How we got the Charlie

Here is what I think happened.

Late in 2018, someone's pet cat had a litter of kittens. I suspect they were unexpected, but initially welcomed by Mama Cat's human family because honestly, who doesn't love cute little kittens?

Time passed. The kittens' eyes opened. They explored their small world, began to play and tussle. Slowly they were weaned off Mama's milk and began to eat solid food. They were even cuter than they'd been as helpless newborns. And they were loved.

More time passed. The kittens became more independent. They started to range further, play harder. They grew larger, reaching sexual maturity. The females went into heat. And, crucially, the males began to spray stinky urine to mark their territory.

And suddenly they weren't quite as lovable as they'd been as tiny kittens.

Or perhaps it was something more dire. Perhaps Mama Cat's human family didn't have enough money to feed them all. Maybe they'd lost their jobs or were moving out of state. Whatever it was, the humans decided the litter had to go.

I picture them all being bundled into the car during the summer of 2019. Driven some distance away from where they lived, probably at night. And then, close to a city park, they were dumped out of the car and the humans sped off, leaving the teenage cats to fend for themselves in a huge, strange, unfriendly world.

Some of them, no doubt, promptly became snacks for the coyotes who lived in that neighborhood. Some may have died of exposure. Others were likely run over by cars when they tried crossing a busy street. But at least one survived by staying hidden during the day, catching small prey or scavenging in human garbage to fill his hungry belly.

This one, a brown mackerel tabby boy with white ruff and paws, was good at catching mice and rats and ate whatever else he could find. He was always hungry. He itched constantly from fleas, and he stunk because he never had the time or space to give himself a proper bath. He was miserable. But he was alive.

Then one evening as the dusk and cold came on, he found a cardboard box with a hole cut in the side, under the eaves of a human house. There was a cozy shirt inside the box. Maybe it felt enough like his old home to be comforting. He slept there for the night and disappeared again during the day, his survival instincts kicking in as soon as the sky began to lighten.

He returned to sleep in the box for two nights, and on the third night there was another, stranger box placed nearby, this one made not of cardboard, but some kind of tough fabric and hard steel wire. Inside the box was the delicious scent of little silver fish in oil. The tabby boy was always hungry and the fish smelled so good that he forgot to be cautious. And when he entered, the box snapped shut behind him.

The tabby boy panicked. His time on the street had made him scrawny but muscular, and he fought with all his might to get out of the trap. Including dragging the fabric cover into the trap with him and gnawing several holes in it. But the trap held. And in the morning the people in the human house, who had been looking for their own missing cat for over a month, found him there.

They scanned him for a microchip. They looked for a collar. They put up signs all around the neighborhood, at the cat rescues and shelters, and at the vet's office indicating they'd found a cat. They fed him, combed all the fleas out of his coat, cleaned him up, had him altered, and took care of all the vaccines and other preventive medicines pets are supposed to receive. No one ever came forward to claim him.

And so Mama Cat's human family never found out that the 10-month-old male cat they dumped by the side of the road in 2019 would grow up to be the best, sweetest Charlie-cat ever.

Their loss.

It's our handsome Charlie boy, all grown up!

It's October! Welcome to CHAOS BAKING!

I know a couple of people who are afraid to bake. They're good cooks, but something always seems to go wrong when they slide cookies or bread or some kind of baked good into the oven. And I can see why they're nervous about baking. We've been practically brainwashed to believe that baking requires precision measurements, careful treatment of every ingredient, and an oven calibrated to the perfect temperature if we're going to get a quality result.

Nonetheless, every now and then it's worth attempting some chaos baking -- just making stuff up to see what happens.

It's easy to forget that people have been making baked goods for a long time, and for most of that time baking was much more a seat-of-the-pants process than it is now. Medieval baking required working with rustic, unsifted flour and a sourdough starter, using no standard measurements to bring a dough together, heating an earthen oven with a wood fire for many hours, then raking everything out so there would be no ash on the bread, then carefully sliding the loaves in, sealing the entry shut with a wooden door that had been soaking in cold water for hours so it wouldn't burn, and leaving the loaves in long enough to bake them through but not long enough to dry them out or scorch them. One way to check oven temperature back then was to toss in a little raw flour; if it turned brown the oven was ready, but if it turned black the oven was too hot.

If medieval peasants could successfully make bread with no measuring cups, no electricity, not even a set recipe -- then we can go a little off script with our baking and still turn out something worth eating.

You want proof? Here ya go!

Right now I have a whole lot of milk that's just gone sour (about 4 cups total), and I'm wanting to do something with it before it actually spoils. Thing is, milk that's just barely soured may not be great on your breakfast cereal, but it's still fine for baking and can be used, cup for cup, as a substitute for buttermilk in most baked goods. I'd just settled on making a homemade sour milk spice cake when I went to the store for supplies.

Well, what to my wondering eyes should appear but a pile of Betty Crocker cake mixes for 98 cents apiece. In this economy, that's hard to beat; I haven't done the math but I'm not sure I could make a cake from scratch at that price. There was no spice cake mix on sale (or even available for purchase), but that wasn't going to stop me. So I changed my mind and grabbed a yellow cake mix. (Also impulsively picked up a six-count of pumpkin spice flavored old-fashioned donuts, which will be important later.)

