You Probably Don't Want Pictures of Dirt

So here's a flower on my golden chain tree.

The aforementioned dirt is the vegetable garden, which is tremendously exciting but currently not much to look at. The sorry little rags of green are the beans, squash, and tomatoes, newly transplanted from their pots. They weren't real happy about the transition and are currently sulking. To add insult to injury I planted a seed next to each plant just in case it croaks.

Four rows of corn and three of potatoes still look like plain dirt. Where's the excitement? I pre-sprouted the corn seeds and let the potatoes develop leafy little eyes before planting. (That counts as excitement to me.)

I had near zero germination on my basil seeds. Four packets, four different types of basil (and not that weird cinnamon or lemon basil, or -- heaven forbid -- purple ruffles, but good green cooking basil) and I got two measly seedlings. We had to go to four different stores and nurseries today to find sufficient basil, and a sorry lot it was, probably because of the frost earlier this week.

Despite how grumpy this all sounds, I am thrilled. It's not just that I'm nuts, although if you saw me printing out labels for each plant (Which font? That required thought. I chose Verdana because it sounds green.), cutting them out with a rotary cutter and ruler, and taping them onto the blank metal markers (with exactly six pieces of tape on each) you'd know that one of my oars is not fully in the water.

I've been trying to put my finger on what makes this garden so exciting and important to me, and it isn't the garden. It's that the whole family is working together on it. Although we all took a part in each task, my daughter and I did most of the planting, and my husband and son did the much of the grunt work on the fence.

And we all had fun with the tools. Red Green had it right:

If at first it doesn't work, force it. If it still doesn't work, switch to power tools.

You should have seen my son with the electric drill. He got to drill through metal, which made loud and horrible and terribly exciting sounds. I, in contrast, like hanging the tools on the pegboard in the garage, each in its own assigned space. My daughter and husband take a more practical approach: tools exist to get the job done. They don't care if they're excitingly sharp or noisy or otherwise of note, they just use them. Weird.

And Now, A Cat.

Here is Summer, sleeping on the piano. She likes to lie down on the piano, on her feeding table, on the counter, on the floor in the middle of the hall. She has perfected the lie-down.

Note, however, that she is not lying down gracefully. She is sprawling. Summer is not a graceful cat. In fact, she is the only clumsy cat I have ever known. In the early days, I wondered why she never jumped onto any surface. After a few crashes, it became clear. It is much safer to claw one's way up to the counter or lap than to risk a spectacular fall.

I had already become accustomed to random crashing noises around the house, as Spock, her partner-in-crime, loves to push things, ever so delicately, with his paws. Lego creation? Crash! Pile of papers? Crash! Box of screws? Crash!

With Summer, the sound is the same but the reason is different. After clawing her way to the top of the bookshelf, she steps on the pile of papers and CRASH! There goes the pile. And there goes the cat.

She gets onto her feeding table in a two-step process: onto the garbage can, then onto her table. Except when the garbage can is empty, and tips over as she climbs onto it. CRASH!

Yesterday she tried to bridge the gap between her table and the counter. Literally. She had her front paws on the counter's edge and her back paws on her table. Time seemed to stop as we watched her, stretched and suspended, try to figure out what to do. Can't go forward, can't go back. CRASH!


Summer is a pushy cat. Here is my current knitting project: a cat nest. Basically a flat-bottomed bowl, the knit and felted cat nest is a favorite with most cats. I will have to make two, of course, and had planned the first for Spock. Blue and brown are nice understated and masculine colors for my logical Spock. Summer was going to get something in a bright red. Summer, however, disagrees. The first bed is for her, and I'd better be quick about finishing it.


Here is Summer, sleeping. She sleeps a lot. (After all, she has to practice her lie-down positions.) She sleeps a lot because she is up all night scratching on my son's bedroom door and meowing for him to let her in. More precisely, she wants him to get up and feed her. Summer loves her food.

Summer will eat anything. Food left on the counter is fair game. Plate scrapings in the sink are fair game. Spock's food doesn't even bear mentioning; of course it is Summer's. Jamie, the golden retriever, cleans his bowl so quickly that she doesn't have a chance at it, but freakazoid Emily likes to eat her food in several go-rounds. Now, when she leaves her bowl, Summer is there to finish it off.

I'm glad Summer is our cat. Why anyone would have given her up is beyond me.

