A Cat And A Piece Of Furniture

I am surfing the Net and IM'ing my youngest sister.

She:  Mr. Diamond likes to sleep under the secretary.

Me:  You know, that sentence could be completely misconstrued.

Spring -- Allegedly

She was not a happy kitty Tuesday morning.  

Sewing - Glamorous Party Stoles from 1949

From The Australian Home Journal.  Left-click to enlarge.  An almost complete run of this magazine can be found on www.archive.org. 

Someone Must Have Slammed A Door

Happy birthday, honey.

Caturday!

Quote of the Day

Die -- you can't do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here
but nothing is the same.
Nothing's been moved
but there's more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.

Footsteps on the staircase,
but they're new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.

Something doesn't start
at its usual time.
Something doesn't happen
as it should.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Every closet's been examined.
Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.
A commandment was even broken:
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.
Just sleep and wait.

Just wait till he turns up,
just let him show his face.
Will he ever get a lesson
on what not to do to a cat.
Sidle toward him
as if unwilling
and ever so slow
on visibly offended paws,
and no leaps or squeals at least to start.

Cat in an Empty Apartment, by Wislawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

Too Pooped To Participate

Sorry.

I'm three weeks overdue on the final post from Mrs. Berolzheimer's epic study on sandwiches, but Atlanta wore me out.  All I feel like doing this weekend is snoozing.

My sweet, lovely boss wanted to go out every night and that meant walking.  The county doesn't reimburse you for taxi fare.

In one of those Life-Beats-Fiction moments, during our presentation we mentioned that we had found the CDC's standard forms for post-radiation population monitoring to be too hard for our volunteers to read -- very small type and not user-friendly -- so we tweaked them considerably.  After we were done, a three piece suit and tie gentleman came up to the podium.   He was from the CDC, he said, rather sheepishly, and would we be willing to give him copies of our forms?

On The Road Again (Again)

Packing for Atlanta, where my sweet lovely boss and I will be giving a paper on "Decon, Dosimetry and Dogs; Investigating The Role of Local Health Departments After a Radiological Event."

They'll be on the edge of their seats.

Quote of the Day

The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of the Revolution  And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong. ~ BGen Howell Cobb, CSA

Grrrsday

The Online Bookshelf - Walter Crane's Painting Book

A child's painting-book by Victorian illustrator Walter Crane.  Available as a free download on the Open Library.

A Murrain Upon Thee (And Thee, Too)

I have wasted most of the afternoon dicking around with this adware issue.  It might be possible for Trend Micro tech support and Google Help to be more useless, but I don't see how. 

Caturday!

At last week's visit, Dr Tinyvet said that She Who Shall Remain Nameless needed to increase her thyroid dose as her levels were still too low.  Twice daily one of us wrassles a pill down her throat and then holds on to her neck until we feel her swallow.

I was cleaning this morning and guess what I found?  She's been tucking the little suckers into her cheek and spitting them out under the daybed.

Eye Of The Beholder

He:  Your favorite actor is on this afternoon.

Me:  ?

He:  Your favorite actor; with Deborah Kerr.

Me: (the penny drops).  Oh, Robert Mitchum! Well, he's one of my favorite actors.  And that's my favorite movie.

He:  One of your favorite movies.

Me:  Okay, my favorite chick flick.

He:  (scornful).  It's not a chick flick...he goes around killing Japanese soldiers.

Me:  To me, that's a chick flick.

This is beginning to piss me off

I have noticed, fairly recently, that someone or something is inserting advertising links into my posts.  I have deleted the ones that I've found, but this is more than annoying.

Is this just a Blogger issue, or is this happening elsewhere?  Because if there's a permanent solution I'd like to find it.

(Note:  as fast as I delete them, they are re-inserted, so this is obviously a program run by the Blogger people.  Grrr).

UPDATE:  This is not Blogger, but rather appears to be the work of an extension called Coupon Server, which smugly informs me cannot be removed or disabled.  Like hell.

Knitting - A cardigan from 1952

Trim and ladylike, this fitted cardigan is from the July 1st, 1952 issue of the Australian Home Journal.  The instructions are on my Flickr account, here.

Vintage Greeting Cards - St. Patrick's Day

As he does every year on March 17th, the spousal unit took pains to wear an orange shirt to school.

When Lunches Were Lunches, Part IV

Vintage advertising from the Woman's Home Companion, October, 1921.

In addition to the detailed recipes discussed last week, Mrs. Berolzheimer provided a list of "Miscellaneous Sandwiches and Sandwich Fillings" for the benefit of homemakers pondering the Lunch Question.  Her suggestions:

1.  Raisins worked into cream cheese.

2.  Chopped raisins, figs, dates or prunes, mixed with chopped nut-meats and moistened with mayonaise dressing or lemon-juice.

3.  The well-whipped white of an egg mixed with a cup each of chopped raisins and nut-meats, seasoned with a little salt.

4.  Peanut butter moistened with salad dressing and mixed with raisins, dates, figs or bananas.

5.  Equal parts olives, peanut butter, celery, mixed with a little salad dressing.

6.  Peanut butter mixed with chopped dill, sweet or sour pickles.

7.  Cream cheese and chopped stuffed olives.

8.  Chopped stuffed olives and chopped nuts, moistened with salad dressing.

9.  Cream cheese and crushed pineapple between very thin slices of bread.

10.  Tunafish mixed with parsley, lemon-juice, seasoning and a bit of onion.

11.  Cream cheese and chopped nuts.

12.  Ground boiled ham and chopped pickles or chopped peanuts.

13.  Cottage cheese and pickles, olives, nuts or pimiento.

14.  Currant jam with pounded walnut meats and creamed butter.  Pass with cream cheese.  Preserved currants may be substituted in this combination.

15.  Boston brown bread with cream cheese or mayonnaise mixed with chopped nuts or raisins.

16.  Rounds of brown bread spread with chopped olives,  minced lettuce and watercress, tarragon, paprika, parsley and chives mixed with mayonnaise.

17.  Pimientos, cucumbers and onion or chives, minced, mixed with mayonnaise and spread on buttered entire-wheat bread.

18.  Green pepper, pimiento and olives with mayonnaise.

19.  Boston brown bread with minced corned beef seasoned with mustard and rubbed to a paste.

20.  Cream cheese used with chopped parsley, pimento and mayonnaise, chopped nuts, sliced sugared bananas, crushed pineapple, chopped or sliced olives, shredded sliced apples.  The cheese may be rubbed with butter or the creamed butter may be spread on the bread.

I'll pass on #s 3, 5 and 20.  Next week:  Hot sandwiches! (I'm on a roll, people.  Pun intended).

Caturday!

In the interests of economy, the spousal unit booked an appointment at Dr. Tinyvet's this morning for both cats.  He trapped Reserve Cat with no trouble but as soon as she spotted the kitty crate being brought out of storage, Her Majesty disappeared.

Neatly and completely.  We spent a quarter of an hour in an unsuccessful room by room sweep before bowing to the inevitable.  Five minutes after he drove off she walked out of the furnace room with a neener neener neener look on her face.

Grrrsday