Monthly Archives: April 2026

My own damned opinion.

I bought a camera and I’m this (years) old.

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Yep. I decided that with the petty thefts going on at the shop, I would monitor my studio. It’s not an expensive camera, but sufficient for my needs. It watches the entry and I can access it from my iPad. It works well enough for my purposes and notifies me when someone walks past my studio.

I was just reading an old Buzzfeed article asking how many years old you are without giving your age or birthdate. The answers were mostly from “youngsters”— the ones who grew up with remotes and color televisions. The oldest was “I’m riding in the back of the station wagon-years old” I can beat that. I’m “crouch under your desk and cover your head with your hands”-years old, also known as “duck-and-cover” air raid drills

Early Atomic Age— prepare for falling atom bombs AKA early Cold War Era. Eisenhower was President and Russia was Enemy Number One. We could be attacked at any time by the godless communists. Air raid sirens went off once a month. If you couldn’t get to shelter, you did the “duck-and-cover.” Yep. That’d save you from a real bomb.

Maybe with the current state of the country, we should start those drills again. Not that they’d do much good. Just ask the folks from Hiroshima and Nagasaki how well they did. The weapons we have now would literally blast us back to the stone age, not metaphorically, literally. There’s nowhere to hide. Maybe Greenland or maybe Antarctica.

With the luck of most of us, a nuke would strike Yellowstone and send us all not back to the Stone Age, but back to the Primordial swamp. Millions of years from now, the future inhabitants of Earth will be drilling for hydrocarbons in the areas formerly known as Chicago, Minneapolis, New York.

Geologists will speculate on the enormous pools of fatty hydrocarbons that were formerly Americans. Archeologists will be confused by the incredible amounts of crumbling plastic artifacts. Anthropologists and Paleontologists will be using carbonized and crushed shards of bones to assemble what earlier life looked like and will come up with creatures assembled from the fragments of humans and their pets.

They’ll mine the great rust beds that were girders of skyscrapers and wonder about the fragments of tarry ribbons winding about under the dirt. They’ll wonder why there are uncountable seams of copper that extend for thousands of miles but are scarcely thicker than a twig. And they’ll find the Twinkies of a bygone era- still in the plastic wrap, still with the creamy filling, and the soft yellow sponge cake.

What fun.

Stuff

Wow. That was fast.

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I filled my taxes Saturday. My refunds arrived in my bank on Tuesday. I suspect they ran it past my prior forms and discovered it was within parameters. I usually file the first of February and get my refund when applicable by the end of March. I waited until Saturday because I didn’t think I would be getting any refunds. As Gomer Pyle used to say, “Surprise, surprise, surprise.”

It’s probably because there aren’t enough people to actually examine returns too closely and just thought “I don’t care. It’s not my money. Returns look okay. Refund granted.”

So my new washing machine is paid for with that money. It was an impulse purchase made as I walked through Menards. The size and price were right. My friend Paul went with me to pick it up and he and the boomerang child swapped the washers. The old one was put down to the street for pickup next week. There was no charge for the pickup ticket, probably because washing machines aren’t too complicated to recycle.a

The new washer is a top loader so the next rugs I weave can be felted properly. The front loader didn’t do that great a job. I tossed my winter comforter in and it came out without dripping. It killed the front loader. I also pulled five dollars in change from the front loader’s filter. Since I don’t keep change in my pockets, I suspect the boomerang child is not careful about emptying his pockets.

I just looked outside and the old washer is gone. Since it’s not trash day, I suspect a junker took it. No big deal since I didn’t pay for the removal. I know I’ve pulled enough stuff from the curb – a trailer’s worth of boards, a porch rocker, a walker for when I need one.

Mini-me once attempted to drag a plastic basketball hoop to the driveway from down the block. A neighbor saw her and helped move it up. The person who put the hoop out, later brought the ball over. When she outgrew it, I dragged over to a neighbor who had a little boy.

We carried her sandbox around the corner one day when we saw a new toddler boy playing with sand in a plastic shoebox while on our walk.. Her toddler bike went across the street to a new family. We had already given away the tricycle.

Yep! This is another ramble from an aged mind. Almost forgot— bringing that washer into the basement meant disturbing the basement wildlife. There’s spiders everywhere upstairs now. I don’t like spiders. Eventually, they’ll go away. Have a good day!

Mostly me, Stuff

I just watched a Catumentory

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That’s just a word I made up. I was given two tickets by my friend Carolyn, to “25 Cats From Qatar,” a film about cat rescue operations in Qatar. Carolyn couldn’t make the show so I asked the former “mini-me” aka my youngest granddaughter, to join me.

The film is part of the Wisconsin Film Festival which started in 1999 and highlights cinema from around the world. These are not your Hollywood-type movies, but the work of filmmakers from Wisconsin and different parts of the world.

“25 Cats from Qatar” is about an American cat rescue group based in Wisconsin. The camera follows a woman from Milwaukee to the capital of Qatar, the city of Doha, to choose 25 cats to bring back for adoption. You find out that 25 cats isn’t even a percentage point of the number of feral and abandoned cats in the city.

Most of these cats are abandoned by Qatar’s temporary workers who leave after their contracts are done. Rather than take the cats back with them, they abandon their cats on the streets. “It’s just a cat.” I learned that there is a rotating population of 3 million temporary workers and an estimated 3 million cats abandoned on the streets.

There are people who have been feeding and providing some care for cats in their neighborhoods and these are the lucky cats. Most have to scrounge for food and risk starvation or being killed by traffic or disease.

The film showed several people who take a few cats off the street, primarily to treat wounds and injuries, and offer them a place to recover before turning them loose again. The healthiest of the cats are held for foreign rescuers to pick up and take to their home countries for adoptions. Very few of these make the cut.

There are veterinarians who will verify that the cats are healthy enough for travel and who fill out the cats’ health certificates and their passports. Yep, today I learned that cats get passports. One of the cats turned out to be pregnant so she smuggled 4 kittens in in her belly.

The young woman actually brought 27 cats (+4) back to Milwaukee. All 31 found homes. I think the entire cargo area of the plane was wall-to-wall cat crates. At the end of the film, there was a question and answer period featuring rescuer and the woman who accompanied her to do the filming.

AJ and I didn’t stick around for that, because my bad knee was really giving me trouble. Apparently, the balcony of the 100 year-old theater was built for shorter people with good knees. I spent the entire film standing which was okay because we were in the very last row and I was able to brace myself quite well against the seat.

As we walked out, I took a tumble – very embarrassing, by the way. I made it down the steps okay. And as we were leaving the forecasted rain was pouring down. Being part cat myself, I really didn’t appreciate the wet, and sent AJ to get her car which she didn’t appreciate because she’s also part cat. 😀