I've been piecing together the story of Biscuit's life for the past year. Over the Christmas holidays, as neighbors dropped by to share some seasonal cheer, a few more pieces fell into place.

I already told you about the big cat's early life. The big Maine Coon cat and his brother Gravy belonged to a relative of one of the Davis brothers (of Davis Ranch). They grew up in the country about 5 years ago, and were happy there playing with their doggie buddies and hunting in the fields. Then coyotes killed Gravy. Biscuit was taken to the shop at Davis Ranch. The shop is not quite a mile from my house, it's where the tractors are kept and maintained. There are several outbuildings there and the guys like to keep cats around to keep the mice in check.

Biscuit hung around the shop for a couple of years, then he would disappear for a week at a time. He was a tomcat, and was evidently out tomcatting. We know this because this year when the neighbors came around and saw him sitting on my porch, or in the chair in my living room, each one of them said, "I have a cat that looks just like that at home. It was a feral kitten."

I'd already suspected Biscuit is Wesley's father. Wesley has a small head and finer bones, like his feral mother's family, but he's a big, big cat. When he stands next to Biscuit, they're about the same height and length. And the same color, with the same markings.

The last mystery about Biscuit was cleared up when the neighbor from the seed company across the field stopped by. She said, "So he's still alive! I haven't seen him for 2 months, he always came around and stayed for 3 or 4 days, then he'd be gone for a week." That would be the week he was at my house.

When he was at the seed company, Biscuit kept the rats and mice under control, and caught jackrabbits in the alfalfa fields. He wasn't wild, but they couldn't pet him.

So now the only mystery is which of my neighbors caught the big guy this fall and hauled him off to SPCA to have him neutered? No one is confessing. I think the neighborhood has lost its might hunter, though. The big guy has totally become a lap cat.

My house had become a war zone. Biscuit is wise. Even when he appears to be sleeping (which is always) he knows all, sees all, hears all.

Part of the problem was the winter solstice. I only had to hang on for a few more days and the days would start getting longer again. There would be hope!

In the meantime, the halls were not being decked. There was no fa la la. I was down to my last 2 sacks of pellets for the stove. Home Depot was out of them, they didn't know when they'd get more. How about in frigging July, when nobody will need them, you idiots?

I had been filling the wood box every 3 days, using a lot of wood. It was going faster than normal because I'm down to the old, soft wood that burns quicker. If this was Idaho instead of California, it would be colder and more of a problem, but that didn't stop me from whining about it.

I did try to do a little holiday decorating. I bought several poinsettias. I had to stack books and other junk around them to keep Wesley from knocking them down and breaking the branches off them. That just made him more determined to destroy them.

So, my Christmas decorations today consist of 4 raggedy poinsettias with about half the flowers ruined.

The cats had a peaceful Christmas, though, because I left them home alone, picked up cousin Beverly, and we both went to Bob and Anna's apartment for a Christmas brunch and to trade a few silly gifts. I didn't get a single picture of that.

A couple of days after Christmas Anna and one of her friends came out and planted the 200 tulips I'd bought a couple of months ago. I think spring will be glorious. This spring we'll be celebrating Bob's 30th birthday. The tulips were blooming when we brought him home from the hospital.

Here are a couple of random things I found to close out the year. Bob's aunts on his dad's side of the family are Patty and Tina. Look here!


What are the odds that a random dog rescue page would have puppies named Patty and Tina on the same page?

The fine lady below is called Baddie Winkle. She evidently has quite a following on the internet.


She's my new fashion inspiration. Here's another fashion that I find intriguing: a peacock dress. The hair is interesting, too.


In the winter I often wear only two sets of clothes. When I wear one, I wash the other. Both "outfits" consist of sweatshirts and jeans. I have been known to build a roaring fire in the Buck stove, put my huge old ski jacket on over my sweatshirt and jeans, and fall asleep in the chair in the living room. There is only one chair in there right now, Grandma Betty's old chair. She was about 5'2" tall, the chair fit her perfectly. Me, not so much. It's cozy, though, when all three cats are sleeping on top of me. That's the only time they get along.

This is trending toward Crazy Cat Lady, isn't it?

Well, okay then.

A couple of days ago I told you what my current practices are for the Christmas season. My son has his own. He and Anna live in a small apartment, so their goal to completely fill it with Christmas shouldn't take too long.


Anna is the queen of glitter glue. We had Thanksgiving dinner at my house and she brought some pumpkins in for decorations. Bob and Anna cooked, there were 9 of us who ate and enjoyed a good time. It was a little strange because there was no furniture in the living room.

