Oh, dem Packers, eh!?

We've eaten the last of the tomatoes from the garden.  Beets, chard, zucchini, and potatoes are still available and the fresh herbs remain.  Fall is definitely here, however, and we've had our first patchy frost of the season.  This being Wisconsin, more is definitely on the way.

We went over to Uncle Bob and Aunt Jeannie's house last night for pizza and the Packers v Bears game.  Once again, the Packers snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by managing to incur more penalties in the first half than they had so far in the season.  Nevertheless, the pizza and company were good and we had an enjoyable evening.  We didn't watch the second half but it's possible that by game's end, they'd gotten more penalties than the entire NFL so far this season.  I hope "da Bears" enjoy their early Christmas present.  Diz-gusting.

Retirement is going well for me and I feel especially fulfilled as I apply primer to the porch railings in front.  We're going to paint over the red paint now on them and give them a coat of white.  As the snow begins to fly this winter, they will become invisible.  We may have to put flags on them as a safety measure.  Since the weather has begin to cool my thoughts have turned to gumbo and I believe I'll make up a batch this afternoon.

The girls, Katie and Bella, our grandcats, have won our hearts and we'll be loath to give them up when their Mom comes home in November.  Still, I'm not sure we'll miss the coarse sand beach that is our bathroom floor.  I feed them and clean out their litter boxes each morning when I get up, and scratch a couple of tummies before I go downstairs to feed Sophie and have my morning coffee.  Bella has taken a cue from Sophie and now comes downstairs at around 4:30 p.m. to let us know that she and Katie are ready for their evening repast.  In preparation for their return to San Antonio and the continuation of Katie's chemotherapy there, I've been in contact with South Texas Veterinary Specialists in San Antonio conveniently situated on Sonterra Blvd.  This will be nice since it isn't far from their home.  They've said that they'll work Katie in when we get down there and the contact person for us, Delilah, seems very nice.

Last night uncle Bob gave me an article he'd cut from the Shepherd Express about Wisconsin's three micro distilleries.  Two, Death's Door Spirits and Yahara Bay Distillers are in Madison while Great Lakes Distillery, makers of Rehorst Vodka and Gin, is in Milwaukee.  Great Lakes also makes whiskey and Yahara Bay makes vodka, gin, whiskey, rum and a couple of other spirits.  Great Lakes and Yahara Bay have tours so we'll have to add them to the brewery tours we so enjoy.  Mayhap we can do something during the holidays.  Could be fun.

Hope everyone is doing well as the holiday season hurtles toward us.  That reminds me.  I need to check out the snow blower but it should be fine since I just got it last year.  Off to the store for some okra and turkey thighs.  Mmmm.  Gumbo!

Brave New World

It's another cool and rainy day in Wisconsin and Fall is definitely in the air even though it's technically still summer.  Katie has now had three weekly treatment sessions of the UW Protocol for lymphoma chemotherapy in cats.  She's handling the chemo remarkably well with just a little anemia and a bad food day a few days after the treatment.  Nevertheless, she is gaining back weight and her kidney tumor was not palpable on exam at her treatment last Tuesday.  Most days seem to be good food days for Katie and great food days for her sister Bella.

I love Duncan's bed

I know they're up there

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we gave the girls the run of the upper level of the house, with the child gate to keep them apart from Sophie our aging female cat who has been savage with other female cats brought into her home.  It wasn't long, however, before Bella discovered that she could easily jump the barrier and have access to the whole house.  Katie followed shortly after.  We were quite concerned that Sophie would go nuclear and we'd have frightened or even possibly injured cats on our hands but it seems we worried for naught.  Sophie has been entirely passive, never once showing hostility despite close encounters of the feline kind on a daily basis.  The girls have now been everywhere in the house and have discovered the joy of an other cat's food and the earthy pleasure in using someone else's cat box.

Sophie sees you...

I must be putting on weight

Janet decided that if Katie loved Duncan's bed so much, she should have one of her own.  It happened that a friend at work had a little dog bed that had been used by her tiny toy poodle before it died so she gave it to Janet for Katie to use.  Predictably, Katie has no interest in that bed being perfectly satisfied with the larger bed with it's homey doggie ambiance.  Bella, however, seems to have taken possession.  We had put it in our bedroom, of course, and when Duncan saw it, he immediately tried it out.  He went round and round trying to find the perfect position.  See picture.  Somehow, he did manage to get himself into the bed.  He looked trussed up like a chicken for the oven or a scoop of ice cream on top of a cone.