In the car on the way back from the store, I ate too many of those donuts. Yeah, sometimes I'm not very smart. Captain Midnight doesn't care for old-fashioned donuts and is neutral about pumpkin spice stuff, so I knew he wouldn't want any of the remaining donuts. He doesn't even like frosting on his cake. This spice cake is probably going to be pretty plain --

Oh hey. No it isn't. I have a potentially brilliant idea.

I mixed up the cake mix mostly according to directions, swapping in a cup of sour milk instead of a cup of water, and adding 1/2 t. allspice, 1/4 t. cinnamon and 1/8 t. nutmeg to the mix. (Now it's a spice cake! There ya go.) Poured it into a greased 9x13" glass pan, then did the brilliant thing: I dropped the remaining pumpkin spice donuts into a bag, mashed them into crumbs and used them as a streusel topping to scatter over the top of the cake batter. Baked about 25 minutes in a moderate oven.

Here's the result.

I didn't even wait for the cake to cool down, I just cut myself a corner piece.

NOM.

This is good, but if anything, this doctored spice cake needs even MORE spice. (My English ancestors didn't do insane things to find better spice routes just for their descendants to be terrified of "1/4 t. black pepper" in a recipe, dangit!) I'd at least double the amount of spices if I were to make this again. As it is, though, it's delicious all on its own and would also be great covered with whipped cream or served a la mode. There's no indication in look or taste that this cake was made with sour milk. And the streusel topping was a genius idea -- soft, light cake covered by a crunchy, sugary, spicy topping.

In fact, it was so tasty that the minute I left the kitchen, Charlie-cat jumped up on the counter and helped himself to a big mouthful of cooling cake. BAD CHARLIE. NOT FOR YOU. So now the cake is safely cooling in the oven with the door cracked open because our cats are mad jonesing for our chaos baking experiments.

Blam This Piece of Crap Day: Let's blam some Spam! (Plus bonus blamming)

Well, it's the day you've all been waiting for!

I'll admit, I didn't think up a good idea to celebrate BTPoC Day until it was upon us. But then I realized I had not one, but two different examples of BLAMming ready to go.

Let's cover the tastiest one first: Spam fried rice. This recipe was slightly modified from one made by Seonkyoung Longest and it is YUM.

Yeah, yeah, Spam is a registered trademark, yadda yadda, bite me, Hormel. Anyway, this can be made with any kind of "canned luncheon meat" you have on hand, as long as the flavor isn't too exotic. I recommend using lower-sodium generic spam if you can find it, because the sauce we're gonna make for this has a fair amount of sodium already.

I have long held a pink-meat prejudice that dates from my teenhood, when my working mom would occasionally make jazzed-up ramen for dinner. If I came in late for dinner, which I occasionally did, I'd get ramen noodles so soft they were falling apart, garnished with shriveled peas and cold chunks of spam. Bluergh. So for a long time I wouldn't eat spam. This recipe brought me around to liking it again. Maybe you'll feel the same way.

Anyhoo, get that spam out of the can and cut it into 1/4" thick slices, then into dice.

And if you have cats, better put them somewhere else. Charlie and Millie became very interested in our kitchen-related doings the minute they heard that can open. But spam of any kind has too much fat and salt and mystery amendments to be good for them. (Sorry, kittens)

Four eggs. There go our next four mortgage payments. Scramble 'em up.

A medium-sized white/yellow/brown onion, chopped or diced. This is optional, but Captain Midnight likes it.

A few cloves of garlic, finely chopped, minced or pressed. You can add as much or as little as you like, but at least three good-sized cloves, I think. 

A whole lotta rice ("6 cups," says Captain Midnight). It doesn't have to be fresh from the rice cooker, like this. In fact, fried rice benefits from using rice that's a day old and starting to dry out. (Yes, another piece of crap to BLAM!)

Also a whole lotta green onions. Use these even if you don't use the white onion; they taste different and a little bit set aside makes a very pretty garnish for the finished bowl.
 

Homemade teriyaki sauce. Refer to the Seonkyoung Longest recipe for full details because I'm lazy.

Oh, okaaaaay. Briefly: 2 parts soy sauce, 2 parts sake, 2 parts mirin, 1 part sugar. For this batch of fried rice, we did "tablespoons" for parts. You can scale it up or down depending on your tastes and how large a batch you're making.

And, of course, a wok. No, it doesn't have to be 35 years old like this one. You don't even need a wok, but you do need a pan that can handle high heat and a lot of fast sauteing, and has enough volume to hold a lot of rice.

Not shown, but used: vegetable oil, a little sesame oil, some cut-up slivers of nori if you like it, and some sesame seeds. And maybe some sriracha.