A couple of months ago I'd asked one of the Jims from Davis Ranch to haul all my living room furniture to the dump. He showed up 2 days before Thanksgiving. Well, OK. Whatever. We dragged Grandma Betty's old rocking chair out of Bob's room, threw some pillows on the floor and set up a couple of folding chairs. That worked.

The Thanksgiving leftovers were barely gone from the refrigerator when Bob and Anna came back to start Christmas.


Not a typical tree saw, but not a chainsaw, either.


I sat on the tailgate while the kids disappeared into the forest. The noisy forest, full of people arguing over which was the perfect tree. When Bob was little, he'd be out in the trees a month ahead of time. I painted him a sign that said "This tree reserved for Bob." He'd mark the tree he wanted, then we'd go back after it a couple of weeks before Christmas. Most years he changed his mind and cut a different tree. One year we found the sign on a different tree.

It took a long time, but they finally came back with a tree.


It looks to me like it's wide enough to take up a third of their living room.


And it has two tips. "No problem," Bob says. "We have two ornaments for the top."

They also evidently have enough lights for 3 trees, every window in the house, and more. They've had a wonderful time shopping for decorations. I hope they have an open house so we can all see.

I think that instead of trying to ban assault weapons, we should simply declare that anyone seen in public with one can legally be shot on sight, questions asked later.

There is no good reason for anyone to be carrying a gun like that in public. If the U.S. is invaded and we need homies with assault weapons for protection, then we can amend the law. Meanwhile, you carry them at your own peril.

Dominique bantams are my primary breed. I also keep a few (fewer than a dozen) white OEGB. In this picture, the bird on the right is my 14 year old hen, #2. The birds on the left are a DB cockerel and his "daughter" a late hatched OEGB. 

My OE are not good mothers, they are great setters, but will kill babies that hatch. This pullet was a lone chick, hatched a month after anything else. I pulled her out of her mother's pen and brought her in. I had no other chicks to go with her, so I took the last-hatched DB and put him with her. 

He forgot about his buddies and adopted her right away. He clucked to her like an old hen to get her to eat and drink, he tried to spread his feathers and sit on her. To this day she's his baby. 

Sooooo. I brought #2 in the house as soon as it got cold outside. She has spent the past 3 winters inside. But this year she just wasn't enthusiastic about her life. I brought the other two in to keep her company. That hasn't worked the way I planned. 

At least 4 times a day the old hen picks a fight through the divider, the cockerel reacts by protecting his precious baby. The old hen loves this, all the while she's doddering around and trying to fight, she clucks happily. No chickens have been harmed to make this story.

Davis Ranch sold sweet corn through mid-November this year, a month longer than usual. I can't testify to how "winter" corn tastes because I didn't try it. I don't eat much corn anyway, and it loses its appeal to me after August.

The corn maze field, which is planted with field corn, still stands green and tall. The recent frosts have nipped the leaves a bit, but it still waits to be cut and fed to cows. This is the first season in 3 or 4 that the corn maze field didn't get blown over before Halloween.

The picture above is indicative of what's happening here right now. Corn season is past. There are still a few dried stalks of sweet corn swirling around with the breezes. Christmas tree season started on the day after Thanksgiving. It has been sunny and dry. The rains that helped green the foothills don't last very long down here on sandy topsoil. This picture was taken in the road, by the way, not in a field. There are no rocks in the fields here. And this is all that's left of all the roads being rocked a couple of years ago. The rocks sink out of sight and soon the roads have to be re-rocked.

Christmas tree season started in a big way. With a traffic jam. I asked one of the Jims why there are so many people so early. He said most of them are return customers and they know that later in the season the choices aren't as good. I think there are 50,000 trees out there, but some are very tall and some were just planted last January. I should think there would still be a good choice of trees, they all look the same to me. Maybe people just wanted to take advantage of the sunny day. It's not as much fun cutting your own tree if you have to lay down in mud to do it.


These pictures were taken the Friday after Thanksgiving. A lot of the people were parents who brought their children (or their dogs) to help pick a tree. Children are a lot of help, as this dad found.


Once in a while his son held onto the tip of the tree to help "carry" it. I told the dad to hang in there, in 10 years he could sit in his car with a cup of hot chocolate and let the kid do all the work.

This is another common scene. What to do with the tree after it's cut.


Another helpful kid.

