Is It Over?

If those prophets were right, the world was supposed to end tonight at 6 p.m.

but if you're reading this, that probably means it didn't happen.  Personally, I'm not ready to be done yet.  How can the world come to an end when there is beauty like this still to be enjoyed?

These are the trees blooming beneath my window, the photo was taken Thursday night in a brief taste of sunshine after several days of rain.  I love the combination of the green and pink colours in this photo, and blossoming trees are one of the things I like best about spring in this corner of the planet.  Now that's what I call rapture.

That Time of Year

Off to the cottage tomorrow for the first time this year.  Time to open it up, clear out the dust and the cobwebs, open the windows and clean out the refrigerator.  Hopefully my sister will be able to get the water running on the first try.  As you may recall, last year, we were without water for the first several weeks of the season.  I am hoping that this year, everything will go smoothly, we're overdue for an easy time of it!

I hope to do a little "saleing" on the way up there.  My friend Stephanie told me that's what her grandmother used to call it, when she'd go shopping the garage sales on a Saturday morning. 

I am leaving behind one quiet, lovely panther-like cat who doesn't spend nearly as much time under the bed as she used to, one poor cat who is, unexpectedly for both of us, going through heat (I feel bad for her but at the same time, I am looking forward to an undisturbed night's sleep!) and one family of cats, a momma and 2 kittens, all of whom get friendlier every day, who I hope will be okay on their own while I'm gone for 36 hours (I'm told they will be and that is not a problem to leave them, but I will still worry). 

Whatever you are doing this first long weekend of the 2011 season, I do hope you will be having fun.  I'll be working hard but enjoying it!

The Garden Door Family

Meet my newest foster cat family.  They have been named the Garden Door Kittens because the momma cat brought them to the back porch of one of Abbey Cats foster moms, knowing they would be well looked after.  Momma cat is named Gardenia (Deeny for short?):

She is a beautiful long-haired calico.  She seems to be settling into my spare bedroom, although she growls a little bit now and then, which sounds more like a rumbling than a growl, as if she is disgruntled rather than afraid or angry.  She is quite happy to let me pet her and comes out from under the bed to let me do so.  No doubt, she's probably still trying to figure out how she got here and who the heck I am.

I'm told she's been hanging around the previous foster mom's backyard for about three years now and this is her 3rd set of kittens (that we know of).  Each time, she has had 2 kittens and a couple from previous years are still hanging about as well.

These two kittens are named after roses.  One is called Polyantha:

and the other is Floribunda:

So far, I can tell them apart because Florrie is just a little bit fluffier than her sister.  She also has a tiny, barely noticeable patch of white under her chin and on her belly.  Polly has a light coloured paw on her left rear foot, as you can see from the photo above.

They are both tortoiseshell cats, which is not a breed of cat but rather a term used to describe their colouring - torties have a mottled colouring with orange or cream and chocolate, black or blue patches.   According to Wikipedia, the more white in the cat's colouring, the more likely the patches of colour are to be more defined, which is how you end up with a calico cat like Gardenia.  Most cats with either of these colourings are female.

At the moment, the plan is that these kittens will be ready for adoption next week, so I don't expect they will be staying with me for too long.  Once again, Katrina doesn't seem to notice or care that there are new cats in the spare room.  Maggie (Lady Killigrew) has been crying at the door, but that may just be because it used to be her room and she likes the view from the window in there.  Hopefully she will settle down, she's been making a fair bit of noise the past two nights since her last kitten left, although she's pretty quiet until the lights go out and I'm trying to sleep (smart girl).

Spot the Cardinal

My friend Kate posted this great photo today on her blog of a cardinal she saw during a recent walk in Sabino Canyon, in Tucson, Arizona:

I love how the red bird is the only bit of bold colour in the photo and how he stands out from the green and gray of the canyon foliage.

Seeing her photo reminded me that I was taking pictures of an elusive cardinal a couple of weeks ago while staying at my friend Heather's house in Virginia.  Here's how my photo turned out:

Can you see the cardinal? Just barely, right? As in, you probably wouldn't know it was there if I hadn't told you.  I was so disappointed, until I realized that my wonderful new camera (the Nikon D3100) had actually taken a reasonably clear shot of the cardinal, all I had to do was crop/enlarge it, like so:

Or even:

The same thing happened when I was trying to get a picture of the rabbit in her back yard on Easter Sunday (no kidding, a real rabbit in the yard on Easter Sunday morning! I went out later looking for eggs but to no avail).  Here's what the first shot looked like:

A not very exciting shot of the side of the neighbour's house and a small brown spot in the grass that could be just about anything, until you crop it down and suddenly, it's a rabbit with a bonus robin in the frame!

Imagine if I had a telephoto lens??  Yes, I am loving my new camera!

