Cat's eye

Last night I set my alarm for midnight. When it went off, I set it for 1am and spent 15 minutes administering 3 different drops to our oldest cat Frida's left eye, with 5 minutes between each drop. At 1am, I set the alarm for 2am and spent 15 minutes dosing Frida's eye, and so the night went in increments of 35-40 minutes sleeping and 15 minutes dosing. Soon I hope to take a nap. The results of this aggressive medication were more encouraging than expected this morning when the doctor rechecked Frida's eye.

Frida called us up from across the street in 1995. She was about 6 months old, we were told by the young veterinarian who had just opened her practice in a town center near our house. Our neighbor and fishing friend had a fish cleaning station outside his house, a stainless steel sink salvaged from a local deli. Frida found it and stuck to it like glue. Bob heard her calling. He told me he heard something and went to investigate. I followed him by a couple of minutes and saw this tiny pale cat looking up at my husband, and he was looking down at her. We took her back to our house and fed her and started calling pet rescue organizations. They sent us to the young vet who was running a special on the surgery and vaccination package that the pet rescue required. The next morning, my husband, who has severe allergies to dogs and a little less reaction to cats, said, "Let's keep her." We had found homes for lost cats and kittens before. But they hadn't called him up personally, like Frida did, and they didn't have a creamy belly with tan spots on the underside and pale pastel tortoiseshell hair everywhere else. They didn't a pointy tale so flea bitten that the hair never grew back straight over patches of the tip. They weren't artistic in the litter box, like Frida, raking the clay into garden formations.

In 2006, Frida's recurring corneal ulcers led to a series of procedures that didn't work and instead resulted in a nasty sequestrum, a black scab that a veterinary professor deftly sliced off, leaving Frida's cornea thinner and more likely to be dry and irritated by allergens. But she was declared cured and a follow up corneal graft was not deemed necessary. Now she has an ulcer for the first time since that surgery, along with a destructive infection that is making it hard for her eye to heal the ulcer, even though it has formed blood vessels reaching toward the ulcer just as it did before. After yesterday's afternoon and night of vigilant medicating, the infection is losing ground and the ulcer is already smaller. I was fully prepared to face the removal of the eye, after putting Frida through months of medication all those years ago. I knew that if the ulcer was not halted quickly, it would break through her already thin cornea and she would lose the eye painfully and dangerously. I also know that we have limited resources for expensive procedures and hospitalization, which is why I dosed her myself through the night.

It's not over yet, but the eye has gained some ground against the baddies, and that's nice because appliances and vehicles have been breaking at a dizzying pace around our house this summer. It takes more than a call to the plumber to fix a broken cat, but it is the most important repair we have to undertake right now.

Another mystery solved

From time to time, our smallest cat Daisy shows up with small scratches on her face and ears. She's not getting them from rough play with the other cats. Yesterday as I was walking through the back yard, I saw her jump right up into the larger branches of the Mermaid rose that grows over a trellis in the back yard. The Mermaid is near both bird feeders and there are two ground level bird baths near it, so its good shelter is something smaller birds like the wrens, cardinals, titmice, and chickadees take advantage of. Daisy was chasing a bird and now has a fresh scratch on one ear. She is not so small as a wren, but almost as nimble, and the Mermaid has big thorns.

Two weekends two bikes

The past two weekends have been given over to motorcycle shopping with the husband. After researching bikes that would meet his preferences, he went to the local Triumph dealer last weekend, knowing that he would have to go out of town to look at the BMW model that interested him. He read the rider forums, read the company websites, read the reviews, and looked over specifications and weighed options until he was fully prepared with questions. I've seen him shop before; he is an artist.

He spent the week talking to two other dealers and set up a test ride for the top three bike candidates today. Sitting on a bike in the showroom can only give so much information. All of my own bikes have been purchased with the same rigorous research but no test ride, because I was a new rider at the time and back then you just didn't get a test ride. Things have changed. I knew the test rides would be revealing, but it wasn't until he talked to his riding buddy that the choices became clear to him.

We have both been dedicated Buell riders for years, but Buells for the common man are no more, and so my husband is moving on. I did not realize that I would have feelings about this transition... how much we had committed to the company until I realized, at the end of today's investigations, that this really would be goodbye to my husband's big Buell. I will still have my little Lightning for a while, until I see that I am getting close to the day the HD dealer says... sorry, we can't work on your Buell any more. I certainly can't work on it myself. What an oddity Buells are... the only American made sport bike, tinkered by a German designer from Sportster engines, small and light (until the Ulysses, of course), nimble, innovative.