You could take a lawn chair and a thermos of warm drinks and have a great time sitting out in the field listening to the chatter as people search for their perfect tree. Some, probably those who cut a tree that was too tall last year, walk up to a tree and extend their arm to see how high the tree is, maybe in comparison to the space available at their house. Even the trees that aren't especially tall can be very wide at the base, and people argue about that, too.

And then there are the guys who don't pick up a saw at the entrance booth. They bring their chain saws. One fellow's saw had to be carried by 2 guys, it was so big. They ended up cutting a tree that was no bigger than the one on the van above. That's 2 minutes' work with a handsaw, but only 15 seconds with a chainsaw. Then 2 people had to haul the saw back to the truck while one more dragged the tree.

I don't cut a tree. When Bob was little, it seemed important to do Christmas the "right" way. We decorated the whole house, baked dozens of cookies, had Christmas carols playing in the background. Now there is just the simple reality: Christmas trees are messy and it's not fun to take them down and cookies are a bad thing unless company is coming to eat them. The carols are still fine once in a while.

There were two poultry shows in November. The first was in Ventura and the next weekend there was a show in Sonora. Ventura is in Southern California. It's a 7 hour drive for me but I don't mind. There's no driving through the traffic mess in SoCal, the Ventura turn off is the first highway when you come down off the Grapevine. That road goes directly west, toward the ocean. The show grounds, in fact, are almost right on the beach.

There is a paved walkway along the beach. I observed two kinds of pedestrians: chubby people walking their dogs and thin jogger ladies. All the joggers wore similar tight clothes and all had long, blonde pony tails, like they were auditioning for a role.

It was warm that weekend. One of the judges, who came in from Montana, happily wore a t-shirt and bermuda shorts. One of my birds was Best of Breed. One of Parker's (from my stock) was Reserve of Breed. Here I am with Parker, on the left, and Brett, on the right.


I look dusty and faded out in this picture. That's pretty much how I felt, too.

The show in Sonora is a two hour drive from my house. I made the drive twice because I help put on the show. The first trip I took the awards and raffle items, and other show-related stuff. I had made these banners as awards:


The embroidery was commercially done, then I sewed them into banners. What a task! I probably had not sewed anything since the last costume Bob needed for a play at the Waldorf school. After I finally found the sewing machine, it took me 3 days to remember how to use it. The hardest thing was trying to use the foot pedal. I have neuropathy, I can barely feel where the pedal is, and then it slides around the floor. It worked better when I duct-taped it to the floor.

Some of my seams are crooked. Even after I pulled them out and resewed them a couple of times. But the people who won them were happy. I would have been happier if I'd been one of the winners.

Cousin Beverly had also been busy with a project for the show. She made this afghan and a pillow for the raffle.


It was a very popular item and made lots of money for the show. As a bonus, she also made a small afghan with a rooster on it for me, and another pillow that I kept.

I dropped things off at the show, helped set up, then drove back home to get my birds ready. Anna came over when she got off work. We washed and primped birds until late that night, then got up at 5 a.m. and drove back up to the show.

The show was quite successful. We had a lot of fun. Then we stayed and helped take the cages down and sweep shavings off the floor. Aaargh. All of my old 4-H friends know what I mean. The show manager excused us about 7 p.m., we loaded the birds in the car, went back to the restaurant at the hotel and had a late dinner with the judges and a couple of other exhibitors. That was a fun part.

The birds stayed in their carriers in the car all night, which they don't mind because they just sleep in their carriers anyway. The next morning we drove back down through the foothills and finally stopped for breakfast in Plymouth at the Dead Fly cafe.

I love having Anna as a traveling partner. If Bob ever manages to get back to showing, he's going to find that she has more friends there than he does.

...without a blog post.

When you don't do this every day, or even a couple of times a week, posting something becomes a difficult task. But this morning it's very chilly here, I can't accomplish anything outside until it warms a bit, and it's taking a while to even get the house warmed up. So I'll sit here with the electric heater almost under my chair and try to write something.



It's chilly because there's finally snow on the mountains and the prevailing winds are blowing that crisp, clean air down this way. We've had enough rain to green up the hills.

Now that I see all the pictures I haven't used, I think I should break this up into a couple of posts.

First, the cat news.

The current cat population has not changed for the past two months. Inside the house I still have Wesley and Gollum.

Sweetie Pie

Outside is the fluffy black female I call Sweetie Pie most of the time. She has two little patches of grey fur on her chest that look like boobs. I can pet her now if Biscuit is with her. There is another very wild black cat that originally showed up with a severe gash on it's back. I only see it occasionally. And there is dear old Biscuit who now spends half his time in the house, sleeping as close to the stove as he can get.

