Fridge art + bonus catblogging

A couple of loose ends from the comments to the 5 weird things about me* post the other day:

Magpie, whom I've known in real life since before the 1st Gulf War, recalled that I had a cat who did a peculiar thing. I'm not sure how that makes me weird, but I do have photos of Anna with a paper bag on her head.

She'd really do this herself. You know how cats will crawl into an open paper bag if you leave it on the floor? Anna really loved smaller bags. Bags that fit on her head. She'd put them on her head and then walk around with them, sort of bumping into things repeatedly (and apparently on purpose).

The other cats in the house, who normally harrassed poor Anna mercilessly, gave her a wide berth when she had a bag on her head, sort of like they thought she might be somehow dangerous. In this picture, she had actually jumped up onto the mantel and picked up the ToyboatToyboatToyboat bag; I was afraid she'd fall down, so I lifted her off. You can click here to see her on the floor with a plain brown paper bag on her head.

My sister the mailman said that she thought it was strange that I used to keep a photo of Counselor Troi taped to the wall above the cats' dishes so they could watch her when they ate. I had to tell her that she was mistaken about that. For one thing, they ate in separate rooms. They did share a water dish though, and there was a picture above it. She's not totally nuts. The picture above their water dish was actually a postcard someone sent me with two cats who looked like Edie and Anna, and who were drinking water out of a bowl that was nearly identical to their water dish.

The photo of Deanna Troi was actually on the fridge, and it wasn't a picture of her, or even of the actress who played her, but rather it was a picture of my 25th birthday cake. A painter friend of mine used to make these fabulous cakes, and then get a bunch of white frosting, some food coloring, and a palette knife and mix all the colors herself and paint with the frosting on the cake from whatever photo you'd give her. Note the Star Fleet insignia (some made up, some from ST:TOS uniforms) on the cupcakes.

Yes, my friends and I were geeks when we were in our twenties. Somewhere there are photos of the Jean-Luc Picard cake that another friend got for her birthday the year after that cake. I'll post one if I can find it, if anyone is interested.

But speaking of stuff on my fridge: When I took down the DT cake photo this morning to bring it in and scan it, I noticed that some of the items next to it had been on my fridge since at least the early nineties. Which is kind of remarkable considering that I have moved house 13 times since 1990. Seriously. There are lots of magnets and old photos and postcards, and also some cartoons, which are torn and faded and yellow. I brought in a couple of them to scan, so that I can at least preserve them digitally. Quite a few of the cartoons have a dinosaur-extinction theme going, such as this one above from back when Dilbert was actually funny. Click here to embiggen and maybe it'll be more legible, depending on your monitor.

And this one is perhaps my all-time favorite cartoon, from Lynda Barry, one of my all-time favorite cartoonists. Click here to see all four of the panels in the strip; the whole file was just too big to post, and I couldn't make it any smaller without making it completely illegible.

The original is pretty illegible to begin with, even though I tweaked it and enhanced the contrast as much as I could. The date on it is 1996. The third panel is especially faded; here's the narration:

"Iguanadon told us the tar pits rocked. Me and Megalosaurus throught it wouldn't hurt to try it once. Next thing we knew we were hooked. We both got kicked out of our band. Iguanadon choked on his own vomit. The scene was getting ugly but we couldn't stop." And then the dialog between the two dinosaurs: Dino 1: "For godssakes! Iguanadon is dead and all you can think about is finding his stash!" Dino 2: It's around here somewhere."

I've always been fond of putting things on the fridge door. I used to collect headlines from tabloid newspapers (the Weekly Word News was my fave: More space aliens, less celebrity gossip) and arrange them on the fridge door.

The one pictured at left is my first solo apartment, sometime in the late 1980s. The cats on top are named Kolena and Martha. I'm not 100% sure which one is which, although I recall that the solid grey one on the right is the mom of the other one (also pictured below).

Those two cats were adorable, though. Unfortunately they only stayed with me for a few months to accommodate a long-term houseguest of their real mom. The poor houseguest was desperately allergic, but as soon as she went away, these two went back home.

Here's a picture of the younger one in a very popular spot: over the pilot light on the gas stove. That was the most wonderful stove I ever cooked anything on in my entire life. I wish I still had it.

I scanned some more of the fridge art, and some more very old pictures of cats that are no longer, in fact, alive. But I need to go do some other things right about now, so I'll save those for another post.

*I know I'm supposed to tag five more bloggers to complete the meme, but I don't do chain letters or anything like that, so if you want to list five weird things about yourself, please consider yourself tagged. You can post it on your own blog or put your list in the comments over on the original post. It is kind of fun to do.