The ultimate choice was a sleeper, a bike he had not even considered until last weekend when he saw it at the local Triumph dealer. So it was down to two bikes, the Triumph Tiger 800 and the Yamaha FJR, and he rode the Yamaha last. While the Tiger was fun and comfortable, the FJR was hard to argue against for a man with a 90 mile commute and a thirst for a road trip.

Where someone has gone before

Gardening in the shade led me to work across the driveway from the front door, where my mother's English ivy and Virginia creeper are working together to cover my plantings-- Big Blue liriope, dwarf Walter's virburnam, white crinum lilies, and a venerable rosemary bush that I planted soon after we moved into the house in 2002. The rosemary succumbed to a wet summer last year and died. It's feet were in clay and soil that had been very dry. When we moved in, there were some very sad little azaleas that had been planted there in unimproved soil with not much mulch, too much sun, and not enough water. The rosemary thrived for years because the soil drained well, but then it didn't after the vines moved in.

Early on in today's clearing I found a credit card. About twenty minutes later I found another one. Both belonged to the same person; one had expired in 2011 and the other in 2012. After a little phone book research I found her, living around the corner from me. I called and left a message, and she called back about an hour later. Two years ago her purse had been stolen from inside her car, which was inside her garage, with the garage door open. Her purse was found soon after at another neighbor's house, but she wondered what had happened to the credit cards. The odd thing was not so much that a crew had been working the neighborhood two years ago, looking for open doors, but that they had left what they didn't want well up into other neighbors' yards. Both the purse and these credit cards were not down by the street; they were up long driveways near the front door. Interesting MO.

Two years ago when this crew came by, our house was locked and the alarm system was on. They left two calling cards, but I didn't find them until today.

Green mulch

Representative of the general condition of the neglected flowerbeds in the front yard, here is my bed of shame. These are all native vines... Carolina jessamine, grapevine, Virginia creeper... the victory of clearing them out of the beds is bittersweet because they are native and natural, but they have no restraint.

Here are the few square yards I have cleared from the vines and replaced the green mulch with pine straw and pine bark. What was green is now brown. Soon my yard will look like every other yard in the neighborhood.

The suggestible and redirectible passionflower vine. This is a hybrid magnificent purple reaching from a trellis to a large sasanqua camellia. Very well behaved.

I have three passionflower vines growing in my garden-- the large exotic smelly purple, the native blue that grows on Payne's Prairie, and this little red, Lady Margaret.

Nap time

Rosie and Daisy napping during the thunderstorm. The storm has passed now but they are still napping.

Return of the rain

I spent the morning redirecting passionflower vines in the vegetable bed-- forgot to mention them among the rogue's gallery of vines yesterday as they are not part of the problem in the front flower beds-- the vegetable bed is the newest  bed and gets more attention than the other beds. Trumpet flower vine tries to come over from the woods but I pull the roots where I can find them. There is very little Virginia creeper in the vegetable bed and even less after this morning. I have several trellises for the passionflower vine and I let it grow on a couple of big sasanqua camellias as well. The passionflower vine is not as much of a problem as the other vines, and it is easy to persuade it to grow in the direction I want it to go. The caterpillars eat it and in winter the leftover vines dry up and fall apart by themselves. I pulled just a few passionflower vines that were coming up in problematic places, like the Alachua Red Climber rose trellis, the Sweet One Hundred cherry tomato cage, and the mystery cherry tomato cage. I'm pretty sure the mystery cherry tomato will turn out to be a black cherry tomato. The seedling came up next to the strawberry plants and I let it grow. It's vigorous and the tomatoes are big, even bigger than the tomatoes on the plant that stood in that spot last year. One fruit started to change from green this morning.

After Tropical Storm Andrea came through, we have had several days without rain. Now a storm is moving in from the west. I had come in for brunch, and because my neighbor was kicking up noise and smoke with his lawn mower, when I heard the thunder. The light has dropped quickly in the past ten minutes, and now it looks like a cloudy twilight outside the windows. The rain has just started now.

