feral cat

as i worked in the backyard tonight, cutting up the tree we started killing yesterday, a cat snuck into the house thru the open back door. but not just any cat. of the 6 who show up on our deck every morning, 2 of the females are pregnant; and this was one of them.

we didn't even know it had gotten in until the girls and hege, who were getting ready for bed by reading a book upstairs, heard it crying. so we started a methodical search, quickly found it in the basement, and then chased it around for almost an hour.

evenutally we convinced ourselves that the terrorfied cat must have bolted out the open back door when we weren't looking, because we'd looked everywhere and had heard nothing for almost another hour. so we went to bed.

12:30 - awoke to animal sounds somewhere near our bed.

primative defense/kill instinct kicked in. i jumped up and closed the kids door, bravely sacrificing ourselves in order to save their lives. and we immediately locate the cat, sitting in the middle of the kitchen, wailing or whatever. making feral cat slam poetry.

it sees me seeing it, and off it runs back down to the basement. we're wide awake now. like hunters.

you have to understand the amount of stuff in my basement. building supplies/wood to rebuild the entire damn house. power tools, a home office, and a decade of accumulated boxes. kids clothes, records, a 40 gallon hefty bag full of 8 track tapes i found years ago, an 8 track tape player i found recently, a male torso manaquin, etc. a pregnant feral cat.

there are two elevated platforms in the basement; one is a stair landing, and the other is currentlysort of a home office. mass Stuff is crammed underneath both of these in an attempt to make the main volume of the space navigatable. the cat was, most probably, under one of these.

first we started climbing under the office (about 4' clearance without the boxes), and after about 15 minutes with me beating every surface wildly with a toy plastic tennis racket and hege conducting probes with a level, we flushed the thing and it ran out. i managed to whack it (lightly, even lovingly) with the racket as it went by just because i could think of nothing else to do. it bolted directly across the basement to the stair landing and dove under. so we spent another 15 minutes carefully moving all the sheetrock and wood stacked up against this platform and barricading the office platform. we opened the backdoor, and i lowered myself in like a tunnel rat.

we started probing again under the landing, which has a 30" clearance and is full of paint cans, sacks of quickcrete, 2 air conditioners, re-mesh, and those paper tubes used as forms for concrete footings. the cat was inside one of the tubes, which was itself inside a big roll of re-mesh. we carefully excavated everything from around it and i crawled back with an old plastic shower curtain (that we were saving?) to shove in the back end of the tube and trap the cat. hege stationed herself at the front.

and it worked. and we carefully pulled the whole thing out and walked it to the backyard for the release. i was like Marlon Perkins except in my boxer shorts in the middle of the night in my backyard in brooklyn with a tube stuffed with a blue plastic shower curtain, and everybody covered in basement spelunking grime. now i'm wide awake.

context shot

this is the feral cat spider hole

mothers day

the girls and i got up early (or let hege sleep in) and set a table and made waffles/ norwegian breakfast. they got dressed up to surprise her. it was a very nice morning.

after working in the yard, we went for an early cook-out at Jed & Julie's newly bought brownstone on 2nd street in park slope. a beautiful place, needing a little work. they weren't nearly unpacked, but did have a new grill and some steak as big as our children. Jack and Rebecca brought the drinks - with Jack bringing a small bars-worth of ingredients and bottles of wine. he made grapefruit margauritas, with shaved grapefruit peels, crushed ice, and confectioners sugar (instead of the salt-ring), using a top-notch Tequila he likes. We brought a couple of chocolate cakes we picked up on the way at the local mexican bakery. the girls played happily and we all got to sit around and do a lot of talking and laughing. it was a good day.

Here's a short video the girls made for hege that morning:

all dressed up

and ultimately no where to go.

a grandmother on our block cornered hege last week and practically begged that hennie & mette come to her grandson's 5th birthday party (we don't know the child or mother at all - never even seen them). natrually hege agreed. but when she asked when and where, Rose told her it was on Friday night from 7-10 PM! waaaaayyyyy out in brooklyn (out near JFK airport). I was angry about it all week; could not believe that someone would be stupid enough to have a birthday party (at a rented indoor playground) until 10 oclock at night?! our girls go to bed at 8. but they were so excited, we had to do it, and planned to stay for only an hour.

here they are dressed up and ready - we drove all the way out, getting lost twice, and walked into the place. an employee and the mother walked up to us with a very confused look on their face and we told them we were there for Noah's party. they looked at our invitation and politely noted that Hege had confused the RSVP date with the actual party date, which was one week later.

we earnestly apologized to the girls and drove off to find some icecream. remarkably, they took it all in stride.

from the desk of hennie lowe

hennie took great care to 'organize and decorate' her desk the other day. complete with telephone just like mama's desk.

hennie's first slumber party

Una's daughter Mia had her 4th Birthday party recently. It started as two large parties (one for the kids, mostly upstairs playing, and the other for all the parents in the backyard and 1st floor eating and drinking). Towards the end of the night all the girls who wanted to stay got their pajamas on and the parents left. Una took this photo in the middle of the night, standing on a chest next to Mia's bed. they had more fun then they thought was possible.

when i came over to una's late the next morning, they were all putting on fingernail polish and painting their faces like animals with greasepaint.

