Cool dry sunlight beat down on the city and the foothills that surrounded it. Houses with big yards and lots of trees in the yellows and golds of Fall extended down the hill to the main highway and river. On a big hill and across the river the afternoon light brought out the red bricks of the campus buildings of the University (the U) where I had just been hired. Beyond the hill, snowcapped mountains pushed against the sky. I had just moved into the house I was renting, and I was sitting on the deck in the back yard studying for a project for my new job. My seat was a bench made from a thick plank set on a pair of thick rounds of wood I had pulled out of a wood pile in the back yard.
This is a photo of what was originally my neighbor’s cat, Mr. Bradley (Cat). It was taken on a sunny day in November a few years ago. The expression on his face is strange, and I only realized later that it was because he was high.
My next door neighbor was a philosophy professor at the U. I was a biophysicist in the Pharmacology Department, and he was, obviously since he was a philosopher, in the Philosophy Department. The Professor was fond of marijuana, but enjoyment of a stigmatized and an at the time illegal plant caused some conflict in his house. His wife would not let him smoke inside on account of the arrival of their baby, Beebop.
Behind their house was a ramshackle garage. The white paint was starting to peel to reveal gray wood beneath, the back end of it had rotted and begun to collapse, and many of the windows were patched with cardboard and plastic. It was it in full view of my own back porch. You can see one end of it in the left part of the photo.
By the end of the second day I lived there, I was familiar with the Professor’s routine. Whenever he was home, every hour or so beginning in the morning, he would get up from his desk in his study overlooking my backyard and where he was writing a book about the philosopher Bertrand Russell. His house is the building on the right, and the window is the window of his study: He would walk out of the basement through the door which is the open door you can see in the photo. Then he would go into the garage and close the sliding door to the garage. Soon, clouds of smoke and the strong smell of marijuana were escaping through the cracks around the garage door and wafting toward my seat on the deck. It went on like this all day until around 1 am.
Mr. Bradley Cat did not like Baby Beebop and left the house often, probably just to get away from her. He followed the Professor into the garage and stayed in there while he smoked.
In the only book I read by Russell, Russell often mentioned a famous British philosopher referring to him only as ‘Mister Bradley,’ but without giving any background on who he was, at least not that I could find in my cursory reading of Russell. The professor would have been familiar with this book and would have read about the brilliant Mr. Bradley. So, one day the Professor got high and decided his cat had a philosophical demeanor and looked like a “Bradley.” Thus Mister Bradley (cat) was named after a British philosopher that the Professor read that Bertrand Russell had liked.
The second day I lived there and just after one of these smoking sessions the garage door opened and Mr. Bradley Cat left the garage. Mr Bradley (cat) immediately spotted me sitting on the back porch and trotted up to me. He squinted up at me in the glare of the morning sun and circled my chair, looking for an invitation to jump up on my lap. That was strange behavior because Mr. Bradley and I did not know each other, and in fact we had never even met. I ignored him, but he was persistent and finally he tried to jump on my lap. He fell to the floor at the last second when he noticed the huge book on my lap.
He had an annoyed expression that seemed to say: Why would somebody be holding a book when they could be holding a cat? That’s when I took the photo.
Mrs. Itchy’s Breakfast Bagel
One side effect of opiate pain killers is itchy skin. I don’t remember if I was scratching an opiate itch or if she was scratching her fleas when I first saw her, but the name fit.
Above is Mrs. Itchy. Four of her large black nipples are visible, identifying her gender to be female. One time when she was sitting upright I counted a total of 8 full-sized nipples and another tiny one that was only half-formed.
Mrs. Itchy was the matriarch of a large tree squirrel clan. Every brooding season, she would bring a litter of 5 or 6 scratchy little babies into my backyard and up onto the deck to beg. The kitchen window opened directly onto the deck and my gf Aelyssa left them nuts on a plate outside the window. I fed them sometimes when I was sitting on the deck.