Biscuit, staying warm in the kitchen

Biscuit, staying warm in the living room

Biscuit on the kitchen floor, being harassed by Wesley

You might notice that Wesley is as big as Biscuit these days. I don't know how that happened. Biscuit has a very big head, Wesley has a pretty little pinhead that contains his devious little brain.

Two and a half cats outside has not been enough to keep up with the mouse population. The mice come in from the fields this time of year, it would take at least 8 cats to keep them under control. But it's hard finding that many cats that can stay safe from the coyotes.

I did finally put poison out on the alley floor of the new chicken barn. Nothing else could get to it. I found 14 dead mice there the next morning, scooped them up and buried them. The next night there were 4 more. I didn't find any dead or dying mice outside the barn, so I believe the wildlife and the cats were safe. I don't like to poison mice, but sometimes there's no other option. I had bought two different kinds of traps and neither worked very well. I caught 3 live mice in one of the traps and had to drive them down to the creek to turn them loose. The trap is made so you can submerge it in water and drown the mice. Oh yeah. Like I'm going to accumulate that kind of karma, living next to the river as I do.

Wesley caught a mouse in the house this month. The first time he caught it, he played with it very carefully so it wouldn't break. It got away from him. The next morning I found it dead on the floor, evidently he learned his lesson the first time. Neither he nor Gollie would eat a mouse. Wesley isn't very fond of any kind of fresh meat, he only eats dry food. And green beans. And the ends off the sweet potatoes if I leave them on the counter to cool after I bake them.

Biscuit eats anything, but he really loves canned milk mixed with raw eggs and warm water. Sort of a liquid custard. He's very well mannered in the house, except his philosophy on meat is that if it's left on the counter, you eat first and ask questions later, the most important question - "will you please open the door so I can drag this stuff outside?"

The cats are well.

...the kids will play.

I love it that when I'm gone to a show for a long weekend, Bob and Anna come out from town and stay here. Often they host a dinner or a party, this place is great for that. The backyard has a large gravelled area near the game room, with a firepit. Bob likes to cook. Mostly everything is cleaner when they leave than when they get here.

This is what was going on in Sloughhouse while I was in Washington.

Bob cleaned the garage, with help from Kevin.


Maybe putting the rooster in front of the little Webber BBQ was a training tactic?

Anna's little brother Saul got to spend some time here, too.



If there's one thing I love, it's sharing all the dirt and animals around here with kids.

Anna took the photos.

I've been very busy showing chickens the past couple of weeks. I have to say it gets more fun all the time, for two reasons: my birds have been winning consistently, and I've been lucky to have a couple of great travel companions.

Our California show season officially kicks off every year with the Paso Robles show. Paso Robles is about 4.5 hours away. It's an interesting place, still fairly rural because it's surrounded by wine vineyards. It would like to be pretentious, like Carmel, but the architecture is more from the fast food era than from Spanish mission times. Nevertheless, it's impossible to find a hotel room there that has reasonable prices. Paso Robles has discovered that if you have some sort of parade or "special" event every weekend, you can bring in wine tasting crowds and charge them $279 a night for a Hampton Inn room that would seldom cost more than $120 anywhere else.

In previous years I have stayed at the official "host" hotel, down the road in Atascadero. It's a Best Western and the show rate is about $140 a night. At other shows, the show rate seldom exceeds $80 a night. This time I asked for a room with 2 beds and was told they had none. "What about a room that doesn't have the show rate?" I asked. "That will be $200 a night," they answered. "No thank you," I said. (Truthfully it might have been closer to, "Are you out of your frigging mind?")

I found a room at Motel 6 right in Paso Robles. For $137 a night. Motel 6. You pay a lot for them to leave the light on for you.

I took lots of birds to the show. Anna's bird Kevin was one of them. Here she is, fluffing his butt at home before the show. It's what one does with Cochins, and involves working with a hair dryer.


Anna didn't just get Kevin ready for the show, she went with us! She helped me load and unload the birds, helped me primp them all at the show, and went to the banquet with me.


We sat at the table with three of the judges. That was fun. Our birds did pretty well. Kevin was Best of Breed, one of my Dominique bantam pullets was Reserve RCCL in one show and Best RCCL in the other.

I know, if you've seen one chicken, you've seen them all.

It was a Double Show. What they do is hire two different sets of judges and hang two coop cards on the cages. So an exhibitor can win points for two shows instead of just one. It's an economical way to enhance the showing experience. Especially if you win in both shows.

