Give Till It Hurts

Well, it really DOES hurt when no one utilizes our generous gifts to best advantage (hurricane relief).

Summer at last...

It is almost October, and FINALLY it is summer in the San Francisco Bay Area. In my particular micro-climate, the temps have been in the 50’s and 60’s most of July, August and September, except for a couple of days here and there. I don’t like that kind of weather. I was beginning to feel that I was lucky to have spent June and part of July in Florida and New York State.

Now I can have my windows and sliding glass doors open until almost bedtime, and I hear my hummingbird a good share of the day as he flits into the garden from where-ever. He likes a lot of the flowers that are in bloom now, so he has a banquet when he is here during the day. Quite often when I hear him, I quietly slide the screen door open and stick my head out so I can see him. I was standing on the porch at one point today, and he was sharing a blossom with a butterfly. A bee was buzzing overhead. I am thrilled. I can have nature right here in my six-foot wide “garden”.

Yesterday, when I was watering the plants with the hose, there was a roar like a bomber or helicopter, or a huge bumblebee, over my head, and that little guy was almost in my hair. He loves the purple passionflower because he can drink for a long time at one blossom. The vine has been prolific this summer. Every day there have been ten or twelve blossoms on it. Hummer also loves the lavender, the purple and rose colored salvia, pink jasmine, and other vines I have growing up the porch posts.

I have been worried about him, because there are two cats who have decided to sleep in my yard. They belong down the street at another trailer, but somehow they like it here now. I don’t feed them, because Sarah, my neighbor does that. They are from the same litter and are teenager cats. One is a tabby type, all spots. The other is a Siamese mix, very light colored – white in areas.

The Siamese is sleeping, even now, in a baby bath type plastic container that was supposed to be a litter box. I got tired of it in the house, because the sides and ends are rounded and the litter was always being shoved out of it. In the spring, I liberated it from that occupation, bleached it, put plant dirt in it, and grew the poppy seeds I had harvested last year. It is quite large. The tabby had decided to sleep in it when it was on the table outside, after the plants had died. He liked lying in the dirt. I decided that was far too close to the humming bird, as some of the blossoms of the passionflower drape across the table on a section of their vine.

I took the “bed” off of the table, emptied it, then put rags in it (such as worn out flannel pajama top), and put it under my huge ferns, on a styrofoam slab for insulation from the cold pavement. Well, it has become the Siamese cat’s bed, instead. He (I guess it’s a he) sleeps there all day. Spotted Kitty, definitely a boy, now sleeps on a barstool beside my neighbor’s trailer, where I can see him out my kitchen window. He watches me when I work at the sink.

I don’t think Siamese Kitty pays any attention to the hummingbird. Spotted Kitty had been starting to take notice of him when he was still sleeping on the table, and I had visions of losing Hummer, so I actually got out of bed one night and took the “bed” off the table. I had a premonition of losing my bird the next day, before I could get out there.

Dear Allie

I really do miss you. I have been thinking about you most of the time. I constantly wonder what you are doing, and what it is like to be there at Duke.

Is there anything I can do to help you with your research for your thesis? Maybe there is something that I can look for out here. Also, I’ll be seeing my Greek friend from Sacramento this weekend. She’ll be doing the show that I am doing at Marin Civic Center. She was a university student in the past, I believe, before she came to this country, and she speaks many languages. Maybe you would like to correspond with her. She is the one who has been following your high school and college progress. I also have another Greek acquaintance that I see on occasion at the flea markets. If there is anything I can ask them, let me know.

I hope you start to find the information you need for your work.

Take care of yourself. Winter will be upon you before you know it. Don’t catch cold.

Grandma

Need to get back to work...

I really must start doing more writing on here. I was going to do a lot about Hurricane Katrina, and my anger regarding the way the rescue was (wasn't) handled, but it has been done so many places, that I was just busy reading other people's thoughts, and have finally decided that there is really nothing I can add that is any better than what others have written.

I have many ideas of things that I want to write about, and soon I'll get back to writing.

Up to this point, I have been so busy going through junk in my place, and getting rid of stuff so I can move, that I have not had a lot of time to write. My brain has been in overdrive about the boxes full of stuff around here, and I can't sleep at night. I must really get it done so I can relax a bit before the really hard part comes - the actual moving.

I have also been doing quite a few antique shows, so the time goes by that way. I have to get up at 2:00 - 3:00 A.M. to do those. The rest of the week I am a wreck after I do that for a couple of days in a row.

Help for the Kitties

I shook the box and it rattled. It was small, like a candy box that you buy at the movies. Then I opened it and tiny creatures with four legs poured out. They were barely more than one quarter of an inch long.

“These look like little mice,” I remarked. “I thought they were something else, something that you are supposed to put in your litter box to clean it.”

My friend replied, “They will clean your litter box, and they will also clean the fleas and dirt out of your cats’ fur.”

Well now, I thought, let’s see if this works. The little creatures were indeed extremely tiny mice, not much bigger than fleas themselves, but they were real workhorses. They got busy in the litter boxes, raking through the litter and leaving it sparkling clean. It did seem, though, that maybe they were eating some of the litter, because there was not as much in the boxes after they raked it. It looked rather thin.

Then they worked on the cats, gleaning all of the fleas and flea by-products out of their hair so that they were also squeaky clean.

But look, in the blink of an eye, these little guys had grown into huge, for them, animals. They were now the size of the cats themselves, and my cats are very large. I began to worry that there would be fights, but everyone seemed to get along.

Now, remember, this had been a whole box full of tiny mice-like beings, and now they were large and running all over the place. Everywhere I looked, they were working, or eating, or playing, in the grass and under the trees, and I don’t even have a yard. Sometimes they looked like cats, and sometimes they were more like squirrels, big squirrels. I wondered if I was going to have a problem, but then I decided to just live with it for a while and see what happened.

Then I woke up.