Thursday Doors: Oregon Drive

Mount Shasta, August 2017

A couple of years ago, I had several posts associated with driving my daughter to college at Willamette University. That drive took several days because we stopped to admire Mt. Shasta or to sample the sights in interesting little towns along the way. She was a new driver then, having passed her test only a couple weeks before we left, and we split the driving about 50/50.

We made the same drive again this year, for a different reason. She moved off campus for her second two years, and she wanted to take the cat, Sadie, to live with her.

I’m also giving my daughter my old car, a 2012 baby blue Mazda 5. She learned to drive in that car, and feels comfortable in it. The magnet I bought for the rear hatch door fell off sometime ago, but the car fits in here. It will be useful to have a minivan to carry stuff around.

She drove the whole way from California this time. I got to doze off in the passenger seat.

Car hatch door with bearcat magnet

Sadie the cat did better than we expected. We were concerned that she might meow her head off for 10 hours, making the trip unpleasant for all 3 of us. But the vet gave her a pill, and, mildly sedated, she spent most of the time sleeping in her carrier. Occasionally she meowed, but just enough to let us know she was still there.

At the pet-friendly Motel 6 we opened the door to her cat carrier to let her out, but she didn’t venture far.  She wasn’t crazy about the trip in general, and is glad to have gotten here!

Cat carrier door stayed closed most of the time

And the final door for this post is the door to their new home:

An interesting green, newly painted. It’s a charming little house. Now it just needs some furniture!

For Norm’s “Thursday Doors.” I’m getting back to it this week!

Thursday Doors is a weekly feature allowing door lovers to come together to admire and share their favorite door photos from around the world. I find it a fun way to focus and curate my many, many travel photos!

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Thursday Doors: Fierce Cat

Early in the morning, before sunup, there was a crazy ruckus at our back door, the one that leads out onto the back deck. Sadie, our cat, was yowling and hissing.

Then she attacked at something she could see through the glass door. There, on the other side, barely visible behind the reflection of the room lights, is her foe slinking away.

Note: this is not Sadie’s reflection. She is a tabby/Siamese mix. This is a neighborhood black cat with white feet. I haven’t been able to get a good look at it or picture of it yet.

Thursday Doors is a weekly feature allowing door lovers to come together to admire and share their favorite door photos from around the world. Feel free to join in on the fun by creating your own Thursday Doors post and then sharing it, between Thursday morning and Saturday noon (North American Eastern Time), on the linky list at Norm 2.0’s blog. 

 

 

 

Mundane Monday: Making a Move

Today’s Mundane Monday blogging prompt is “Making a Move.” On Dr KO’s blog, the move involves a cat.

I tried the new Word Press editor last night on my blog. Change is inevitable: even if it ain’t broke, people still try to fix it. So I was planning to “make a move” to the new editor. Use blocks! Paragraphs! Pictures! Galleries! It’ll be so easy, and my blogging efficiency and posting frequency will skyrocket!

Epic fail.

The problem for me centered on the picture galleries and the captions. They don’t work on iphones or ipads (at least). If you put your pictures into a gallery on the phone while you are waiting for a long intermission to finish, when you get back to the computer to finish up the post, the computer doesn’t recognize the pictures as a gallery at all and turns those gallery blocks into lists.  In list mode, rather than being under the pictures, the captions were to one side. And there were weird, annoying bullet points next to the text. The placement of the pictures wasn’t right either.

So I re-made all the galleries in the new editor and published the post. It looked fine to me. Then I got an email from a friend. On his ipad, my blog looked like this, with the pictures STILL messed up.

New editor gallery block fail

So I went back to the classic editor. The blog looks fine now.  I hope. I’m not making that move yet. But please read the blog–I worked hard on it! Thanks to these editorial snafus, I didn’t get it published until very late, when most people east of me had already gone to bed.

