John Burridge

Smokey, our old grey cat is dead. He was fifteen years old. He had survived saddle thrombrosis about three years ago, which slowed him down a little and required some daily meds to prevent another blood clot. He had been up to his usual “let me in / let me out” and channeling his inner raccoon at the water bowl routine early last week. 

Last Thursday, he was low energy, but restless. We think Aoife knew something was up, because she kept coming up to him as if to check up on him and would give him some licks. By the evening it was clear that I would need to take him to the vet. He went out that night, and crawled up under the outdoor sectional’s cover; as this wasn’t terribly warm, I brought him back inside to one of his cushions. 

Mark found him dead Friday morning. 

It will be weird not singing “Smokey, the Smokey Cat / Wonders where his dinner’s at” or “/ meow meow meow and all of that.” when I see him. It will also be weird not singing, “Kitty Food for Smokey / Kitty Food for Cicero, too,” during kitty meal time.

Since Friday is usually listener’s choice day on KWAX, I requested some cat themed music as a memoriam. In between some kitty waltzes, I heard a cat meow that sounded just like Smokey—I’m fairly certain it was part of a recording coming over the radio, but I’m very glad that I was hearing it while working from home alone in the morning instead of hearing it home alone in the night. Similarly, I walked into the dining nook, and for an instant thought I saw Smokey crouching out on the deck: it was actually a reflection of Mark’s shoes.

We think Aoife wonders where Smokey is; she seemed to be looking for him in the back yard Friday night.  I'm not sure what's going through Cicero's head, but I think he's noticed Smokey's absence during feeding time.

Some favorite Smokey stories:

When The Child and I first adopted Smokey, the shelter gave us a cardboard cat carrier to bring him home in. Half-way through the half-hour ride home, Smokey punched a claw through the top flap and forced it down into the box with him and managed to get out.

Smokey liked to groom Mark. https://johnburridge.blogspot.com/2019/09/cat-grooming.html

Smokey used to accompany us to the blackberry bushes a few blocks away. On our return, we ran into a dog. We could practically hear him saying, “A dog! I’ll hold it back as long as I can! Warn the others! Run! RUN!” He appeared at a house a few minutes after we did, agitated and almost panting, and had to lie down.


Smokey was visiting his “girlfriend,” a cat across the street, when a dog on a too-long leash went after her. Smokey leapt onto the attacking dog’s back and made it drop his girlfriend.

When we got a little black kitten, Cicero, Smokey didn’t find out right away. But the first time he saw a little black head peek out from a hiding spot underneath a printer stand, Smokey’s ears slowly swiveled back, his lips pulled back to bare his fangs, and he let out a long, slow hiss. Then he ran out of the house, ran across the street, and sought solace from our cat-lady neighbor.
https://johnburridge.blogspot.com/2016/09/mostly-cats.html
https://johnburridge.blogspot.com/2016/10/kitty-wars.html
https://johnburridge.blogspot.com/2019/02/smokey-and-cicero.html


Hiding out next door is how he responded when we brought home an American Staffordshire Terrier puppy, too. https://johnburridge.blogspot.com/2020/03/aofie.html


Smokey slowed down in his final years, and spent a lot of time finding sunny spots to nap in. He also liked to crawl underneath the outdoor furniture coverings, which were black, and which could turn into solar powered kitty saunas. His last year, he also developed a habit of digging in his water bowl like a raccoon washing his hands, which generated some spectacular puddles.

Tuesday Evening, October 8, 2024. Waikoloa Beach, HI

The layout of the resort is passive-aggressive towards pedestrians. The different centers are about ten minutes apart from each other by foot. One can walk, but I think they want you to take shuttles or drive. Or golf.

Since Mark slept through Monday night’s sunset, he offered to walk to the beach to watch tonight’s.

