Pet weirdness – bringing in mice

The other night we let in Little Gray because it was way too cold to keep him outside even in his little heated doghouse.

To our shock and dismay, he trotted inside with a mouse in his mouth before we could notice and block his way. I don’t know what he was thinking. That he had to pay a cover charge to get in?

Or maybe he just wanted to give us a gift? Or, more likely, he had just caught the mouse when he saw the back door open and didn’t want to give up either opportunity.

Anyway, he dropped the mouse, which scurried off into my husband’s study, which is heaped with papers and clutter to hide in. For the rest of the evening, the cat sat in the back hallway and attempted to keep an eye on the entire house.

Finally, the mouse showed up around midnight, scampering along the living room. The cat was on him like white on rice (to work in a cliché), but ran into the kitchen with his prize as soon as I came out of the bedroom to see what was going on.

For some reason, Little Gray dropped the mouse in the kitchen, and my husband and I were able to shoo it out the front door while keeping the cat indoors. The mouse looked unharmed but obviously shaken up. I guess it now had a story to tell its dozens of grandchildren.

Do you ever have your cat try to bring prey into the house? If so, what does he bring?

Copyright © Obsidian Bookshelf. I don't allow my content to be copied and reposted in full. You may use an excerpt (a few sentences) with a return link, but not the entire post.
Links:

• My fiction list at Goodreads.com..
• My upcoming fiction.
• My published fiction.
• My how-to-write articles.
• As always, thank you for reading!

Pet weirdness – eating bugs

Okay, I know that Little Gray has some issues, having once been a stray cat. Even after five years in a good home, he remains fascinated by water as if remembering that a refreshing drink isn’t easy to find.

Whenever I water the plants on the back porch, he stares at the streams that trickle out of the bottom of the pots and run off the edge of the porch. He will even follow them and dab his paw into the wetness. He doesn’t trust the quality of the water he gets when I refill his bowl. He has to sniff it first and often will dip his paw in the water, sniff his paw, and then lick the water off to make sure of the taste.

Also, he has an urgent need to sniff everything that I have in my hand whether it’s a book or a turtle that I’m carrying from one part of the yard to the other. He’s not hungry per se, but he wants to know what I have.

The pet weirdness reached a new height the other evening when he was sitting on my lap in the kitchen and we both noticed a small cricket hopping along the tiled floor. (This was probably a leftover cricket from our pet toad, who recently passed on and went to toad heaven after five happy years here on earth with us.)

Anyway, the cat jumped off my lap and went to investigate the cricket. That wasn’t so weird because I know cats get curious about little moving things. But after sniffing the cricket, our cat licked it up in a matter-of-fact way, swallowed, and came back to my lap for more petting. I couldn’t believe what I’d seen. I mean, I've never seen a cat do this before.

And I hoped that he wasn’t about to spit it up. (He didn’t.) Does your cat eat bugs? If so, what kind of bugs? Was he or she ever a stray? Is this normal cat behavior?

Copyright © Obsidian Bookshelf. I don't allow my content to be copied and reposted in full. You may use an excerpt (a few sentences) with a return link, but not the entire post.
Links:

• My fiction list at Goodreads.com..
• My upcoming fiction.
• My published fiction.
• My how-to-write articles.
• As always, thank you for reading!

Pet weirdness - thinking of a name

We have a stray cat who adopted us about five years ago. I mean, what’s not to like about our back yard?

Plenty of water and moist dog-food chunks to eat. Of course, these things were intended for our turtles, but the cat had no problems with shouldering them aside and taking over their food.

Plenty of birds to hunt. We were also putting out birdseed for the hordes of pea-brained wild doves that seem to feel that it’s our duty to look after them along with the trees and other landscaping features in the back yard. No other cats or dogs.

So he settled in to stay in our back yard, and I didn’t catch on that he was ours until one rainy day (which almost never happens out here in the desert) in which he stayed on our back porch all day. Until then, I’d thought he was one of the neighborhood cats who frequently roamed across our property. But then I realized that he had no other place to go.

We bought him some dried cat-food and a heated doghouse, and the rest has been history. Except we couldn’t decide on a name for him. Which is funny because we’re usually good at names – at least for computers.

My husband has named computers on the network after ocean life (Mollusk, Oyster, Scallop) and cuts of meat (Sirloin, Ribeye, Porterhouse). I have named them after Confederate generals (Longstreet, Stuart, Beauregard) and Egyptian gods (Ptah, Isis, Horus).

But we couldn’t figure out a name for the cat until we went with the obvious, Little Gray. (He’s not so little now, being about 10 pounds.) How do you name your pets? After their appearance? Personality? After favorite characters in books or movies?

Copyright © Obsidian Bookshelf. I don't allow my content to be copied and reposted in full. You may use an excerpt (a few sentences) with a return link, but not the entire post.
Links:

• My fiction list at Goodreads.com..
• My upcoming fiction.
• My published fiction.
• My how-to-write articles.
• As always, thank you for reading!

More Geeking Out

Okay, my latest aquisition is really cool. This is a 3.5-inch pewter miniature of General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson from the American Civil War, and it looks JUST LIKE HIM.