One time, she accidentally bit my finger while trying to grab a broken almond. It hurt bad, but she held on. I could not jerk my hand away. Blood filled her mouth and spilled down her chin. This must have gone on for a minute before she finally realized my finger wasn't squirrel food. When she let go, it felt like somebody had smashed the tip of my finger with a hammer. Blood was spurting to the rhythm of my heart beat.
Here is Mrs. Itchy just before she bit my finger with those big yellow teeth:
Squirrels don’t seem to excite cats the way an escaped paraqueet does. Mrs. Itchy seemed to know this and had no fear of Mr. Bradley and often passed within inches of him. Mr. Bradley (Cat) never attacked.
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Except for the time I lived off the grid, I have never been a morning person. I prefer to sleep through as much of the morning as I can. I am more tired than when i went to bed, even after 8 - 10 hours of sleep. All I can do is shuffle around. I cannot speak or be spoken to. Getting out of bed too early is dangerous - I get plantaritis when I step too suddenly on the cold floor. If I try to exercise in the morning, I suffer pulled muscles. I get severe cramps in my calves if I run, and I get searing spasms of pain in whatever muscle I was exercising if I lifted weights. My injuries are so bad that I have had to put off exercise for weeks afterwards.
I think the problem is the hour that I get up. I can go to bed any time between 8 and 4 am, but when I get up at 8 am, I feel awful until 2 or 3 in the afternoon, no matter how much or how little I sleep. However, if I stay in bed until 10 or 11, i can deal with the day. If it is the weekend, I need to sleep until noon.
Despite that, on work mornings, we woke up together and ate together. But one of our problems was that she demanded I wake up early on the weekends too. She was not working, but I was. She was already 2 years into a long vacation, but I had worked the whole time and I needed the weekend to recover from the stress of the work week. I had already explained perhaps 100 times (once for each weekend we lived together) to her that I needed to sleep late on the weekends.
It was this way on a warm Sunday morning late in the Spring. We had left the kitchen window open for fresh air. We often ate in the kitchen on the small table under the window. We could see down the hill and across a river and the main highway and over to the U that was built on the next hill. By 6 am, Aelyssa had already made breakfast. She had set the kitchen table. She served me a toast and spread it with homemade raspberry jam. She poured a cup of coffee for me and left it at my setting beside the bagel on the table under the kitchen window.
One ought never shout indoors. The house is a quiet refuge from the racket of the outside world. Unless there is a fire, nothing is worth shouting about. When someone in the house wants to communicate, they need to go into the same room and speak quietly and calmly.
Aelyssa shared some behaviors with Archie Bunker from the popular TV series All in the Family. One shared trait that the reader might have figured out is that she was the dictator of the house, just like Archie. Archie commanded like a king and bullied and browbeat everyone until they did what he wanted. Also like Archie, she shouted in the house.
At exactly 6.30am Sunday morning, I was awoken from a dead sleep by shouting: “GET UP RIGHT NOW!!!!”
She was in the kitchen, and I was in bed with the covers pulled over my head to keep the cats from licking my face because they hated it when I slept later than they slept. It was Sunday, and I needed to sleep.
“Mrs. Itchy is eating your breakfast: get up!!! Your squirrel is stealing your toast!!” seh said.
More shouting: “Mrs. Itchy drop it!! Get out of bed and get your toast away from that squirrel.“
I got up and shuffled into the kitchen. Aelyssa was still carrying on.
“Mrs. Itchy (Squirrel) stole your breakfast. I guess you don’t get to eat.”
“I thought she was afraid of you. What happened?” I said.
“I went outside for a minute to talk to Mrs. Crabtree,” she said.
Mrs. Crabtree was our other next door neighbor. She did not like squirrels or cats. She chased both species away whenever they wandered into her yard.
“Then Mrs. Itchy was on the table with your toast in her mouth. I tried to get it back, but she ran out the window.”
“How do you know it was Mrs. Itchy?”