We walked along a golf course and then down some steps to Waikōloa Anchialine Pond Preservation Area, a lava flow filled with brackish ponds. Feral cats live here and we saw ten (at least): tabby, Siamese, calico, white, tuxedo, and black cats. There were very likely more hiding in the underbrush. The Sun was about ten degrees off of the horizon and the Moon was a waxing almost quarter. We got to the shore, which was a collection of dark lava, white stones (coral), and coral chunks. The sky shifted to purple and rose hues. I spotted Venus about a third of the way fro the Sun to the crescent Moon.

The rocky short was spiky and offered few comfortable places to sit. Some sandpiper-like birds took a bath in the shallow water around the rocks. The sun sank some more and I watched for the green flash (didn’t see it). About this time we realized the Marriott Luau must be happening across the bay because lilting guitar and a tenor’s voice echoed over the waters and strings of cantina lights lit up on the far shore. What appeared to be a sunset “booze cruise” sailed into the bay. We looked but didn’t see any fire dancers. About halfway between Venus and the Moon, Antares appeared. The clouds around the sun continued to put on a ruddy show.

About this time we heard someone, apparently on the path behind us, channel his inner Gollum and start to rave in an wrathful and frenzied manner. I think it was one person, but it sounded like a sad person was having a screaming match with an angry person, possibly about tourists and the environment. By this time the sun had completely set and it was dark enough that Mark started using the flashlight on his mobile. I wasn’t quite sure if Gollum was coming any closer or not, but Mark and I agreed it was time to move along.

After some stumbling off of and back onto the path, we made it to Lava Lava Beach, which was lightly populated. As we watched, a skiff, presumably from the Booze Cruise, discharged a gaggle of bridesmaids onto the beach. By this time Scorpio was bright and undulating through the sky.

We navigated around a large zooey Hilton pool, around a pickle-ball court, through a parking lot, and back onto the main pedestrian loop. Mark wanted to see the milky way, so we sidetracked back through the feral cat sanctuary at Waikōloa Anchialine Pond Preservation Area. Mark found a patch of unbroken pavement between the lava flows that was on a dark part of the path and we traced the Milky Way fro Cassiopeia through the Summer Triangle and Delphinus. Scorpio was still up, so Orion wasn’t.

We made it back to our unit and contemplated spas and day-trips for the overmorrow. 

Yesterday was a vet day:  I loaded both cats into carriers and drove them to the vet's for their vaccinations.  The theory was if they were both going at the same time, they'd keep each other calm.  Based on the syncopated caterwauling, I'd say it was a bogus theory.  

The cats eventually forgave me for stuffing them into cages and taking them to That Awful Place -- Smokey was over it about ninety minutes after we got home; but Cicero held out all afternoon and refused to come into the house, even when it was hailing.  To be fair, he had hidden under our bed when he heard Smokey wailing from his cage, but I had coaxed him out and then immediately thrust him into a small loaner carrier.  

That evening, I read the synopsis of Dion Fortune's contribution to Neo-Paganism in Ronald Hutton's "Triumph of the Moon," as a kind of counter-balance to some other readings.

So, naturally, I dreamed...

I was on an island research center.  The island was rocky and temperate -- there were fir trees instead of a jungle, and it wasn't icy.  A group of us entered the center, which was blocky and reminiscent of classical architecture.  The more I think about it, the more I am realizing that it was based on the architecture of the Lighthouse of Alexandria.

There was something about riding an elevator, which, paradoxically, seemed to be lowering (there was some sort of shuttling motion in the rafters of the elevator car as if a cable was being unwound), but we travelled up to one of the upper floors.  There was also something about entering a defunct part of a library -- in my dream's eye, I saw a floor schematic of the complex, and we entered a greyed out portion.  This had been under the prevue of an unnamed country, but they had withdrawn from the research center for reasons that were never revealed in the dream. 

