Month: March 2006

Pets, Photography

Friday Cat Story

Shelly

Speaking of cats…

Pandora, my old cat, is a little strange. She’s lying under my feet, with a wadded up wash cloth between her front paws.

Sin

Pandora has two odd habits. First she compulsively washes anyone who pets her. I’m allergic to cat saliva, so whenever she sneaks in a stealth lick, I break out in red bumps. She also washes Rory. He doesn’t mind. In fact, he sometimes hunts her down and makes her wash his face and ears.

Second, she carries bits of paper and cloth around the house. I have no idea why she does it. During the night, she gets into the trash and the laundry hamper and digs out wash cloths, socks, and bits paper. Every morning, I wake up with a pile of her thievings outside my bedroom door. She doesn’t always bring them to me, though. Sometimes she sleeps on top of them. Sometimes she plays with them. And sometimes she just carries them around the house, trying to meow.[1] Because her mouth is stuffed full, what little sound there is comes out muffled and garbled. At that point, about all I can do is point and laugh. Luckily, she’s weird in many ways, and is one of those rare cats who enjoys being a clown. She’s totally okay with being pointed and laughed at.

I would worry that the fabric/paper fetish was a sign of an age related cognitive disorder, except she’s been doing it for more than ten years. The same with the compulsive people licking. They’re odd behaviors, but they’re normal for Pandora.

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1. Pandora has never been able to meow properly. Instead, she makes a little chirping noise or a whispered “mah.” When she was a kitten, my roommate had one of her littermates. The only way we were able to tell the kittens apart was that Pandora would open her mouth and no noise would come out. Luckily, Pan has an excellent sense of humor and doesn’t mind in the least being laughed at. I’ve known cats who were mortified when they were laughed at, but not Pan. She’s a ham.

Music

Stealing Fire

Shelly

This has turned into a beautiful day–warm and sunny with blazing blue sky.

On my way home, I listened to Stealing Fire. It occurred to me that the reason I love that album and Humans, in particular, is that they both speak to human potential, good and bad. Humans have an enormous capacity to cause harm; we’re our own worst enemies. We also have the capacity for greatness. In the end, it is the choices we make–the choices that make us human–that are at the core of his songs. Cockburn castigates us for our failures, but he also shines a light on our best potential.

Music

Something jewelled slips away

Shelly

It was 10F this morning, which relative to recent temperatures, was arse cold. The slush from yesterday’s thaw had frozen overnight, so I had a hell of a time getting my car out, because my tires were stuck in ice.

I ended up being just late enough for work that the sun was starting to rise as while I drove east to Bloomington. It started as a slight lightening, but by the time I got to town, there was a narrow band of deep orange hugging the horizon. As I was driving into Bloomington, Bruce Cockburn’s The Rose Above the Sky came on.

I’d always associated that song with sunsets, partly because of the imagery of the lyrics, and partly because the song–for me, at least–is simultaneously sad and uplifting. It makes a lovely sunrise soundtrack, as well.

I discovered Bruce Cockburn when I was in high school. I was babysitting one night, and after the kids had gone to bed, I had MTV playing while I studied. They were debuting the video for Madonna’s Like a Virgin, so it was playing nearly non-stop. Sandwiched between repeated airings of Madge’s décolletage was a video for If I Had a Rocket Launcher. I was hooked (on Bruce, not Madge’s breasts). The next day, I went to Stonehenge, the local hippie head shop & record store, and spent my babysitting money on Humans and Stealing Fire. I think I probably spent more time listening to those two albums than any others during the rest of my high school years.

It’s weird. I didn’t know anyone else who had even heard of Bruce Cockburn, much less anyone who listened to his music. So, while it was the 80s, and I was listening to the standard Velveeta fair, I was also listening to Bruce Cockburn. It was like a weird, secret influence that no one else in my group of friends knew about. They were listening to Depeche Mode and the Petshop Boys and I was listening to Canadian folk-y-ish music with decidedly spiritual overtones (I really don’t know where I’d place him genre-wise). I like Depeche Mode, mind you, but their music didn’t make me think or feel. Bruce’s did. And does.

I still don’t know anyone who listens to Bruce Cockburn, though I did have an odd Bruce encounter with complete strangers once. A coworker was going through my CDs at work, and commented that friends of hers were going to see Bruce play in Indianapolis. She gave me their phone number, and I called and asked if I could tag along. (Keep in mind that I am pathologically phone-phobic and I’m not too keen on hanging out with strangers.) They said sure, so I went to Indy with a couple of strange–in more ways than one–Canadians to see Bruce play. It was an absolutely amazing show. I recall him saying, between songs, that Canadians only sing about social issues and love. He does both, and does them well.

