Cats, Dancing, and a Soggy Springtime in Paris in Everyday Ramblings

It has been a busy week and it will probably stay this way until the 4th of July holiday here. First it was so hot one could barely function and now it is refreshingly cool and kind of sort of wet. The slugs are happy and we need the rain. Hard to get photos in.

I have been spoiling the cats with toys and play. The carpeted scratching post deal I got at the independent pet store last weekend has been a big success with Diego. Why didn’t I do this earlier! Many cardboard boxes would have remained unmolested. It came with a feather toy on a chain. It took about 18 hours for Carlo to completely disassemble the chain and free the bird toy.

It is tied on there now with string, plain old cat friendly string.

One day out on the street I picked up a Ping-Pong ball that had escaped from somewhere and the cats love that. They play with it and then it goes missing for a week or ten days and then one of us finds it again so I decided to order a bunch of them. It turns out you can get Beer Pong balls relatively inexpensively in a lovely array of pastel florescent colors.

I admit I had to ask Saint Joe yesterday exactly how Beer Pong is played as this is a piece of cultural knowledge I completely missed. When I was a young person we took our drinking seriously, no games were involved. Dancing, yes but no bar games.

He thoroughly enjoyed explaining it to me.

The balls came yesterday and the cats managed to hide one green one in about a minute… but I know were the pink one is. :)

In the delivery there was also a cushy cat bed that I thought I’d put next to the sink to contain Carlo, as I can’t seem to keep him off the kitchen counters no matter what I do. He, of course was totally suspicious of this contraption. I couldn’t get either one of them to settle into it yesterday.

They are total towel cats. They sleep on old towels. It is their destiny I think as shelter cats. I have towels all over the place. Diego spends a lot of time on a centrally located low table where he can see into all the rooms (and outside) in a cardboard box with a towel in it. Carlo hangs out on a towel on a corner of my dining room table. Or on the towel that is wrapped around the heated cat bed.

Did I mention they are spoiled?

This morning I had an inspiration. I put a towel over the cushy new bed and put Diego in it and he is there right now keeping his one eye trained on me.

Our big excitement this week is Miss E. Her exchange family situation in Nantes turned out to be much less than ideal and she is currently on her way to Paris, where she will spend 9 days in Montmartre on her own in an Airbnb rental.

She will be 16 in September.

She speaks French, thank goodness so that will help, and the weather is not good there right now, which will also help. Her mother was trying to placate my concern yesterday by reminding me that she is a resourceful kid and hasn’t betrayed her trust in any serious way… Hmm. I guess all that lying about going to dance class when she wasn’t doesn’t count.

My response was, “I am not worried about her! I am worried about everyone else.”

Me thinks there is some romanticism at work here all around. Her mother wants to give her a wide and interesting range of experiences; I was on my own at 15 most of the time and I know how treacherous and challenging the world can be.

But then I was not an absolutely charming self-possessed urban savvy mixed race kid that had been loved and attended to her whole life so Miss E.’s experience will be quite different from mine.

She is incandescent and people are attracted to her light.

Wish her a safe a remarkable adventure will ya? There is at least one adult on the ground there that will be looking in on her. Eek.

Last updated June 11, 2016