Mosby, 2005 - 2021. RIP.

Mosby crossed the Rainbow Bridge two weeks ago. She had a good life, and was 15 and much beloved.  She was a Very Good Kitty, and will be missed.

Mosby started off life as a stray cat.  She would wander across my back porch, and when I saw her, she would streak away to the safety of bushes, thus earning herself the nickname "The Gray Ghost."  She eventually figured out that I could easily be conned into giving her a bowl of dry cat food twice a day, so she decided to stay a bit closer.  Not close enough to touch, as that would take another two or three weeks of twice-daily feedings to make sure I was safe to be near.

Eventually, as all female stray cats must, she became pregnant.  The day that I went out to find her and take her inside so she could have her kittens indoors instead of outside under an azalea bush was the day she disappeared to give birth.  I saw her the next day, and she was much slimmer.  It took nine days to find where she had given birth - at the bottom of  the neighbor's four-foot-tall flower box.  I was able to lure her into the cat carrier with wet food, and fished the five kittens out to put them all into the Cats' Room.  Becoming a permanent resident meant that she needed more than a nickname, she needed a name.  I know enough of Virginia history to know that "The Gray Ghost" is also the nickname of the Confederate raider John Mosby, so she became Mosby.  (As there was already one John in the house, there was no need to confuse matters.)

The kittens grew to be old enough to go to new homes, and four of the five did. Mosby and the fifth kitten stayed with me.  As the fifth kitten was a gray-and-white tuxedo cat (sometimes known as an Armani Tuxedo cat), and the pattern looked like it ought to be formal Confederate wear, she became Rebel.  Also in no small part due to her general disdain for rules. 

At the time, there were two other cats in the house, Sami and O. Henry, my parents' cats.  Four cats were plenty, and Mosby and Rebel found their place in the feline hierarchy.

A year later, Tommy returned to the house.  He was a kitten from the litter of the pregnant stray who adopted me a year before Mosby showed up, and his owner could no longer keep him, so would I please take him back?  As a result, there were now five adult cats in the household.

Over the next few years, Sami and O. Henry passed away, and Mosby stepped into the position of Matriarch of the Household.   Rebel, of course, retained her position as Kitten Forever, Never Growing Up. 

Mosby made a point of always showing up for Morning and Evening Roll Calls, also known as breakfast and dinner.  (Tommy would sleep in for breakfast once every three months, and Rebel, once every four months.  Mosby always appeared, possibly remembering the days when she was a stray, when the next meal was uncertain.)  She would always sleep near me, and during the cooler nine months of the year, she'd find a warm and cozy spot, nestled between my knees and shins at night or in my lap if I were watching TV.  

Mosby and her daughter Rebel loved each other fiercely. They would usually sleep together, and would groom each other at length daily.  In the last ten months, Rebel developed into quite a caretaker for her mother, being there to comfort and to groom her daily, and to run to her side from the far side of the house when Mosby would awaken and call out for company. 

Mosby is survived by her daughter Rebel and her housemate - and possible half-brother - Thomas Jifferson (Tommy, to his friends), and by her human.  She might also be survived by other kittens, one of whom was known to this household as Harriet (because of a lightning bolt of white on her forehead, like Harry Potter), and who knows? perhaps grand-kittens or more.

Mosby liked to be held, to be petted, to purr loudly, and to curl her front paws around your finger as she was "kneading" in the air.  She loved to sleep in the sunlight, following the sunbeam around the house as the day went on. She loved to sit in open windows, sniffing the outdoors, and Rebel often joined her there.  Mosby loved to eat grilled fish of every variety, but none more so than salmon.  The next time you eat salmon, raise a morsel of it to her memory.

 

Mosby.  RIP.

Bedroom critters.

No, not the ones who live here year-round.

Yesterday morning, I woke up to the sound and sight of a squirrel climbing on the screen outside of my bedroom window.  Very noisy, as tiny claws pulling on screen mesh tends to be.  Plus, he looked pissed off.  Forty-five seconds of skittering around on the screen, and he finally left.

About five minutes later, it occurred to me to wonder: how did he get to that window? After all, I've been at this house for 16 years and have never seen a squirrel there before.  My bedroom is on the second floor, and the first floor that it's above is at ground level. That window looks out over my driveway (and my neighbor's driveway, and then my neighbor's house), so there's no tree that he jumped from.  That face of my house is all brick, so it's not like he climbed up.  No idea how he got there.  Maybe there was a tiny tornado that picked him up and deposited him there, and that would explain why he was so angry.

A couple of hours later, I was outside and took a look.  Ah.  There's an insulated pipe that runs from the outside unit of my air conditioner up to the attic, and it's located right by that window.  So he climbed up that, for some reason.