Today Janet's cousin Char and husband Phil are coming up from Illinois for a brewery tour and dinner at a German restaurant.  Uncle Bob and Aunt Jeannie are going to be here for dinner (they're in Madison for most of the day) but we'll be taking Char and Phil to Sprecher for the tour.  Brewery tours are always fun and Sprecher does  make good beer (also good root beer and other sodas).  Fortunately, brewery tours and German food are not affected by the weather so I'm sure a good time will be had by all.  While I'm not a huge fan of hog knuckles and red cabbage, I do like a good Wiener schnitzel and I'm also partial to sauerbraten the way Grandma used to make it mit knadeln und ginger snap gravy.

Finally, the vegetable garden is on it's last legs as summer comes to a close.  I've had some fun with eggplant making a chinese eggplant dish that got a thumbs up from Janet (no such luck for Dal Curry).  I've laid in some coconut milk and will use another for a Thai red curry.  I absolutely love Thai curried eggplant so I'm probably going to go for it next week.  I still have to dig the red potatoes I planted in Spring but I'm looking forward to trying them.  People say that home grown is much better then store bought potatoes. We'll see.

Auf wiedersehen.

The Hat People

Katie and Bella are doing well, just for the record.  I have been advised by my muse, however, to talk about other things besides the cats on this blog.  Therefore...

My inner anthropologist was piqued recently to find that my wife and brothers-in-law had all, (almost) independently purchased the same type of hat.  This may be the beginning of a social movement or the founding of a tribe of hat people.  Anthropologists, of course, are inevitably excited by the discovery of a new group of indigenous people with a strange, heretofore unknown culture since it is not only intellectually stimulating but potentially provides the grist for journal articles, professional advancement, etc.  Fame and fortune also often come with such discoveries.

I've often had second thoughts about my decision to abandon anthropology as a profession and so I wondered if this might be a door just opened that would allow my re-entry to the field.  A social or cultural anthropologist will, of course, immediately see the hat people as a cultural and social phenomenon.  This is a variant on the old saw (!) that says when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  However, since all of the members are blood relatives, one must not dismiss the potential biological ramifications of this discovery out of hand.  Fortunately, I have immediate access to experts in genetics with whom I can explore these possibilities.

At the same time, this nascent culture has interesting linguistic components including a variant of the English language that includes a number words that are similar to English and yet different in fundamental ways.   There are also curious phonetic and syntactic elements that, aside from physical appearance and mode of dress, identify the speaker as a member of a different tribe to those not from the Hat People's geographic area.  This is similar in many ways to the relation of Scots English to standard English.  Here too, fortunately, I know a trained linguist who will be able to address the linguistic aspects of the tribe in more detail.

As the ethnographer for this group, I will be watching closely and will, in fact, live with one of the tribal members in her hogan.  It will be important to remain aware of the "observer effect" so as not to influence the behavior of this subject.  I will report back at a later date after I've had time to become better acquainted with the culture of this interesting new group of native peoples of the north.  ;>)

Hope for those in a parched land

If you see hot and brown and dry every day (and I don't mean California), try these pics.  There's a big T-storm that has been moving through our area for a couple of hours with a great deal of rain, and donner und blitzen.  The girls don't care and Duncan is so deaf he doesn't know it's happening.  It's been a warm and wet summer and the grass and vegetation generally have remained green and growing.

We're having a Labor Day party for our local relations and the forecast is for the storm to have moved on by this afternoon when people start showing up.  It could be tricky, though, because the yellow jackets get pretty feisty this time of year and will bring all their friends to the party once they smell the food and beer.

I'll try to get some pics of the folks that I can post so all can see how youthful and vigorous we are.

