Cat in a Box

In our family we love laughing about brand names. Always have, always will.

And Albrecht Discount has the greatest brand name for pet supplies.

It is Heart To Tail!

The other day when I had my delivery from Aldi, some of the groceries arrived packed into a Heart to Tail box. It is now Jeoffry's favorite toy.

Heart To Tail must have planned that!

This box was just like a little cat house. It is like a freebie I got along with my Heart To Tail cat food and Heart To Tail cat litter. We are spoiling Jeoffry recently with canned cat food. He does not barf as much. If your cat barfs, try canned food instead of dry food, is my advice. It makes a difference.

Plus, if you play your cards right, you might get this box.

Heart to Tail!

When the cat bites, when the bee stings

 Howard, the guy I married, has been doing daily vlogs. He does not call them vlogs, or video logs as I would. You know me, I cannot say blog. I must say Web lot!

Anyway, Howard calls his daily video logs just by their opus numbers. He is now up to Opus 5.

Opus 5 does not interest me too much. It is about pizza. Men will always chow down their pizza and there is nothing that anyone can do about that. Well, I have an Amish chicken in the oven tonight so if Howard filled up on his pizza, that's fine, I will eat this chicken all on my own over the next few days.

However back to Howard and his opus numbers.

My favorite is Opus 2!

I linked to it up above. I think it should go viral.

That moment when Jeoffry just lunges at him and bites him! I cannot stop laughing.

Jeoffry really does not hurt you when he bites you. It just looks so dramatic and that Howard caught it on film is amazing.

It bodes well for Howard's video log, I will say that.

I have subscribed!

Jeoffry Counteracting the Devil

 Jeoffry on the windowsill as twilight falls.

There is that line from "Pippin".. "Cats fit on the windowsill." We sang that song way back at Christ the King and I never forgot it.

Cats fit on the windowsill.

They do!

Haha, that picture looks so, ahem, urban. The curtain is like that because I bunch it up so it clears the part of the window that is open. 

I was not aware when Jeoffry slipped into the room and I did not hear him jump up onto the windowsill. I looked over and there he was and it was so cute I took the picture.

What do cats look at when they are on the windowsill? What do they see?

Here he is in the kitchen, looking out into the night.

That is explained in the poem "My Cat Jeoffry":

For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary.

For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.

For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.

The picture shows Jeoffry counteracting the powers of darkness.

And there is also this line:

For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.

True!!

The Christmas Tree Struggle

Tonight I put up my tree. I always report on how that goes and this year will be no exception.

However it will be different.

What a struggle this was!

I actually put up the tree yesterday. Today I set out to add the lights. Normally this is no big deal. But this year, ay yi yi.

I made history. This is the first time I ever put all the lights on the tree -- and then took them all off again and started over!

Has anyone ever done that in the long history of Christmas trees? I bet not! 

What happened was, I had a new string of lights from CVS and I wanted to add them to the tree. They were colored lights on a white string. I already had two strings of colored lights on a white string but I had them strung up around my front sun room, as in a redneck bar. I was hoping I could keep those lights up.

However. I realized I had no other colored lights on white strings. Also this new one I got, it was so short that it reached only halfway around the tree. For crying out loud! I had assumed it would at least go around the tree twice or something.

Fie on this string of lights!

So I took down the lights that had been strung up around the sun room and pressed them into service. Eventually I had the tree covered. But it did not look right. I fussed and fussed with it. I overlapped strings, looped them around in U-turns, tried this, tried that. But there was no getting around that the tree was well lit around the bottom -- that's where the new string was -- and kind of sparse in parts around the top.

Not only that but you could see wires. "I don't want to see any wires," Marvin Hamlisch said his mother told him when he got his first apartment. Hamlisch would gab on and on at Holiday Pops concerts and you would die you were laughing so hard. Anyway, you saw wires when you looked at my Christmas tree. That ain't right.

I worked and worked, trying to fix things. My Cat Jeoffry yawned and went to sleep. 

My Black Cherry Berry tea grew cold. 

My treasured Carmen Dragon 1950s Capitol Records Christmas album finished Side 2 and shut off.

I kept working, grimly, in silence. About a half an hour later I gave up. I started tearing the lights down. I could not believe I was doing that and when I was half way through, I bitterly regretted it.

However. There was no turning back!

The story has a happy ending. When the lights were all off the tree and lying all over the floor, I flipped the record over and started it again. Carmen Dragon's "O Christmas Tree" filled the room. It made my house feel like a 1939 movie set. I started the lights from scratch, putting the new lights in the middle instead of on the bottom. And in five minutes I was done.

Another Christmas, another Christmas tree. Well, still the same Christmas tree. But another experience.

One for the books!

Cats Without Vanity

Cats can be vain. They are famous for that. There was one time when My Cat Jeoffry got upset when he was jumping from the mantel and stumbled and landed awkwardly. He could not stand that I was laughing at him so he took a swipe at me.

I said, "Don't take it out on me that you're a klutz!"

I still laugh about that!

However there are times when cats are without vanity.

That is when they are asleep!

Fig. A is Jeoffry up above. I took that picture today. It was hot and Jeoffry stretches out when it is hot in all kinds of odd and unflattering poses. He also enjoys sleeping in the shade of furniture.

Here is a closeup of his face.

Another shot.

And there is this from the other day. I sent this to Howard and he gave it a giant thumbs up.

How could you not give that a thumbs up?

So cute.

No vanity!!

Cats and Cat Toys

Like any pet owners Howard and I have spent money on toys for our cat Jeoffry. 

Just as one example there is a large and alarmingly realistic rat. I bought it at Pet Supplies Plus and I think I went up to over $5 for it. Thanks to my German parents who lived through the Great Depression, I have a problem with that. However Jeoffry loves it. (Me, not so much. If I find it in the middle of the floor I toss it back into Jeoffry's box.)

