Cat Art

Just like when I used to walk with Olga, I'm finding interesting things out and about with Bailey. Yesterday afternoon on Agamemnon Road (my favorite local street name), we passed all this artwork set out for the taking. Someone's obviously having a clear-out.

I couldn't resist two of the pieces, a watercolor and a pencil drawing:

I can't tell if the drawing is original, but I think so. The watercolor certainly is.

I have no idea where I'm going to put them, but we need some good cat art around here. We might even have a cat or two if not for Bailey (who hates them) and Dave (who is allergic to them).

I finished off the Thom Gunn biography yesterday. The end of his life was rather tumultuous and sad -- he was sensitive about aging and losing his looks, and becoming increasingly involved with party drugs like methamphetamine, which ultimately led to his demise. I think people who were attractive in their younger lives often really struggle with getting older, but so far it hasn't been much of a problem for me -- perhaps because I was never much of a looker in the first place. What have I got to lose?! There's a weird kind of freedom in that, and it makes a good discussion question for your next dinner party -- is it better to experience being young and beautiful but then lose it all, or better to be consistently average looking? The latter certainly makes for an easier, quieter life.

(Of course older people can be beautiful too. Quiet down out there!)

Anyway, I enjoyed the book overall and belatedly realized that the subtitle, "A Cool Queer Life," comes from a line in a Thomas Hardy poem, "Her Second Husband Hears Her Story." At the end, after the wife has related a macabre tale about the death of her first husband, her second spouse exclaims, "Well, it's a cool queer tale!" Gunn used it in his book "Boss Cupid," and as biographer Michael Nott perceived, it summed up his life as a sort of double-entendre.

I also worked in the garden part of the morning. I dismantled the log pile in the back corner left over from the work done on our elder trees. I'd intended to leave it as wildlife habitat, but alas, the only wildlife I've seen in the vicinity is Ratthew, and that's not exactly what I had in mind. So I swept up all the leaves and twigs and smaller stuff -- all of it bone dry and not containing any life at all, as far as I could tell -- and put it in bags to be collected as yard waste. I'm not sure yet what to do with the few big logs that are left, but at least there's a lot less cover now for Ratthew.

Belly-rub face!

And here's a funny Bailey fact -- she watches television! Last night I was watching "The Comeback" starring Lisa Kudrow, which is a good if occasionally painfully cringey show, and in one scene Kudrow's character, Valerie Cherish, holds a squirming puppy. Bailey was immediately interested in the puppy, and jumped down to stand right in front of the TV watching it intently. She also looked behind the TV to see if the puppy was there!

I've never had a pet that responded to the television, so this is a first for me.

I'm once again using the opportunity of Dave's absence to eat down a lot of the food we have stockpiled in this house. We had some chicken and some bolognese sauce in the freezer, and once food goes into the freezer Dave is always loath to use it. He says freezing changes the texture. Philistine that I am, I don't even notice that -- so I've been eating it up. When it's gone I'll probably wind up eating bizarre combinations of odd ingredients, like dinner rolls, jalapeno peppers and peanut butter -- but I'm not there yet!