I also devined the last and most heavily covered pine tree in the front yard. Carolina jessamine had formed a beautiful mass about twenty feet up. It bloomed gloriously in January. It will not stay there, however, and it is joined by grapevine and Virginia creeper, and all of them are growing over the camellias next to the tree. If it is too wet to work in the yard after the storm passes, I will resume the destruction tomorrow. I also have my eye on a grapevine that is covering my buckthorn saplings, growing over onto them from my neighbor's hedge. Buckthorn is one of my favorite trees. We first became aware of it when we discovered it growing in our previous house's back yard, and I have loved it ever since. I will let it grow just about anywhere it sprouts. Beautiful leaves and demure little berries that the birds love. It's a great understory tree, very sweet.

Everything's still vine, but not as vine as before

As I was devining the trees in the front yard, I reflected that, while I'm amused and poking fun at Daisy's shenanigans, she deserves credit for her skills. She survived abandonment on a dirt road with her sister, who had a broken pelvis, and her sister's six kittens. With her sister injured, it was probably Daisy who got them anything to eat and kept the kittens from wandering off-- Aunt Daisy. She was barely a year old when she was rescued and we adopted her from our animal clinic. The kittens were adopted rapidly because they were at the ultra cute age and had beautiful coloring, and her sister healed and was adopted too. Whereas Daisy is brown and orange tabby with white paws, her sister was grey tabby, much more uniformly patterned. Daisy has more orange on one hind leg than the other, one shoulder orange and the other not, and a slightly off-center blaze on her asymmetrical orange nose. She's unusual inside and out.

I have come to the painful realization that even the vines I love have to go. They are beautiful and lush and completely out of control. The last time I asked my arborist to take down a tree, it took him five weeks and several phone calls to finally do it. The tree was just at the edge of the woods and covered with trumpet vine and virginia creeper. I don't blame him at all for avoiding it. Vines make the job complicated and dangerous.

I like the things I have planted in the yard and would like to be able to see them-- coonties, camellias, sego palms, daylilies, azaleas-- but I can barely see them through the vines. Virginia creeper, Carolina jessamine, smilax, Singapore skunk vine, wild clematis, English ivy from my mother's garden, variegated ivy from gardening friends-- it all has to be pulled. I will keep a small patch of the ivy in a place where I can keep it off the trees. I'll keep my mother's species clematis on the trellis; it's much more cooperative than these other vines. I planted the Carolina jessamine near pine tree in the front yard, innocently thinking it would just grow up the tree. It grew everywhere except up the tree. It spread all over the flower bed and grew up through the camellias and I pulled it all years ago, and then it came back and covered everything on the ground again and finally grew up the pine trees. The time has come for the jessamine to go.

Hunting 2

Daisy's indoor hunting continues to bring adventure her way. Just a few minutes ago she faced down a dangerous snake on the kitchen counter. She hopped up onto the stool next to the counter to keep my company as I was taking a water break. All of her instinctive defenses came into play instantly. She arched her back and watched without blinking. The counter was not empty. There was a pan upside down drying on a tea towel. At first I thought it was the pan that surprised her, but next I observed that her attention was fixed on the tea towel. The design of the towel's one inch border features alternating black and red stripes, loosely printed so that some white shows through here and there.

Daisy reached out a paw and touched the edge of the towel lightly and quickly, then drew her paw back, then touched again, and once again without drawing her paw back this time, having determined that the tea towel was already dead. Only then did her body relax and she lay down on the stool with her head resting on one splayed out foreleg, as if nothing had happened. In a sense, I suppose nothing did happen, but if it had she knew what to do.

Hunting

Daisy's hunting skills are improving. She has successfully removed tomatoes and blueberries from the kitchen counter and batted them all over the house. She can even get blueberries out of a tea cup, but not when the tea cup has been tucked away inside the cabinet. Fortunately for the wild life in the yard, she can't catch a bird, squirrel, or butterfly, but a couple of lizards have lost their tails.

Gardening in the shade

Gardening in the shade is the only possibility in ninety degree weather. If the day is overcast, I can work anywhere in the yard, but on a sunny day it's easy to get heat stress. So I follow the shade. Today I finished clearing the piles of vines that came down with the tree during the storm. Then I moved to the front of the house, where Virginia creeper grows up through the azaleas. I got most of the big roots and spread mulch. I'll get what's left another day. I cleared the vines back in the fall, but I did not do a good job of getting roots until today. Even the smilax vine I dug up previously came back from a couple of little pieces of the root that I missed in the fall. As the shade moves around throughout the day, eventually I will get to each area that needs attention.