Somewhere around here in the dream, Cicero was with me.  We were in a kind of card catalog hall, with lots of shelves of unread books.  The room was large and airy, but dim, as if only every third light worked.  Leaning up against a shelf was a pile of books which included Dion Fortune's "Moon Magic," "The Sea Priestess," some other books of her fiction, and some sort of book on antiquities that belonged to my parents (their names were written on the inside cover of the book.  The sense was that since this section of the research center was closed, if we wanted to, we could take some of the books.  I wanted some of the books I saw, especially the one that had been my parents' -- in the dream I supposed that the book had been left behind when they left the Mangla Dam Project, but I couldn't figure out how it had ended up in a foreign government's library.  I had a sense that this was my, or at least my family's, book, and that I had every right to it.

The ownership of the books didn't resolve, and the group left the library.  There was something here about going down a level or two to a kind of utility or engineering floor filled with lots of unused machinery.  At this point, Cicero got away from me (he'd been good up until then) and I had to coax him out from between collections of shelved tools and conduit that he'd crawled into.

There was probably more to the dream, but that's all I recall.  What strikes me about this dream is that it could have turned into an elevator anxiety dream, but didn't; it could have turned into a lost in a twisty, constricted place, but it didn't; and that it was set in a conflation of the Lighthouse of Alexandria and the Library of Alexandria.  

 

Whew!  We survived the weekend heat dome.  I'm very thankful we were able to keep the house cool.  It's heat like this that makes me glad that I can run a fountain for the bees and birds.  I saw one parched looking hummingbird taking a rest with its beak held wide open and was glad it was able to get a drink.   Usually, they just land on top of the basalt column and take a sip; this one was hovering next to the column and drinking the overflowing water.  It's possible the water was too hot for a full on bird bath:  it was warm to the touch coming out until I renewed the basin's reservoir from the garden hose. 

The dog handled the heat fairly well, but the cats objected to be cooped up inside during the day.  We let them outside at night, once the pavement had cooled off.   On the up side, being forced to share space with the dog (who really just wants to lick them and say "hi" dog-style), seems to have made the cats slightly more tolerant of the dog.  They've gone from "OMG! A dog! We're gonna die!" to "Such a shame she wandered / into our enclosure ...."

---

I went into work the other day; the office is still mostly working remotely, but I'm finding that I need to start transitioning into physically going in.  Even for summer term, campus is still sparsely populated.  My office Windows machine hasn't been updated in a while, and I think it took something like three hours for it to download version upgrades.  Part of the length of the upgrade may be due to the machine's age; it's easily from 2012.  It won't be able to handle the Windows 11 release (I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing).

My co-workers also came in for work, and we took a lunch break together.  I always forget that I'm kind of tall because everyone's the same height on Zoom.  It was nice to visit with folks who I've only met virtually since my hiring last year.  It was also weird to be physically present... and working on different machines than my personal machine at home took a little getting used to (I'm not a huge fan of web-based MS Office, and this summer I'm going to have to get MS Office on various machines running the same version).

Isolating in place at home and working remotely has made the weekdays blur together.  It's an odd feeling working with less physical boundaries between work lives, home lives, and family lives.  I'm getting a touch of cabin fever, the treatment for which is physically leaving the house for a power walk or to get food.  Mark is working from home (most days), as am I.  The Child is attending his classes remotely.  Mostly,  we're managing to give each other enough space.

On the dog front, the cats have moved from fear and grief to anger.   Okay, and a little indifference.  Mostly.  Smokey was going to do something about That New Creature the other day when Aoife came into the bedroom while Smokey was on my lap, but I was able to negotiate a peaceful retreat with the use of a blanket.

I connected with a FaceBook group that watches a local pair of bald eagles (and their arch-enemies, the ospreys).  There's a nest that's visible (at least until the leaves come in) from a local Willamette River path, so I fled the house with my camera and managed to get a photograph or two -- mostly of eagle beak.  It's not quite as concentrated bird as The Raptor Center, but at least it's open.

On the writing front:  staying home means I'm actually at home before 1:30, so I've had lunch and I'm actually writing by 2.  Some friends have started up writing groups in Zoom, which seems to work as far as motivation.

