Categorically Cats

It’s Saturday, and that means. It’s time for Linda Hill’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday. This week’s prompt?

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “-cat-”  Use the letters at the start, middle, or end of a word and make it the subject of your post – or just use the word “cat.” Enjoy!

And rather than trying to be clever, I just took the word at face value.

When my daughter was younger, she used to ask me for a baby sister. Unbeknownst to her at the time, I had been advised against having more children since my labor and delivery with said daughter had been rather rough. Eventually, my daughter was old enough to understand that there would be no baby sister. Her solution: ask Mom for a cat, or more accurately, a kitten. That’s when Snickers came into our lives. Two other cats joined our family over the next few years: Aphrodite and Cappuccino.

Aphrodite was born to an outdoor cat, but when it was discovered she was nearly blind with other defects, she was brought into the house of the family who owned the barn she was born in. The problem with that idea was that one of the children in the house had an allergy, and the blind cat needed a home. That need happened to coincide with Kate’s request for a second cat.

Cappuccino was a rambunctious little kitten who made Curious George look almost bored. Cappuccino was a bit of a tech geek before the days of widespread cell phone use. But she was into printers and paper shredders. The sound of either one would bring the Capp running at full clip to “investigate.” She would sit next to the printer, and it would look like she was reading what came out of it. As a kitten, she’d hop right up on the edge of the paper shredder to check things out. We wanted to hire her out for spy work, as she seemed to have a knack for keeping an eye on so many things.

The other awesome thing about Cappuccino is that she took Aphrodite under her “wing.” Although Cappuccino was younger, she began mothering Aphrodite, helping with grooming and teaching her to jump onto the padded piano bench. It was like she understood that Aphro needed some help and just rose to the occasion.

When I went to grad school, Aphrodite and Cappuccino went with us, and Snickers stayed with Kate. The cats left us in reverse order, with Snickers living to a ripe cat age of nearly 18 years. Kate wrote this post for Snickers, aka Tuna after he died in February..

The pictures above are not of our cats, but of a couple of cats from Taiwan. But you can see Snickers in Kate’s post.

If you want to join in the fun, check it out at: http://lindaghill.com/2015/11/06/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-nov-715/

My Answer to This Week’s “To Do or Not to Do Tuesday”

Since I started a new feature this past week, I decided that Friday was a good day to post the answer. That way when the decision is “to do,” I’ll have the weekend to jump in with both feet. And when the answer is “not to do,” I can use my weekend for things that are already on my “go ahead” list.

TO QUILT OR NOT TO QUILT

This one probably won’t be much of a surprised, but I’m going to be taking on the mystery quilt challenge. I first heard about it when I was reading a post about it on Mary’s blog.

https://stitchinggrandma.wordpress.com/2015/10/31/another-mystery-quilt/

I was immediately intrigued and posted a comment which began a brief but active conversation between us.

• Deborah says:

  I don’t really have time for this, but I’m so tempted by your post that I’m going to go peek. No promises about restraining myself. 😉
  •  stitchinggrandma says:

      As long as you download the instructions each week, you can set your own pace.
•  Deborah says:

   Yeah, but that’s no fun. I need the push of the group keeping me on schedule. 😉 But yeah, that’s a great back-up plan.
  • stitchinggrandmasays:

    Go get your paint chips!! I will pester you to keep on it! It is really a ton of fun. Do read through Bonnie’s full post before you start your fabric selections.

    **********

    So I went to read Bonnie’s post and made a list of the paint chips and the fabric measurements for each. This morning, I had a little bit of time between appointments, so I stopped at Lowe’s for paint chips, and later I will start the treasure hunt for the appropriate fabrics.

    I also have to pick up a couple of special rules for making angles. This part is quite exciting because the idea of learning a new technique will help me move ahead on my quilting. I like to do a lot of my own designing, but sometimes, I am a little shy about the triangles I use. I’m hopeful that an easier triangle construction process will motivate me to use more of them in my quilts.

    Of course, I will honor the schedule I posted in my Tuesday post. Jack’s quilt still is the priority. I will be getting his quilt sandwich put together this weekend, and hopefully start quilting. I want to get it done because I want to give it to him. But I also want to get it done and give it to him because I want to start posting pictures of how cute it is turning out. But it’s still in “surprise” mode, so I can’t post pictures yet. Soon!

    In the meantime, I’m off to scout out some fabric! I won’t buy a lot today, but it will be fun to play with the new color scheme between the rest of the errands and appointments I have today.

    The great thing about this thinking “process” is that it wasn’t really a matter of “deciding” to quilt. That decision has been made over and over in the past, and it’s never been a true decision. I can’t stay away from quilting even if I think I want to try.