Singing

Frida has been taking a joint health supplement for a week now. Last night something extraordinary happened. During a prolonged and stentorian episode of singing and carrying Stripe Mouse around the tv room and kitchen, she hopped into a cardboard box containing tissue paper that we keep next to the tv, Stripe and all, looking like a three year old. Frida is eighteen. It's not unusual for her sing and carry Stripe around for a half hour or an hour after breakfast and dinner, but this song lasted over two hours and was especially ear-splitting. She has never shown any interest in the box before. Daisy sits in the box, and Rose sits in the box, and last week I started sprinkling a little catnip in the box as well as on the catnip rug, which is a bath rug in front of the fireplace. Frida hopped in and out of the box with Stripe several times. I felt as if I were watching someone else's cat in a video posted on YouTube, but it was my own sedentary Frida showing us that "there's a dance in the old dame yet," to quote Mehitabel, another cat indulging in kittenish antics at a ripe old age.

Nibbling

This morning I looked out the breakfast room window and there was the rabbit, looking around the part of the paisley bed where the little sport of Cecile Bruner rose used to be. The mutabilis rose that got crushed by the tree is nearby, so it consoled itself by eating a few leaves of mutabilis that were now within its reach. The rabbit avoids the front of the house, so it is unlikely to discover Cecile's new location any time soon. The mutabilis is holding up pretty well, and yesterday was a hot day that would test its ability to get moisture up to its leaves with a split trunk.

Weather or not...

Storm preparedness for Tropical Storm Andrea is under way at our house.

Flooding may occur in low lying areas: Earlier this afternoon, I was feeling complacent about the possibility of 35 knot winds. The forecast is usually more dramatic than the weather that comes. I turned on the Weather Channel and got out the Cat Charmer to entertain the two young cats. For some reason this stimulation sent Nick careening into the water bowls with much crashing and splashing as a result. I mopped up a half gallon of water with a towel, thinking this may not be the end of water tonight.

Loose objects may become dangerous projectiles in high winds: Even with close observation, you don't really know how many birds are coming to your feeders until you take them down. Right now the chickadees, titmice, downy woodpeckers, and cardinals are teaching their fledgelings how to gather food. That includes our feeders. I will remount the feeders in the morning when the storm has passed and they will be clean and full. Wild birds do not depend on feeders alone, so it is a temporary inconvenience.

I also moved the trash cans and hose reels and one three foot tall cone shaped wrought iron trellis. The house has plenty of tarps and lanterns and batteries, water purification and a cook stove and fuel. I hope it will just be a quiet Thursday night with some bands of wind and rain moving through, but one never knows. In 2004 we lost power as three hurricanes moved through. I read my students' literary journals by the light of an REI camp light. We lost a cat too; I think I've told that story in this blog before. If the worst that happens tonight is that I unnecessarily moved things, then I will feel the force of luck once again.

Meanwhile, the mutabilis rose that got crushed yesterday is holding itself up a little higher today. In other news, the sport of Cecile Bruner that I moved a few days ago has put out one new leaf a day for a total of three-- with the encouraging humidity and rain and cloud cover we have had with the storms moving through, transplants are getting a lucky break.

discipline

Tomatoes have no self control. We have had several inches of rain in the past two days. The tomatoes will drink and drink and the fruit may split their skins.

That's in the front garden. In the back garden, a tree fell today while I was at work. It missed the birdbath that was an anniversary present from my husband, but it fell on the mutabilis rose bush that is about five or six years old. The main trunk is split into three. I spent about an hour pulling vines and pieces of the tree off the rose, pruned it a little and said words of encouragement. I hope it can heal itself.

The students are gone and today and tomorrow are just work without them. Today I organized and culled the books in my classroom. Tomorrow I will work on files. I hope to show more discipline and save myself countless hours searching for things I did not file properly the year before. It is also time to discard old material that will not be used again. Its parking meter has run out. One has to be in the right mood for this sort of cleaning and I am.

pirouette

Not long after my last post, the last hatchling to leave the nest flew off. Archie had been flirting with leaving the ledge since before his nestmates had left, flapping vertically and horizontally and windowwise like Judson. After a long engagement, he finally consummated late in the day today. My Sunday Times is still unwrapped and unread because I was following the nest cam and live on the ground with Urban Hawks.