“She’s right there,” she pointed out the window.
Sitting upright on the fence was a skinny squirrell with a toast with raspberry jam was hanging of its mouth. She was close enough to make out 2 columns of black nipples. There was a big notch in the bottom outside edge of her left ear. It was Mrs. Itchy.
This is a photo of what was originally my neighbor’s cat, Mr. Bradley (Cat). It was taken on a sunny day in November a few years ago. The expression on his face is strange, and I only realized later that it was because he was high.
My next door neighbor was a philosophy professor at the U. I was a biophysicist in the Pharmacology Department, and he was, obviously since he was a philosopher, in the Philosophy Department. The Professor was fond of marijuana, but enjoyment of a stigmatized and an at the time illegal plant caused some conflict in his house. His wife would not let him smoke inside on account of the arrival of their baby, Beebop.
Behind their house was a ramshackle garage. The white paint was starting to peel to reveal gray wood beneath, the back end of it had rotted and begun to collapse, and many of the windows were patched with cardboard and plastic. It was it in full view of my own back porch. You can see one end of it in the left part of the photo.
By the end of the second day I lived there, I was familiar with the Professor’s routine. Whenever he was home, every hour or so beginning in the morning, he would get up from his desk in his study overlooking my backyard and where he was writing a book about the philosopher Bertrand Russell. His house is the building on the right, and the window is the window of his study: He would walk out of the basement through the door which is the open door you can see in the photo. Then he would go into the garage and close the sliding door to the garage. Soon, clouds of smoke and the strong smell of marijuana were escaping through the cracks around the garage door and wafting toward my seat on the deck. It went on like this all day until around 1 am.
Mr. Bradley Cat did not like Baby Beebop and left the house often, probably just to get away from her. He followed the Professor into the garage and stayed in there while he smoked.
In the only book I read by Russell, Russell often mentioned a famous British philosopher referring to him only as ‘Mister Bradley,’ but without giving any background on who he was, at least not that I could find in my cursory reading of Russell. The professor would have been familiar with this book and would have read about the brilliant Mr. Bradley. So, one day the Professor got high and decided his cat had a philosophical demeanor and looked like a “Bradley.” Thus Mister Bradley (cat) was named after a British philosopher that the Professor read that Bertrand Russell had liked.
The second day I lived there and just after one of these smoking sessions the garage door opened and Mr. Bradley Cat left the garage. Mr Bradley (cat) immediately spotted me sitting on the back porch and trotted up to me. He squinted up at me in the glare of the morning sun and circled my chair, looking for an invitation to jump up on my lap. That was strange behavior because Mr. Bradley and I did not know each other, and in fact we had never even met. I ignored him, but he was persistent and finally he tried to jump on my lap. He fell to the floor at the last second when he noticed the huge book on my lap.
He had an annoyed expression that seemed to say: Why would somebody be holding a book when they could be holding a cat? That’s when I took the photo.
Mrs. Itchy’s Breakfast Bagel
One side effect of opiate pain killers is itchy skin. I don’t remember if I was scratching an opiate itch or if she was scratching her fleas when I first saw her, but the name fit.
Above is Mrs. Itchy. Four of her large black nipples are visible, identifying her gender to be female. One time when she was sitting upright I counted a total of 8 full-sized nipples and another tiny one that was only half-formed.
Mrs. Itchy was the matriarch of a large tree squirrel clan. Every brooding season, she would bring a litter of 5 or 6 scratchy little babies into my backyard and up onto the deck to beg. The kitchen window opened directly onto the deck and my gf Aelyssa left them nuts on a plate outside the window. I fed them sometimes when I was sitting on the deck.
One time, she accidentally bit my finger while trying to grab a broken almond. It hurt bad, but she held on. I could not jerk my hand away. Blood filled her mouth and spilled down her chin. This must have gone on for a minute before she finally realized my finger wasn't squirrel food. When she let go, it felt like somebody had smashed the tip of my finger with a hammer. Blood was spurting to the rhythm of my heart beat.
