Phew! Saved a life today

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A little about rhythm of life here, for Saturday morning. We’re going to do this the way it says in Genesis – “the evening and the morning”. There’s a lot of cats. In the afternoon yesterday, Cheyenne and Aubrey were here. Cheyenne played teacher and made homework sheets and math tests on my computer, and Aubrey jumped on my bed, wore my reading glasses all the time she was here, and we looked at my earrings. Any that were on loops rather than posts, she hung on the hem of her teeshirt. Grandaddy Bob brought in one of the four-day old kittens – an orange one, that was under the kitchen again. That’s not where Yasmin’s got the rest. We put her back where we found her though, and hoped Yasmin would come back and get her. She’s abandoned them before – that’s how I got Yeshua last year.

We both worked on projects last night. We looked at the materials available for knife handles together, and some of the blades. The blades we looked at were commercial ones – Bob was just looking for a place to get started, using what’s here already. I went out the back and picked an emerald-green Dymondwood slab (a dyed, laminated wood product) and black linen micarta to go with, with brass for the metal parts. There was a lovely block of greenish stabilized buckeye burl, and a small piece of red jasper, and that’s in end stages now, with brass pieces. Desert Ironwood’s beautiful, hard and greenish – there was a small piece of fossilized walrus jawbone left over from something else, and the colours are really good together. We put a piece of copper rod beside it, and decided that’s what to use with it. Then he decided that would be better with a big blade, so he’s using one he cut out of an old sawmill blade, that we annealed in the kiln last fall. And finally, we’d been looking at a piece of malachite/azurite composite, and wondering what it would be good with. Well, there’s a piece of bone left, I think it’s moose, and the deep blue stone looks fabulous with it. There’s enough nickel/silver left for one knife of that, for sure, and probably enough bone for two. There’s a green stone, I don’t know what it is, that I think would go well with the white and blue, and there will be fine black spacers between each different colour. So, after that, Bob went outside and put together the handle for buckeye burl knife, and started grinding two of the sawmill knife blades for something else.

While he was out doing that, inside the house was quiet. I took my knitting on the sofa, made a pot of Madagascar vanilla tea, took the smoke detector off the wall and buried it in the sofa cushions, lit some sage, and took my knitting and the tea on the sofa, with as many of the lights off as I could manage and still knit. Lovely, lovely. I was there for a couple of hours and got VERY happy. Then Bob came in and we agreed that both of us had said we’d cook vegetables yesterday, and neither of us had, so we finished the chicken curry, because it has vegetables already in it. After that, I made Chocolate Cream Tea, and took a mug of that to bed with my knitting, and listened to Moussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”, the one from the last night of the Proms in 2006, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting, on YouTube. Superb. Bob came and listened to the last two movements with me.

It was cold last night. There was two inches in the rain gauge, after about nine hours of rain – no lightning, but lots of wind. The hydro went out for an hour Thursday night around 10:30, and again later, while everyone was asleep. In the first one, we just went out in the hammocks and listened to the night sounds – crickets, maybe cicadas, tree frogs, a dog a couple of farms over, a train going through Arp. It was beautiful. Clear still too, and lots of stars, when the wind blew the branches apart enough to see the sky. I was sorry when the lights and mechanical sounds (AC, etc.) came back. It was 90F here on Thursday afternoon, and it’s mid-afternoon Saturday now, and not quite 60. The night and the ceramic tile floors over crawl space were cold. This is the way my bed looks just before I get in it. I took this a couple of nights ago, so the book’s different, but you get my drift.

This morning I woke up. Only Yeshua was in – Tiger’d been trying to climb on top of my dresser in the night again, so she got to go sleep on the roof. I cuddled Yeshua for a while, got up for necessary biological purposes, and plunged the toilet. Opened the door to the cat-feeding enclosure outside. (It’s in a huge old cage for something else, so we can close it at night and keep the ‘coons and possums out.) Came back to bed for a while and read. By then, Tiger was sitting in the crotch of the tree outside my bedroom, looking in at my bed and mewing piteously. I couldn’t stand it, so I got up and let her in.

We’d bought bacon ends and collard, mustard and turnip greens the other day, and I’m going to cook them soon. This morning I thought a Western Omelette would be a good breakfast, so I started bacon and onions on very low heat, and thought I’d shower while they cooked, but I got the second shower, and the onions charred just a little. Then I put the eggs in, and some pepper jack on top and put the lid on and let it cook slow, like a frittata. There was enough coffee let in a pot in the fridge for about two mugsful, and I didn’t want it cold today, so I heated them in the microwave, and got berries ready for Bob, and that was breakfast. It’s time to make more coffee.

During breakfast, I could still hear that kitten under the kitchen. So I went and found her. Lying on your tummy on the wet ground, wiggling far enough to reach under the house for a kitten, in Texas fire-ant country, is a BRAVE thing to do. The stings on my ankle from last week aren’t quite healed yet. I got her out, and Yasmin walked past, so I tried to interest her. She sniffed the kitten and walked away, and I tried again, and she did it again. But I followed her, and found where she went in a little culvert-y thing, and put the orange kitten in on top of the others she was nursing. I was a little worried, but then I looked again, and the kitten was nursing too, and Yasmin was cleaning her.

We’d agreed Monday we do NOT want another house cat, and we weren’t rescuing any kittens. This morning I told Bob I’d put her back, and he said,
”We can get kitten formula and raise her by eyedropper again, if we have to,” But I don’t WANT to. It really ties you down. And then, you bond to them. Yeshua’s very bonded to me, who was his Mom in all senses from the time he was a week old. It’s not just biological bonding. Other cats grow up and are perfectly happy to abandon their mothers. Yeshua always knows where I am, when I’m here, and he stays close. If we have to eye-dropper feed that little one, she and I are going to have a terrible time giving each other up later – I hope Yasmin keeps her in the nest.

I'm going out to knit in the hammock now.