Earthy Not Earth Day

Well, it wasn't technically Earth Day, but on Sunday we made a vegetable garden.

We didn't plant seeds. We didn't buy seedlings. We took a hole in the earth and filled it with compost and dirt, with a little help from the neighbor's Bobcat.

The project began about four years ago when we chose the sunniest section of the yard for a vegetable patch. We live in mid-Michigan, which has hard-packed clay, nearly pure sand, and occasionally beautifully rich soil located seemingly at random. Our sunny patch turned out to be the first variety.

You can make pottery out of this soil. All spring it's gooshy; by summer it's rock hard. My husband painstakingly dug out a rectangle about 40 by 60 feet and two feet deep. We began to line it with rocks for drainage and about the time we contemplated adding pipes, the whole project got out of hand.

So for the next few years it was the Clay Pit, which is much more fun than a sand box because the things you build are nearly permanent. The kids would get out there with pickaxes and shovels and a hose, creating rivers and mountains and dams and whole undulating landscapes. They'd be at it for hours, returning to the house in shoes caked with inches of clay. I'd warn their friends' parents that their kids would come home really dirty but tired and happy, and they did. I highly recommend a Clay Pit in your yard if you have children.

This year, to my kids' dismay, I insisted on creating a garden. (Luckily the Clay Pit is so big that I only commandeered half of it.) We had some rock-hard clay mountains left from the original excavation and two big old compost piles to work with. It really did take a Bobcat to break apart the clay mountains, which we layered with more-or-less rotted compost in a giant brown lasagne. My husband operated the Bobcat; I loaded and unloaded the compost from the tractor's trailer; my daughter learned to drive said tractor. My son helped spread the clay, which was the most difficult job, disappearing at odd intervals to work on his own project, digging a drainage ditch and lining it with clay. He always has marched to a different drummer.

I became closely acquainted with the compost pile. We are lazy composters, taking grass clippings and weeds and waste from the perennial beds and dead leaves and, well, piling them up. That's it. We don't mix it or water it or maintain a carbon-to-nitrogen ratio. Unsurprisingly, the result is not a homogenous mixture of soft, crumbly, dark brown soil. It's more like flattened mats of leaves, pockets of dry-as-dust grass, curiously wet and slimy areas, and poofs of white powder (mildew?) that rise in clouds when I forked into the pile. Compost has many faces, all wildly intriguing but none very pretty. Crawling through the whole mottled mess were lots and lots of fat earth worms, so something must be going right inside our Compost Failure.

Next weekend we'll dig into our older compost pile that lives in the woods on the other side of the yard. The innards of this pile actually look like compost should, nice and soft and rich and loamy, kind of like a great big brownie. If the weather is good, we should be able to put a nice layer of this stuff on the new vegetable bed and rake it smooth. We may even get out the electric fence kit I got for my birthday back when we first dreamed up the garden. (The deer here are satanic.)

Oh. What will we plant? I know it sounds nutty, but a part of me doesn't want to plant anything at all. I am so pleased with the building of it, with the dirt and rotted this-and-that, the layers of earth, that I don't want to mess up its simplicity and purity. Maybe I'll just have a dirt garden.

A gratuitous flower photo. After all, it's spring. :-)

fingers crossed

She reached through the bars with her soft white paw and gently batted my daughter's hand. "I am a Good Kitty," she said. "Take me home!"

We made inquiries, visited her several times, and finally brought her home. The car trip elicited the most pathetic mewing. We promised her that it was a temporary arrangement.

Summer is a lovely cat, with soft and fluffy fur, double-toed paws, and a spot on her nose that makes her look silly. She took no notice of the dogs and soon made friends with Spock, neither cowering from nor resisting his curious overtures. She knows her litter box (a Most Important Feature in a cat) and arrived pre-spayed and with a full complement of shots. She may possibly have brought some tiny insectoid friends, but a trip to the vet after the weekend will put paid to those little interlopers.

Summer is in the house, and Spring is in the yard. We have crocuses, snowdrops, robins, red-winged blackbirds, and a bluebird. A few trees are lacy with buds. And there is sun!

Today we will rake the yard and set the gardens to rights. If we find garter snake babies, we will know spring has fully arrived.

Top 10 Lost Items

(click to view larger)

10. ruler
9. stitch markers
8. the right size needle
7. crochet hook
6. pattern
5. how-to book
4. pen
3. pencil
2. scissors
1. glasses!