La. Purchase Gardens & Zoo

on the last day of our visit, on the way out to the airport, we gave ourselves enough time to stop by Monroe's Zoo. I (nor Mother for that matter), had been since I was a child. Its in a rough neighborhood outside of town, surrounded by abject poverty and desolate living situations. So our expectations were low. I was braced to be quite depressed actually.

but to our surprise, it was beautiful and well maintained. not every exhibit was what it should or could have been, and one or two we did actually find to be quite bad (the Hippo House), but the vast majority of the zoo was happy, clean, and very professionally presented. The grounds and landscaping were fantastic too.

the zoo is crossed by a maze of picturesque canals; as we stood on an arching wooden bridge, two swans swam beneath us. Peacocks roamed freely on the sidewalks, and the girls could not believe their eyes while standing next to real live flamingos.

the 'australian' section

leaving for the airport - it was a great way to end what had been a truely fun and relaxing vacation

(easter) at Wal-Mart

one day we went on a grocery run and on the way back to the car i spotted this guy and we walked up to him. he was incredibly nice, with a soft, high-pitched voice, and couldn't have been more willing to let the girls hop into his .... car?

i forgot who made this thing, but he said he hadn't customized it. it was actually a production model motorcycle from the 70's, and that only about 1000 of them were ever made.

hennie drawings

we bought each of us (all 4) small bound drawing books before traveling to louisiana for easter - something to draw on while on the plane. it turned out to be a much bigger hit than i'd imagined it would be, and hennie especially has taken a very personal interest in maintaining hers. maybe its a pre-diary.

we often, as an alternative to reading books, put on some music and all get our books, the markers, and draw for a while before bed.

here are some of hennie's drawings (mettes are still a bit formless, but i'll post some before too long because i can see that she's following a similar arc as hennie):

she's very attuned to 3/4 views - i explained it to her a very long time ago and she got very excited because she understood what i meant. and she's very proud when she draws what she really sees (or in this case, imagines). she makes a point of telling me that only part of the right eye can be seen, and the nose is shown from the side, etc.

this was supposedly a drawing of mette, done tonight.

this she did on the way to louisian, maybe the first drawing in the book. the top text she did herself, backwards (its not scanned in reverse). I have no idea why - she did it when we weren't watching. she said the glass was wine, with a flower in it. the portrait is, as noted, of Mette.

and this she did tonight while i sat still and she carefully studied me as she drew each feature. i think its fantastic and love it. she was so proud because she new how successful she was being as she drew it - it actually looked like me. she started by trying to copy the shape of my face, and paid attention to the shape of my glasses and my mouth in particular. the last was the hair, which she seemed to have a lot of fun with; laughing and telling me that it was 'doing crazy things tonight' as she drew each section of it. my ears are not nearly that big, but i think she made them larger because she was trying to draw the lines she saw in them.

egg hunt

this was easter morning, finding the baskets the easter bunny had left by the back door for them.












the most cleverly hidden egg was the very last to be discovered

Easter

we took a ride thru the fields in mother's truck. hennie and i got to hang our legs out the back and just shoot the breeze.

one of the biggest events of the week was the nightly bubble bath in the whirlpool. we'd fill it up with bubble bath and turn the jets on the whole thing would whip itself into a giant dollop of foam. the girls would dive in like it was edible and swim and play for as long as we could stand to laugh at them.

gonyaws

aunt carolyn, Judy and 3 of her kids were nice enough to drive all the way over from Mesquite, Texas to spend the day with us. we smoked a couple of chickens w/ rosemary over pecan wood (gathered by durwood and hennie) and served them with sauteed endive, roasted new potatos and homemade sourdough bread. It all worked out well, and we spent a very easy afternoon lounging around the fire, talking, and raiding Durwood's wine closet. we hadn't seen carolyn and judy for many years, and never met Kristen, Shelby, or Wesley.

the girls loved meeting the older kids, who were probably a bit bored at times. but they are great kids and took a lot of kind interest in playing with hennie & mette and including them in everything they did. here's hennie looking up to wesley, literally and figuratively.

incredulous judy

shelby, kristen, & durwood









hennie got her first glimpse at kids sporting cell phones - and she was easily hooked.

aunt carolyn was looking great

nobody was sure of the genetic taxonomy of all the relationships there, but these two are def. related. first, second, third or removed a few times, but still related.