Anne's blog

Kitten season at Petsmart

I made a Petsmart/Target run today for household goods (making my contribution to PCE growth in July--that's a Fed joke). Wow, it is kitten season! Cat's Cradle had several cages and there were at least a dozen kittens:

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These were taken with my cellphone so the color's not very good. But other than the first two photos, these are all separate cages. And I don't think I even got all of them.

Plus, there was another shelter outside the store and they ALSO had kittens!

Shenandoah and Monticello

I'm finally getting around to posting pictures of my brief trip to Charlottesville four weeks ago. First, here are a couple of pictures of Shenandoah. It was pretty foggy (but not rainy) the day I was there, so I didn't get any really good pictures. But I did go on a little hike and saw a deer right next to the trail.

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By the way, the deer in Shenandoah are SUICIDAL! Skyline Drive is 105 miles long and twice in the first fifteen miles, a deer ran directly in front of my car. I then drove the next 90 miles absolutely at the exact speed limit.

Here's Shenandoah Valley in the haze:

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Monticello was beautiful and the weather was perfect the day I was there. They don't allow pictures of the interior but I took many pictures outside in the flower and herb gardens:

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Check out the butterfly (there were many):

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Yes, YES!!

Good news from AP today.

N'est-ce plus ma main...?

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The first person responsible for introducing me to opera was, of course, my mother. The second person, however, was Beverly Sills. Even though she retired from singing when I was eight (well, nine minus one day), her recordings introduced me to operatic singing once I became interested in it a few years later.

In the fall of 1984, my mother took me to see La Traviata at the San Francisco Opera. At that point I had been constantly exposed to opera since birth but wasn't that interested in it. As a kindergartener, I remember wondering what that weird-sounding instrument was that people sang with when they weren't singing with an orchestra. (It was a harpsichord. That was how many opera recordings I was exposed to.) Seeing La Traviata at the age of thirteen finally made something in my brain click and I fell in love with it and wanted to hear it again and again. The recording that my mother owned and that I listened to was Beverly Sills' recording with Nicolai Gedda. (In the discography in the NYT today, Anthony Tommasini said of this recording "To hear Ms. Sills at her vocal and dramatic best, this is hard to top.")

I then read "Bubbles", which my mother had lying around the house and which made a very entertaining read for a teenager. Her personality and intelligence shown through her writing. I liked the fact that she was American and approachable, she studied languages, she stuck to singing interesting roles (she resolutely retired the Queen of the Night from her repertoire, even though she could have made a career of singing it, because she thought it was boring) and she took her acting seriously. Reading "Bubbles" actually made me willing to listen to other operas besides Traviata (which I was obsessed with for a while), above all, Manon, which I also fell in love with.

(Don't underestimate the effect of the travails of Violetta and Manon on the impressionable female adolescent brain. I was also studying French in school and even read Manon Lescaut and La Dame Aux Camelias in the original! I was a really weird teenager.)

Anyway, the Beverly Sills phase passed and by June of 1985, my operatic interests had expanded sufficiently that I saw the entire Ring at SFO, which was a departure from coloratura repertoire, and also discovered Puccini and Mozart, neither of which she really sang very much. And I never warmed up to her in the bel canto roles like the Donizetti queens (maybe they worked better on stage than in recording). But she's still responsible for the fact that I know Manon and The Tales of Hoffman much better than more conventional repertoire like Trovatore or Aida.

(Oh, and I always wanted to be a coloratura soprano. Oh, well!)

Oh, I just missed them...

Two more whale sharks join the other three in the Georgia Aquarium, one week after my visit there...

My overnight guest Iphigenia, or, Am I a CCL?

Last night, as I was walking home, I came across a cat. I often see cats in my neighborhood, both strays or indoor/outdoor cats. This one was different. She appeared to be a kitten (about six months old was my guess). She also seemed to be a purebred Abyssinian. She had no collar.

Two possibilities crossed my mind:

1. She had insane owners, who, after spending hundreds of dollars on an Abyssinian kitten, let her go outside freely without at least a collar. But it meant I should just leave her alone.
   
2. She had gotten out accidentally, which struck me as more likely (since I don't let my cats go outside), which meant I should take her home, and put up flyers around the neighborhood.

Heavily influenced by the fact that she was the cutest, friendliest cat ever (as shown by the fact that she started purring when I picked her up), I'm afraid I did the latter.

It was tricky getting her inside. I brought her into the front hallway, then unlocked the door. Ulysses, unfortunately, had heard my key and was waiting just inside the door. He therefore immediately came face to face with an INTRUDER CAT, which totally freaked him out and sent him zooming up the stairs with his tail poofed out.

(Ulysses, by the way, has never in his life set eyes on a cat besides his mother, his littermates, and Persephone.)

I whisked Iphigenia (the name is a family joke) up the stairs and into my downstairs bathroom. Ulysses hovered outside for quite a while:

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Then I made flyers:

FOUND

SIX-MONTH-OLD ABYSSINIAN KITTEN

NO COLLAR OR TAG

VERY FRIENDLY


FOUND FRIDAY EVENING ON D ST. SE, BETWEEN 11TH AND 12TH


IF YOURS, PLEASE CALL xxx-xxx-xxxx (cell)

and put them up over a two-block radius from where I found her.

At one point, when I checked on her, she slipped out and came face to face with both of the other cats. MUCH hissing and growling from all three. I was able to wrap her up in a blanket and put her back in.

