There appears to have been . . . cats?

Posted on by hollyfrostgoldportpress

By Holly the Assistant

Fairly late last night, Sarah dropped me a note asking if I could put something, anything, up today.

This is anything.

The various cat anecdotes include “You’re playing with knives.” addressed to Circe, Muse, and Indy. To which I pointed out that they come pre-equiped with knives, so this is hardly an unusual thing. These, however, were box cutters, and we prefer the cats to stick to smaller blades. (Like the ten on their front paws.)

Then The Wolf tried to steal peaches, and I told him he was taking after his big sister, and he was very affronted.

Between packing and cats, the House of Hoyt’s internal appearance is currently best described as “Possibly en route to Oz”, and between de-cluttering, cats, and dogs, the House of Assistant’s internal appearance is “Accompanying the Hoyts to Oz”, so I shall leave you with a photo of a fine fellow who fails to feline, and who has discovered that de-cluttering is not a cat friendly activity.

70 thoughts on “There appears to have been . . . cats?”

  3. Decluttering on the way to Oz?

    Pay NO ATTENTION to the pile of objects behind the curtain!

    Nor the ones in front of or beside the curtain.

    Or the boxes on the porch, chairs or dining room tables, for that matter.

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      1. Well, it does seem there are some ‘tiny houses’, meant for the homeless population, going unused.

        Perhaps we could drop them on local politicians?

        —

        Please do not pack the cats.

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  4. Youngest had a tumble at school and ended up with a fracture. It’s a buckle fracture so she should just need to wear a split for for weeks and can actually do low impact stuff with that arm, so as breaks go, it was about as not bad a fracture as you can manage.

    While we were at the kids bone expert for them to take a look at her, she charmed the front desk into getting a whole pile of cat stickers.

    She spent the rest of the visit pointing to cats and asking me if I’d like to get a cat like that…

    I think we’re going to have to get a cat now.

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    1. Look at the breed standards for an idea of how different cats might behave, then check the local and online rescue sites to see if a suitable cat might be available.

      When I finally decided that I was ready for another cat, I did this and found a purebred Birman for next to nothing, because he was dealing poorly with his humans’ ongoing divorce.

      He is adjusting well, and generally behaving to breed standards. :-)

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    2. And if you don’t want to try for a specific breed, hair color is amazingly accurate.

      Like, Tuxedo Boys are generally chill. Oranges are generally waiting for the shared brain cell to show up, with possible insanity.

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      1. Our orange isn’t dumb, he’s just fixated. On me. I sometimes refer to him as a barnacle cat. When I’m gone, he’s not orange, he’s yeller.

        The black & white (cap and saddle, not full tuxedo) is named Mayhem. He earned it.

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        1. Our creamsicle is AKA “squirrel cat.”

          She also Objects to the ditzy messy-blazer black and white cat. (she’s got her shirt coming out the bottom of the coat, and the toe is out of her boot….)

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      3. I could believe it. That said, I’ve usually just gone to the local cat adoption event and just seen what cats clicked. I figured when we’re ready for the next cat, we’d probably do that, just now with the little ones in tow

        That said, all the prior cats I’ve gotten have been when I was single and living on my own, so the usual criteria was “which car most looked like they needed a quiet space”.

        Not so much anymore…

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        1. :deletes long comment:

          Maybe look into fostering?

          Foster fails are about the only way I know to get access to young sibling kittens, which is important in a house with kids– the cats can entertain themselves, but also bond without being the alpha of the house.

          And if they’re not a good fit, you have trained cats to live well with others.

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    3. Harryvoyager, depending on your home you may want to consider a pair. If the house is mostly free of humans during the day a pair of juveniles (particularly littermates especially males) seem to work well together. If there is someone home at least some part of the time single will work although they may stick like velcro to the human at home. Consider adopting older ones for singles as they are a smidge less crazy. If you end up looking at purebred cats look on line, some require lots of maintanence (long haired breeds especially) and many breeds have a variety of health issues that have appeared over time. We have had 3 pairs of male litter mates over time and they seem to bond together well and keep each other company. Sometimes they are bosom buddies to a level that is a bit astounding.

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    1. I’ve had the junk man haul two (2) completely full dumpsters out of here in the last few years, and it barely made a dent. Two homes worth of furniture, a store, plus our old stuff from the Old Days as I call the 1990s. (36 years ago, kids. Holy crap, right?)

