Things that made me Happy this afternoon. . .

1) Getting out of work much earlier than expected, with a beautiful, sunny afternoon ahead of me.

2) Finding fresh corn on the cob at the supermarket, the first of the season! I bought four ears and two of 'em are going into my tummy tonight!

3) Opening up the porch when I got home, and throwing open windows for the first time, both out there and inside the house.

4) Sitting on the couch out there with two quats on my lap, just watching the world go by and seeing how much the quats enjoyed the fresh air and sun.

5) Just now: ordering three lilac trees from White Flower Farm to plant in the front and side garden patches around the house. I've always had lilacs and daffodils in the spring, and at this house I'm gonna have both (won't order the daffodils until the end of June, though). Cost me $90 all told, but some things you just have to have. It's a quality of life issue.

Now I've got to go and close those windows! It's getting chilly in here!

-- Freder

An odd relic

Pictured above is a side panel from one of the boxes I unpacked late this week. My mother had filled it with a wide range of her smaller creations -- candlesticks, necklaces and the like -- and then stowed it in the attic, lord knows how many years ago. When I found it, I exclaimed out loud: "Mom!" -- and of course it came with me.

It's hard to date this box, but it probably goes back to the late '70s. 9-Lives hasn't used that logo or design in longer than I remember. It's too bad; I like its retro stylishness, and the winking cartoon quat. You don't see many cartoon mascots for products anymore (although I've noted that Speedy is still around, and Mister Peanut never really left --  just changed his appearance a few times).

Can anyone else remember some cartoon mascots that have retired to the old mascots home, or ones that are still around?

The now-defunct (?) Hamms Beer, a local Midwestern brew, had a bear character that I always liked. We used to have a ceramic display piece featuring the bear. Haven't seen it since we moved from Southern Maine, but I popped onlike just now, and lo & behold, there was a picture of it:

Changing styles in advertising, clothing and design have always interested me, and I sometimes marvel at things like the 9-Lives box that once looked contemporary to us, but now, clearly, belong to a different era. Even the terminology has changed: "Tuna and Chicken parts" is much more open and honest than anything you see in these days of Designer Cat Food when "Tasty Temptations" and "Fancy Feast" are more likely what you see on the shelf. Back then, Quat Fud was Quat Fud.

That box goes back to the time when we had, get this, more than thirty cats outdoors, and close to twenty more indoors. My mother bought between three and five CASES of cat food every week. And as you can see on the box, there were twenty-four cans in each case.

When we fed the outside quats, we put down two big trays of food, each with at least three cans of food and whole mess of crunchies mixed in. A whole bunch o' quats would circle each tray. It was like feeding a bunch of small, furry pigs.

At that time we also had two dogs, two horses, one pony, a goat and a flock of sheep. The horses and pony were for my sister, but guess who had to help out, and guess who got stuck caring for all of them when she went away and got married? Sandy, her male palomino, hated all men, had probably been abused, but he ended up liking me better than he did her. I was the only man he ever let hug him around the neck. I was the only one he trusted, and I led him to his death.

That still haunts me to this day. He's buried at the old house, another sad memory to leave behind.

As for the cats -- one summer, I'm guessing it was in the early or middle '80s, a terrible disease swept through the yard. It killed quickly. It seemed as if a couple of times a week there was a new body for me to bury. By the time it was over, there were only about eight or ten hardy quats remaining. With comings and goings and people dropping their kittens on us, it stayed at around that number for a long time. It was only within the last decade that it got down to around six, then five, then four, then three, and finally Junior was the last to disappear. I wish he could have made it through the move. He was a sweet guy.

On her deathbed, my mother said, "Bring them in." I think she meant Junior, Whitestockings and Grumpyface.

But how could I? Grumpyface is too wild, Junior was an unspayed male, and I did try with Whitestockings. Longtime readers of this blog know how that turned out.

It's funny how something like the side panel of a cat food box can take your mind down some long-abandoned, branching pathways.

-- Freder

Putting The Wolf Behind Me

Yes, this is really Us. Although my costume   is Superman, my face is JFK. Which not only dates me, but is something to Ponder Upon, whether you agree with the connotations or not.

Right around the time this picture was taken, my sister sexually abused me for the first time.

From that day, to the day in the early '70s when she threw me out of the recliner because SHE wanted to sit in it, to the day a couple of years later when she threw me off of the toilet because SHE wanted to shit in it (never mind that there was a perfectly serviceable bathroom just thirteen steps down) to the day just a few months ago when she sold the old house out from under me even though I was willed the right to live there for five years --

-- from that day to this, I cannot think of my sister without thinking: "I hate you, Claudia."

