This morning the bird baths have frozen over and vegetable plants are drooping in the frosted garden. In this cold weather, the birds are appreciating extra food. The wax eyes like sugar water, and berry truffles in coconut feeders – while still keeping busy in the camellias. The blackbirds enjoy apple and pear cores and persimmon skins when they aren’t digging along the garden edges. Felix sometimes sits in the tree above the coconut feeders for hours. The sun is out and it’s a good day for drying washing on the line. Soon, the broad beans will perk up again.
Later this morning, Felix is keeping a look-out above the coconut feeder.
This is the aftermath of the free form painting of two great-nephews, aka Michelangelo and Da Vinci, when they were in town this weekend. There were a couple of disagreements, or contrattempi, but they were mostly harmonious as they worked, unlike the famous Italian rivals.
The work of two painting prodigies aged 3 and 5. I can’t wait to see what their little sister (aged 5 months) will create.
I was delighted to see them heading straight for the paints – no interest in coloured pencils or screens. They were very generous with squeezing paint from the tubes, mixing colours like there’s no tomorrow, experimenting with all the brushes, and applying layer after layer to the paper, as you can see. Their output was astounding.
So in the moment was I that it didn’t occur to me to photograph them as they worked so, for the photo, I’ve used paintings from their last visit in April (the style remains the same) as they were keen to take the latest ones away with them. Their dad had the genius idea of drying the thickly layered pages in front of the log burner so the paintings could be transported safely. I’m sure their intended recipients are thrilled and the work will be festooning fridge doors from here to Dunedin.
Their April paintings are carefully filed with the creative work of their mother, aunts and uncles; all of it named and dated – a record of their output over several years (See April post Family Time) when they spent school holidays at my house. This weekend’s visit reminded me of those happy days.
We are down to our last log basket of the November delivery of firewood and it looks as though we’ll be needing the fire for another two or three months. We’ve found the (low-emission) log burner to be the best way to heat our nearly 100-year-old house which has single-glazed windows but is otherwise well insulated. People were clearly tougher than us in the past. Perhaps they did more manual labour. I found the house too hot when I came in for lunch hot and sweaty from lugging and stacking wood today.
The delivery of kiln-dried, ready-to-burn firewood arrived this morning. It usually takes me an hour per cubic metre to stack, a total of three hours for the minimum they’ll deliver of 3 cubic metres, but this time it took only 2 hours. That doesn’t count the time I took to tidy up the wood shed space. I paused in the first hour to put on a lighter jumper and to pump up the wheelbarrow tyre. Felix supervised for a while, then went inside to sleep. I had a brain blip at the start; stacking the firewood the wrong way round. So strange – it’s not as if I haven’t stacked wood many times before!
Wood shed readyThe second wheelbarrow loadAn odd way of stacking woodFelix keeps an eye on proceedingsProgress after 1 hourAll done in 2 hours
Absolutely loving RNZ’s countdown of the top 100 NZ waiata as voted for by listeners. I didn’t vote, despite thinking I would choose Dave Dobbyn’s Welcome Home for its compassionate message and gentle, catchy tune. There are so many to choose from across a huge range of genres and talented artists and it’s great to hear the songs we love.
Some of the songs are nostalgic and others are new to me. I found myself singing along to Tūtira Mai Ngā Iwi, dancing to Untouchable Girls, while Nobody Gets what they Want Anymore astounded me with its beauty.
What a great way to spend the Matariki national holiday! As I listen to the songs and the messages coming in from listeners, I have a sense of the whole country going about their day while enjoying the music. What speaks more of Aotearoa than our music?
This evening, Mum and I rolled our eyes and tutted with disbelief at some pampered pets on television, doted on by their humans. Then, we simultaneously looked at Felix lounging on a favourite fireside chair.
How does he sleep with his head upside down? And his eye open.
I ordered more firewood this morning to see us through winter. The wood pile has been steadily diminishing as we have the fire on all day lately with this cold, and now wet, weather. We have to keep Felix warm, after all.
The rain isn’t of apocalyptic proportions as it is in other parts of the country, thankfully. The garden plants must appreciate it after a long, dry period. There is broccoli and rainbow chard to pick for dinner, and loads of lemons for my winter-cold, throat-soothing drinks (with fresh ginger and manuka honey).
Inside, Felix looks content in his fire-side chair (although he is surely uncomfortable holding out from using his litter tray), while we are transported to the other side of the world and other times by our books, and a batch of home-made chocolate-chip biscuits further lifts our spirits.
Thank you to everyone expressing concern about Felix. After an early visit to the vet this morning, he is much better – and so am I! The vet found what is probably a cat-fight wound on Felix’s back and gave him two shots: antibiotics and anti-inflammatory. Back home, Felix ate some food and is now settled on Mum’s bed.
This whole episode reinforces how important it is to keep Felix in at night. I’ll be more alert when we come in the front door at night – managing Mum’s slow progress with her walking stick, closing doors to keep him in, pursuing him straight away if he does get out, and not expecting that he will come back inside any minute now. That would avoid all that worry, and the trepidation that I felt when I opened the sitting room door this morning; was he still alive?
I also discovered from the website last night that The Cat Vet is open in the weekends and that clients are encouraged to ring if they are concerned about their cat out of hours. (But there’s that thing where you don’t like to bother people.) I can’t praise the vet enough for giving Felix an appointment at such short notice, doing a careful and lengthy examination, testing his urine (he’d peed in his carrier), eliminating the possibility of toxins or a blockage, taking his weight and temperature (which was up, indicating a fever), explaining everything to me, and even cleaning up his carrier (well, the vet nurse did that). I have more syringes of anti-inflammatory to give him and am advised to keep him inside – not difficult on this rainy day.
Felix has been on this chair for two days. He hasn’t eaten or toileted and isn’t interested in the water I’ve offered him.
His eyes are quite bright, but he moves stiffly when he stands up and turns around on the chair.
Despite my efforts to keep him in at night, he managed to get out when we got home late on Friday. I sat up until after midnight waiting for him to come in, and went outside calling to him. In the end, I went to bed. He was on the chair in the morning – and has been there ever since.
It’s a happy hearthside hierarchy in our household as winter bites. As the day goes on we rotate seats as in musical chairs – dictated by Felix, of course.
This comment on Reddit made me laugh. For days I’ve been trying to remove Greek which has been taking over my google searches. It got worse when I tried to change it in my google profile settings: all the instructions were in Greek! The Greek script is beautiful, but incomprehensible to me. I just had to guess, interpreting the icons, until I got it right. But still Greek keeps popping up.
I trace the problem back to the photo of a Greek inscription I took for my last post, Old School, and asked google to translate it. I’m guessing that AI has made all manner of assumptions as a result.
I can see from the comments on Reddit that lots of other people have had the same problem, sometimes after travelling to another country. One commented that Arabic and Hebrew are even more incomprehensible and are read from right to left. Even if the Greek went from right to left I couldn’t read it.
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