Here is Mrs. Itchy just before she bit my finger with those big yellow teeth:
Squirrels don’t seem to excite cats the way an escaped paraqueet does. Mrs. Itchy seemed to know this and had no fear of Mr. Bradley and often passed within inches of him. Mr. Bradley (Cat) never attacked.
------------------------
Except for the time I lived off the grid, I have never been a morning person. I prefer to sleep through as much of the morning as I can. I am more tired than when i went to bed, even after 8 - 10 hours of sleep. All I can do is shuffle around. I cannot speak or be spoken to. Getting out of bed too early is dangerous - I get plantaritis when I step too suddenly on the cold floor. If I try to exercise in the morning, I suffer pulled muscles. I get severe cramps in my calves if I run, and I get searing spasms of pain in whatever muscle I was exercising if I lifted weights. My injuries are so bad that I have had to put off exercise for weeks afterwards.
I think the problem is the hour that I get up. I can go to bed any time between 8 and 4 am, but when I get up at 8 am, I feel awful until 2 or 3 in the afternoon, no matter how much or how little I sleep. However, if I stay in bed until 10 or 11, i can deal with the day. If it is the weekend, I need to sleep until noon.
Despite that, on work mornings, we woke up together and ate together. But one of our problems was that she demanded I wake up early on the weekends too. She was not working, but I was. She was already 2 years into a long vacation, but I had worked the whole time and I needed the weekend to recover from the stress of the work week. I had already explained perhaps 100 times (once for each weekend we lived together) to her that I needed to sleep late on the weekends.
It was this way on a warm Sunday morning late in the Spring. We had left the kitchen window open for fresh air. We often ate in the kitchen on the small table under the window. We could see down the hill and across a river and the main highway and over to the U that was built on the next hill. By 6 am, Aelyssa had already made breakfast. She had set the kitchen table. She served me a toast and spread it with homemade raspberry jam. She poured a cup of coffee for me and left it at my setting beside the bagel on the table under the kitchen window.
One ought never shout indoors. The house is a quiet refuge from the racket of the outside world. Unless there is a fire, nothing is worth shouting about. When someone in the house wants to communicate, they need to go into the same room and speak quietly and calmly.
Aelyssa shared some behaviors with Archie Bunker from the popular TV series All in the Family. One shared trait that the reader might have figured out is that she was the dictator of the house, just like Archie. Archie commanded like a king and bullied and browbeat everyone until they did what he wanted. Also like Archie, she shouted in the house.
At exactly 6.30am Sunday morning, I was awoken from a dead sleep by shouting: “GET UP RIGHT NOW!!!!”
She was in the kitchen, and I was in bed with the covers pulled over my head to keep the cats from licking my face because they hated it when I slept later than they slept. It was Sunday, and I needed to sleep.
“Mrs. Itchy is eating your breakfast: get up!!! Your squirrel is stealing your toast!!” seh said.
More shouting: “Mrs. Itchy drop it!! Get out of bed and get your toast away from that squirrel.“
I got up and shuffled into the kitchen. Aelyssa was still carrying on.
“Mrs. Itchy (Squirrel) stole your breakfast. I guess you don’t get to eat.”
“I thought she was afraid of you. What happened?” I said.
“I went outside for a minute to talk to Mrs. Crabtree,” she said.
Mrs. Crabtree was our other next door neighbor. She did not like squirrels or cats. She chased both species away whenever they wandered into her yard.
“Then Mrs. Itchy was on the table with your toast in her mouth. I tried to get it back, but she ran out the window.”
“How do you know it was Mrs. Itchy?”
“She’s right there,” she pointed out the window.
Sitting upright on the fence was a skinny squirrell with a toast with raspberry jam was hanging of its mouth. She was close enough to make out 2 columns of black nipples. There was a big notch in the bottom outside edge of her left ear. It was Mrs. Itchy.
