Orange Tabby Therapy.

We got back from the hospital in the early afternoon. All three of my boys helped me into the house where a borrowed motorized scooter was waiting. I scootered straight to bed where valentines flowers and chocolate were waiting and, after a quick bite, passed out for the rest of the evening.

Jim-Bob, our orange tabby, was initially quite displeased by the new arrangement. He did not like presence of the wheelchair or the extra glasses and pill bottles on the bedside table where he likes to climb before he hops onto the bed and curls up in my arms. He woke me up a few times in the early evening with the sounds of a glass or a book being shoved unceremoniously off the table onto the floor. He still wouldn’t come onto the bed — my cast appear to spook him.

About midnight I woke up as the first round of painkillers wore off to note that he had overcome his dislike of the wheelchair where he was now sleeping and, apparently, watching over me. I moved him as gently as possible onto the bed so I could use said wheelchair to get to the bathroom and back. As soon as I was in bed again, he hopped back onto the wheelchair. This time, after an ibuprofen, I gently pulled him back onto the bed for a little snuggle that turned into an official Jim-Bob curl-up and sleep-over, and, as his purring reverberated into my arm, the pain seemed to disappear.

It could have been the miracle of modern medicine, but at least some of my money is on the pain killing effects of orange tabby therapy.

Gratuitous Artist Pics

 There are several things that are certain in life at our house.

Dust.

Bills.

Taxes.

And if I sit down at my desk and open a keyboard or a tin of watercolor paint (it has to be watercolor paint), Jim-Bob will crawl into my arms within five minutes to offer his assistance and advice. He is now demanding full credit on all paintings, arguing that he has become an indispensable part of the creative process.

Poem – Familiar

My familiar keeps

The world and work at bay.

Heavy as a blanket,

Draping his heat over my fear,

Hiding my anxiety under

Fat and fur and purring

Till we, happily entombed

Under imaginary desert sands,

Sense that day and lull

Are done.

That’s No Lady

We thought we were starting with Lady Jane Grey (yes I watch too many historical dramas) and Gentleman Jim.  Well, 5 minutes after we got home, we decided our swaggering orange tabby was more of a confirmed country boy and started calling him Jim-Bob.

We still thought Jane was very ladylike as she hung back under the coffee table and curled up in cardboard boxes in the sun.

That night one of the house mice made the mistake of venturing out from behind a cupboard to steal a piece of Katy’s kibble.

A ball of grey shot across the living room and kitchen, and the mouse scampered back to his hiding place.  Little Jane was on the hunt however, and she was ready to tear apart our kitchen to get to it.

She didn’t get it, but she was in the mood for a hunt.

Everything was fair game. Bits of string, hands under blankets, feathers.  Nothing was safe.

She spotted Katy-the-Wonder-Dog’s thumping tail and crouched for the attack, but then decided she didn’t really want to hunt anymore.

For now.

When the light is right or she just feels like it, however, Lady Jane becomes a fuzzy poltergeist.  A one-woman weapon of mass distractedness.  She’s a calamity.

Which is how I suggested a better name for her might be Calamity Jane.

I wish I could say it wouldn’t help her fit into her new life at Casa Chaos better.

Progressions

A Winters Nap

Learning to draw on the iPad has been easier than I thought. It’s just different sensation from drawing on paper but no more different a sensation than painting.
I spent the first few weeks experimenting with the first page of a book I’ve been working on over the last six months. I still sense this new tool will ultimately speed up my workflow, but as I tried different variations, I’ve noticed an unpleasant quirk creeping back into my work.

In the past, whenever my creativity has felt stunted as it was during a very busy autumn, I’ve gone back to basics — a pocket sketchbook and a black pen. The pocket sketchbook reminds me that The only pressure is to get something down on the page. Indelible, ink ensures that corrections are impossible. Mistakes will happen, and the only thing you can do is to move forward. Freeing oneself from any expectation of perfection is like prying the lid off a mason jar filled with fireflies that have been waiting to get out all night. Suddenly you’re in the darkness. The results are irregular and uncontrolled and surprisingly beautiful.