On the gym front:  well... I've been doing power walks, so that's better than nothing.  Aoife makes doing mat exercises difficult.

 We have a new, 40 pound, 8 month year old puppy, probably an American Staffordshire Terrier (i.e. a Pit Bull).  She's a rescue puppy from a Modesto, California shelter.  The name on her papers said her name was "Chanel," but The Chid mostly likely did not find this a butch enough name (I thought it was hilariously ironic).   After a few suggestions like "Bailey" and "Guinness,"  The Chid did some quick research of Irish names and settled on Aoife.   She didn't seem particularly attached to her previous name, and is responding to Aoife.

She's a total snuggle-butt; very sweet and curious; and will bark three short, sharp, "gruffs" at strangers at the door and gate.  She's been trained, as she understands "sit" and "stay" and has good leash etiquette.

This is the first dog we've had in fifteen years.  (Our old beagle, Pickles, succumbed to complications of a hyperactive adrenal gland.)  We'd been talking about adopting for a few months, with vague plans to do so this summer when The Child was out of school  COVID-19 fallout in Oregon prompted Mark to expedite the process.... so Saturday, we went to a pet shelter "just to browse" and (surprise!) came back with a dog (Mark started crying when he thought about the shelter animals in California being killed).

The cats are not amused.  Smokey is threatening to go live with our neighbors across the street (where he already gets kitty treats), and Cicero is hanging out with his brother, Spencer, two houses down and generally pulling the Great Disappearing Barn Cat routine.

The consensus so far is that Aoife is curious and wants to play with the cats--but we're going to let everyone get used to everyone else's scents for about two weeks before there are any face-to-face meetings.  The dog rescue foster mom we got her from showed Mark a video of Aoife pretty much ignoring her cats, which helped convince us she'd be okay with Smokey and Cicero.

Over the years, I've attempted to have some kind of water feature in our back yard.  I like them because the stillness of the liquid when the fountain is off provides an anchor to the landscaping, and also the sound of falling water helps to mask things like the rituals (or whatever it is) that the eight-year-old girls are doing two houses over.

For a while we had a little solar-powered fountain, which was nice in a bird-bath kind of way, and which the cats appreciated during the hot summer months, but which was more of a novelty than an actual water feature (also, it required a lot of fiddling with to keep the solar panel pointed at the sun).

When the large plastic, semispherical planter we'd been using for a fountain basin fatigued and cracked, we did without a fountain last summer, and the cats drank from a metal, shallow, shell-shaped basin (which was fine until I started to wonder if any lead solder or something decorative was leeching into their water supply).

This year I finally got enough gumption (and savings) together to get a more industrial-strength fountain.  I'd been skulking around a local landscaping shop, scoping out things like basalt columns and fountain basins for a few weeks.

Saturday, I dragged Mark to the shop to help choose a rock and fountain.  My fantasy would be to plunk ten-foot tall basalt columns at the cardinal points of the yard and install a baptismal-font sized column in the west with a brook-sized current of water springing out of it.  But, as just one ten-foot tall basalt column A) costs something on the order of $2000.00 and B) weighs easily two tons, and as I have not mastered Merlin's spells for moving the menhirs of Stonehenge, it seemed rather impractical.  Even a foot high basalt "bird bath" weighs around 300 pounds, so I ended up with something lighter (at an estimated 200 lbs) -- half a basalt column, cut at slightly inclined angle and polished.  It has a hole through its long axis for water to well out through.  I'm expecting the polished face will reflect the sun and be useful for telling the solar time.

The shop sold plastic reservoirs that are sturdy enough to hold about 500 pounds, a water pump, some tubing, and various piping features.  It all weighed in beneath our car's carrying capacity, and soon Mark and I had all of the stuff home (well, okay, we still need to get some fist-sized decorative stones to put around the column, but that's for later).

