chessandlena.com

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. Lena and I are definitely looking forward to a few days off from the grind.

It's a sad time, though; my cousin, Posy, died this week. She was a beautiful woman with amazing artistic talent, and I'm sorry to say that I did not know her nearly as well as I'd have liked. I have one incredibly vivid memory of her: when we were stupid geeky kids playing Dungeons & Dragons all the time, she came down to our table in the basement holding a drawing-- I think it was colored pencil but it may have been pastels-- of a dragon curling round itself. What I remember most, though, is her face just then. I think she liked that her art made others happy much, much more than she liked others praising her art.

I took a picture of our rose bush beginning one last bloom in November a few days ago-- today I saw that it had finally fully opened. I think it opened for Posy.

And another bittersweet moment, I just hung a painting in our sun room. It was painted by my great-grandmother, and belonged to my mother; we got it from her things when she died in April of this year. It's a beautiful painting. I miss my mother.

Our black cat, Bear, has a drinking problem. He likes to drink from the faucet in the bathtub. Observe:

For a while he used to wander into the bathroom, stand at the tub, and meow as loud as possible until Lena or I came and turned on the faucet. That sort of worked for a while; Lena and I are trainable, but both lazy. So Bear has taken to seizing the opportunities whenever we're near the bathroom to launch himself to the tub and meow.

Unfortunately, "near the bathroom" often coincides with "using the bathroom." And Bear doesn't really know the difference.

Let me leave you at that perilous thought for just one second to explain something about cats in general and our cats in particular, and Bear especially. They resent closed doors. They *hate* closed doors. Hate. Hate, hate, hate. At our house, a closed door is soon met with a meow and a whine. Then some scratching. Then another plaintive meow. And then the thumping begins. Dup-dup-dup-dup-THUD. Dup-dup-dup-WHAM. That is the sound of Bear ramming the door with his head, the hardest substance known to man, and certainly the heaviest weapon Bear knows about. Toward the end of keeping our house and our cats as undamaged as possible, we've adopted a more or less open-door policy toward the bathroom, at least when guests aren't about. So when you're comfortably ensconced in the bathroom, chances are pretty good that you'll get a visitor or two during your stay.

And back to Bear's habit... I was in the bathroom, conducting a minor transaction (standing), when I hear the door swing open, and Bear tears through the air, with a light redirecting jump onto the toilet tank, and onto the side of the tub, where if I don't manage to turn the water on while I'm actually peeing, he'll proceed to whine and meow about me taking my sweet time and how he's withering away of thirst, practically drying up as we speak.

At least, that's how he thought it was going to go. Instead, he miscalculated the jump, missed the redirect, knocked all the sundries off the tank, knocked the lid off balance, and fell into the trash can. I managed an unbelievable reflex catch of the lid before it fell down. Bear, who is often spooked by loud noises, even when he makes them, took off into the bedroom like a shot. Laughing, I finished my transaction and went to make sure Bear was not bleeding.

Bear, gifted by God and Nature with a mind like a spring cloudburst and the attention span of a goldfish, went for another drink later on that same evening, in practically the same manner, only without the wipeout.

I know the day is coming when he "crosses the stream," so to speak. I am dreading that day. But not enough to fully close the doors, of course. That's crazy talk.

So every other summer or so, we get some kind of infestation here in Sticky Hall. The first year it was wasps; the second it was ants (and spiders); the third, it was kittens; the fourth, wasps again; the fifth, ladybugs; last year, again with the spiders; and this year, something new-- crickets!

What the hell? What earthly set of causes gives rise to a cricket infestation? Yet here we are, I've killed probably fifty or more this summer, and disposed of almost twice that number.

Lena has cracked me up a few times this infestation without meaning to. One morning, I come into the kitchen to her saying, "Ooowwwhh..." in her this is very tragic voice. There was a cricket with only one leg remaining scrabbling across the floor. She asked me in the same voice, "take care of it?"

"You can't just kill it yourself? Take a shoe, or a paper towel...?"

"Oh, but it only has one leg... don't kill it!" I stopped tearing off the paper towel from the roll, then waited until she was out of the room and killed it. I'm a sensitive, animals-should-not-be-mistreated kind of guy, but insects are not animals. If I'm blowing karma by killing bugs, then I'm already going to be a cockroach for my next fifty lives. Sorry, Brahma, but that's how I roll.

I'm reminded of a story about my grandfather. He used to kill rabbits which were destroying his garden-- he viewed them as pests and only pests. But his two granddaughters, my older sisters, wailed and wailed when they found out he was killing cute little bunnies. "There are humane traps," they cried. "You can trap them and release them somewhere far away, so they won't get back into your garden." After he'd had enough, my grandfather bought a humane trap and set it, and soon caught a bunny, much to my sisters' delight and to the easing of their tormented souls. Then my grandfather picked up the rabbit in the humane trap, took it to a pond, and drowned it.

