Tuesday, January 15, 2008, 14:02
A Cold Morning
It is cold here at Rural Route 2 this morning: 6 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Certainly not the coldest temperature I have ever seen, but still cold.
No, the coldest I have seen here was 45 degrees below zero straight air temperature. That was 10 years ago now during an "old fashioned" winter when, at the end of the season, the total snow fall was 86 inches. That year, a cold front settled over this part of the country in early January and stayed for going on two weeks. Every night it was 20 degrees below zero or colder and would "warm up" to between 10 below and 0 during the day. Except, of course, for the night when it was 45 degrees below zero. The temperature warmed up to about 15 below that day.
The cold snap finally broke, and one morning, it was only 0 degrees. The town patrol truck conked out on the hill below our driveway, and the patrolman walked to our house to use the telephone to call someone to come and help him get it started again. We live in a somewhat remote township with a small population, and consequently, not much tax base to support things like brand new town trucks costing in the neighborhood of a $100,000, depending on how many bells and whistles are ordered to go along with it.
The patrolman came in the house, used the telephone, and then I offered him a cup of coffee while he was waiting.
"Feels warm out this morning, doesn't it? Downright balmy," he said.
I laughed. I had thought the same thing when I had gone outside to feed the horses.
"You know it's been cold," I said, "when 0 feels warm."
I have had that experience this winter, too, when the weather turned cold in December and the temperature fell to 15 degrees below zero for several nights in a row, and then one morning when it was 2 degrees above zero, it actually felt warm.
The weather forecast says the temperature will stay cold all week, and some forecasters on local television stations are saying the high will be in the single digits below zero this weekend. Much will depend on how windy it is along with the cold temperatures. With any luck at all, the wind will stay light so it does not feel even colder.
Then again, it is January, and we must expect this kind of weather in January. It is one of those necessary evils that will bring us just that much closer to spring. Besides, as long as it doesn't get to 45 degrees below zero, then I guess I can't complain.
Comcast
If anyone who reads my blog has a Comcast e-mail address and is wondering why you did not receive the last issue of Rural Route 2 News, all of the newsletters with those addresses bounced back to me as "undeliverable" and "service refused." Randy did some checking into it and discovered that Comcast is blocking e-mail from our ISP's domain server.
LeAnn R. Ralph
Monday, January 14, 2008, 19:55
Snowflake: The Time of Her Life
Snowflake has been having the time of her life. Now that she no longer has any nursing duties since Guinevere died, she is free to play with Henry, Katerina and Dora.
For the first few days after Guinevere was gone, Snowflake spent much of her time lying under the table where Guinevere spent much of her last few weeks. It was as if she were waiting for Guinevere to return or was wondering where she was. Snowflake tried so hard in Guinevere's last weeks to help our old silver tabby feel better: grooming her face and ears and legs, stretching out to be coy upside-down kitty in an attempt to get Guinevere to play, cuddling up next to her so Guinevere would have another cat next to her for comfort.
A few days after Guinevere died, Snowflake realized her friend was gone for good and was not coming back, and then she remembered there were kittens who needed someone to play with them.
As for the kittens, I have been letting Dora, Katerina and Henry come up in the house in the morning while I am feeding the horses so I can fill buckets of water and carry them out the door without fending off kittens. The babies want to know what is on the other side of that door. I keep telling them it is very cold outside and they would not like it. I have to fend them off upstairs, too, if I go outside, but at least upstairs I am not carrying a five-gallon bucket of water at the same time.
The kittens are coming up in the house when I do the evening feeding too, and at night, when I want to ride the stationary bicycle that is down in the basement. Riding the bike regularly, I have found, seems to help my back. They come upstairs sometimes at other times of the day, too.
When the kittens come up in the house, that's when Snowflake springs into action. She has always wanted someone to play with, but our mottled gray cat, Sophie, who is only a year older than Snowflake, is so grumpy about the whole thing that Snowflake has never been able to play with her.
I have explained to Sophie that this is quite contrary on her part. As a kitten, Sophie would jump on the older cats to try to get *them* to play with her. And she would not be denied. I watched her one time with our brown tabby Sebastian. She kept trying to jump on his head, but with each jump, Sebastian, would swat her aside with his paw. Finally, Sophie ran around behind him and bit his tail. I do not believe I have ever seen a more surprised look on Sebastian's face. After that, Sophie's game was to jump at Sebastian, be swatted aside, and then finally, to run around and bite his tail. Sophie was *always* pestering the older cats to play with her, and they were very indulgent, either letting her play and not reacting too much or else actively playing with her.