Another One Gone

Jackie (a.k.a. Jacquotte Delahay), the last of the Pirate Kittens, went to live at a different foster home tonight, one with five sweet little kittens just two weeks younger than she is (known as the "Spider Kittens"), so that she will be adopted with a second kitten close to her own age.  It was a long ride to her new home, about 45 minutes in the car, along the busy highway in the pouring rain, and she was really well behaved during the trip.  There were a few plaintive meows and mournful cries, the kind that almost break your heart while you try to explain to the wee thing boxed up in the cage that "it won't be long now, we're almost there", but mostly she was quiet and tolerated the noise and uncertainty.  But as soon as we opened the cat carrier at the new place, she walked right out and began exploring her new surroundings.  She didn't seem fazed by the fact that there were 6 other cats in the room, 5 of them smaller than her, and none of her new roommates seemed to mind having her there.  The momma cat there was a tiny thing, she didn't look much older than a kitten herself, only about half the size of Katrina and the Pirate Mom.  As long as she doesn't give Jackie a hard time for being the new kitten on the block, and she didn't seem at all inclined that way, it will be good.

Jackie, the fluffy girl

Now I'm back home, trying not to feel guilty about taking the last kitten away from the momma cat, whom I've been calling Maggie (because "Lady Killigrew" is much too difficult a name for everyday use, as far as I am concerned).  She seems more comfortable about Katrina being around now that there isn't a kitten to watch over, we'll see how things go the next few days as the two spend more time together.  I believe the plan is that she'll stay here with me for at least a few more weeks, and she'll need to be spayed as soon as her milk dries up, but that suits me fine.  She is a very friendly cat, I'm sure we'll continue to get along very well.

Jacquotte Delahay and Lady Killigrew



Visually Inclined

I have a

to take pictures

of things that interest me

as I see them,

where I see them, such as

a keyboard surrounded by coins that look like
Canadian currency but aren't



a Henry Moore sculpture



signs of encouragement




doorbell art



rusty staples with a splash of colour



love on a telephone pole



ROD Toronto May Meeting

Got together yesterday with my friends Diane and Lorraine, whom I first met online when we were all taking Mary Ann Moss' "Remains of the Day" class.  I noticed their Toronto based messages on the Yahoo group, emailed them and suggested we meet up and we've been doing so on a regular basis for a while now.  It's great to have people you can hang out with and talk about the things you enjoy creating, how to's, where to get stuff, who's doing what, etc.  It keeps you motivated and it provides a constant source of inspiration and information.

It was a grey and foggy day yesterday, although the temperature was quite pleasant.  Here's what the view looked like as I drove into the city:

We started off yesterday at an art store downtown that I had never been to before, called Aboveground Art Supplies, on McCaul between Dundas and Queen. 

It's located right next door to the Ontario College of Art & Design (fondly known as OCAD)(check out the funky exterior of their building in the photo below) but I hadn't even heard of it until two weeks ago at Art & Soul when I met a couple of other ladies from Toronto who told me about it.

The store is crammed full of art supplies of every sort, inside an older building that clearly used to be a semi-detached house, with two staircases on either side of one wall and small rooms leading in and out of each other.  I picked up some 22x30 inch sheets of Fabriano Artistico 140 lb. watercolour paper to take on my trip to Portugal next month with Teesha and Tracy Moore, as well as a few other treats.

As Diane was possibly about to receive a phone call to say her daughter was in labour, we decided to grab some lunch next and walked a few blocks to Baldwin Street, which is filled with a collection of funky stores and restaurants (and poetry on telephone poles).

On our way to lunch, we stopped off at each of our cars to do a quick show and tell of various goodies we had brought to show one another.  Our get-togethers always involve show and tell, as we are each always in the midst of taking a class, creating a new journal, just back from a trip, etc. and there are always goodies to show and share.  Usually we spread out in someone's home or across a restaurant table but since we weren't sure how much time we would have and whether or not it was about to rain, this was the first time we did it in our vehicles!

Along the way, we passed this guy, who was offering his paintings for sale while dressed for wet weather in a red rubber coat and matching boots:

Here's where we ate, delicious eggplant and goat cheese paninis on calabrese bread:

After lunch, we paid a visit to Curry's (another art store) and picked up a few more bits and pieces (better prices on Copic markers, in case you were wondering).  Diane headed home (no phone call, so no new baby just yet) and Lorraine and I headed off to The Paper Place on Queen Street West to check out their selection of decorative tapes (sorry for the fuzzy photo, must have been the excitement of seeing this many tapes all in one spot):

I couldn't resist picking up a few, including these ones with the Paris theme:

Rain, traffic congestion, closed roads and detours all combined to make my drive home slow and somewhat frustrating but other than that, it was a great day out with my fellow craft monkeys.  Looking forward to our next get-together and in the meantime, I'll be getting busy with my new art supplies.  Thanks for a lovely day, ladies!