      I’ve decided I like my junk, and I’m leaving it to my heirs. Thinning out the actually worthless and the doubles of things that are twice as worthless is an activity for winter weekends when it’s too cold to go for a ride. ~:D

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        1. Had reason to let someone we know that I was at least somewhat familiar with the “Tiller Trail” (south umpqua from Canyonville east through Days Creek, to Tiller and beyond). Had to note, “It has been almost 50 years!” Next fall (’27) it is officially 50 years since I left the district to return to college for the last time (worked Sweet Home, ’78).

          Eek.

          Part of the problem, regardless of the heart health problems, it is hard to be “Old”. I am not old. My mom is old (91). My husband is old (’74). I’m the baby.

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    2. Well, of course.

      Life is taking that as an identification. ‘Look at De Clutter’, and Life says, well, sure, here you go!

      Couple 6 weeks ago I moved all the moving boxes, mostly untouched since we moved in 2019, out into the side yard, swept up the mouse poop on the floor, set up a cafeteria sized table, and commenced to sorting. No rain up here until yesterday, so all the boxes were fine; and now the pile is MUCH smaller, so a large tarp covers the remainder while Oregon gets its first drink in a long while, into next week if the Weather Guessers might be believed.

      Our move from CA got accelerated at the end, and a lot of stuff got packed and shipped that we would not have brought had we actually taken the time to cull; we worked on it for nearly a year and truly didn’t get very far.

      Of course, there were differing intentions. My goal has always been ‘Make This Go Away’. Spouse’s goal was ‘Give This A New Home’. Those are not incompatible, but the second is a much slower process. The same intentions applied up here, too, so those boxes generally just sat.

      (If you are an ophiophobe, skip this bit in parentheses …

      So, I mentioned mouse poop. And that has a living origin. And y’know what keeps the numbers of mice down? Yes, you know – snakes.

      I had observed a baby hog snake outside my side door from the garage to the side yard. But it skittered under the sidewalk slab, and I didn’t see it again. Until about 6 weeks ago, when I started moving boxes.

      Hanging from some packing tape, inextricably caught, was the desiccated baby hog snake – about 5 feet off the floor! Poor snake, not a good way to go. I didn’t know they could climb boxes.

      OTOH, no actual mice around.)

      OK, y’all can start reading again.

      So, after 2 years I decided St Vinnies was getting a lot of nice women’s clothes, and while I was trekking out there, a bunch of stuff I will never use again could go there, too. That satisfies the ‘New Home’ criterion, unless SV has to trash some of the things, but they have to pay to do that, so they are a little selective of what they take.

      And I found someone to take her stamp collection, mostly dormant since Before Kids.

      But I have been throwing away enormous amounts of things that would not have passed spousal approval. Much of it bothers me, too, but I can’t use it and don’t have a connection to, for instance, sewers and knitters to take stuff.

      I bought a set of Costco storage bins and I’m organizing things into them, even numbering the bins and taking pictures and documenting in an ipad app called ‘Under My Roof’. They stack nicely against the garage wall, and now I have space around my breaker panel.

      Wife and I and family cleaned out her mother’s house after she passed; I just found the pictures of that event while cleaning (I have an immense number of physical photos, much unorganized, filling one of those bins, and I keep finding more. Clearly, photo records of our lives were not High Priority.) And then wife and I and my sisters cleaned out my mom’s house, which took most of a year because we’d come up for a Saturday, work for a while and reminisce for longer.

      So, we resolved to leave less of a ‘collection’ for our kids.

      Father in law used to say folks should either move or have a small fire every 5 years.

      Evidently OGH Ms Hoyt is trying to bring the average down below that. Good Luck, I say!

      (Dad was USAF, so we did 10 interstate moves as a family, and I have done just 3 interstate moves myself, though two more within the same cities required some packing and sorting.)

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          1. Our local library ran out of money, pretty much. Operating now on volunteer labor and a pittance. One of the first things we did when we got here was get library cards, and then pretty much didn’t use them.

            The same building also contains the CG Senior Center; it had been the Safeway up until 1994, but we got here 2019 so never saw it downtown.

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        2. Price it at 50% below market. It’ll sell, and you’ll recoup some of what you spent that way. and some serious hobbyist or home business seamstress might just make you an offer for the whole lot which clears it even faster.

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      2. Our last move was in 2003 (evacuating and returning doesn’t count.) :) BTW, we’ve had about 0.4″ of rain yesterday, and over 0.3″ today. That’s helping the fire’s remaining hotspots becoming warm to cool spots. Looks upward and does a short prayer.

        We left Silicon Valley in 2003 after the dot-com implosion. The house needed renovation, and that was complete in August ’03. Our agent told us to house-hunt (we had three possibles lined up) while he showed the place.