In the middle of the afternoon, I was back in my bedroom for some reason. Okay, I was going to take a nap.  Almost asleep, and I hear the fluttering of a bird against that same window.  What are the odds?  I close my eyes again, and there's more fluttering.  Stupid bird.  Go away and let me sleep.  Swoosh - and fluttering again, at the other window.  Yes, the bird was inside my bedroom.  Another first, after 16 years.  *sigh* Okay, how do I get it out?  I don't have a net or anything like that.  So maybe I can capture it in a blanket as it's flying across the room? Or in a towel when it comes to rest on my ceiling fan?  Well, trying those once each showed that repeat attempts would also be futile. 

The cats were of no help.  Mosby sat on the bed and watched as the bird flew from window A to window B to the ceiling fan to window A, etc.  I'd say she was figuring out the bird's moves and tendencies before making her attempt, and not just being lazy.  Tommy walked back and forth from the bed to a table, but always about five seconds behind the bird.  And Rebel was running along beneath the bird, always four feet below it, never jumping up towards it.  I guess they were entertained, though.

Eventually decided I'd have to open the window and try to shoo it out.  Opening a window and leaving it open until the bird figured out how to use it was exactly what I wanted to do, given that it was around 50 degrees outside.  Got it open, and then I had to start shooing the cats away, because they wanted to play goalie in front of the open window.  I tossed the cats out of the room, and waited for the bird to make its break for freedom.  And waited. And waited.  And watched as it kept flying across from the other window, and hitting the top half of the window (the half that was closed).  

Fine.  Now I dropped the blinds to cover the top half of the window, so that the only sunlight coming in through that window was through the opening.  Three more flights across the room and running into the blinds, and then the bird soared out through the open window into the great beyond.

Enough interaction with Nature for one day.

Never the twain shall meet.

I was driving northbound on I-85 in North Carolina a couple of months ago, on my way to a business school class reunion from someplace in South Carolina.  I pulled into the right lane, and took the exit to a rest area, in large part to stretch out my hamstring (which was shrieking in pain and about to start spasming, not what you especially want to have happen to the leg that controls the brake pedal).  There are signs indicating that this rest area is the location of the North Carolina Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and other signs indicating that there is a "Blue Star Highway" memorial here as well.

The Blue Star Highway memorial is circular, twelve feet across, made of different-colored bricks, and looks to have been designed by high school students (names and school listed on a nearby plaque, together with the names of the contractors who donated the bricks).  As such, it looked fine.

And the sign over there indicates that the NC Vietnam Veterans Memorial was down this paved path ("Authorized Vehicles Only!") to the right, about 900 feet.  Fine, I can stroll down to it.  As I'm wandering down the path, it occurs to me to wonder why the memorial is pretty much in the middle of nowhere, accessible only via an Interstate.  

The memorial itself is fine, I guess.  A little large for my tastes, and at the same time surprisingly reserved. Nestled into a hillside, it's a circle that's probably 125 feet in diameter, and most of the center is a flat, green, well-kept and recently-mowed lawn.  Some of one side of the field has a brick wall on it, with bronze plaques listing the 1600 North Carolinians who died or went missing during the war. (The memorial is also to honor the 260,000 North Carolinians who survived Vietnam.)  There's a ten-foot berm surrounding the field, which makes the top of the berm level with the natural ground height on the uphill side and twenty-five feet above the ground level on the downhill side. The hillside was planted with appropriate-looking shrubs and trees.  All in all, it looks like a proportionally-sized stadium for a 40-yard long football field.

I continued along the path on the other side of the memorial, back up the hill to the rest area, on a path that's about 150 feet long.  Okay, I'm a little turned around, as I'd have expected the rest area buildings to be off to my right, but they're over there on the left.  I guess the paths to and around the memorial were a little more twisty than I realized.

As I approach the rest area buildings, I don't see my car.  I know where I parked it relative to those buildings, and it's not there.  Well, this is becoming a substantially less fun trip by the minute.  I get closer to the rest area buildings, and yes, there's the sign pointing to the Blue Star Highway memorial - but it's pointing in a different direction from the buildings than it just was.  And as I get to the memorial, I see that it's now a ten-by-fifteen foot rectangle, again made out of different-colored bricks, and designed by high school students.

Wait, what?  Why are there seemingly two different rest areas, both on the east side of the northbound lanes of this Interstate? This makes no sense to me. I can see the traffic out on the highway, zooming by from left to right as you'd expect. What's going on here? Why did they do this? What can the layout of the memorial and the highway and the rest areas possibly be that allows this? And where's my car? (And why do I hear the Twilight Zone music?)

Okay.  I finally decide that for some reason, there really are two rest areas here, and I need to retrace my steps back down the hill and around the memorial to get back to the rest area where my car is.  I do so, and as I trudge back up the long hill to the parking lot, I spot my car, exactly where I left it.  So that's a good result.

Fine.  There are two different rest areas on the right side of this Interstate. I don't understand it.  But thanks to my handy cell phone, I can pull up the map and take a look.

And, well, hmm.  There's the answer, and it raises more questions.  On this stretch of highway, the northbound lanes are west of the southbound lanes.  Which means that the memorial, and both rest areas - one for the northbound lanes and one for the southbound lanes - are actually in the median between the north- and southbound lanes.