I say not long, but the truth is that followers online and on the ground spent hours upon hours this weekend following the hawks. In a rural environment, hawks would not need humans watching over them. In an urban environment, perhaps the same is true, but it is also true that there are so many variables that many pairs of eyes and hands can help protect the hawks from the dangers we have created. So, let it be and let it be as is.

Side stepping and flying forward

I moved a small rose bush this morning. It's a sport of Cecile Bruner, just a little smaller flower. For over a year I have been trying to stop the bunnies and deer from eating it and I finally gave up and moved it. Any time it grew a few leaves and gained more than six inches in height, they would eat it back. It was actually trying to grow sideways to avoid the nibblers. It also had a lot of root competition from nearby trees. They know where I am watering regularly and send in the roots. I hope it will have a chance to grow now. It's near the front door. It's not a retreat exactly, more of a side step.

By far the most exciting thing happening this weekend is the fledging of the Washington Square hawks. The oldest of the three, Kiku, left the nest around 10:30 Friday morning. By the time I got home that afternoon, there were lots of pictures and videos of her flying around from cars to street then from building to building. This morning she has made her way back to the park from the side street she was exploring and her parents brought her food. Before many people were up this morning, however, the youngest Judson had fledged just before 5:30. No one seems to have captured it on film, but two members of the chat group witnessed his departure. Now the middle hatchling Archie is alone in the nest having lunch. She seems interested in leaving, practicing her jumping and flapping, but she hasn't taken the plunge yet. To see a hatchling fledge live... that would be mountain top (in honor of anniversary of Hillary's climb). I have only seen pictures and video of the previous fledges. It's the most amazing thing to see first flight. Everything depends on the success of the first landing.

Watching the NYU hawk cam is an experience that is hard to describe. I have watched since Mother's Day two years ago, when Violet and Bobby hatched one egg, Pip. I thought he was named for Dickens' hero until this year, when I learned that pipping is what they call the first breaking through of the egg tooth through the egg. After Pip was successfully independent, Violet succumbed to her leg injury, caused by a metal banding loop. Rosie appeared within a few days in Bobby's territory, and last year they raised two chicks, Boo and Scout.

This third nest has been entertaining as Bobby and Rosie mature as a couple and as parents. Bobby has always brought sticks to the nest, sometimes imperiling the chicks, and last year a plastic bag notoriously wrapped around a chick dangerously for several days. This year, Rosie has brought twigs with green leaves regularly. Kiku ate voraciously, Archie second voraciously, as we all worried that Judson wasn't getting enough food when in fact he was doing quite well, thank you very much. He always seemed to be off to the side looking the other way while Kiku and Archie did everything together. One morning, while the hatchlings were still quite young, Bobby brought a newspaper to the nest, and he and Rosie together worked it over and then under the chicks, until they were three little white downy heads bobbing around in a newspaper boat. A sense of play and fun has been the characteristic of this year's nest. Judson flew at the window repeatedly instead of across the ledge like the other two. It was his way-- always the other way.

I watch afternoons, nights, and weekends. I love to watch them sleeping in the nest. There is never audio and at night the camera changes from color to black and white. It is serene. Among the hundreds of people who watch, only a few make comments on the chat side bar, among them hawk expert John Blakeman who teaches us patiently about hawk biology and behavior. They are funny and friendly, warmly welcoming fellow birders, mostly from New York but also watching like me from afar-- New Jersey, Missouri, South Carolina, California, Boston, Hong Kong, Australia, and several of us in Florida. We tease each other and make terrible puns. When we get rowdy, our typing is atrocious. I feel as if I have about two dozen friends whom I have never met.

In previous years, we have had Roger Paw's photos from the park as well as the nest cam. Now we also have Urban Hawks' photos and live streaming from the park. GhentArt's screen captures on YouTube have kept me from being so forlorn at work, as I can watch his clips but not the nest cam during the day. It has become a much richer experience for those of us who can't walk around the park in person. Some day I hope to make a pilgrimage to Washington Square Park, join a meet up at the fledge bench, and thank them in person for making this experience possible and welcoming all of us into the company of the hawk watchers at the park.