Feb 5 I hear scratching and scurrying sounds in the ceiling above my bed. It must be birds on the roof. Feb 10 I find a pile of sunflower seed shells dribbling from a bag of bird seed in the sun room. Outside the door is a fat squirrel innocently nibbling under the outdoor bird  Read the Rest…

You know sometimes you hear a noise in your house that you can’t identify? But one cat opens an eye and another one yawns. The third lifts his head up, but none of them summon a sense of danger or even curiosity. And so everyone relaxes. An hour later you find the shower curtain has  Read the Rest…

Putzer the Attorney and I were sitting in my sun room this morning drinking coffee when she got a text from her husband James in Walla Walla. “Don’t forget your wallet,” it read. “Do you get tired of hearing that?” I asked her. “Yeah, it’s gotten annoying.” Of course you’ll all want to know what  Read the Rest…

Two huge raccoons raced in front of me last night when I was calling the cats.  The cats were sitting three yards away and refused to look at me, the person who feeds them.  They were like people at a sports event waiting for a moment they had anticipated and fantasized about all season.  The  Read the Rest…

It’s been a discombobulating week, and not helped by the time change.  I particularly loathe Spring Forward. It throws me worse than Fall Back in terms of messing with my sleep.  In addition I am a morning person who counts the growing minutes of spring morning light like Scrooge counts his money.  I yearn for  Read the Rest…

I have a list of time sensitive stuff I need to be attending to and every time I look at it, I can’t focus.  There they are, swimming in front of me, the soul-destroying articles of an over-scheduled, self-employed life: taxes, emissions, ink cartridges, Easter ham, April billing, water-color classes (Five items, all dependent on  Read the Rest…

I live in an area of Seattle called Crown Hill. When someone isn’t sure where that is, I say Upper Ballard.  That doesn’t really clear anything up.  So then I say Greenwood.  Greenwood sounds very Henry VIII and olde.  That appealed to me until I watched The Tudors, which was creepy. Crown Hill, which now  Read the Rest…

Meal time is an exciting event in the lives of my cats.  When they were kittens, they engaged in extended periods of play, exploration, and swinging on curtains followed by restorative naps, and eating for growth and strength.  Now that they are cats, they engage in extended naps, brief periods of play if I play  Read the Rest…

In this recent spate of late but glorious summer, I did something I haven’t done in years because it hasn’t been warm enough.  I dragged a chair into a shady patch of my yard where the lilac branches meet the tops of the black currant bush and create a cool cavern.  I maneuvered the chair  Read the Rest…

This week I finished a painting inspired by a photograph of a wheelbarrow full of pumpkins, and Eugene, my first little soul-mate cat.  He’s the cat who liked raisins, broccoli and ear wax –I don’t need to get into how that came about—and who played my answering machine when he was bored. I wanted riots  Read the Rest…