Spoilage

Greg is learning to speak cat. He has to; he's home alone with them all day.

Their demands are incessant. Open the door. Open the window. Pet me now. Move the shade. The papers are in my way. Cradle me and scritch my tummy now. The dish is empty. Put me on the top shelf of the bookcase. Dry me off. Make the red dot appear. Big Red is in the yard—do something!

So Vivani gives Greg the "I want" meow.

What do you want? He opens the door.

Meow. Closes the door. Opens the back door.

Meow. Food?

Meow. He reaches to pick her up, and she runs into his office. Greg follows her.

Vivani sits in the middle of the room, looks over her shoulder to see if he's paying attention. Meow. She turns and looks at the extra desk. Meow. The extra-special Vivani "I want" meow that rocks her body back and forth for emphasis.

Gina is sleeping on the thinking pad by the window. Greg watches Vivani. Meow. She looks again from him to the desk. You want me to get Gina off the pad so you can sit there?

Meow! Yes!

Vivani didn't find Greg's belly laughs very funny. Gina stayed where she was.

Fortuna tried to kill us

Well, alright, no it didn't. Other than marveling at the bright yellow orb in the strangely blue sky, nobody could tell we were from Arcata. Which I have mixed feeling about: I like to represent my wacky little town when I venture outside it's tie-dyed city limits. But...the guy handing out water and sodas saw my stadium pad and thanked me for coming "all the way down from Orick," and when I said, We're from Arcata! a guy next to us in line said, way out of the blue, "I'm barred from Arcata. That's 'cause I keep running down dreads." As in, "...you weird, dreadlock-wearing hippies."

What?!

Sometimes I wish I had a "blending in" hat like Greg's John Deere hat or Alisha's Hayfork Future Farmers of America hat (in stunning camo). Mine doesn't blend at all.

Instead, we just sat down in the stands (one for George Carlin), listened to the announcer make fun of Crescent City and watched us some rodeo. First up! Steer wrasslin':

First, stand around discussing the weather, the horses, and that pretty young thing on the big sorrel in the barrel racing...

Time to get 'er done. Chase down a steer on your trusty cowpony...

Jump off your galloping horse onto the head (and horns) of your steer...

Next, grab the steer by the horns...

And twist its head to try and get it to lie down. It only weighs 600 or 700 lbs, shouldn't be too hard...

Yes! You wrassled your steer to the ground. Good work, cowboy.

How long ago was this?

Tomorrow's cowboys keeping cool in the dirt bowl beside the arena.

So American: a monster truck (with longhorn ornament!), buffalo, and cowboys. Throw in some cheap beer and flag-waving and I just might OD. D'oh!
The stunt here was to get the buffalo on top of the trailer. They got one of them up there, but never both. What can I say? Buffalo are not pliable personalities.

But the cowboy rode his horse to the top of the trailer, and that was nice.

Oh! One of the bulls in the bull-riding event was named Crab-man!

So, a good day in Fortuna, even if we did fry in the direct sun.

Evidence

Vivani Catpants has a technique she uses when hunting houseflies: slap them to the windowpane with her paw, clap her two paws together, and bring the fly trapped between her paws to her mouth. Mmm, good eating.

Yesterday, my husband says, Are you going to ask me about the butterfly wing? Well, no, I wasn't; I figured he put it on the sill above the kitchen sink because it was pretty. But he said he left it there to remind him to tell me that Vivani caught a butterfly. He knows this because he saw her in the bedroom, dry-heaving like only a Stafford can, until she horked up a small pile of legs and body parts. It was only when he saw the wing on the carpet that he knew what it was that didn't go down so well.

So when I saw the pile of bird feathers on his office floor, I knew to ask for the story. He'd been sitting in the living room when he saw 'Pants sit up and stare hard, then streak into his office. He followed her as she dashed into the bathroom: a young bird (sparrow, I'd guess from the evidence pile) had indulged its curiosity about the partially open window, and had gotten trapped in the bathroom. It fluttered near the top of the window, looking for the way out, then dipped down to explore the bottom of the glass.

As soon as it dipped down Vivani slapped it to the wall, clapped her paws together, and had it in her mouth. Since she knows what we two-leggeds do with birds, she jetted past Greg's legs, out of the bathroom and into the bedroom, with Greg thinking Oh, no! Not under the bed! But it was only a diversionary tactic as her real goal was the open bedroom window. She was out it in a flash, and that was the last he saw of the bird, or of Vivani for several hours.

Mmm, good eating.

The face of an angel, the maw of a demon. Even if it is pink.

Purr

Purr.
Purrpurrpurrpurrpurrpurrpurrpurrpurrpurr..rrr, rrr, rrr, rrr...purrpurrpurrpurr. Purrpurrpurr. Ruh-ruh-ruh, puh, puh, puh. Purrpurrpurrpurrpurrpurrpurr, purrpurrpurrpurr. Purrpurrp—

"Why ju purring, eh?"