On the way home, we opted for the slower, more rural route that Carlotta and I discovered in previous years, up Hwy. 26 to Hollister. We had to go through Hollister so we could stop at Casa de Fruta, of course. We each bought some chocolate (mine is sugarless) and then tried to make it last until the top of the pass on the way back to Interstate 5. This time I failed by about 1/4 mile. Anna still had some left because she had bought a few extra pieces for Bob. I may have driven the rest of the way home with chocolate smeared on my face and clothes.

The next weekend I went all the way to Vancouver, Washington, for another double show. This time I hitchhiked a ride with Pete, one of my chicken show friends. It was a 9.5 hour ride. If you know me well, you know that it was 9.5 hours, each way, of intense conversation about a wide range of topics. I don't sleep in the car, I don't want to miss anything. When I'm a passenger, the driver had no problem staying awake.

One thing you get to see at an out-of-state show is a bunch of new chicken show people. Actually, there were 7 of us there from California, so not only did I get to meet new people, but got to spend time with old friends, too.

I only took 5 birds, two of them were sold to a new Dominique breeder in Washington after the show. Again, my birds were Reserve RCCL in one show and Best RCCL in the other show (the same pullet shown above). It was a real treat, though, that one of our California junior exhibitors showed two of his pullets: one was Best RCCL in one show and the other was best in the other show. That one went on to be Reserve Bantam of the Junior Show. The junior, Robert, hatched his pullets from eggs from my chickens this past spring.

In case you see my stripey chickens and confuse them with Barred Rocks, here is a quick comparison:

Barred Rock bantam pullet

Dominique bantam pullet

The barred rock is a beefier bird, its stripes are evenly spaced, straight across, and narrow. The Rock has a "bunny" tail, it does not stand up. The Dominique is a more sprightly bird, with a higher carriage and a smaller body. It has "tight" feathers instead of fluffy ones. The pattern is called cuckoo. The bars are wider and more random. Another basic difference is the Rock has a single comb and the Dom has a rose comb.

Do you recall a couple of months ago when I said I'd let my flood insurance lapse because it had gone up to $3300 a year? I'd had flood insurance for more than 20 years and every year it steadily went up, but this year there was a big jump.

Talking to my neighbors, I found that many of them have never had flood insurance, including some whose houses are practically built into the levee.

Well, son Bob lives in town, but this is still home to him. Last week he said we really need flood insurance out here, please see if I could get it reinstated, and he'd pay for it.

Many years ago we had a nearby friend who was an insurance agent. He covered everything for us and we trusted him. When he died, his sister (also a friend) took over his business and we also trusted her. But the company she represented fired her after 4 or 5 years because her sales were insufficient. It didn't matter that her customers liked her very much, that she always did a great job for us. All of her accounts were arbitrarily passed on to other agents. My new agent was someone whose office is in downtown Sacramento, a total stranger.

In the year after that (10 years ago) my Dodge Caravan drowned. I put in a claim. The insurance company sent a person to look at the car, which I'd had towed to a local garage. He decided the car bent a rod because I'd been racing it and denied the claim. The mechanic at the garage called me and said, "You need to challenge this, the guy who came out here is really a doofus, he didn't listen to a thing I told him." So I did that. It wasn't fun. The insurance company pretty much treated me like a criminal. But I won. The first thing I did after that was cancel all my insurance policies with them and go elsewhere.

For car insurance I went back to AAA. For house and property insurance, I went with a company that works through Farm Bureau. But I forgot about the flood insurance. When a statement came a few months later, I just paid it. I figured since flood insurance was through FEMA, whatever local agent I had wouldn't matter, they were just a technicality. The original fellow who set up the account had said it wasn't a money maker for him, he just did the paperwork for a minimal fee.

So. Time to see if I could get that flood policy reinstated. I called the farm insurance office to see if they had any advice. The owner of the office talked to me and took my questions. He knew exactly where I live and what the flood history is in my area. He knew that in the last big flood, in 1997, there was a levee break in Sloughhouse and only one house had water in it - about an inch on the floor.

Within an hour he called me back. There is evidently a website for FEMA where agents can get an estimate for their customers. He said the first thing it asks for is an elevation certificate. Did I have one? Because if I didn't, it costs about $700 for someone to come out and do the measurements to get one. The online program wouldn't let him go further without the elevation certification.

Well, of course I didn't have a $700 piece of paper that said what the elevation of my house is. Why would I have that? Just for the fun of it? He said it was probably a requirement so the program could compare the elevation of the house to whatever the high water elevation is for this area. I said, "I will stipulate that the ground in front of my house is 12 feet lower than the top of the levee, which is about 150 yards away. However they designate areas of risk, I'm sure this house is in the highest risk zone."

