Our cat Malcolm, age 17 1/2, enjoys being vacuumed, although he’s a bit camera-shy here. (My son is wielding the vacuum here.) Usually, he rolls around in ecstasy (seen briefly in the video), making sure every part gets vacuumed. He often presents his head to make sure his cheeks are groomed. When much younger, Malcolm would dash [...]
Posts Tagged as ‘Personal’
November 5, 2009
It’s Grand!
We made a detour to the Grand Canyon on our drive home in September from California (Yes, I’ll be wringing posts out of that trip for some time to come!) It was well worth the four hours’ deviation from our dash (just ask a certain highway patrolman in New Mexico) back to Kansas City, even though we’d visited the [...]
November 2, 2009
Farmville on Facebook
I signed up for Facebook a few years ago to see what my children were doing at college. Yes, that sounds like spying…. Instant Messenger, MySpace, Facebook. They signed up, I signed up. (They weren’t sneaky enough to keep it a secret.) As soon as they moved on — it took me a while to catch [...]
October 25, 2009
Ode to a McIntosh Apple
I grasp your smooth curves eagerly between my trembling fingers. Your skin is so brilliantly green, blushed with bright red.
You minx, how you tease me with your beauty, with the promise of your juicy sweetness. Are you ripe? I hold you to my lips. My teeth bite into your firm white flesh. I taste tartness, yet sugar melts [...]
October 15, 2009
Surf’s Up
I love road trips, especially when I only do twenty percent of the driving. In mid-September, my husband and I loaded up my minivan with some of the left-behind belongings of my daughter and her boyfriend and headed west to Huntington Beach, California. Laura and Ryan had moved there in mid-August, making the drive in [...]
September 27, 2009
A Greeting Card For Every (Ridiculous) Occasion!
As a fledgling greeting card designer, I thought this was an hilarious video. The end was particularly silly!
September 13, 2009
Butterfly School at Monarch Watch Fall 2009 Open House
One of the highlights of the annual fall open house at Monarch Watch is Butterfly School, in which Chip Taylor, founder and director of Monarch Watch, demonstrates how to catch, hold, tag and release a Monarch butterfly before it begins its migration to its winter home in Mexico.
The weather for this fall’s event (Sept. 12) was [...]
September 11, 2009
Spiritual Rez
I could hardly hear my daughter on the phone over the music.
She was at a concert, listening to friends in a touring reggae band. Finally I made out what she was repeating. “Can the band spend the night at your house?”
I swallowed hard. “Uh, uh. Sure.” Where would we put them? We’d just had some [...]
September 3, 2009
Saving Bees
My garden is a hang-out for bees of all kinds — honey bees, native bees, carpenter bees. I love watching them going about their business and am glad to help out keeping them fed. Bees are important pollinators. Pollination is essential for most of our food crops.
The honey bee population has dropped dramatically in recent years, and scientists [...]
August 26, 2009
Happy Anniversary, Shuttlecocks!
Fifteen years ago, four giant shuttlecocks landed on the grounds of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. Designed by sculptors Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, the shuttlecocks received a mixed reception when they were first installed, but now they’ve become Kansas City icons. They add a whimsical touch to the classical exterior [...]