        Wednesday after Labor Day, we had made an offer, and had two on the house. One was shady (*cough* illegal safe house *cough*) while the other was fine. Only catch was we had 16 days to close and leave.

        Mega scramble. Long term rental of a Penske truck, eventually 3 storage units, trips to Salvation Army, the San Jose dump, and other places. (I had to scrap out a truck and a VW project. Got a bit of money for the truck, and a “heh” from the Bug shop.)

        Banker’s boxes took care of the myriad books (I counted 70). I had to rent a lift-gate truck for machine tools and that curiously heavy metal box in the back closet). By Sept 18, we closed. Sept 19, we had a Ranger full of stuff, a Focus equally full (with two small dogs on board), and a tent trailer for the weekend before we closed.

        Got it done, with usual shenanigans from our old bank (our selling agent put the fear of God in them to send the money), and mixups with keys. A couple weeks spent getting the new house set up, then I went to Cali and had movers do two of the storage units. (I did the last one with a Budget rental truck; machine tools, freedom pellet dispensers and such weren’t leaving my supervision.)

        All things were moved by Halloween. It took a few years to empty boxes, along with questions like “I thought we packed those. Did it not come off the moving truck*”, as well as “why did that come?”. Also, the local library got a fair number of books when I culled my SF dead tree collection. They also got VHS tapes when such was a thing.

        (*) I didn’t bother to check off box numbers. Should have, but caught the “hurry up” vibe. They had three destinations on the trailer. No idea if that box went to Seattle or not; it might have ended at Salvation Army.

        Protip: We took advantage of the storage unit promotion policy. “Three months on a special deal!”. We were gone under 2 months. If you can find it, and can actually empty it in time, it’s a godsend.

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        1. My ‘curiously heavy box’ is a 2x2x4 job box. Dunno what the mass is, just know its about 160# empty, and I had to empty it to move it about 6 feet.

          My other heavy box (#2 on order) looks like what it is, despite a collection of refrigerator magnets.

          —

          Looks like maybe half an inch through tomorrow up here; my flowers like that. Hasn’t been enough to bother turning off the sprinklers.

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          1. So far, we had 0.4″ yesterday, and about 0.5″ today. Good for the non-burnt trees and grasses. The short route to town opened (to my surprise), but I expect they’re going to have trouble with dead trees coming down the slopes. Whee. [Makes note to consider taking the longer way home; going to town is away from the hillside cuts.]

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            1. In Willamette valley proper. Do not know how much, other than “raining” yesterday. Today got the predicted thunder and water dump.

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              1. Here at the south end of the W valley, 0.18 in. so far today. Grok says 0.36 in. yesterday, but patchy. Coming down pretty gently, so likely to get absorbed.

                Had enough sun that my new solar fountain in the birdbath ran itself dry twice before I pulled off the nozzle and left it bubbling after the second refill in 2 hours.

                Old fountain just got tired. I guess I’ll treat them as expendable – 3 years or so and replace.

                Do cats like rain? I see a couple X videos where some like snow. We never had a cat, or a dog, in my nuclear family. My parents had dogs but never cats.

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                1. Do cats like rain?

                  Depends on the cat. We have had some who glare at you and rain (your fault). We have had some where if it is raining, when they come in, need towel dried. MMV One does not know which cat one will get.

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                  1. In general I would say that cats are not fond of rain. We had semi-ferals (i.e. Barn cats although there was no barn) that we fed and cared for when I was a kid. When it was raining they mostly holed up on the porch as they knew food and warmed instant milk would show up (yes I know the milk is a bad idea but this was the 60’s and early ’70s and cat veterinary practice was essentially bupkus). Snow was more universally appreciated especially if it wasn’t too cold and our Chow Chow dog was out on the lead. They’d romp with him in the snow playing with this bear like 80 Lb dog like he was another cat. If it got cold they’d all make a pile on him.

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              2. Towards the middle of Silicon Valley we actually got 0.11” last night after midnight. First measurable rainfall in a couple months.

                Rumors have Ultra Mongo El Niño pointing the storm track mostly south of us, but we’re within the “higher than normal rainfall” zone, which extends right across the country across the southwest and south all the way to Florida, while north of the SF Bay Area is forecast for a dryer than normal winter.

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      3. We helped clean out paternal grandmother’s home after she passed. Learned not to have anything to do with Good Will (growl). SV took everything we gave them, including reams of yarn and yards of material (quilt square preps). Seriously she had those packed everywhere. I am not kidding, everywhere.