Perhaps most important, on the other side of the chair, a clean table top waiting for my cup of tea.

Happy Spring!

Male Red-winged Blackbird, originally uploaded by Greg7 and shared under 

a Creative Commons license. Thanks, Greg7!

It's snowing today, and it snowed yesterday, and I'm still routinely wearing my winter coat inside the house to save on the heating bill. (I'm cheap.)

Today, however, I saw two red-winged blackbirds. The return of these lovely birds means spring to me, regardless of the ice in the forecast for this afternoon.

It's not the angle of the sun, or the lengthening days that brings this change in season. For me, it's the sunshine on these birds' wings.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter, originally uploaded by tifotter under a Creative Commons license.

I wish you renewed spirit and a joyous sense of humor at this time of rebirth.

Popovers

Popovers have always been a bit of a tricky wicket for me. Sometimes they pop; sometimes they don't. Sometimes they stick to the pan so tenaciously that I'm tempted to take an axe to them. Occasionally, when I'm counting on them most, they're hard little rocks.

And sometimes, unexpectedly, they rise gloriously, and when they do, popovers are sublime.

How to achieve the perfect popover? I'm convinced it has more to do with gremlins than science. Although the concept is simple -- flour, eggs, milk, butter, and salt -- the execution has a lot of variables. Must the ingredients be at room temperature? Do you mix the batter vigorously, or treat it tenderly as if it were muffins or biscuits? Do you let the batter rest? Do you pre-heat the pan? Change the temperature mid-bake? And what sort of pan do you use: a deep popover pan, a regular muffin tin, or (as I used above) a tin sized for jumbo muffins?

Recently and with great reluctance I further increased the variables by revising the popover to conform to a low-cholesterol and low-saturated fat diet (the reasons for which are tragic but boring). So, no egg yolks and no butter. I feared total, dismal failure.

Check it out. They popped! And the taste and texture were great. Sure, they're a little less eggy, and someone with taste buds more perceptive than mine would call out the missing butter. But for me, they're divine.

Cross Your Fingers and Squint Popovers (to make them pop)

3 egg whites

1 1/4 cups half-percent milk

1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour (I have not yet tried whole-wheat, but I will.)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon zero-trans-fat butter substitute, melted (I used Smart Balance)

Whisk together the egg whites and milk. Stir in the flour and salt, then the melted non-butter. Let the bowl sit on top the stove while the oven pre-heats to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. (If your stove is like mine, it has a warm spot, good for bread dough and popover batter.) Pour batter into a greased 6-hole jumbo muffin tin and put in oven. Immediately reduce heat to 400 degrees. Bake 25 minutes or until they're browning and smell good. Remove from pan and eat immediately with maple syrup or jam, burning your fingers and mouth but enjoying every single bite.

Mmm Mmm Good. Sort of.

photo by Northern Miniatures by Amanda on flickr,

under a Creative Commons license

After reading selections from Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma, a new fervor for mostly-vegetarian cooking has assailed me. Helped along by the surprise gift of How To Cook Everything Vegetarian from my mom (thanks, Mom!!) I've had lots of fun planning out menus and serving simple, fresh, and delicious meals.

Well, not always simple. Yesterday I made homemade tomato soup. It sounds easy, but let me tell you, any soup recipe that involves roasting and straining and food processing in addition to stove-top cooking is not a simple recipe to me. And the clean-up was daunting for a simple bowl of soup. (Note: I probably used more pans than called for because I'm a lousy cook.) 

The result? It was . . . okay. Kinda like straight tomato sauce.  (Additional note: I should probably not expect gourmet taste from store-brand ingredients.)

It was perfectly good soup. It tasted like tomatoes. And I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that I prefer the taste of Campbell's. To be perfectly fair, I should make the recipe again, using high-quality ingredients. But I'm not going to, at least not right now. One can, one pot, and one bowl. That's awfully hard to argue with.

Poetry in Honor of St. Brigid

photo by phirleh on flickr, shared

under a Creative Commons license

There is a tradition among bloggers to post a poem in honor of St. Brigid each February 2. I love poetry, and often read it to my children. While my son groans, he has written a poem or two himself; and my daughter loves to write poetry.

Back in the day I took many poetry courses and even taught a few as a graduate student. And yet the wonderful thing about poetry is that I am no more an authority than any other person. While poetry is sometimes accused of being obscure or accessible to only a rarified few, I think it exists for everybody. It is ours, and we don't need anyone to tell us what it means. If anything defines poetry, I think it's that it speaks directly to the reader. (My old professors would probably faint.)