We had watched the guys at the shop load the column into the car and privately wondered how many years of lifting 200 pound rocks would result in a slipped spinal disc or something.  In our driveway, after a few abortive attempts at rock wiggling, we looked at the column, sitting on its side in the back of the car.  It didn't look impressive, and driving around town with a essentially a stone battering ram wasn't high on my list of things to do.

After about ten minutes of wiggling, fiddling around with various planks and levers of wood, we managed to maneuver the stone into a position where it would perch on the car's tailgate.  Then we carefully managed to slide it down a plank and into a waiting wagon (yes, we braced the wagon's wheels so it wouldn't roll forward).

Mark announced that he wasn't going to move the stone any farther without some proper equipment... which is probably wise, considering that various lumbar and scapula parts of my body reminded me Sunday (the day after) that they're over half a century old.  Unfortunately, I don't know a troupe of burly men who want to do a historical reenactment of moving Stonehenge stones.

The next step was fountain basin placement.  The original site I'd had in mind, right off of the deck's steps, was too cramped.  I thought about placing the basin due west of the lawn circle, but that plan was vetoed because it would harm plants and probably become a magnet for arbor vitae tree needles.  So it ended up next to the bonsai shelter.

Sunday.  Since our entire yard tilts along a southeast to northwest axis, I had to dig out a little bit of the ground to get a level site for the fountain.  Mark wanted me to put down pavers, too, on the theory that they would help to keep things level when the ground shifts because there's a 200 pound basalt column and (8 inches X 17inches ^2 X pi = 7263 ^3 inches ) 262 pounds of water on top of it.

One trip to the paver store later, I was digging a hole, and then pounding the bottom flat with a concrete paver and singing the Ewok Cooking Song, "Lukan Dukan Lu-la ..." And digging some more.  And pounding more.  And then laying pavers down and seeing if they were level.  Then picking them back up.  And pounding the ground (which has a high clay content).  And pinching my fingertips.  And singing some more.  And leveling.  And pounding.  And ripping a cuticle off of my thumb.  And trying to find more places to put the extra dirt.

At some point my rendition of the Ewok Cooking Song was interrupted by Mark, who said that he and the child were going on a walk.

Eventually, I managed to get the hole as deep enough, and as level enough, and wide enough to put the basin in.

Of course, I had to fill it with water, plunk the water pump in and plug it in.  No one got electrocuted or anything -- and when I turned it on, The Child said, "It looks like The Bellagio."  Mark started humming, "Con Te Partiro (Time to Say Goodbye)."

The installation was not finished, but it was getting dark, Mark wanted to go look at freshwater mammals at Delta Ponds, and my hands were hurting.  So we paused.  The next steps are getting the proper rock-moving tools, hiring an electrician to install an outside electrical outlet (to allay Mark's fears of some electrical catastrophe), and adding some decorative rocks to the top so the basin doesn't look like a giant's lost watering can spout came loose and fell into our back yard.

Went to the gym Friday Night and did the regular routine.

Cats turning on their cute in the hopes of speeding up the duration until dinner time.  Usually Cicero will get a little bored and then there's pouncing. 


But then there is grooming.  I haven't quite figured out the whole "I-love-you-I-bite-you-I-pounce-you-I-run-away" relationship between these two.

Cicero brought a rat into the neighbor's yard and started playing with it; this gave me a good opportunity to stop painting the side of our house and grab the camera. 

The autumn has been dry, so the yards in our neighborhood are still on the brown side. 


I'm recovering from the mandatory Autumnal Student Cold.  This has interrupted my return to the gym, which is delaying my attempts to shrink the bicycle tire around my abs. 

 Cicero's brother, Spencer, came over to the house.










He came for breakfast, but we're only supposed to feed him the stray snack or two, so I put up the unfinished breakfast bowls Cicero and Smokey had left behind (I suppose I qualify as a crazy cat lady, because when I heard Spencer rustling around in the kibble, I could tell it wasn't Cicero or Smokey).