        We, hubby did, I had a new infant, helped MIL sort through their stuff. Much higher quality of stuff. What she did not take into the assisted living apartment (essentially her bedroom), the kids did not take (girls – house, boys – garage/fishing/hunting), was sold in a number of garage sales and finally SV. Regarding garage stuff? Since BIL is a mechanic, most of that ended up in our garage and shed. Hubby is sorting through that. Gave a lot of the nuts and bolts, etc., to the local high school, which could be used for the shop program for building among other things, electric go-carts, students race. Or recycle for $/#.

        Maternal grandparents. Dump run after dump run of anything that should not have been burned in the burn pile. Everything else went to family (grandfather and great grandmother painted, those found home, etc.) Readers, start cringing. Yes, we were burning books (mold/mildew).

        My mom has been designating or giving items to family to pre purge. Crystal goblets for wedding presents. Silver set – wedding presents, to granddaughters (sisters have theirs, I do not want nor need). Dad’s guns were handed out per his instruction. Still a lot to go through when she passes. Including aforementioned paintings and art. Us three girls will distribute based on what our children need or want.

        Our stuff? Poor son will be dealing with not only our 48 years together, but his paternal grandfather’s garage. Dad is working on clearing that. One thing I have done is if I am not working the hobby, then any scraps went to SV. Books, I went ebooks early, have SV or library donation a long time ago (I know what happens to estate books). The rest? Mostly photo albums and son’s scrapbooks (school, sports, scouts), which we have digitalized a lot of. Only child, so he decides in the end. Although with a few of the aforementioned guns and (his) great and great-grand parents paintings, hints as to passing on if he continues to be childless (for reasons, his direct cousins are not the best solution). The rest I cannot, and never will be able to part with personally, are all the quilts, afghans, that I have no use for, but homemade.

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        1. Moved literally hundreds of books to a 2nd hand bookstore before we moved (that’s my version of giving things a new home) – not enough wall space for bookshelves in the new place. More windows, and the one big wall that would have suited has my built-in wine cabinets and liquor/glassware cabinets.

          Still moved about 200, and have since been buying different translations of Iliad and Odyssey; read some of Lattimore’s to my kids after we finished Hobbit and LOTR. Also have survival/medical type books on dead tree, and that collection is growing a bit, but I just checked with AMZ – I have 5300+ Kindle editions of things. Bunch of those were free or $0.99, but good heavens! Wife used to get lots of free ‘cozy mysteries’ that I don’t read.

          Gave away a nice set of Britannica to someone who thought he could resell it. Kids never got into it, which was pretty disappointing. I read a lot of my parents’ 1948 American People’s E, which I just looked up and found it had been marketed mostly by Sears! And just had to throw it away after my mom passed – no one would take it. About killed me, I hate to throw away books, even 60 years out of date books.

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          1. The local used book store in Flyover Falls only takes slightly old bestsellers. They would have been thrilled to get the Tom Clancy books (ranging from very early to well into the share-cropped era), but they refused the book club editions. I said nope and went to the $TINY_TOWN branch of the county library. They were happy to get them. If they could not shelve some books, they’d put them up at their periodic rummage sale.

            I only have 540 Kindle books. I’ve picked up a few where I already have the dead tree version, since about half of my DT collection are in a ladder-accessible mezzanine in the shop/barn. Ladders are no longer my friend, and once I can achieve it, I want to clear out as many books from there as possible.

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      4. The version of that saying I heard was that a fire was the equal of 3 moves.

        Grandma was profoundly affected by a childhood fire. When she passed, we cleaned an entire spare room, mom’s old bedroom, the attic and basement of what appeared to be every piece of mail received since 1970.

        Re snakes, the farm had an entente with the black snakes – eat all the rodents you want, sun yourselves on the warm grain bin foundations, where we can see each other coming, and we’re good.

        Joke at work is that we reorganize the office every so often just to make the engineers clean their desks.

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        1. “Joke at work is that we reorganize the office every so often just to make the engineers clean their desks.”

          Used to work with a manager who used archaeological filing – layers and layers and layers – and a refined proprioceptive sense to find things. He’d go on vacation, and we’d need something. So we organized his desk for us.

          Nice mild mannered man; never killed any of us.

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        2. My office/room is or gets messy.

          My desks usually are, or get, messy.

          The mess does crowd out functioning for me, because I am visual, use stuff to cue me, and need to do mental sorting that I need clear FoV for.

          I learned more about people who function with mess when I was reading about Bob Pease.

          He was a California eccentric who was an analog circuits engineer, who stuck with a Volkswagon Beetle.

          On books:

          The bad advice is “just figure out what you will not need for professional research, and de clutter everything else”.

          I do have a more focused collection in paper in the places I immediately work.

