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?