Being a nosy person, I had to look up St. Brigid. She was Irish, perhaps the daughter of a pagan chieftain and a Christian Pictish slave. (Accounts vary.) According to this article, "Brigid was given the same name as one of the most powerful goddesses of the pagan religion which her father Dubhthach practised; Brigid was the goddess of fire, whose manifestations were song, craftsmanship, and poetry, which the Irish considered the flame of knowledge." Which is interesting, because before I looked up St. Brigid, I had chosen this poem by Anne Bradstreet.

Here followes some verses upon the burning of our house, July 10th, 1666. Copyed out of a loose paper.

In silent night when rest I took,
For sorrow neer I did not look,
I waken'd was with thundring nois
And Piteous shreiks of dreadfull voice.
That fearfull sound of fire and fire,
Let no man know is my Desire.

I, starting up, the light did spye,
And to my God my heart did cry
To strengthen me in my Distresse
And not to leave me succourlesse.
Then coming out beheld a space,
The flame consume my dwelling place.

And, when I could no longer look,
I blest his Name that gave and took,
That layd my goods now in the dust:
Yea so it was, and so 'twas just.
It was his own: it was not mine;
ffar be it that I should repine.

He might of All justly bereft,
But yet sufficient for us left.
When by the Ruines oft I past,
My sorrowing eyes aside did cast,
And here and there the places spye
Where oft I sate, and long did lye.

Here stood that Trunk, and there that chest;
There lay that store I counted best:
My pleasant things in ashes lye,
And them behold no more shall I.
Under thy roof no guest shall sitt,
Nor at thy Table eat a bitt.

No pleasant tale shall 'ere be told,
Nor things recounted done of old.
No Candle 'ere shall shine in Thee,
Nor bridegroom's voice ere heard shall bee.
In silence ever shalt thou lye;
Adeiu, Adeiu; All's vanity.

Then streight I gin my heart to chide,
And did thy wealth on earth abide?
Didst fix thy hope on mouldring dust,
The arm of flesh didst make thy trust?
Raise up thy thoughts above the skye
That dunghill mists away may flie.

Thou hast an house on high erect
Fram'd by that mighty Architect,
With glory richly furnished,
Stands permanent tho: this bee fled.
'Its purchased, and paid for too
By him who hath enough to doe.

A Prise so vast as is unknown,
Yet, by his Gift, is made thine own.
Ther's wealth enough, I need no more;
Farewell my Pelf, farewell my Store.
The world no longer let me Love,
My hope and Treasure lyes Above.

It isn't the Christian sentiment that I find most striking about this poem -- it's the plaintive tone, and the story it tells. What did she lose in that house fire? Did she have a library of precious books? Did she lose her own poetry? Perhaps they were her store, her pleasant things. Maybe it was some jewelry brought from England, or letters from people she loved but would never see again.

I read, some time ago, about a brave soul who gave away nearly everything she had, keeping only forty things. I wonder what forty things I would keep, and what Anne Bradstreet would have kept. I wonder how close our lists would be.

It Snowed!

Dogs, particularly Golden Retrievers, truly understand snow. Snow is to be gloried in, running and digging and rolling in it. Snow smells good to me; I can't even imagine how intoxicating its scent must be to a dog.

Of course here in Michigan it snows a lot. And it has to be shoveled. (Snow is a lot heavier than one might think.) But Jamie reminds me that every snowfall must be savored.

If you have snow, enjoy it. And if you don't, enjoy the pictures, and be glad you're snow-shovel free.

Peace, Love, and Harmony To All

Peace Love Harmony To All, originally uploaded by gooseflesh.

I have zillions of New Year's resolutions. My favorites are the ones I made for my husband. He got two computer-generated lists to pin to the wall.

I have resolutions for my kids, too. They will Finish What They Start, Pick Up What They Put Down, and Clean Up After Themselves (mostly that last one).

For myself? There are the usuals: lose more weight, exercise more, walk the dogs daily (a bit difficult on our never-plowed, icy-when-it's-not-muddy dirt road), make lots of money, transform my rat-hole of a house into a showplace (or at least make it comfortable, clean, and well-lit), and donate about a metric ton of our possessions to Goodwill.