Letters to Esther, Photography

Spring?

Shelly

The solstice was yesterday. Forsythia is in bloom, my baby walnut trees have swellings on their branches, the peepers have been peeping, and birds have been returning. So, of course, it snowed last night. Welcome to spring in Indiana.

So, I thought I’d share some photos of crepuscular rays I took last week.

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100_1762

I’ve been working on Letters to Esther. I’ve got nearly everything from the old blog format moved to the new website. Now, I’m in the process of scanning the original letters and adding them to the transcriptions. It’s slow going, because many of the image files need a lot of tweaking to make them legible.

I’m not even bothering to scan the rough drafts of Esther’s replies to Richard, because they’re written on pages from her exercise book, which have seriously degraded. I don’t want to handle them too much, because the paper is brittle and brown. And, because she wrote in pencil, the text is faded. In order to make scans legible, I’d have to do some serious Photoshopping acrobatics. Maybe, at a later date, I’ll scan them, but for now, I’m leaving them be.

Once I get all the currently transcribed letters scanned and images added, I’ll start transcribing new letters. Right now, I’m about half-way finished with scanning the transcribed letters. Just to give an idea of scope, that’s taken me about 50 hours of solid work, not counting time it took to do the original transcriptions.

Tangent Alert!

I’m watching bad daytime court teevee (Judge Alex) while working on the computer. I haven’t been paying close attention, but the defendant–whose off-lead Dalmatian attacked and killed the plaintiff’s on-lead Dachshund puppy–seems to be arguing that she shouldn’t be responsible for the full amount of damages because the plaintiff’s dog isn’t a purebred “Datsun.” I nearly choked on my toast. Lady, if you’re gonna try to mount that sort of defense, you really ought to get the breed name correct. Claiming that the dead puppy didn’t “look” like a purebred “Datsun” does not make you look like any kind of authority on the breed. I’m just sayin’.

Now, I’m debating the merits of digging out my car so that I can drive down to the mailbox to pick up the mail. There ought to be Netflix waiting for me. It would be nice to have something to watch besides daytime teevee, and it would be a good idea to get the car cleaned off, so I’m trying to talk myself into it.

Letters to Esther

What is Letters to Esther?

Shelly

Joyce asked in comments about the story behind Letters to Esther, so I thought I’d answer her here, in case others were wondering.

Several years ago, I found a large wooden crate jumbled full of letters at a flea market. The stall owner was selling them piecemeal. I started digging through the mess and noticed that they all seemed to be addressed to the same person. I wondered how many had already been sold; it seemed criminal to me that someone’s life was being divvied up and meted out in little parcels, so I offered the stall owner $20 for the whole lot. He accepted, and I lugged the crate out to the car and took it home with me. I had no idea at that point what I’d end up doing with the letters, if anything. I just knew that they were in need of a guardian.

I knew I wanted to read the letters, but beyond that, I didn’t have any plan for what to do with them. However, it quickly became clear to me that I needed to find out more about Esther. Obviously, original documents are the best place to start researching a person. The problem was that these were letters to Esther, not from her. Sure, there is a lot of information about Esther’s life contained within those letters, but her voice is missing. Or so it appeared to be. What I found was that she had saved rough drafts of many of her replies. Those drafts were written on the backs of homework assignments, in faded pencil on badly deteriorated pulpy paper, often on time stolen from her school day. I became even more certain that I should do something to preserve and share these letters. Surely someone who cared enough not just to save a lifetime of correspondence, but to also keep rough drafts of her replies, would approve.

I started transcribing the letters a few years ago. It’s a tedious but satisfying process. I had in mind putting them online, but at that point, I had no idea how I wanted to go about it. Last year, I decided to start uploading them to a blog, so that I could get a feel for whether or not people even wanted to read them. It wasn’t a perfect solution, and soon got bogged down for several reasons. I decided to hold off on uploading any more letters until I had the time and energy to create a website for them. So, that’s what I’m doing now.

About Esther herself, I’ve been able to find out quite a bit. She fell in love, I think, with a young man from her hometown of Geneva, Indiana. The letters between Esther and Richard began when she was still in high school and Richard in college. Esther later attended Indiana University, and continued to write to Richard for a couple more years. At some point, and for some reason I’ve been unable to determine, the relationship–and the letters to and from Richard–ended. It may be that those letters were destroyed by Esther herself, or by a family member after her death in the 1997, or maybe they were sold before I bought the crate of letters. I know that after she finished college, she taught grade school. She later married a man named Robert H. Cooper. Dr. Cooper was a lover of nature, a conservationist, and a professor of science at Ball State University (my alma mater). The Cooper Science Building was named after him. I’ve spent many hours in that building, so it was a very strange feeling to see that circle closed, and to know that Esther was part of my life long before I’d ever “met” her.