(I got lucky with this mid-pounce shot.  A second later and my camera strap was a kitty toy.)







Spencer stayed for some chin skritches, and then went outside.  I wasn't sure where the other cats were, and Spencer seemed to be looking for them.  Since he's a photogenic cat, I got out my camera.





The cats in general seem to not like having the cameras too close, but the new zoom lens lets me stay far enough away that they don't seem to mind it too much -- although Spencer did want to come up and sniff the lens mid-session.


And then it was time to go on with my day...

Yesterday afternoon, (Friday,The Ides of Winter) was practically 70F, so I managed to get some writing done outside. I was visited by a small black spider, who seemed  to be particularly interested in my tea:  I had to shoo it out of my teacup twice.

Went to the gym Saturday.  I've been advised to mix things up a little more than I have been to help with my shoulder and back (work the back to balance out working the front).  30 minutes and 300 calories on the elipitcal (while I did line edits to a story).  3x12x20lbs on the butterfly pull (a reverse pec-fly).  3x12x80 Lat Pull-downs.  3x12 Roman Chair curls.  3x12 bridges.  Also some assorted quasi-yoga stretches.  Pool-noodle spine stretches and thigh faschia stretches.  30 second planks.   3x12x20lb triceps pull-downs.  

Cat Update:  We have two cats:  Smokey, who is about 8 years old; and a newly acquired kitten, Mister Cicero Artemis Fowl Wiggles (Mr. C or Cicero for short), born May 15, 2015.   Smokey is a 17 pound long hair something-or-other.  Mc. C is a black tabby-Siamese mix.  

Day Three of the Early Writing Discipline. I had a feeling this morning would be more difficult. About ninety minutes before I was supposed to wake up, I dreamed that my iPad's alarm clock started playing "Leena's Dance" (from the Original Star Trek pilot) and that Smokey came in to demand petting. Since the dream was both a replay of the previous two days and what was going to happen, I was pretty confused a moment or two after the dream, when I thought I'd slept through the alarm.

When "Leena's Dance" really did go off (hey, if one is going to get up to write science fiction and fantasy, one may as well be woken up by quintessential pulp fiction cheesy dancing girl music), I sat on the edge of my bed and thought really hard about actually getting up, stumbling through the house, doing the tea thing and getting some words in. I was tempted to fall over sideways and back into bed. But I didn't. I'd like to say that it was because I was disciplined, except that by day three it was easier to force myself up than it would have been day one or two.

I wrote some, but today was more disjointed than yesterday. I wasn't as good at last night's prep as I had been the night before, and I got to bed a little later, too. I'm seeing where I'm not clear on character development, setting, and action. I did make a discovery about my character's boat that I hope to make good use of.

In other news... Today is much warmer here in the valley than it has been the last few days -- there wasn't frost of any kind on the car when I went off to work, and walking around campus has not required extra layers of clothing to keep from freezing. It is a little cloudy, but only a little; the sunshine makes this January day seem like a very early Spring Day instead of an early Winter one.

This morning's writing started out with me repeating Niaomi Kritzer's statement to engineers: Always assume there will be cats. Smokey, our cat, decided that he really happy to see a human up at 5:15 AM because it was obvious that I would now be able to play with him and stroke his fur. He was a little disappointed that I had honest-to-goodness tea in my mug and not something more sensible, like cat food.

And then, a few moments later, it was time for a reprisal of Evita as the fast food I ate yesterday, which apparently had Deadly Green Peppers in it, got far enough into my system to cause trouble. As I abandoned my heroine, who was sailing on a lake with a mysterious stranger, I rushed to the bathroom as quietly as I could so as not to wake anyone. And I muttered, "She's sad for her people; sad to be betrayed by her own weak body..." Several times.

Other than that, I think that doing quick outline of "candy bar scenes" and having them read helped to prevent me from staring at a blank screen while I simultaneously tried to wake up and think of what to write. I got about 700 words.