Challenge # 28 Meet Our Mascot

This challenge comes from a small writing group.  We have a large series of random questions that we answer and share.  The goal is to answer at least one per week.

Question:

If your family had a mascot, what would it be and why?

Meet Our Mascot 

Our mascot would most certainly be a cat, not a comic looking cat like Sylvester, but an elegant, slightly down on her luck, cat like Grizabella.  Over the years we have been lucky enough to have many cats share our house.  It all started with a black and white stray who most certainly had at least nine lives.  The most dramatic time with her was when she had gotten into a bottle of medicine that had a loose top, knocked it over, got it all over her fur and licked it off.  We let her out in the morning and she crawled under the house and stayed there for 5 or 6 days refusing all food and water. I thought she was a goner and she came out good as gold.  She lived with us for several years and at least three new homes.

We had a couple of Persians move in next and they were  from a really good bloodline and would make great show cats if one were so inclined.  The female slipped out of the house and destroyed that pedigree line with her six kittens from a neighborhood Tom.  With eight cats in the house now, my daughter developed an allergy to cats. We searched to find good homes for all the cats and we were heartbroken so we kept two of the kittens.  These had to be both inside and outside cats so the dander would not bother my daughter as much.

These two stayed with us for many years and another three moves to new houses.  In the animal world we had several dogs and a couple of rabbits in addition to the cats.  Somehow the cats always seemed to belong in our house and worked out the best for us in the long run.

Today my daughter has three cats and her daughter also has three.  We still manage to get the occasional dog or bird or lizard or tarantula or fish in the same house hold with cats.  I guess you are destined for pets or not in the universe and we are certainly the lucky ones.

Challenge #16 Extra Room

This challenge comes from a small writing group.  We have a large series of random questions that we answer and share.  The goal is to answer at least one per week.

Question:

If you had an extra room in your house, what would you use it for?

My extra room.

Who doesn’t love extra rooms, it’s kind of like having extra cash or finding money in your pocket you forgot you put there.  Just puts a smile on your face.

At one point I had more rooms than people living in my place so I actually had an extra room, it started life as a guest bedroom.  After a few years of having only two overnight guests, I finally said enough is enough and lets make this far more useful to me, so it became a sewing room.

My initial thoughts were to move the bed to one side of the room and put my sewing machine and table and fabric on the other side.  That lasted for a couple of months, then the bed went and storage shelves were added so I could fit my fabric stash and my craft supplies.  This was the life of the extra room until I began to move, then it was the first room to get packed up and became the holding room for all the boxes and furniture.

Today, I would do the same with an extra room.  I have had a few friends who have done some really fun things with extra rooms that might change my mind.  One of my friends has turned that extra room into floor to ceiling storage, with shelves for storage and careful stacking, all the walls are hidden by boxes and furniture.  I have a friend who uses her extra room as a TV room and has completely banned her family from the living room with electronics and no television.  This room has become the  electronics center of the house and the TV is pretty much running non-stop, but everyone walking into the house doesn’t hear it.

Another friend has the spare room turned into a meditation/yoga room.  Painted in calm soothing colors with inspirational quotes on the walls it really is a calm place.  A scented candle or incense burning transports you to a serene and restful place almost instantly.

One of the coolest things I have seen is a room that is pretty much the cats playroom.  With  shelves and hiding up high on the walls and ramps that allow cat only access they seem to love the safety of their space away from all people.    I think the luxury of an extra room really can become any adult play room or a reflection of their unique personality.

 

 

Save Water

The sign in the summer house said, “Save Water, Bathe With A Friend.”  This was some 40 years ago and I can’t imagine where my totally uncool and un-hip parents got it.  Let alone had the nerve to put it up for display on the bathroom wall. The “summer house” was a  4 bed, 1 bath old farm house in the middle of no where farm fields, about  90 miles north of nothing, Perhaps spending so much time in the middle of all that nature they developed a new set of rules for survival other than we had in the city.  I don’t recall the sharing of bath water with anyone while there, but the sign seems very relevant now in the era of conserving our resources.

On some show I recently watched, the person shared their method of conservation and it is in teaching the children what to do.  Like turning off the water while brushing your teeth.  It just seems so logical to teach them that from the time they are first learning to brush their teeth and it then becomes a lifelong good habit.

This caused me to reflect on what I could do and the answers don’t have to be dramatic, just practical. A simple one I will now do is when an ice cube falls on the floor, don’t put it in the sink to melt, put it in the dog or cat’s water dish or in a houseplant to melt. I can do this.

Cats At The Quilt Show

There may be an overload of cat ladies who quilt, or quilters who quilt for cat ladies.  I have at least 2 cat ladies in my family and I am currently working on 2 cat quilts.  These are some I found at the quilt show and they were in a variety of categories.  I like the idea of using cat fabric to create the cat pattern used in one of the quilts. Some are full sized bed quilts and some are wall hanging size, all of them are beautiful.  I hope you enjoy.

I Need A Little Help

These are some of the hardest words to say for me as well as many people I know.  I don’t always know that I need a little help, I know I am very bad at asking for it and right now I am not sure what that help would look like.

Many of us here like to  think of ourselves as writers, more of us can’t even put our names in that sentence, big sigh, well here goes.  I am trying to write a murder mystery style book and can’t figure out how I want to have someone die.  I want  my main character to be around when they find the body to help solve the murder as an amateur sleuth, but not to be too closely involved.  My setting is current time in a big city.  Should be easy, right.

I guess this is a bigger ask than I originally thought, but if anyone wants to share a crazy idea, I would appreciate it.  I do think I will go back to the board game and see who committed the crime in the library with a candlestick.

Clowder

It’s never too late to learn something new. I had no idea a group of cats is called a clowder. There are several other names you can use, but I like this one. Here is my clowder.