He took that information and got back on the phone to FEMA. On the phone with a real person, not just dealing with their online program.

In another hour he called back. He said that because my house is over 100 years old, it will not need an elevation certificate. That's a requirement for houses built more recently. He had found a page in the FEMA rules that said if county or state rules prevent rebuilding on the same site, the money can be used for removing what's left of the house, and then for relocation to another site. And then he said, "The policy can be reinstated, it will be $1660 a year."

What????

Guess what? That little agent lady for the old insurance company, the one I never met in person or had any dealing with whatsoever, had been raising her cut of MY flood insurance for the past few years, until she was making almost as much as the insurance itself. It would almost be worth a trip downtown (which in my mind is equivalent to a trip to hell) just to look her up and verbally spit in her eye.

Consider how much of our income is spent on insurance. Car insurance, property insurance, health insurance, life insurance. It's illegal not to have some of these things, and you're considered irresponsible if you don't have others. I have heard that doctors in California cannot take cash from patients anymore, the transactions must go through an insurance company. I have heard that people who live in areas that were recently ravaged by wild fires have had their policies cancelled, even those who did not suffer any fire damage, because now the insurance companies don't choose to cover people in those "dangerous" areas. Let's be logical, if all the vegetation in your area was recently burned, it could be 20 years before the fire danger there is high again.

Are there areas where there probably should be no houses? In California, there certainly are. More than half of Sacramento is built on floodplain, a lot of that in the past 30 years. Why? Because developers bought those properties and pushed their projects through at the Board of Stupidvisors, several of whom were elected with the support of developer money.

That isn't relevant with my house. It was built long before developers ran the county. But what a rip off for the people who have bought those new houses. I wonder if their insurance agents are also sitting in their offices, adding hundreds of dollars to the flood insurance because this is an El Niño year and everyone is panicked?

I am so sick and tired of plain old people, who work hard and try to be responsible, getting sucked dry by every business they are forced to deal with. It's indicative of our overall economic state: there are not enough "real" jobs, so we all end up like a bunch of monkeys sitting in a circle, picking and eating each  other's nits.

Happy Broderick Crawford Day

10-4!

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know that October 4 is Broderick Crawford Day. You probably won't get the holiday off on Monday just because it fell on Sunday this year. No one recognizes the holiday except me and my friends.

Why do we celebrate this day? We're remembering the old actor, Broderick Crawford, from the days when he played a California Highway Patrolman on our black-and-white TVs. His character didn't have to shoot or taze people to get them to behave, he was gruffy with them and talked fast and loud.



I mean, really, if this guy pulled you over to give you a ticket, would you argue with him?

I have yet to find the person who hauled the big outside cat, Biscuit, off to SPCA and had him neutered. I think that person probably thinks Biscuit is their cat, and did this to make him an acceptable house cat.

The truth is, Biscuit belongs to no one. He goes where he wants, when he wants. Sometimes he's at my house every day for a week, and then I won't see him for a week. When he comes back, he isn't thin or stressed. The cat knows what he's doing.

The truth also is that even when he was a tom cat, Biscuit had better manners than any cat inside my house. That would be the destructive Wesley and the opinionated Gollum who leaves poop bombs on my mousepad when something offends her. Wesley is usually what offends her.

Last week we had some unseasonably cool weather and Biscuit showed up, looking for his eggnog. I make him a concoction of two small bantam eggs and some evaporated milk. He loves it.

This time when I checked on him an hour later, he stood at the door and let me know he'd come in, if asked. He's never been interested before. Now that he's not a tom and I figured he might not rip Wesley's throat out, I asked the big guy in.

He went right to my chair and snuggled in, so I sat next to him.


He's a very well mannered fellow. He would have been fine except for Wes and Gollie. Wesley sat and stared at him for a long, long time. Then when Biscuit turned his back, Wes snuck up, his eyes spinning madly in his head, and grabbed the end of Biscuit's tail. (Any experienced hunter would probably know what a stupid move this is.)


Sweet Biscuit didn't bat a sleepy eye, he just jerked his tail away and left Wesley with a mouth full of fur. For half an hour, Biscuit napped at my feet while Wesley kept his creepy watch from afar.


Then tiny Gollie showed up to see what was going on. She wasn't happy.


I was pretty sure Biscuit and I were both going to be shredded. He must have thought so, too. He went to the door and asked to go out.