Zooming out on the map, you can see that the northbound lanes cross under the southbound lanes about a mile south of the memorial, and cross back over them about a half-mile north of it.  

Hmm. Well, surely they couldn't have built the Interstate like this with the weird crossover first, and then decide it would be a grand place to put the memorial, so the idea of the memorial must have come first.  But why not build the exit ramps as they do where I've seen rest area plazas in the median in other states (Maryland and Delaware come to mind), with the exit ramps on the left side of the traffic lanes?  Or even have the exit ramp on the right side of traffic, and have a flyover lane to take the rest area traffic to the median (also Maryland, or maybe New Jersey)?

It gives me something to ponder for the next hour and a half of my drive, and I finally decided that what must have happened was this: there was an existing highway - either US or NC - that eventually became the southbound lanes of I-85.  While it was just that highway, they decided to build the memorial. That explains why the access to the memorial from the southbound lanes is easier than from the northbound lanes - a 150-foot walk instead of 900 feet, and a paved road leading to parking spaces by the memorial, instead of a road for authorized vehicles only.  Once they decided to make the highway into I-85, it was reasonable to place the memorial into the median, and to do that, they had to have the crossover to make the northbound lanes be on the other side and for the exit lane from the northbound lanes to the rest area be on the right, as for all other rest areas in the state..

I've been over this stretch of I-85 at least six, and possibly ten, times in the past half-dozen years.  I've never noticed anything unusual about this stretch of road, and I'm sure I've stopped at this rest area before.  The bridge where the northbound lanes cross over the southbound lanes north of the rest area is marked (with an admittedly small sign) as "I-85" and I imagine the other crossover is marked as well. But those are small signs, easily missed, and you could easily stop at the rest area without seeing either the memorial or the other rest area, or even suspecting that they were there.

And, for what it's worth, for the forty-five minutes that I was wandering around this memorial area, early afternoon on a Friday in the spring, there was no one else anywhere near the memorial.

Irene

That's my front yard, after Irene. Maybe a half-dozen good sized branches, up five or six inches in diameter. But better than having the whole tree come down on my house, as it did for a couple of my neighbors.

And now it's the Long Wait for Dominion to do something. Today is Day Four of the hurricane, and they have restored power to exactly one of the ten traffic lights along a four-mile stretch of Parham Road.

Their latest claim is that they'll have restored power to 95% of the Richmond residents who lost power by Friday, and to everyone by Saturday. I'll believe that when I see it, and you shouldn't bet much money on them fulfilling their promises.

Signs and portents.

There are always signs around you, wherever you go. All you have to do is know where to look and how to interpret them.

Take these signs, for instance, from my trip to California in October.

A trained soothsayer would take one look at these and know immediately that they shout out: Danger! Beware! You were exposed to the flu on your flight across the continent, thanks to the person in the row behind you, and it will make itself known to you in about six more hours!

Sadly, I am not trained in the saying of sooth, and had to learn of their warning the hard way.

Another minute of fame.

I was in Iowa last month, for a family wedding. My first trip to Iowa since 1964, and while I imagine that it's changed a lot since then, I really wasn't paying all that much attention to the state back then. A fun trip. While in Iowa City, I did a little sight-seeing, taking in the Amana colonies and the Herbert Hoover presidential library/museum.

For me, though, the most entertaining part of the trip was a one-day side trip to Madison, Wisconsin.

Oh, sure. There were fun things to see on the way to and from Madison, like a winery, a well-regarded brewery, and the self-styled "World's Largest M."

But the best part was going to the Great Dane brewpub in Fitchburg, where they were serving the John Stoner's Oatmeal Stout.

No, sadly. Actually named after "the first farmer" in the Fitchburg region.

Still, of the eleven beers they had on tap, I thought this one was the best. So I had a bunch of it the evening I was there. I'll happily report that it was interesting, complex, smooth, full-bodied, and had a fine head, just like its namesake.

They don't bottle or distribute their beer, near as I can tell. You could buy a growler of it at the pub, but there's no way you could get a full growler onto the plane. So any of it that I was going to drink, I had to have that evening.

They were impressed enough that someone would come all the way from Virginia to try their beer that they gave me a t-shirt with the John Stoner's Oatmeal Stout logo on it.

Sami, 1993 - 2009. R.I.P.

Sami, my senior cat, passed away a couple of weeks ago. He was 16.

His health had been in rapid decline over the previous three or four weeks, getting to the point that he no longer wanted to go up or down stairs. But he seemed not to be in any pain, and still enjoyed getting attention and sleeping where he could sniff the fresh air.

He was a good cat: gentle, and friendly, and agreeable to all - humans and cats, alike. And he always carried himself with a good deal of dignity. He had a lot of feline companions during his life; probably 4 in Florida and 4 or 5 in Virginia (not counting the kittens who came and went). And before moving to Virginia 3 years ago, he was a good companion to my father.

He'll be missed.