Bruce taking me for a walk at the dog park – I like to see things that remind me of warmer days when we get to this point in Winter.
Dogs
The Cat Who Reformed
We inherited her from my mother – the last in a series of pedigreed ‘apple-head’ Siamese cats owned by my parents – when Mom fell catastrophically one morning in the kitchen of her house in Valley Center, California, and fractured sufficient bones in her upper spine to render her essentially a paraplegic. The house which Mom and Dad had built (the second on that site in Northern San Diego County), in which Mom had lived alone after Dad passed in 2010, had to be sold. There was practically nothing left of the original family relics, after the first house burned in the Paradise Mountain Fire in 2003, so all the furnishings went without a pang of regret from us. Ancestral bits and scraps which meant anything to us all had already been parceled out before the fire anyway.
But that left Mom’s pets; the dogs, which went to my sister Pip – and two cats, Davy and Isabelle, whom my daughter obediently hauled back to Texas from California. Davy was a stray, a bridle and white specimen, fairly elderly at the time when we took him in. He had been dumped in Mom and Dad’s remote neighborhood, escaped being eaten by coyotes, and scraped sufficient acquaintance with Mom and Dad and their next nearest neighbors to be considered for addition to either household. There may have been a coin-toss involved. Anyway, Davy was added to Mom and Dad’s pet collection – I don’t know whether they won or lost the coin-toss. Davy, having remembered starvation and escape/evasion was determined never to be hungry again, and was a hefty chunk-o-cat by the time he passed away of natural old age a year or so ago.
But this is about the other cat-inheritance, Isabelle.
Worthwhile Reading and Viewing
It’s been a while since I posted a link collection, so here are quite a few…
The highest-resolution snowflake photos ever captured.
The real kind of snowflakes, not the metaphorical kind.
Stella’s best leaf jumps of all time.
A lot of enthusiasm
Spot, the Robot Dog, goes to work on an oil rig.
Bet Spot can’t do what Stella can do.
The recent discussion of port congestion reminded me of this very interesting website, which shows the world’s maritime traffic in real time or very close to same.
And on a more somber note: November 10 marked the 45th anniversary of the Great Lakes ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald, an event memorialized in song by Gordon Lightfoot.
Still on the subject of transportation: the implementation of Positive Traffic Control for US railroads, which has been a huge and complex project, is almost complete.
I’m not sure that this mandate really represented the best possible safety-return-on-investment for the money expended.
Turkish trash collectors built a library for abandoned books.
Visiting cards and actual visits, as a Facebook equivalent in 1800s Russia.
Reminds me of a passage in one of Fielding’s novels, in which a woman takes great pleasure in going through the visiting cards of people who called on her, which made me immediately think of like-collecting of Facebook.