There is also this cat toy that has a ball running around a circular track. Jeoffry loved it for the first week we had it and now we cannot get him interested in it for love or money. That was also from Pet Supplies Plus.

A great and cheap cat toy that is always a hit is the spring. These colored springs come in packages of a dozen or something and the cat will chase them everywhere -- up and down stairs, around the room, through doorways, skidding across the kitchen floor.

However.

Nothing beats free toys!

"For he chases the cork." That is in the poem "My Cat Jeoffry." Jeoffry does indeed chase the cork! And we seem to have an endless number of corks in this house, need I say more.

There are corks and then there are cardboard boxes.

I do some grocery shopping at Gordon's Restaurant Market. When I leave I always try to grab a box from the selection available that Jeoffry will like. Above is the newest model.

It has a square opening that Jeoffry loves! He likes to peer out of it as he is doing in the picture up above. He also has a game he plays with it. He will rocket into the box and shoot a paw out at me. Not just a paw actually. He shoots out his whole front leg!

Ha, ha! One day I will try to get a picture of that! It is not easy because whenever he does that I am just laughing so hard.

The best cat toys in life are free!

Cat and mouse

"For there is nothing so sweet as his peace when at rest."

Jeoffry caught another mouse!

That sentence rings out with a sense of great joy. However when I actually perceived the event, it was not as joyous. A dead mouse in the house -- perhaps it is not as bad as a live mouse running around but it is still not pretty.

I was at the Steinway playing Johannes Brahms and suddenly my eyes began roaming the room and that was when I saw something by the radiator.

At first I was thinking, it is just one of Jeoffry's toys. He has several toys that look alarmingly real including a small brown fabric mouse and a big alarming-looking rat. Maybe it is that gross little toy mouse. That is what I said to myself as I continued playing the Brahms.

I decided to wait until the piece was over and so I did that. For the record this was the first Impromptu Op. 119. I like to run through the whole set. However on this occasion that was not to be.

After I played the last notes of that first impromptu I got up for an impromptu check on that mouse.

It sure looked real. 

It was real.

Jeoffry got up meowing. He likes to listen to music and he did not like that it had been interrupted. He should have thought of that in view of the mouse. Couldn't he have eaten it or something? Could he not have taken it somewhere else?

But now that I thought of it we had been warned. He had been obsessed with the area surrounding the radiator. He had even been sleeping there.

The things that cats know that we do not!

Meanwhile... it has quietly been five years since Jeoffry's first mouse -- at least the first mouse to our knowledge.

I wonder when we will find the next one!

The oldest houses in Buffalo

Today my friend Meghan and I went out drawing in Allentown. We stopped in a coffee shop where we found a good view of the city's oldest houses.


Buffalo's oldest houses sit on Allen Street one after another. There are three in a row, maybe more but I have always considered these three the oldest. I drew two of them. There they are up above.

As I worked I had to come to terms with an uncomfortable truth.

Pretty as the houses are, and old as they are, what really interested me was the "Do Not Enter" sign and the fire hydrant.

I am still a young enough artist that the bends in the street still amaze me. Every time I sketch a scene like this one, I cannot get over the scale of the houses that stretch down the street. I have to be very careful as I go forward. Those houses around the corner, they take up only a few millimeters beneath the eave of the house on the corner.

That is incredible!

I keep holding up my pen, checking, marveling.

Only when I got it down did I let myself sketch in the "Do Not Enter" sign.

Cool things to look at are everywhere. When I was taking a break I stopped in the coffee shop's restroom. and I saw this:

You have to wonder how many beers went into that logo.

Genius!

And earlier today I took this picture of Jeoffry in his holder.

So many images.

So little time!

Happy cat

For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.

That is a line from "My Cat Jeoffry" and I found myself saying it because, well, our cat Jeoffry is better.

He had a cold for a few days and was sneezing alarmingly. He was not quite snoozing a lot. He was still on his feet. But you could tell he was not his true self.

He became his true self at a most inconvenient time of course when I had just cleaned off my desk and was trying to get work done.

How was I to interrupt him when he was scanning the yard below looking for the groundhog?

"Is there a groundhog?" We ask him that.

"Is there a Chihuahua?" Poor Jeoffry was down with his cold and scarcely noticed the Chihuahua at Thanksgiving dinner. Now that is it for the Chihuahua until next Thanksgiving! Our friend Larry's mother brought the dog and there will not be another chance for Jeoffry to see them again until next year. I keep thinking the Chihuahua is a he but it is a she. Her name is Precious.

Precious is precious and so is Jeoffry.

For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.

For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.

Our cat is once again complete!

Catnap

"For there is nothing so sweet as his peace when at rest."

That is a line I love from "My Cat Jeoffry."

Above is My Cat Jeoffry asleep on an armchair in the living room. I have these two beautiful red armchairs I was not appreciating on his account. One was upstairs well protected from Jeoffry by piles of stuff. Another, not matching the first but similar, was downstairs, but it was covered by an old quilt so Jeoffry would not claw it.

Finally a few weeks ago I said, I will bring these chairs out into the light.

Probably they will have a short lifespan but meanwhile I may as well enjoy them!

I have reason to be concerned because very early on after we got Jeoffry, we had to bring an armchair out to the curb. He had absolutely gutted it. Such was the damage that the garbage men stopped in their duties and just laughed openly. I observed them.

They understood: A cat lives here!

So far, though, the armchairs do not seem to have aroused the obsession in Jeoffry that the earlier chair did. He claws them now and then but not with any real commitment.

He does like to sleep on the one chair.

"For there is nothing so sweet as his peace when at rest."

Let us hope he remains at rest!