More serious, if not necessarily more obtainable, I'd like to reduce my family's carbon footprint. The best resource I've found is The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices, which recommends what actions we can take to most effectively reduce our impact on the planet. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists (who wrote the book), the most important action I can take, eclipsing all others, is to drive less.

Unfortunately we have chosen a lifestyle that centers around driving: we live in the country and commute to work and school. Short of selling the house and moving to a small home in the city, we are stuck with an enormous oily footprint.

So most of my efforts are largely symbolic: eliminating petroleum products wherever else I can. I had no idea, for instance, that laundry and dish detergents are typically petroleum-based. The mountain of petroleum-derived plastic recyclables that we haul away from our house each month (in the car, of course) doesn't make me feel any better. (Why is it so difficult to find refills for those thick, heavy containers, seemingly designed for permanence rather than waste reduction?)

Meanwhile, if saving the planet (surely a worthy goal) takes up most of my efforts, I am perhaps not focusing where I might make the biggest impact: on my children. I want them to be the most thoughtful, compassionate, responsible, and useful people they can be. What concrete actions I can take towards this goal will be my real resolution. I'm not sure what actions these will be, but this year I will try to find out and do what I can.

Rats and mice. I was just going to eat fewer cookies. . . .

a little holiday music

I'm shamelessly scamming this video from another site (Mason-Dixon Knitting). It's wonderful and I hope you enjoy it.

tricked!

skunk, originally uploaded by aquave1vet and shared through a Creative Commons license.

Trick-or-treating went very well -- lots of friends, lots of candy, lots of fun.

But a trick awaited us at home: our dog Emily got skunked!

Thank heavens I'd stocked up on hydrogen peroxide for my safer, gentler cleaning routine -- I used a gallon of it on her, along with baking soda and dish soap, then followed it up with a wash in dog shampoo.

The peroxide/baking soda mixture works amazingly well -- Emily was essentially odor-free after just one wash. It just took me awhile to realize that the one spot of elusive scent that remained was on her snout.

Swabbing down the bathroom, then using odor-neutralizing spray throughout the house capped off the trick. We went to bed smelling not exactly like roses, but not of skunk, either. A good thing, too, as Emily sleeps on my pillow.

Please note that this cute fellow is not my skunk. I didn't get a picture myself; this one is from Aquave1vet on flickr.

Why I Can't Finish My Quilt

There's a large, furry weight on my quilt, anchoring the cloth so that it won't go through my sewing machine.
This weighty thing also takes lightning-swift swipes at the thread, the needle, and my hand, which disturbs the sewing zen.
It only disappears when the long, unattached binding strip, trailing across the desk and floor, attracts its attention, and its claws.
I love my Spock-cat.

kitten problems

We are not doing well with kittens.

Spock (one-year-old silver tabby) is fine (probably -- see Isis, below).

Citrus (12-week old orange tabby) was diagnosed with a previous spinal injury that left him gimpy and not reliable in the litterbox. Our vet adopted him from us and is rehabilitating him for placement in a home that can handle his special needs. (I love my vet!)

Isis, Citrus's replacement, (10-week-old tortoise shell) tested positive for feline leukemia. I didn't realize how bad this is -- basically, it's a death sentence*. And it's extremely infectious to other cats. She is currently isolated in a bathroom until we get the results from a more accurate laboratory test. If that is positive (and the vet says it almost certainly will be), we'll have to euthanize her.

The vet feels that Spock's risk of having contracted it from her is low, as he is older and more resistant, and has only spent one week with her. Nevertheless we will have to have him retested in four to six months.

So it's kind of a hard weekend, with Isis basically on death row until we get the second test results. It should come in Monday or Tuesday. In the meantime, we are trying to give her love and attention without focusing on the outcome. She deserves all the love she can get.

Think good thoughts for my daughter, please. She is taking it hard.

*I understand that one can keep a cat with feline leukemia comfortable as long as possible -- apparently 85% die within three years -- but not with other cats free of the disease. We don't think it's fair to Spock to keep her, or fair to Isis to keep her in a very confined, separate space long-term. While there is a small chance that she could overcome the infection, it is only a small chance, and would take months before we knew for sure.

ETA: On September 24, the second test came back positive, and we put Isis down. My vet was wonderful, treating Isis tenderly and crying right along with me.

what time is it?

Photo by Duncan McNeil (dmcneil) on flickr.com, under a Creative Commons license.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

So am I nuts, or what?

