement, and Table Cat's eyes don't get along with the flash very well.

What an alien.

 Hey Harouny on a treadmill...

You're doing it wrong.

It was all too brief, but I am a tired person who worked four hours at one job, three at another, then drove home in the deep dark in a car she just can't get used to driving. And my Isabel cat needs my love too, in my parents' house across the street from Haroun and Table. And Emma!