The next morning, though, he was at the door again and came right in. He slept for 23 hours. Most of the day he was in my chair, but he came into the bedroom late at night and found a place to snuggle. At about 3 a.m. my feet felt cold. I have neuropathy, it's unusual for my feet to feel anything. They seemed to still be under the covers, so I turned on the light to investigate.

Wesley must have sucked up every drop of water he could find in the house, like a helicopter taking it up to drop on a fire. Where he'd been sleeping, he'd peed it out in a huge puddle. He obviously doesn't understand the subtlety involved in "marking" one's territory. Biscuit, still asleep on the other side of the bed, was aghast when he woke up to hear me snarling and throwing things at Wesley. He ran for the door and wanted out. He's been gone a week. It has taken me about that long to thoroughly wash all the bedding.

I don't think Biscuit's too interested in moving into this asylum. It may seem much safer to him to be outside with the raccoons and coyotes. In his other house, he probably has a bed with his name on it and no moron house cats to make life uncomfortable.

When you graduated from high school (or its equivalent in some foreign country), did you ever think you'd be attending a 50th class reunion? I didn't. My dad died when he was 36, my mom when she was 58. I'm always amazed when I realize how long I've managed to live.

I know there were other reunions along the way. My brother has faithfully attended his. I'm not that sociable. Also, I attended high school up in El Dorado county and only lived there for 4 years, after my mother married my stepdad who had property there. My true home and the people I grew up with have always been here in Sloughhouse.

But I went to the 50th because it seemed like it is the final chapter in a book that started long ago, and I'm always curious to see how things and people turn out.

The reunion was well attended, I think at least half the original class was there. Even our foreign exchange student, Peter (from Germany) came. This is Peter with Dale, the organizer of the event. Peter did not travel the longest distance, though, that prize went to Maggie, who flew in from New Zealand.


It's so interesting to walk into a room where you're surrounded by old people and realize that you're one of them. I admit that some mornings I'm stiff enough to remind myself I'm old, and sometimes my memory lags, but I really don't feel much different as a person than when I graduated 50 years ago. Other people, including one classmate with white hair and a long, white beard, said the same thing. You never feel like you've grown up, or that you're finally qualified to be the adult in charge.

How did you make friends in high school? Like I said, I wasn't very sociable. We lived quite a ways from the school and I did not drive, there was no public transportation other than the school bus, so after school sports and activities were not an option. I didn't go to dances or go on dates, the only parties I went to were slumber parties with a few friends. I spent most of my spare time at a nearby Tennessee Walking Horse stable (I could walk there) that was owned by a classmate's family. I have kept in touch with her and a couple of others over the years because of the horses.

This is a picture with two people who were my friends during high school. We became friends because our last names were in close alphabetical order. I spent a lot of time in the middle, between Pete and Diane. Pete says he got through our science classes by copying my notes. I confess, I was good at taking notes.


I don't think I've ever been to a party where there were so many hugs, and where everyone seemed really happy to be there and to see everyone else. I'm sure if I'd heard all the stories, I'd find that some of us had accomplished a lot (by society's standards) and others had barely squeaked through. Those things that might matter at a 15 or 20 year reunion (where everyone would be noticing what kind of car you drive) really don't matter at this point.

This is a picture that says it all for me. These two, Diane and Steve, were boyfriend and girlfriend in high school (when "dated" was not a euphemism for other things). They went off and married other people. Diane has been married to her husband, Frank, for 48 years. Here are Diane and Steve, together again. At least for a dance and a picture.


Steve and I competed all the way through high school for the best grades. He ended up being class valedictorian by a point or two, I was salutatorian. Steve was (and is) intelligent. I was mostly just clever.

Well. So that book is finished. A great ending, I smiled all the way home.

This year another of my birds won. This is #47. What a great way to start the show season!


This year my friend Katherine also entered birds and she made the trip to Santa Rosa with me. Twice. This show is not the same as other poultry shows, which are held on weekends. The birds are cooped in on Monday... which was Labor Day ... and are picked up on Thursday evening later in the week.

We took the back roads to get to Santa Rosa on Monday (thank you Julie Kroger) and made it in 3 hours. We stayed that night because judging was the next day. There were not a lot of birds, so the judge took a long lunch.

John Monaco, Katherine Plumer, Walt Leonard

It was fun to spend time with two great judges and officers of the American Poultry Association (John and Walt), and a renowned illustrator of the Standard of Perfection (Katherine). Or, more accurately, 3 other goofy folks. This is why I love poultry shows, the friends are the best.