And yet --

-- today, for the first time, I thought of her, and thought, as always, "I hate you!"

-- and then thought, But I don't HAVE to hate you anymore. You don't even know my address or phone number, and if I have any say in it you never will. You are Out of My Life, for once and for all, forever.

You bitch. I never have to put up with your abuse, ever again.

THANK GOD FOR THAT.

Life is so much better without you in it.

And yet, it comes at such a cost.

Big Change in the Weather

Unfortunately, the Weather Weenies and Wenches were right about this one! The last (one can only hope) snowstorm of the season is a doozy. You're looking at a picture snapped 45 minutes ago from my porch, and it's gotten worse since then. As you can see, the snow is so wet and heavy that it's weighing down the branches of my pine trees to the extent that they actually obstruct the driveway! When I was out shoveling the steps a little after ten, I heard the distinct crack of a branch snapping. Mainers who weren't born yesterday know what this means: there are going to be power outages, perhaps significant and lengthy ones.

In the big Ice Storm of, I think, '89, we were without power at the old house for fourteen days. Today is another day that I'm glad I'm not out there!

I have some Juicy Gossip to report. Tiger Whitestockings seems to have found herself a beau!

When I took her food out this morning I was surprised when she crawled out from under the deck and struggled up the stairs through three plus inches of snow to meet me. I was even more surprised when another cat came after her.

He was Big. He was Yellow. And when he saw me, he got a Stupid look on his face.

That's right: Whitestockings's taste in Men hasn't changed! This guy looks like he could be Big Stupid Yellow Cat's younger brother and Junior's pampered uncle. My jaw dropped. So we were both crouched there, staring at each other with stupid looks on our faces.

He turned and ran back under the deck, and instead of staying and eating her breakfast, Tiger Whitestockings went after him. When she couldn't find him, she stood below the deck, looking around anxiously.

So, it's serious! She's found herself a New Junior. Sort of tells you something about Human Nature.

One of my tasks for this day off is to continue, at a pace, working on the new site. This will give you an idea of how small I'm starting and how much I have ahead of me. I decided that the earliest chapters of Tinsel*Town, my graphic novel in progress, should appear under the original logo. But there were a couple of things I didn't like about the original logo, and even the revised logo that replaced it had legibility problems and was smaller than what I wanted for the new site.

So I re-made it, from scratch. in Adobe Illustrator. The original was hand drawn, many years ago; this version is all CGI, although I tried to preserve some of the hand-drawn look. The possibility exists to import it into Flash and animate it ever so slightly. I'm going to think on that one a bit. It's probably better to get the basic site designed and uploaded, then work on dressing it up as time allows.

Many, but not all, of the other graphics found around the old site are going to get the same treatment, some more dramatically than others. Before I put together a single page of the new site, I'm going to get the bulk of the graphics in place.

In the meantime, I broke down and bought a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium All-in-One for Dummies. I just needed some real, printed-on-paper documentation that I could sit down and read, and the official books from Adobe appear to be little more than tutorials in book form. I have no patience whatever  with tutorials -- can't see the point in spending time playing with imaginary projects when I have a real one right in front of me that needs my attention. 

Although I'm only 50+ pages into an almost 1,000 page book, I've already picked up some useful knowledge -- and confirmed my suspicions about the "Bridge" program -- that it's completely extraneous. I've been doing this long enough that I can manage my own files, thank you very much, and unless Bridge can pull out a little electronic chair and whip and make those files climb up on their hind legs and jump through hoops I don't have a use for it!

So, today is for staying indoors, fixing my lamp, working a bit in the Halloween bedroom, poking some site graphics into shape, and reading some more about the software. Oh, I still have my taxes to do as well, but that ought not to take long. 

I'll keep you posted on Whitestockings's newfound Love!

-- Freder

Mildred Pierce, Mildred Pierce

Well. I certainly didn't expect to spend two hours in front of HBO tonight. I hate remakes as a general rule, and modern remakes of classics particularly annoy me. King Kong, anyone? Do we really need new versions of True Grit and Mildred Pierce? There are so many eminently adaptable novels out there that have never been filmed, and even ones that have, but were filmed badly the first time around. Why do we have to keep re-digging old ground?

I probably wouldn't have bothered with HBO's all-newfangled Mildred Pierce at all if Kate Winslet wasn't involved. But I like her as an actress, and beyond that -- well. Let me slip briefly into full crass adolescent mode: I'd kiss that woman from the top of her head down to the tips of her toes and then work my way back, only slower. And that damned lucky stiff (pun intended) who gets to play Monty! Why don't I ever get work like that? I tell you now that if I did, I'd do everything in my power to blow every take, just to make it last. . .