Drawing on the iPad lets you correct mistakes; it lets you anticipate and try to prevent them. Being able to create images with a different layer for every section means being able to edit one section without accidentally disrupting another. It’s a wonderful safety net when digitizing a final version of a rough draft, but it does take some planning. 

That detail is where the devil lurks. You focus on the final image, but instead of letting it flow organically, it’s easy to get caught up in figuring out the steps through the maze and even easier to begin worrying if the image is good enough. Could it be better if you removed this layer and replaced it with that?

I didn’t realize I’ve been doing just that until the second day of my kick starter when I wanted to copy a photo of Thing2 snuggled up with Jim-Bob. Deciding that tracing the photo would be too constricting because of changes I wanted to make, I started a rough sketch with the pencil tool. This is the point in my sketchbook, where I get lost in my subject. On the iPad, however, I was thinking about how I would do the next layer and what style it should be. As I began focusing on potential mistakes instead of just creating, my devilish inner critic stirred, and the firefly light flickered.

I started the second layer, determined to focus on progress, not perfection. The result was something new for me along with the recognition that discovering when not to use each tool in your art kit can the most important thing you’ll learn.

A Tale of Country Kitties

One of the facts of country life is that other critters live in the woods with your pets. Snoop, our fat black feline god of pleasure found out in August that fishers weren’t as easy to escape as bears, and we saw him no more.

We all mourned him – especially Thing2 who spends more time on the floor with the animals than anyone else in the family.

The house mice tried to feign sympathy, but there was no mourning period in the nooks and crannies behind the walls. We knew we needed a new mouser.

Thing1’s girlfriend’s (yes you read that right) family owns a few barn cats who, in addition to being excellent mousers were prolific breeders this summer. So a few Saturday ago after I got off work, we decided to see if any of the kittens could be coaxed into the slothful life of a housecat.

We had two semi-willing takers (bribed with a bit of catnip) and named them Lady Jane (because she was so grey and seemingly dainty) and Gentleman Jim who seems more like Jim-Bob now.

We got them home and Jim-Bob promptly swatted Katy-the-Wondering-Dog’s nose, confirming her opinion that cats are freaking crazy and making us wonder if a barn cat could be happy as a housecat.

It took them less than an hour to convert.

Jim-Bob unlocked the age-old wisdom of cats that tells them that humans are bad hunters but excellent servants and sampled every lap and couch. Jane — not sure if she or Katy would be the bigger wimp — held back a bit, waiting until bedtime to snuggle up with the human of her choice (Thing2 in this case).

There’s something magical about an animal that can live in the wild but still prefers to occupy the laps of very unmagical humans. I don’t know if it was magic or just the vibration from the purring, but it didn’t take us more than an hour to realize how much we had missed having cats, even if only for a month or two.

Cats and Kings

4 20CatandKing web

Our dog is pretty good about not begging at dinner time, but Snoop, our fat black god of pleasure, has a habit of parking himself by the Big Guy’s chair as soon as the Big Guy settles himself and his plate at our round pedestal dinner table.  

Snoop stares longingly up at the Big Guy.  The Big Guy, doing his best ogre imitation, orders him to go away and starts to eat.  Snoop begins a classic silent meow, but ends it with a squeak to make sure the Big Guy is aware of how adorable he’s being.  The Big Guy ignores him for a few bites until Snoop reaches a paw up to pat the Big Guy’s leg.

Then the contest begins, with the cat and Big Guy staring each other down until someone gets the next bite of whatever is on the Big Guy’s plate.  Snoop doesn’t always win, but he does so often enough to make it quite clear to the humans that it’s not the cat who is looking at a king. 

it is NOT Cold

IMG 3020

At this time of year, the big challenge of living off-grid in an earth-sheltered (read: 3 feet of insulation on 3 sides) is to remind yourself 69 on the thermostat would be T-shirt weather if it were describing the temperature outdoors, but when the only thing reflecting light back at you as you let the cat in at 5AM for his morning nap is the frost coating the world outside your door, it’s hard to remember that it’s too early in the year to light a fire.