This morning I had coffee with some very good friends in a local cafe. It's brand new, with minimal decorating. Other than furniture and a small fireplace, the most prominent piece in the room is an enormous clock, probably 2 1/2 feet across, visible from every seat and table (not the clock above -- that one is in Scotland).

I've been there four times. Every time, the clock has shown the wrong time. It's not just a little off -- it's way off, not even close to the hour or minute.

The first time, I figured the place was new, with many details not yet worked out (want cream or milk in your self-serve coffee? You have to ask for it. The cashier hands you a gallon jug.).

By the fourth time, I was amused and a little irritated. I'm enjoying a coffee, staring at an enormous clock face which tells me it is 4:24 in the afternoon. Huh. I thought it was more like 9 in the morning. Silly me.

It's not important, just disconcerting. So today I timidly asked the cashier if she could maybe set the clock to the proper time.

She looked at me like I was nuts. "It's decorative," she said. "It doesn't need to be set."

I hemmed a bit and commented that it was running, so would it be too difficult to just set it to the right time? "I don't have the authority to do that," she replied.

Um, perhaps the manager could set it? "He doesn't have that authority. Only Corporate does."

I must have looked astonished, because she got defensive. "Look," she said, "we figure everyone has a watch or a cell phone. No one needs to look at the clock for the time."

I was speechless.

But am I nuts?

(p.s. You still have to ask for the gallon jug to put white in your coffee.)

kitty video

Nothing extraordinary here, just our cats being cute.

Citrus, the little orange kitten, has some congenital problems that make it difficult for him to walk,* so it warms my heart to see him having fun.


*The vet assures me he's not in pain, and he can walk, albeit a bit unsteadily.

Thrifty

My mother-in-law passed on last year. She was a woman of remarkable generosity and talent. As the wife of a Navy officer, she moved her family across the country -- and an ocean -- many times with efficiency and grace. And she was thrifty: she could squeeze a dime till it screamed, let alone squeaked.

One of her talents was sewing, from cushions to tailored suits. And by going through her sewing supplies, I'm awed once again by her thriftiness. Several spools had different threads on them, just dabs of each. I'm guessing that she wound leftover bobbin thread onto empty spools to save for the next time she needed that color.

She saved every snap and fastener, even if its mate were gone. Perhaps she saved them for mending, or just from habit.
And there were jars upon boxes of buttons, sorted by color and sometimes type: I wonder what she used the purple buttons for. Clearly most of the buttons were used, cut from old clothing. Somebody must have worn a lot of shirts with little white buttons!

I'm sorting through the threads, buttons, notions, needles, and fabrics, choosing some to keep and some to pass on to others. (If anyone needs grey buttons, I think I have several pounds of them.) While I don't keep my thread ends, I am going to put one of the multi-colored spools on my sewing table to remind me of my mother-in-law, her talents, and her thrift.

Fear the Kitten

Today we received two new family members. My daughter has longed for a cat for years now, since our last cat died of lymphoma. So we planned, and read up on cats, and finally made a trip to the shelter.
Meet Spock.

Nothing to fear in Spock. According to my son, this cat commanded us with his eyes to take him home. He purred and rubbed against our fingers through the cage bars and told us he would be a very pleasant companion.
And so he has proven to be, in the space of an afternoon. He made his name known on the car ride home, perhaps a record for our fastest-named pet. And after a brief adjustment period in an unused hallway, Spock made peace with the dogs and found his bathroom, his food dish, the couch, and our hearts.
This one-year-old kitten also had the grace to arrive neutered and with his rabies inoculation. What a thoughtful fellow!

Fear and trembling, however, may now ensue:


She looks harmless enough, this darling eight-week-old tabby kitten with a big purr, rabbit-soft fur, and the cutest little paws. You can't tell from this picture just how small she is: this is one tiny little kitten. The "awww" factor is high here. She grabbed my daughter's heart as soon as we walked into the shelter.
Citrus, as she is now named, told our dogs quite firmly and loudly that They Are Not Welcome In Her Presence. I have never heard a growl this loud from any cat. She also has a fearsome hiss and lightning-strike paws. While the dogs have learned not to approach her, just the sight of them arouses a constant low humming growl in her tiny little body.
Luckily she likes us just fine. We are making allowances, as she is so young and so small. It must be quite frightening to enter a household with animals many times larger than herself.
In the meantime, however, Fear the Kitten. She can roar.