Ehm, where were we?

Oh, yeah. Mildred Pierce. What's the point?

In its favor, the producers haven't in any way tried to re-make the Joan Crawford version, but instead took took a completely different approach to the material. Within minutes, I was thinking "Dang, I'm going to have to break down and read the book now." By choosing not to open with the murder, the entire thrust of the thing is changed. Mildred Pierce becomes more of a family drama than a noir, and unless you know what's coming you'd be justified in believing that the story was going to track in the direction of "a story of redemption and rebirth."

That, of course, is exactly not where it's really headed.

Very much not in its favor is the runtime. Mildred Pierce is a fairly slim book, and squeezing a five-hour mini-series out of the thing must be a lot like squeezing a gallon of juice out of a single orange. Not having read the book, I can't tell you where the padding has been inserted, but padded it very much is. At times, this Mildred Pierce has the arthritic pace of a daytime soap opera, and stringing together two parts in one sitting makes it all the worse. Events that took a few minutes in the original picture here seem to go on for days. I was able to get up and do the dishes without missing a thing.

Honestly, five hours of Mildred Pierce is a lot like three hours of King Kong. It looks gorgeous, and I can watch Miss Winslet suffer through her trials until the cows come home, but honestly someone needs to take a pair of pinking shears to this thing. As Jerry Lewis wrote in his very entertaining book The Total Filmmaker, "How freakin' long can you drown Shelly Winters?"

There are going to be people who try to tell you that this version is grittier and more realistic than the 1945 version. I'm going to tell you that it isn't so. With its calculatedly beautiful photography and design, and Miss Winslet doing things like letting her bathrobe drape over her bare shoulder in a way that must have been uncomfortable and that no person would stand for in private, this Mildred Pierce is no less glamorized or Hollywood-ized than the original version, It's just that glamour means a different thing than it did in 1945, and it's all right today if it comes with a little bit of tarnish and patina.

Tarnish and patina are exactly what the director of photography gives us here. It's lovely to look at, but sometimes feels a bit calculated.

The performances are tops, from Miss Winslet all the way to the crusty old coot playing the restaurant owner, and here, at least, the style is more naturalistic than in the original.

But in the end, what kept me watching the new version was not so much its quality as my interest in how very different two films based on the same novel could be. The plot points are all there, but everything else -- it's a bit like looking at non-fraternal twins. There are eerie similarities, but no one would mistake one for the other.

Better?

No. Sorry, but no.

-- Freder.

Period, End of Story.

Dear Dad;

I'd bet folding money that you're going to see this, which is why I'm posting it here instead of putting it in an email to you.

I guess that what I've been trying to say in my recent angry posts is actually quite simple.

I'm not your confidante and you're not mine. For once in your life, respect somebody else's wishes and stay out of things where you are not needed or wanted.

There. Now I'm done with this subject.

-- Freder.

The Cat at Night, Nerve, and My War against the Inanimate

I need to write more about Dahlov Ipcar later; until then, this image from her book
The Cat at Night is the perfect compliment to my first story, , , 

I was so happy to see both Tiger Grumpyface and Tiger Whitestockings at different points this evening.

Three weeks ago they both seemed to be thriving, Whitestockings especially, who enjoyed the warm weather and the melting and actually stayed around during the day, sunning herself on the deck with her front paws folded beneath her.

But then as it turned colder again she seemed to get nervous and skittery. Frequently when I came home at night she would come out from under the deck and cry at me, and follow me up the stairs looking nervously over her shoulder.

Then she disappeared for a solid week.

Grumpyface had already not shown herself for two weeks prior. I wasn't all that worried, because the food was being eaten at night, and it was like her to keep a low profile. But as the weekends came and went with no sign of either of them I started to grow concerned. There are other cats in the neighborhood, and once I found one of them (a beautiful Persian) mooching off of my plate. So maybe it wasn't my guys cleaning up the food after all.

Finally, last Friday night, I opened the door and Whitestockings appeared. She ran up the deck to meet me, and I picked her up and gave her a great big hug. She didn't mind. That was something new. I stayed out for a while and petted her and talked to her while she ate.

Didn't see her again until tonight, which was very much a Repeat Performance. I did get her a special treat of Fancy Feast, to make sure that she would come back!

Earlier in the evening, while it was still light, I opened the door and saw Tiger Grumpyface's tail swirling around the corner at the foot of the stairs. She ran away across the driveway. I went to edge of the deck, looked down at her and said, "Tiger Grumpyface! I'm so happy to see you! Where have you been for three weeks?" She paused midway across the driveway and looked up at me with an expression that said, "Don't take one more step in this direction, buster!"