          However, that is partly accomplished by a fairly substantial non-fiction collection in PDF, as well as a willingness to collect fiction in epub. My electronic collections are a mess.

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          1. “My desks usually are, or get, messy.”

            [looks at desk] A messy desk is a sign of genius!

            That’s my story, anyway. ~:D

            There’s also the thing that if you have time to keep your desk all super tidy and squared away, all the pencils lined up, you don’t have enough to do.

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      5. Another option for the yarn might to be to sell it on eBay, Etsy, or Revelry – just be sure to include the dye lot information on the skeins. People will go to a lot of effort to match yarn when they run out of a discontinued yarn mid project.

        For that matter- do you happen to have Carron Simply Soft Teal Zeal Ombré, dye lot 294022 a bonus? I need at least one more skein to finish a shawl.

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  7. ”…possibly en route to Oz…”

    Make sure final inspection before leaving checks for squished witches. Not a thing you want a phone one call from the buyers agent about in the middle of the night.

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        1. And on top of that when you get to Oz and switch from Sepia tone to Technicolor they’re going to stick out like a sore thumb. Of course Technicolor is why they’re ruby slippers rather than L. Frank Baum’s silver. The silver ones didn’t show off the cool color technology.

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            1. Maybe but there is SO much weird stuff going down in Munchkin land that those socks are probably the least of their worries. Having mostly seen The Wizard of Oz on a 25″ color tv of the 70’s it wasn’t that shocking. When there was an anniversary (2019? the 80th?) there was a restoration done and new 70mm prints made for IMAX. I got to see it on a huge IMAX screen and oh my goodness. It was like some brown LSD fever dream it was so intense. The first jump from the sepia tone (Not black and white) to color is incredibly shocking, even when you KNOW it’s coming. And in the background, there are LIVE flamingos in some shots, along with other odd animals. Oh, and yes, the darned winged monkeys are terrifying when they’re 25′ tall. My dad always said it was astounding to see as a kid (he was 8 when he saw it) and claimed TV didn’t do it justice and it seems he was right. I wonder if there is a UHD DVD of it.

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  9. Jase T. Cat is sooooooo helpful when someone is trying to use packing paper in a box. Even more helpful if you bring something in from the garage. As in, “I will help you exercise will power and not cursing as I get in the way, rub on everything, and try to eat anything string-like I can find!”

    His former owner might have played with him using strings or shoelaces, or toys on strings. The trouble is he now eats thread, strings, necklaces, fringe on garments and cloth, garden twine, Christmas ribbon …

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  10. The last time I packed to move, the place looked like someone threw a grenade into a library, then heaved boxes in through the hole in the wall. It got better eventually.

    At some point, I have a house, storage unit, and classroom to whittle down. The classroom will be the easiest, because I try limit what goes there. Now, about the 60+ years of books collected at the house and in the storage unit …

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  11. On the eighties.

    It was good that the soviet union came apart.

    The world was a worse place while it was intact and functional.

    The twenty-twenties will probably look worse in hindsight because the communists are still mass murdering in China.

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      1. Construction that totally didn’t cause the collapse of that glacial dam, and as noted they failed to warn anyone downstream when they observed same.

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        1. And the sensors that were removed by Trump cutting USAID weren’t paid for by USAID…. and were the wrong type of sensor to detect that event instead of the one they were intended to watch for.

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    2. They see it as a zero-sum game. They believe that there must be a winner and a loser in the gender war, and they want to make sure that they’re the winner.

      Also, if you dig a little, there’s plenty of evidence that since the start of the movement some of the women lionized for “leading” it in the past have really been looking for absolute male subservience, and use “equal rights” as a cover for it. The women in question also tend to be anti-Christian (and worse), and anti-family. Also heavily socialist. They were using a problem (gender inequality) as a cover to try and slip in a much more radical agenda that the people wouldn’t go along with.

      Basically, the rad-fems have been involved with it since the start, and they’re the ones that the rad-fems now teaching history point to as the leaders of the early movement. Up until the last few decades, the rad-fems in the movement could stay safely in the shadows. Now that gender relations have progressed to the point that they have, the rad-fems have to come out in order to keep things moving in the direction that they want.

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  14. In other news, “Don’t be evil”.

    https://www.westernjournal.com/google-sending-people-jeffrey-epstein-site-fake-gop-midterm-convention-link

    When users search for the upcoming Republican Midterm Convention, set to take place from Sept. 9-10 at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas, one of the first links to pop up is “gopdallas2026.com” After clicking that link, however, some users were directed to a U.S. Department of Justice search page with the words “Epstein Library” across the top.

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