—urrpurrpurrpurrpurrpurrpurrpurr. Purr. Purr. Rrrrrrrr, purr, purr. Purr, puh, puh, ruh, purr, purr, purr. Purrpurrpurrpurr—

"Why ju so happy?"

Purr.

"Ju not fluffy..."

Purrpurr.

"Ju not gata Numero Uno. I da Number One gata. Me. So why ju purr, eh?"

Purrpurrpurr.

"Ju be happy if I bite ju on the ass? Huh? I bite ju on the ass again, eh?"

Purrpurrpurr. Purr.

"I bite ju foot, I bite ju ass. Oh, so now you stop pur—" Whump.

"Okay, I fight ju! Let's see what ju got, Orange!"
Bam! Thud! Crash!

[The lights come on.]

"Eh, be cool! Da big guy, he—"

"What are you two doing?"

Purrpurrpurrpurrpurr, rrr, ruh, ruh, rrr, purrpurrpurr.

[The lights go out.]

"Orale! They going to sleep now. Ooh, she left her esweater out! Ju take the esweater, I go sleep on her head."

Purr.





[Vivani and Gina's wrasslin' was so loud the other night we thought we were being burgled.]

It's Gonna Fog

That's what the locals told the rodeo announcer in Orick today when he asked if it was going to rain and did he need to cover his speakers: "No rain, but it's gonna fog."

And fog it did: I woke up dreaming about rain, and went outside to see everything dripping wet. But the wet start to the day did not dampen our desire to attend Orick's rodeo. See?

"Rodeo—the No. 1 homegrown American sport." Huh. Isn't that NASCAR?

Greg and Noah, post-bbq, waiting for the rodeo to start. Greg's wearing his "blending in" hat.

The first event was the animal scramble: a truckload of hens, roosters, bantams, goats, geese, and a piglet is let loose in the arena. Whatever the kids can grab they can keep—or sell to the spectators immediately after the scramble. Some of the goats went for $50 or more!

The next event was mutton bustin'. That's right: parents strapped their children to ewes and pushed them out the gate to see who could ride a sheep the farthest. Seven-year-old Austin of McKinleyville won the event. Some of the kids mutton bustin' were as young as four!

That's me, enjoying my rodeo Sunday in Orick.

I love the flashy colors favored by Western riders. Lots of roans, palominos, paints, and tobianos at the rodeo...including these guys taking a break between events.

Again with the flashy colors, plus coordinating purple tack, Orick's cowgirls...

...and cowboys. I'm guessing that liver chestnut is a Quarter Horse or Quarter Horse mix, though a fair number of Arabs were in the arena, too.

Hangin' at the rodeo.

Show us your class, Orick!

But the event most people want to see is the bull riding, so they do that one last. I'm fine waiting til the end of the day. I'm partial to bareback bronc riding myself, and Greg likes the steer wrestling. Really, though, everyone likes bull riding:









Even though most of the riders did poorly this year, nobody left in the ambulence. So all in all it was a pretty good day of rodeo.

Summer jobs

Usually I only see kids out on Saturdays, but with school out it's an everyday event: kids riding bikes, riding skateboards, huddled in awkward co-ed groups or hunched over in gender-specific plotting. Sitting on porches, gazing at shop windows, eating bagels.

I've also seen a fair number of kids at the workplace, and generally involved with whatever it is their parent does for a living. Even a few lemonade stands—my neighbor says her kids used to make bank with their stand on Farmers Market Saturdays.

Today I was delivering mail around the corner from the house, on the street we like to think of as Boom Town. We call it that after an Ian Livingstone game of the same name. You play a 1950s developer trying to build the most desirable subdivision you can while steering the little unpleasantries of town life into someone else's subdivision. (Nobody wants to live next door to a pawnshop.) In our little Boom Town we have a DIY carwash, a car repair shop, a tattoo parlor, a medical marijuana clinic, an Internet cafe, and a used clothing store, one right next to the other!

I'm not sure who the enterprising party here was, the kids or the parent, but whoever it was was having a summer sale, parked across the street from Boom Town in their brown beater of a car: mom smoking a cigarette and talking on her cell phone, two 8- to 10-year-old boys goofing off in, on, and around the car, and a cardboard box of glass pipes sitting open on the trunk.

If you think about it, it really was a good location to sell glass pipes.

I sprayed a dog today

It's the first time I've used pepper spray: surprisingly pretty, orange-red and holiday appropriate. It stopped the dog, but I didn't get the full, satisfying reaction of yelping and carrying on about being sprayed. It just turned away. I've heard that pit bulls are spray-resistant.

Despite the jolt of adrenaline, the whole thing bummed me out. I've had dogs lunge at me, charge me from down the block, slam into doors trying to reach me...usually my satchel and a stern word is enough.

So I was jittery and feeling irritated at stereotypical dreaded hippies keeping poorly-trained pit bulls when a block and a half later some other stereotypical hippies offered me a handful of fresh-picked berries, and then it wasn't so bad.