It's nice to know that they are alive and well, but I wonder what's going on.

*

The last couple of days, I haven't been so much depressed as anxious and easily nerved up. My ongoing war with inanimate objects has flared up again, and this has contributed to the nerves.

Some things just don't like me, especially small things. Looking back on it, I marvel at how I managed to survive in the old house with all of its bric-a-brac piled atop mountains of other bric-a-brac without destroying more of it than I actually did.

Small, fiddly things are especially vexing. Mounting the mailbox onto the mechanical man was a real battle for me, because the nuts and washers and screws were tiny and I knew that if I dropped them I would never find them again. This made me nervous and when I get nervous my hands begin to shake. When my hands begin to shake I get more frustrated and nervous and this causes my hands to shake all the more.

This morning I had a skirmish with a fork that, I swear, absolutely refused to stay on the plate.

Scrambled eggs and toast is my normal breakfast, and when it's all whipped up my usual thing is to carry it in here to the study and eat while I check the morning email, Facebook posts, etc. Usually this isn't a problem, as I carry my juice (Welch's Berry Sunsplash, yum!) in my right hand and the plate in my left with the fork curled underneath in my fingers. Today, for some reason, I just placed the fork on the plate and tried to pick it up.

It slid this way. It slid that way. I tried to make it rest against the food; instead it slid towards me. I grappled with that damn fork for half a minute until gravity finally won, and it hit the kitchen floor with a loud CLANG.

I was already feeling pretty hissy and jumpy, but the CLANG went right through me, and from there the morning went downhill.

A lamp that worked in the old house for thirty years or more suddenly decided, a couple of weeks back,  to loll and droop and throw its shade on the floor. I fought with that damn lamp for three nights, until it finally craned its neck at me and spurted sparks. FOOSH! One dead lamp.

This morning I finally put it in the car so that I could drive by the hardware store and get some parts to fix it with. But my cloth grocery bags were also on the seat, and I didn't move them; so of course the lamp was on the edge of the seat and as I pulled out of the driveway it started to throw itself all over the place.

A normal, sane person would have stopped the car, moved the bags, set the lamp up in a more secure position. If you've been paying attention at all, you know that I am not a normal, sane person. I tried to fix the situation with my right hand while I drove with my left, fussing with the lamp while careering around some very narrow and twisty sidestreets. Yes, it was exactly like something out of the Darwin Awards books except that I somehow managed to avoid killing myself.

Although I did get quite flustered and Mister Anxiety closed his hand around the base of my spine, and that son of a bitch has really cold fingers.

*

On a happier note, all of the inside quats are much more responsive and outgoing with me than they were in the old house. For the past few nights, I've had Pandy Bear and Patches sleeping with me in addition to Honey -- who does not seem to mind that the way she would have in the old house. It's been warm enough some of these days that I've been able to open the door to the front porch -- and they LOVE it. They seem to actually be disappointed when I DON'T open that door. They sit on the windowledges and the furniture, and Pandy Bear finds a sunny spot and rolls over on his back to give his tummy access to Maximum Warmth.

Honey is the only one who seems to have any reservations left whatever, and even she has found Her Places that she loves.

Today when I pulled in the driveway, she was sitting in the bay window at the side of the house. I slowed to a crawl and waved at her and shouted, "HI, HONEY!! HI, HONEY, I'M HOME!" and she raised herself onto her front paws and meowed back.

Thanks but No Thanks

I just sent this email to Dear Olde Dad, in response to yet another demand for money, yet another request that the full results of the second auction be disclosed to him:


Joann's office will soon issue you a check (if they haven't already) for the items you inserted into the auction (which in retrospect I shouldn't have allowed you to do. Just a bad idea all around, but I was still in a state of shock, and the whole auction process was an Act of Violence being perpetrated on me at a time when I was not ready for it -- I couldn't think straight). 

But as for the auction results, Joann and Sue and Carole and I are all in agreement that it does not fall into your Circle of Concern, and we will not disclose this information to you. Get over it.

Like you, Claudia cannot stop haranguing the estate for money, and Sue tells me that, somehow, she has a pretty accurate notion of what is in the pot. 

It seems that in the whole family, I am the only one among us who is not interested in reducing Mom's life to a dollars and cents amount.

I  should never have taken money from you -- not that, honestly, I was given much of a choice. I do love the house, but if this didn't pan out, something else would have, and it wouldn't have come at such a cost.