Trenchwork

That pile of blue binders?  They’re gone gone gone gone  . . .   Missed it? Let me repeat it:  They’re gooooooooooooone!  Outta here.  On their way.  To Canada.  And I’m feeling sorry for poor Birgit who has to receive them, which will probably happen between the weekend and next Wednesday, given the vagaries of the postal systems.

Am I happy with what she’s getting?  Not entirely.  I felt as if I were obligated to use hand cards, and there’s a reason why I don’t.  I have them, but my hands are too fragile for that.  Combs and flick cards I can do, but there’s a reason why I bought a drum carder.  As a result, a number of the breed study skeins are slubby, uneven, and not at all what I’d have liked.  But what is, is, and if I need to redo those skeins later, I will.  In the meantime, it’s gone.

And suddenly I have some time on my hands.

So, I’m spinning that fake cashmere, catching up on e-mail, working on DH’s Cobblestone (it’s up to the yoke, yay!), starting a quick dyepot, and  running up some quick cable yarn samples.

Exams are next week, but I’ll only have about 80 or so, so I’m alternating syllabi and lesson planning for next term with play time.

We still have snow.  It’s about -10C/13F at the moment.

And we have a few icicles hanging from the roof . . .

The longest of those guys is about 2 or 2.5 feet. But after a lot of slush and sludd, the weather is drier, and it’s easier to see who we’ve had visiting the snack spot in the yard.

We’ve had magpies, crows, and deer.

And there are a couple of cats.

We have no idea which is actually someone’s pet and which is wild, but the one we’ve seen most often lately is the big black bugger I told a coupe of friends about earlier this year.  I’ve searched and can’t find that it actually made it to the blog, so let me just risk repetition and tell you about the cat (and forgive me for pasting from an earlier text).

The cat.  See, the thing is that the general consensus is that I’m a total wuss when it comes to animals.  I love animals in general, and have a really hard time turning away anything that looks like it needs help.  Nearly all my pets—barring my GSD—were adoptions and strays.  Like the 17-year old cat my parents are keeping which showed up at the office one Christmas season for several days running and devoured the remnants of a leftover frozen lasagne.  But what people don’t really realize is that DH is absolutely no better than I am.  They just don’t quite expect him to be a total mush, and he really is.  He’s just as quick to throw old bread out the window for the deer or badger as I am, and he even calls them the same way you’d call a cat.  Funnily enough, they’re getting used to it, so when he opens the window and whistles, they stop, turn to look at him, and then just wait until the window is closed before they turn around and mosey up to the spot where he tosses the bread.

One day in March, I had opened the kitchen window a bit in order to air out the house.  But what you need to know is that Norwegian houses have wood-frame windows which open out or up and out.  And they don’t have screens.  If there is a screen, it’s hand made by nailing 4 pieces of trim together and stapling screen over the frame and hoping you’ve measured the thing properly so that it really fits. It comes out during summer, and is shoved in a closet for the remaining 9 months of the year.  This window in particular is one of those which swings out.  And it has plants on the sill.  Mind you, only three of those pots actually had living green things in them (houseplants just don’t survive if I’m responsible for them, poor buggers), but they’re there.  And there’s a heavy set of lace curtains covering the window.  Can you see it?

But in my haste to catch the bus, I forgot to close the window.  It was only ajar and not fully open, but there it was.  DH picked me up on his way home and we drove into the yard, and his first question was to ask why the window was open.  I looked at it blankly and then remembered, so that explained that.  We parked the car and started unloading groceries, but as I opened the kitchen door (the front door opens to a tiny foyer which sends you either up the stairs or to the right through the door to the kitchen), I heard something that sounded like someone or something was in the house.  And a small crash.  My first thought was that a bird had gotten into the house.  We have magpies in the area, and while they’re shy, they’re also rather curious, and it’s just possible—although unlikely—that one may have had a wild hair and gotten into the house.  But then I heard a miaow.  THEN I hear DH outside calling, “Puss, here puss puss.”

The pieces clicked and I realized it was one of the semi-wild cats we’d been setting out food for over the previous few weeks.  (We saw one digging through the snow to get the bread we throw out for the deer and decided to start putting out a bit in the evenings.)  Sure enough, I look outside and there’s DH trying to call a big black cat.

The cat is talking like crazy.  Nonstop chatter.  And DH decides to call the cat into the house and get it a little food.  He does, and the cat cautiously comes into the kitchen, chattering the whole time.  The moment DH puts the bowl down, the cat tucks into it, but is still chattering between bites.  Seriously, I didn’t know it was possible for a cat to talk with its mouth full.  We decide that maybe it needs some water, so we get a little bowl and put that out . . . but no, it’s really interested in the food.  We pet it without problem, and it likes being petted.  It leaves the bowl a few times just to be petted.  So we do.  And it’s still talking.  Then I reach down to move the bowl out of the traffic pattern and the cat comes back to the bowl, then grabs my hand hard enough to draw blood . . . and keeps talking.  I figure it was the “don’t mess with my food” warning, so wash the hand and blow the incident off.  But then I walk around the cat and the bowl, and the cat growls in a half-hiss kind of thing as my feet come near it.  And by now, Trond and I are looking at each other and laughing and deciding it’s totally his fault that we have a psychotic cat in the house.  Then he walks around the cat to get to the other room, but he gives the cat lots of room—and still gets a heavy-pawed thwap! for his trouble as he passes by.  Of course, it would have been much less effective had he still had his shoes on . . .

But the cat—still talking, mind you—follows him to be petted, and when it does, I scoop up the bowl and head outside, calling the cat as I go.  We’ve been putting food in the kennel run on the side of the house, so I put the bowl there and left the cat to it, then scrambled back through the front door and securely closed and locked the sucker.

It was a riot, and we did see the cat on a regular basis after that.  It wasn’t fat, but was fairly muscular, and a wee bit too lean, but it was healthy enough.  I saw it in the daylight for a change a little while after that.  It was crossing the yard going up into the little woods behind us, and it walked like a bruiser.  You know, that  “if cats could swagger” kind of walk?  The sort of bulldog walk which says that it owns the place?  That.  That was the cat. 

The moral of the story is that DH no longer invites strange cats into the house.   And I—who might have thought of it on my own first—have no intention of considering it either.

And that’s the story of the cat.    It amazed me that it jumped through the window which was over four feet off the ground (which meant that it was jumping blind), through the curtains, through the plants, and didn’t disturb anything until it went on a scramble to get out of the house.  It dumped over the garbage and tucked into some crackers which had been stored in a plastic bag on the counter.  I scrubbed everything down and sanitized the place after we got it out of the house, and we still joke about the beastie—but DH still puts out food for it when the weather gets cold and there’s snow on the ground.  It may have a Napoleon complex, but we’re not gonna let it starve. 

That’s the cat.  That’s the cat that owns the track in the snow.  At least, we think so.  When we came home the other day, it was sitting at the side of the house and started talking the moment we got out of the car.  We fed it some fish, and it purred like a chainsaw when I pet it.  This evening, DH saw it sitting in the yard, watching the kitchen window.  Waiting. He tossed out some fish, and when I looked a little while later, it was on the front step, calmly washing away.

Is it possible for a cat to be a stalker?