Later that evening, I corralled Persephone and Ulysses into my bedroom and let Iphigenia out of the bathroom to play (she was complaining about being locked in there):

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She is a totally beautiful kitty with a silky coat. She is also incredibly affectionate, the kind of Abyssinian who climbs on your shoulder when she wants to cuddle (also, the kind, unfortunately, that bites your nose in an excess of affection...). She followed me closely as I went around the apartment. I was in love with her. I was also worried about what would happen if her owner didn't turn up. I couldn't keep her, not with two cats already. Could I find someone to take her? Would she have to go to the shelter? Although I had no doubt, if she did, she would get snapped up immediately.

But my phone rang at 9am this morning. Turns out a nice older couple down the street from me missed her coming home last night, got worried and made their own flyers this morning, and when they went out to put them up, found mine and called me right away.  The husband, Francis, who came to pick her up, said Ruffie (which is her real name) has caused them no end of trouble. She has already had to be rescued four or five times out of trees. She has gotten into the neighbors' houses. She is also, of course, SUPPOSED to wear a collar but is always getting it off. She is also very friendly to everyone and escorts the children of the neighborhood going to school.

She is, in fact, a purebred Abyssinian, and most astonishingly, he told me she was two years old! She is half the size of Persephone and Ulysses (big, clunky mongrels that they are), so I just assumed she was a kitten, which was really the main factor that made me "rescue" her.

(Most breeders and shelters these days want adopters to keep their cats inside. But when I said gently to Francis "Didn't the breeder say anything about keeping her inside?", he gave me a blank look.)

So now I feel guilty for making them worry (although I still think they're insane for letting her go outside...). And, more importantly, am I turning into a crazy cat lady? Isn't this how it starts? Rescuing cats that need to be rescued? Next thing you know I will have twenty cats in my apartment and will be bankrupting myself to buy pet food and kitty litter...

Georgia Aquarium

I just returned from a brief trip to Atlanta. (Note this is the first time I've been further south on the East Coast than Alexandria just outside the Beltway, except for changing planes in airports. In other words, it's the first time I've been to the South. But my friends from the South hasten to inform me that Atlanta is not really the South!)

I had some free time and my cousin and her husband, who used to live there, told me I should go see the aquarium, which is the largest in the US. It was pretty impressive. It was also the Friday afternoon before Memorial Day weekend, so it was massively crowded!

I couldn't get pictures of everything, usually because it's hard to take pictures through glass, or the animals were hiding from the crowds, or it was too crowded. But here are some good ones from the ones I did take.

Here's some kind of shark in one of those pools where you can pet the rays (it's not a baby hammerhead, but I don't remember what it is).

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The river otters were quite frisky, playing with their shells, and I got several pictures of them.

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In the cold water exhibit, they had some beluga whales:

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The scale is hard to see but I think they were about 30 feet long. (They also had sea lions and penguins, but I couldn't get any good pictures of them.)

The best part, though, was the deep ocean tank. First, you walk through a corridor under the tank where the walls and roof are glass. I didn't like that much because it was incredibly crowded and hard to see anything. But then you come out into a huge room with a gigantic glass viewing wall and you can see the entire tank. It was hypnotic; I think I watched for about 20 minutes.

There were random schools of fish:

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There were lots of groupers (about 5-6 feet long):

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Most impressive of all, there were whale sharks, the world's largest fish, about 20 feet long:

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Finally, at one point, a school of rays decided to swim by:

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Funniest kitten video ever...

For anyone who has ever hung around kittens of a certain age, this is hilarious...

Update on Doha

The pond where Doha and her offspring were taken by the US Trade Representative's Office is right around the corner from where I work, so of course I had to stop by and see if I could find her. I was a little nervous about what I would find, since I was aware that mortality among newborn ducklings is extremely high.

I walked around the pond. Didn't see any ducks or ducklings swimming around. Finally, I saw a female mallard, by all appearances solitary, roosting on a reed tuft a few feet from shore. As I looked at her, I became aware of two things. First, she appeared to be extremely overweight. Second, I realized I could hear ducklings peeping, even though I couldn't see any.

After a couple of minutes, a duckling climbed out from underneath her wing, where it had been hiding, and on to her back. (I don't know whether it was Portman, Zoellick, Kantor, Barshefsky, or whoever.) I was able to snap a picture with my cell phone:

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As I watched, a few more ducklings came out from under her wings, where they had been completely invisible. I think there were at least four or five (but, alas, I don't think there were ten hiding under there). Then I left, because I could tell she was getting nervous with me there, and I didn't want to disturb her.

Make way for Portman, Zoellick, Barshefsky, Kantor, Hills, Yeutter, Brock, Askew, Strauss, and Dent!

Doha and family (Washingtonpost.com)

It's spring in DC so it must be time for cute stories about ducks nesting outside Federal buildings! Two years ago it was the duck nesting outside the Treasury building who acquired her own Secret Service detail and received a car ride to Rock Creek Park. (In the first story I link to, the Treasury Secretary is described by a spokesperson in all seriousness as having been "briefed on the duck.")

Last spring and this spring, a duck (apparently the same duck both years although I don't know how they know, since all ducks look alike to me) nested outside the U.S. Trade Representative's office, then, after the ducklings hatched, the whole family was escorted by staffers to a nearby pond outside the Department of the Interior. (No car ride for them!)

The staffers named her Doha, after where the current round of trade talks is taking place, and named her ten ducklings after the last ten U.S. Trade Representatives (not including the current one). And since the Post only reported the names of the first four, I had to look up the other six myself...

Unfortunately, based on my observation of the pond on E St. between 18th and 19th last spring, the life expectancy for ducklings in DC is not very high...