I couldn't do such a thing-- I'm way too cutificated by the little furry bunnies myself-- but it gives me no end of mortified laughter to remember what a character my grandfather was.

On another occasion of finding a cricket with just one leg remaining, Lena asked, "how is it that so many of them only have one leg...?" I didn't have to answer, just gestured to the cat that wandered through the room at that moment. Some questions almost answer themselves. I've seen it a couple of times now-- cat finds shiny, bouncy, unpredictable new toy that makes loud, shrill noise when you squish it... noise good! Play more! Then toy stops making noise. Boring. Leave toy noiselessly thrashing in middle of floor, go whine for drink from bathtub tap.

Anyway, there are quite a few tales of death, mayhem, and other amusements that we've amassed over the years with my family having such a morbid, macabre, and black sense of humor, and possessing three carnivores that have no lack of skill when it comes to killin'. But I suppose for now, I'll just sit back and listen to the peaceful chirruping of the crickets. And the occasional scream.

We've got a fairly involved renovation in Sticky Hall. Laminate flooring in most rooms, one rug at a time, one room at a time. We've done the former kittenery (I should probably post some pics of that), and have moved on to the front room, formerly home to a criminally green-blue rug with light pepto-pink walls (someone with a nightmarish sense of color occupied the house before us). The logistics of the flooring in this room are a little challeging, as we have a large sofa, a loveseat, and a bigheavyass upright piano that all have to be moved. As of last night, we have 2/3 of the former carpet removed, that same 2/3 cleaned, sealed, and primed; and exactly 1/2 the floor complete.

We were a little worried about the whole floor business, that is, how the cats would react to it. In one way, we hope that they find it much less desirable to pee on. In another, we hope they're all cool with walking, running, lying, rolling, et al, on it.

So last night, I hear a strange crackling noise from the formerly-clown's-bodily-emission-colored-nightmare room. Now, we have 3 cats and a room full of tools, laminate scraps, plastic bags, etc, so I know that at least one cat is going to mess with at least one thing in that room. If you have a pet and you hear a noise in the house, 99% of the time, you know that pet is involved. But when I looked in, I saw zero cats and zero things moving. Whatever. I went back to doing other stuff. But I kept hearing this noise. What the hell? Plastic bags? Wrapper from laminate boxes? A small laminate piece skittling across the floor? Each time I looked, no cat, no movement, no nothing. Fine. I turned out the light and waited quietly.

In galumphs Maya, at full fat and furry speed, onto the new floor. The crackling sound is her claws on the new laminate. She spins, sliding to a stop, and scrabbles her way back into the kitchen at full speed. Then she comes in again, spinning, sliding, and bolting back out. And again.

I laughed when I realized: she liked it. The spinning, sliding... oh, God... we're doing the whole house in laminate... this could get quite ridiculous. Certainly it's going to make messing with them via laser pointer a lot more interesting.

In other news, Lena and I have been periodically getting up and going for early-morning exercise/wake-up walks in the park. Theoretically we would (and should!) walk every day, but we're both not morning people, and the whole getting-up-early thing does not come easily, nor regularly. But some days, we manage: get up, throw on something suitable (it hasn't been too cold for shorts yet), and go walk for 45 minutes or so.

The first time we went, we saw a large, powerful-looking dog, mostly rottweiler but a little larger than usual, so maybe some great dane thrown in (that had to be an angry, angry breeding session). He was running along, about thirty yards off the road, and there was a guy in a car driving along at about the same speed. Okay, I said. Guy trying to get his dog back into his car, dog maybe romping a bit longer than the owner wants. No big deal. We walked on. Later, as we move along into the dark part of the road, near the river on the southwest side of the park, the car appeared on the turn in front of us, with the dog galloping beside the car. They passed us with no fanfare; indeed, the dog was happily tearing along the road, too busy to worry about us.

Lena laughed. "He's walking his dog, isn't he?" Then I laughed too.

We've seen them each time we've walked... and it's still funny.

Today I uprooted three very young saplings and an absolutely gorgeous blooming sunflower.

It was done intentionally and with malice aforethought.

The location is why:

The tree in the background is the Colonel, a majestic cottonwood that drops a crap-ton of fluff, sticks, and cotton-pod hulls on our house every year. It occurred to Lena and I after seeing the sunflower that we hadn't really cleaned out the gutters yet this year. What's more, neither one of us could remember doing it last fall, either. Evidently there's some good nutrimenty stuff in there, if a sunflower can pop up out of nowhere like that.

Never before have I felt taunted by a flower.