This was Kevin's first show. Despite a few errant feathers in his tail, he won a blue ribbon for Anna.


He turned out to be a nice show bird, and attracted a lot of attention. I can't say that for all the birds I took. My large fowl Dominique pullet was totally overwhelmed, this is how she spent the show.


She wasn't ill, she just curled up and slept to escape it all. My bantams aren't like this, they are show offs. I don't know what to do with this girl, she's going to take some work. I hope that won't involve keeping her in a cage in the house for a while.

Our trip back down to Santa Rosa on Thursday was much easier, we could actually use the freeways. Katherine drove on the way home, I was grateful for that.

Anna was thrilled to get her ribbons.



We consulted a Cochin expert and found out Kevin's wild tail feathers are probably a result of too much protein in his food. This is so, I was trying to get some meat on his bones. The expert says to pull the twisted feathers and let them grow back, and that it takes a couple of years for a large fowl Cochin to get its full growth, you just have to be patient. Sigh. I could fit 4 bantams in his pen.

Everyone knew this could be a really bad year for fires in parched California, and it has evidently come to pass.

I only want to make an observation on one aspect of the "Butte" fire that is about 30 miles up the highway from where I live, in Amador and Calaveras counties.

The residents of these counties have not sat around waiting for the government to take care of them. While the government firefighters do their jobs, the residents have been rescuing each other. They set up a new Facebook page to coordinate rescue activities. For example, one person might post that coming home from work, he was stopped and prohibited from driving through a fire area to get home. "I have 2 horses and 2 dogs. They're all human-friendly."

Within a half hour, someone on the other side of the fire line has gone to the person's house, loaded the animals in a trailer, and posted about it on their way to an evacuation site. In many cases, horses have been turned loose with their owners' phone numbers written on them when people were given a quick evacuation order. Most all of these have been rescued.

There are people who have been driving their trucks and trailers on the back roads for the past two days. Others are contributing gas money, or providing animal feed and caging at rescue sites.


Libby is my cousin. I have quite a few relatives up in the fire area, all of them appear to be safe so far, though the number of destroyed houses last night went up from 8 to 84. I'm sure when this is all sorted out, there will be people I know who need help.

I'm so proud of the folks "up the hill." Most people in that area are not wealthy, they are having to take time off their jobs to jump in and do what needs to be done. What a great example they are.

One of the reasons I haven't posted many blog entries this year is I haven't been able to email pictures from my iPhone to my computer. Don't know where they go, the phone does the "sent" sound, but the pictures never show up. I can still upload photos directly from my big camera, but I don't take it with me all the time.

I was trying to remedy the problem today. I'm not totally inept in the computer world. I was a typesetter first on a paper tape system, then used code on a mainframe system, and finally in the early days of Macs, I bought my own computer and printer and have had one ever since. I used to be able to keep my software compatible and my computers in good running order.

Right now I have this 5 year old iMac that I'm using, a 4 year old MacBook Pro, a year-old iPad, and my old iPhone 3GS. All of them have software that is supposedly old and no longer supported. And except for the iPad, none of them will run the latest operating systems so I could actually download the newest version of Safari, or Firefox, or whatever.

In the Mac world, that never used to be a problem. Obsolete software was always a Microsoft tactic. Or maybe it was just a result of them not caring enough about the quality of their product to make it compatible, or even more likely, they didn't have the skill to accomplish that.

I don't do Microsoft, though. Never have, never will. So I'm not accustomed to putting up with shit like this. And guess what? I don't intend to trash the computers I already own and go out and buy a bunch more junk just so I can read email or transfer photos, or suffer the annoyances of Facebook. The software I use for real work still works fine on my computers, it's just the useless, social media junk that doesn't.

Every device I own is in perfect working order. Nothing is broken, I take good care of my stuff. I've had Macs for more than 30 years, and each one was working great when I moved up to a bigger or better model. I did that because I wanted to, usually because the new computer was better or faster and I needed it to run graphics programs that I could use for actual work. Not because some moneygrubber decided that making software obsolete every 6 months was a path to bigger profits.

If you ever worked for a newspaper, or for a quality type shop, or as an editor, you must wonder – as I do – who is on duty on the internet on the weekend. I'm thinking maybe a 12 year old boy.

The only way a headline like the one above would have made it to print at any place I ever worked is if a smartass typesetter did it on purpose and snuck it in.

I don't think many people who dabble at internet news are smart enough to even be called smartasses.

Suspicious Death in Body Found Floating in Deer Creek