Second Thoughts

So after thinking about it, we decided that the child gate in the stairway wasn't a sure enough means of segregating our cat from the girls.  When we're away, we'll close the girls up in our bedroom and just give them the run of the upper level when we're there to supervise.  As the doctor said, "an once of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

On the left you'll see pictures of the TDY girls relaxing in their Wisconsin quarters.  Katie, the calico, is from Korea and sustained a serious injury as a kitten on one of the runways at the air base where her Mom was stationed.  She's a bit shy but deigns to let me pet her and scratch her behind the ears at the times and places of her choosing.  She has a really sweet face and disposition and, unfortunately, feline lymphoma.

Bella is the sleek but zaftig black cat who flops on the floor whenever I enter the room, rolling onto her back so I can scratch her tummy while she kneads the air. I've known Bella since her Mom picked her out of a score of kittens at a humane society in San Antonio, Texas.  Bella has a sunny disposition but sometimes bugs her sister Katie who will, if sufficiently provoked, apply corrective action to Ms. Bella.  Bella is also notorious for stealing the covers when she sneaks up on the bed at night after I've nodded off.

By way of orientation, the girls had been staying in Illinois with two very good friends of their Mom while she is over seas.  They took Katie to see a vet when they became concerned that she might be losing weight.  Long story short, Katie was found to have a mass on her right kidney that turned out to be lymphoma.  Lymphoma is a very aggressive disease in cats and could have been fatal in a matter of weeks if not discovered and treated.  Since the two cats are inseparable, they both came to live with us in Wisconsin so that Katie can receive weekly chemotherapy treatments from a veterinary oncologist practicing here.

So far, Katie seems to be doing well and has gained back about 0.5 pounds of weight, a significant amount given her size.  Everyone who knows her is hoping for a good outcome from her treatment and at her last visit to the oncologist we were told that her tumor has decreased in size - a cause for some optimism.  Statistically, the odds of a successful remission with the treatment regimen she's on are very good.  We're all rooting for her.

The Wide Open Spaces

As mentioned in my first blog, we've been keeping Katie and Bella in our master bedroom.  Janet and I have been taking turns sleeping in the front bedroom (the other sleeping in the master bedroom with the girls) so that our elderly Duncan Dog and Sophie Cat would have someone in whose room they could sleep as has been their custom.  Duncan would be happy to sleep with the girls (!) in the master bedroom  but Sophie has historically been opposed to having other females in her house to say the least.  It's not much of an inconvenience to us to have the girls in our bedroom but we wanted to let them have a bit more area to explore and enjoy so we barricaded the stairway up from the first floor with an expandable child safety gate.

Having installed the gate half-way up the stairway, we opened the bedroom door and gave the ladies the run of the second floor.  Bella was exploring instantly and quickly found the cat tree we'd put in front of the window in the back bedroom.  In fact, the gate isn't high enough to prevent the 3 cats from going up or down the stairway if they want to climb or leap over it but we decided to pretend that they aren't smart enough to figure that out or else would not care to do so.  We'd really like them to have more area in which to chase each other around.  It would also allow us to put their litter boxes in the guest bathroom, reducing the zoo-like ambiance now extant in our bathroom as well as the coarse sand beach we walk in when using it.

This evening not so long ago, Janet asked me if I knew where Katie was. Beads of sweat appeared on my upper lip as I envisioned a major disaster involving Sophie and Katie but I realized that I'd heard none of the screeching that usually accompanies a cat assault.  A few minutes later, Katie was found peacefully sleeping in Duncan's bed in the front bedroom.  To my way of thinking, that's a very good sign!

In the beginning...

The Mewlings will attempt to chronicle the lives and travails of Katie S and Bella S, two cats TDY to Wisconsin while their Mom serves her country in a galaxy far, far away.  I'm not an experienced blogger so I have much to learn but it is my intention to post to the blog at least weekly (if I can figure out how to get back to it).  I'll do it more often if I find it cathartic or if I just have so much to share with the blogosphere (does a blogger use words like blogosphere?).

Please feel free to offer suggestions on how I can improve the blog.  I may be an old git but I can still learn and will try to make improvements as best I'm able.  Do keep it constructive, though.  Perhaps given time I'll become addicted to blogging.  A gene for it just may run in the family.

I'll be back with news on Katie and Bella who are, as we speak, enjoying the comforts of the master bedroom in our house.  There are a couple more things I need to figure out before I swing into high gear as a blogger but hopefully that won't take long.