All the details are correct. Look at the brown sorrel pony he's riding, which was smaller than most of the officers' horses. And the shape of his beard. And the weird little squashed-up forage cap he always wore.

Stonewall Jackson was very unusual, even for a military genius. There is some modern-day speculation that he had Asperger's Syndrome, a form of high functioning autism.

From what I've read about his pre-Civil War career as an instructor at Virginia Military Institute, I could believe it. He taught physics with a military application and would memorize the textbook and lecture directly from it. If students disturbed his routine with questions, then obviously they weren't grasping the information. To help them, he would repeat the exact same lecture the following day, word for word. There are some cadets' letters that have survived to today in which they whine about him being their least favorite instructor, ha, ha!

He was also deeply devout (maybe even a religious fanatic) and yet he loved battle. He didn't like to fight on Sundays, but he would if he had to. And he was a devoted father and husband. Definitely a person of contradictions.

Some historians think that if he hadn't fallen at Chancellorsville, he would have turned the tide at Gettysburg and perhaps helped the South to win the Civil War. I believe the part about Gettysburg, but I don't think the South could have won the war overall. Not against generals like Grant and Sherman, who had far more men and materials. However, it's fun to speculate.

Even more than the attention to detail in this miniature, I like the energy that the figure holds. You can see this best in General Jackson's hands where he's pulling the reins and pointing. I do a little sculpture (whittling on a very basic level) and I'm fascinated by sculptures that capture energy and look alive.

Copyright © Obsidian Bookshelf. I don't allow my content to be copied and reposted in full. You may use an excerpt (a few sentences) with a return link, but not the entire post.
Links:

• My fiction list at Goodreads.com..
• My upcoming fiction.
• My published fiction.
• My how-to-write articles.
• As always, thank you for reading!

Okay I have to geek out about this...

I love miniatures. I have to restrain myself so they don't take over my house -- because, being miniatures, they don't seem to take up space. Anyway, I found this on eBay. It's a chess piece (the Knight) in the shape of Confederate cavalry officer J.E.B. Stuart from the American Civil War, and it looks just like him! (Hard to see from my photo, though). I just had to geek out about this.
Here is the real J.E.B. Stuart, courtesy of Wikipedia in a public domain photo:

Copyright © Obsidian Bookshelf. I don't allow my content to be copied and reposted in full. You may use an excerpt (a few sentences) with a return link, but not the entire post.
Links:

• My fiction list at Goodreads.com..
• My upcoming fiction.
• My published fiction.
• My how-to-write articles.
• As always, thank you for reading!

The Wild One

I'm getting addicted to movies from the 1950s. Cinematically, it's such a different world that it just blows my mind. I feel like a stranger in a strange land, watching these movies. Every little thing stands out for me.

For example, take The Wild One (1953), starring Marlon Brando. Plot: A gang of bikers led by Brando reduces a town to anarchy when the aimless youths descend en masse upon the straight-laced populace, overwhelming them with ennui and purposelessness. My initial impressions:

• The soundtrack is very typical for the time – endearingly overwrought and intrusive. Those filmmakers really wanted to make sure they manipulated our emotions for us.

• I think these bikers are supposed to be in their late teens and early twenties. However, Brando was twenty-nine when he made the film and many of his pals look about thirty-five. Didn’t Hollywood cast real teenagers in teenage roles back then?

• Brando…okay, I might as well say it. In this movie, he looks too gay for words. Have a look at the photo. I have to remind myself that this movie influenced the look of the gay leather man subculture, and not the other way around. Have another look at the photo – that mouth, those eyes! Very sexy.

• Brando’s voice is totally different from what I imagined. I associate him mostly with Apocalypse Now and The Godfather, which should give you some idea of my approximate age, ha, ha! In both of those movies, he had very stylized way of speaking, so I didn’t know what his real voice sounded like. Turns out it’s very soft and very high-pitched. Not what you’d think from looking at him. Plus he has a very pronounced, nasally Midwestern accent. It sounds so different from the way I talk that I have to wonder what I must sound like to people from the Midwest.

• The setting looks spectacularly fake, almost surrealistically so, especially at night. The little town looks like a hollow set on a Hollywood lot. Night of the Hunter with Robert Mitchum looks like this, too, and it’s great. It’s very striking and weird.

• Brando has a great line in this film. He and his biker pals wear leather jackets with the name of their gang: Black Rebels Motorcycle Club. One of the girls in this small town asks Brando what he’s rebelling against, and he looks at her and sneers, “What do you got?”

The Wild One may not be “early” Brando’s most emotionally powerful work (that would be On the Waterfront), and it’s not the most surrealistically weird 1950s movie I’ve ever seen (that would be Night of the Hunter), but it’s well worth a trip down memory lane, especially if you’re looking for something different to download to your iPad.

Copyright © Obsidian Bookshelf. I don't allow my content to be copied and reposted in full. You may use an excerpt (a few sentences) with a return link, but not the entire post.
Links:

• My fiction list at Goodreads.com..
• My upcoming fiction.
• My published fiction.
• My how-to-write articles.
• As always, thank you for reading!

Too Funny

The End of Publishing

stormtroopers on their day off