It’s funny that this subject should come up today. I just got off the phone with my mom. At one point, I mentioned the fact that when I was small, we would drive around in the country and look at old, abandoned houses. We’d park the car, then everyone would get out and go their separate ways, exploring the things that interested them. The grown-ups seemed more interested in the crumbling bones of the buildings, but I was always fascinated by the detritus left behind. Pieces of yellowed newspaper stuck under torn bits of linoleum, marbles or the arm from a doll that must have belonged to long-gone children, calendars left on damp and peeling walls, a spoon lying in a door-less cupboard; then as now, it was the small artifacts that commanded my attention.

Letters to Esther, Meta

Letters to Esther Update

Shelly

I spent the better part of last night creating a header graphic and playing around with formats. I think I’ve finally got something that I’m reasonably happy with. I decided to go with hand coding, because I couldn’t find an automated way to get what I wanted. Yippee, more work. But, I think it’ll work out okay. For now, I’m dumping everything into a sub-directory of the mother site, but that may change at a later date. If it does, at that point, I can also re-visit the issue of content management systems that might (or might not) do what I want automagically.

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Esther Munro

Anyway, if you want to take a look at a rough conceptual draft: Letters to Esther. There are only a few letters at this point, and Home is the only nav link in the header area that goes anywhere. I’m trying to make sure that the letters themselves are legible but not huge. At this point, the thumbnails are around 10k each and the full-size images are 30-40k for half sheets and 80k for full-sheets (many of the letters were written on a folded sheet of paper that opens like a book, with two small pages and an interior centerfold page).

I also scanned some photos that were included with the letters. One set is a mass-produced group of photos of the University of Chicago’s buildings, c.1920. I’ve uploaded them to a Flickr set. The others are of the Indiana University Cosmopolitan Club’s 1923 International Banquet. One of the photos shows Esther herself. I’ve created a Flickr group for those, as well.

Ladybusiness

But the next post such stories I will tell

Shelly

I trust everyone made it through the Ides okay? No knives in the back? I apologize in advance for the lack of Deep Thoughts and for the to-ing and fro-ing. Some posts are just like that. Tomorrow’s might be better, but I wouldn’t want to bet on it. But, hey, 4 out of 6 paragraphs have to do with animals, so that’s some sort of theme, isn’t it?

I had a most pleasant surprise this morning when I got to my car. The lovely Ms. Lea had stopped by on her way home last night and installed a clip on my seatbelt to keep it from strangling, or, hopefully, decapitating me. I’m so short that even with the seatbelt adjusted down as far as it’ll go, it still lies across my neck. Not a good thing for either comfort or safety.

And, further proof that this will be a good day, I saw a gray fox. It was hard to tell because he was a little unkempt and the brightness of my headlights washed out his color, but his coat looked to be light greyish and his tail had a black tip. It was too small for a coyote, too large for a cat, and not shambly enough for a ‘possum. It was definitely a slinky little fox.

I also had a cute encounter with a mouse when I stopped for gas. I went in to buy a pop, and as I walked back to my car, I saw what I thought was a leaf scuttling along the ground between the front tires. When I got closer, I saw it was a little mouse. He ran into my rear wheel and poked his head out between the alloy spokes and stared and stared and stared at me with his shiny black eyes. I told him he ought to move along, because it would be a long and unpleasant ride to Bloomington. I hope he took my advice.

Via Boing Boing, Garfield is finally funny. Really, really funny. The best part is that you can play along at home. Just remove Garfield’s thought bubbles, et voila, instant improvement!

I’ve added Carol J. Adams’ The Pornography of Meat to my Amazon wish list. Dear lord, there is a lot of bizarre advertising out there, and the worst of it seems to be that which involves the pimping of meat. The reviews of this and Adams’ earlier book are a mixed bag, but I’m curious about what she has to say on the subject, and about where she falls on the animal welfare-animal rights spectrum. I don’t have a lot of patience–precisely zero, in fact–with PeTA and those who knowingly or ignorantly buy their flavor of Kool-Aid. I do think that there is a lot that can and should be done to ensure that animals are treated more humanely and respectfully in the US, but I think PeTA (remember, small e for ethical!) has gotten it spectacularly wrong.