I had hopes when Snowflake was a kitten in her box that Sophie would play with her because I always knew when Snowflake was awake by Sophie's actions. She would sit by the box (that was covered with a blanket), alert and listening. As Snowflake grew older, Sophie did play with her a little bit. It was when Snowflake got big enough to really play and roughhouse and roll around on the floor and chase and run that Sophie turned grumpy and refused to play.
Playing is, of course, part of a cat's business and is one of the fascinating things about them. They are lifelong players -- running and chasing and pouncing and swatting and batting. I suppose when you are a predator by nature, it pays to keep your skills sharpened and to stay in good physical condition, even if your prey is only a rabbit fur mouse on a string or a paper ball or a pen or a even a tiny stone that becomes lodge in the bottom of a shoe and finds its way onto the kitchen linoleum.
So, Snowflake has spent the better part of the past year, trying to get Sophie to play, and Sophie has spent the better part of the last year being grumpy about it.
Not that I am really surprised. Sophie is grumpy about everything. Woe to me if she needs medicine for some reason. By the time the medicine is finished, my hands are covered with scratches and pricks from Sophie's claws and teeth. The only time Sophie is not grumpy, or at least is relatively not grumpy, is when she has decided she wants to sit by the computer in my office and bump her head against my hand as I am trying to type.
But at last, now that the Dora, Henry and Katerina are bigger, Snowflake has someone to play with! And not just "someone" but actually a brother and sisters. They were all born to our barn cat, Little Sister, who is an exceptionally good mother in the spring but acts like she doesn't even know she had kittens in the fall. I am going to try my hardest to get Little Sister into the vet clinic this summer to get her spayed. We will still have kittens from the old mother cat so that I will not go into withdrawal and develop clinical depression because suddenly I do not have kittens in the hay in the springtime. I know I will never get the old mother cat into the vet clinic. She is too wary and too downright mean. It always surprises me that the old mother cat's kittens turn out to be friendly, nice cats. But they do.
It makes me smile to see Snowflake and Henry and Katerina and Dora, racing around the house, leaping over one another and rolling and biting and kicking and sharing a rabbit fur mouse, first one batting it and chasing it and then another. There's Wooly Bully, too -- a dark purple lump of sheep's wool with a leather string for a tail.
And then, too, there is Pixie's little pink rag dolly with knotted cotton cord for a head and pink and light green fringe at the bottom. The pink dolly, made out of lambs wool or something similar to it, also has a squeaker. When Pixie was little, she used to chew on the dolly and squeak the squeaker.
Now the pink dolly has become a kitten toy. I hear it go "SQUEAK!" every once in a while in the living room, and when I look in there, either Henry, Katerina or Dora is tussling with it and having a grand time. Much to Snowflake's delight. She will sometimes join in the "squeak the dolly game" or will start another game of her own. There's also the "velvet mouse filled with catnip game" and the "chase our tails game" and the "stalk each other around and over the couch" game. Not to mention the "afghan game" -- "I will hide under the afghan on the couch and when you walk by, I will leap out at you and we will tear across the house."
Right after Guinevere died, I told Snowflake and the kittens that they needed do lots of funny things to make us smile, and they have been . . .
Monday when I came in the house after taking the dogs for a walk across the frozen tundra, otherwise known as the back of the farm where I grew up but the "frozen tundra" Monday morning because the temperature was 9 degrees with a 20 mph wind out of the west/northwest that made it feel below zero, Henry, Katerina and Dora were in my office on top of the upside-down aquarium that is protecting one of my Christmas cactus plants.
At first they were startled that they had been discovered on top of the aquarium. But then they grew curious over what I was doing with the silver box (camera). The little Colorado blue spruce Randy received as part of his Christmas gift from the company he works for are *supposed* to be on top of the aquarium. But Henry, Katerina and Dora make sure the trees spend more time on the floor than on the aquarium. I guess I will have to start keeping them on the desk.
The trees, by the way, are from the National Arbor Day Foundation. If you want to order trees (you can get free trees with a $10 membership fee), visit the National Arbor Day Foundation website here.
The trees came sealed in the plastic tubes. When spring comes and the ground thaws out, we will plant them. Henry and Katerina and Dora are just going to have to find something else to play with besides our Colorado blue spruce, but I really don't think that's going to be a problem.
LeAnn R. Ralph