When I first read this prompt, “making a move,” I actually thought of something different, however: a physical move. I am working on my holiday letter, which always puts me in a retrospective mood. I scroll back through most of the current year’s pictures, and sometimes those from previous years too. Three years ago, we got ready to make one of the biggest moves of our lives.

This is our realtor’s gift of flowers and a balloon, congratulating us on our new house (set in front of the door of the old house):

And our cars, on a truck ready to move across the country:

And our empty house:

This post about the move, “Gandalf’s Knock,” is still, more than three years later, my most-viewed post.

Am I glad we moved? Yes. But more on that another time . . .

 

 

Mundane Monday: Warm

This week’s Mundane Monday post from Dr. KO was so cute that I’m just going to copy it. I love sleeping kitties (and non-sleeping ones).

 Our cat, Sadie, spends most of the daylight hours lying around and sleeping. We adopted her as an adult from the Humane Society of Silicon Valley. She started out living in our daughter’s room and it’s still her primary residence, even though our daughter is in college in Oregon now. I’ve posted pictures of her on this blog before, particularly this one: Sleeping Kitty.  The sunshine comes through the window onto the bedspread and blankets and makes her warm and cozy.  So the theme of this blog will be Sadie’s favorite blankets.

She particularly likes fleece, which the Humane Society had already figured out. It took us a little longer. First we tried this maroon cat bed, which she liked for a while, as long as it was under the desk:

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Then she migrated to our daughter’s bed, which she preferred, ignoring the cat bed altogether.

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She was especially happy and warm with the blue fleece starry blanket.

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Our son’s bed was not her favorite, until we put a fleece blanket on it too . . . I got this blanket as a gift from my former employer when I had our son, my second baby (now 15). 

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Sadie’s other home, besides the kids’ bedrooms, is the guest bedroom, except when I’m practicing my violin in there!

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And then there is our daughter’s high school graduation blanket. (School colors: black and gold) Black fleece, for maximal display of cat hair!

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Mundane Monday: Wordless Cat

Dr. Katherine’s Mundane Monday photo shows her cat communicating without words. I know this prompt could be interpreted more broadly, but I can never resist a chance to show pictures of my cat.

We adopted Sadie in 2016, as an adult. She is part-Siamese and a little cross-eyed.She was pretty quiet when she first came to live with us, but lately she has gotten more vocal. She has always been quite expressive without words, even when she didn’t meow much.

Why did you wake me up?

Where’s my food?

Oh, there it is!

What do you want to do now?

No, not that again!

Oy! Guess I’ll play along . . .

Sometimes she’s cute, sometimes she’s fierce:

Or, queen of all she surveys:

Mundane Monday: Great Wall Shopping

The Mutianyu area near Beijing is a great place to visit the Great Wall of China. It’s not crowded, a long stretch of the wall itself is restored to good condition, the surrounding natural scenery is beautiful, and it has a chair lift and toboggan! But today I’ll focus on the mundane aspects of the visit: what you see when you pay your money.

Mundane Monday: Framed Cat

So I hear the Mundane Monday Challenge might be winding down. Only a couple of more weeks! The challenge is to find a mundane object and frame it beautifully. I think I have to settle for interesting, rather than beautiful, when it comes to frames. But I never go wrong with cat pictures.

Thursday Doors: Happy Halloween!

Halloween is traditionally a time when you see a lot of doors. It’s dark, and you knock on your neighbors’ doors and ask them for candy. These might be doors you never knock on any other day of the year.

Thursday Doors on Friday: The Norma

I guess it’s a thing now: in my universe, Thursday Doors happens on Friday. You know, maybe I could learn to use the handy dandy Word Press post scheduling function . . . or not. Maybe next week.

Mundane Monday: Sleeping Kitty

Our cat Sadie has been living with us for a little over 6 months. She sleeps a lot. Most cats do, but she seems to do it even more than most. This isn’t just a subject for Mundane Monday. It’s for Mundane Tuesday, and Mundane Wednesday, and . .