Now, what happened next went fast enough that I didn't take pictures, but:

Captain Midnight prepped all the ingredients beforehand. He got the wok screaming hot (yay gas stove!) and put in a tablespoon or two of vegetable oil. When it was hot, he threw in the egg. It immediately puffed around the edges. He tossed the egg around until it was about three-quarters cooked, then fished it all out into a bowl. Then he added a tiny bit of oil and the chunks of spam. These he cooked, gently moving them constantly, until they started to get crispy (the first rule of improving spam: improve the texture). Once they were nice and crisped up, he fished them out so he could cook the yellow onion. (If you're not using this, don't take out the spam; just move right on to the garlic.)

Onion in. He cooked it just until it softened and started to brown. Then in went the garlic, and he tossed it around just until it started to smell good. Back in with the spam; added the rice. He stirred it about until things were well incorporated, then drizzled the teriyaki sauce around the edges of the wok. That was thoroughly mixed in. As the rice absorbed the sauce and started to get dry again, he threw the egg back in and chopped it up a bit (you want fairly large chunks of egg in this -- I mean, if you're going to pay for eggs, you might as well be able to taste them!). Off the heat, he added just a touch of sesame oil for flavor, three-quarters of the green onions, some sesame seeds, gave it all a good toss and it was ready.

This was promptly plated up and sprinkled with additional green onions.

I prefer my fried rice without nori on top.

Captain Midnight prefers his with LOTS of nori on top. And some sriracha for good measure.

Remember what I said about the cats? Yup.

No, Millie, you cannot have some.

Both the cats did get some strips of nori, aka Tasty Green Fish Paper. And great was the omming and nomming thereof. So a good time was had by all.

And now for the Bonus Blam: a thrift store special!

About two weeks ago I ventured into the local Goodwill looking for sundries. What I found was a very large ball of red yarn with three sets of knitting needles shanked into the middle of it. Whoever had owned it before had started knitting a scarf with it, but had gotten bored with the project and ended up donating it to Goodwill.

Well, I ripped it back to the beginning, and after two or three tries with different patterns, I finally settled on this one.

This is variously called a basketweave or checkerboard pattern, it's fully reversible and it works up fast enough that even though I'm a slow knitter, it's nearly done. I will either give it to the Red Scarf Project or pass it on to someone else in the community who needs or wants it.

So that was our Blam This Piece of Crap Day. How was yours?

Buenas noches, señores

 Soy Doña Calavera.

Mucho gusto.

This year's Halloween costume was fairly haphazard and last-minute, but still pretty effective.

I wanted to take at least one good picture while holding Charlie, but as it turned out he was terrified of me. This was the only photo we got where he wasn't trying to squirm out of my hands and hide under the bed, poor guy.

V and a few friends had a Halloween party here, so they handled the trick-or-treaters. Which is just as well, because this year we had the most trick-or-treaters we've ever had at this house. I guess it pays to sign up for the Teal Pumpkin Project. (We got smart this time and offered not only non-food prizes, but allergy-safe treats as well.) I think we'll do it again next year!

Pandemic: ugh

How's this past week been for the Laundry Faerie, you ask?

Public domain Cyclone image by Mark Houtzager

Well, to sum up: it's been a roller-coaster. First elated. Then nervous. Then terrified that this nation will experience a full-on coup d'état, with the tacit approval of about a third of the population. Plus, this last week -- due either to nerves or some kind of brand-new food allergy -- I've been continually breaking out in hives. 2020, you truly are the gift that keeps on giving. I had a televisit with the doctor, who prescribed an anti-steroid medication, loratadine and an antacid, but the thing that's kept me out of continual scratchy hell is Benadryl. Trouble is, Benadryl completely knocks me out. So I can either be awake and blazingly itchy from the back of my scalp all the way down to my knees, or I can have some temporary relief and stay zonked out in bed all day long.

Let's just say this week hasn't been very productive.

Fortunately, Captain Midnight came to my aid on days when I couldn't leave the house, picking up aforementioned Benadryl and emergency groceries (gotta have Mountain Dew, he says), and other stellar behaviors. He's a keeper.

Miss V has been busy working at a local business, walking a lot, getting trim and making some big life choices. But since they're her life choices, not mine, I'll let her discuss them elsewhere at her discretion.

Charlie-cat is being a furry little mendicant, as usual. It's a good thing he's so cute, or we'd have turned him into gumbo by now. He's also discovered that if anyone leaves the pantry doors open, he can sneak inside and hide out in the kitty-cat clubhouse area behind the food. We have accidentally shut him in there on more than one occasion, and only found his super-secret hiding place when he started knocking stuff over in the pantry and we looked at each other and said, "PA! DID YOU HEAR THAT SUSPICIOUS THUUUD?"

At the moment our biggest challenge as a family is staying 'rona-free until we can get vaccinated... which, realistically, won't happen until spring 2021, but it's a lifeline all the same. I've been trying to avoid risk whenever I can, but I realize we've just been lucky up to this point -- it's very easy to catch, and it's extremely difficult to tell who has it. I've got five siblings, and at this writing three out of the six of us have caught a case of the stuff. Soooooooooooooo that's fun.

I miss my mom. But I guess that goes without saying. I try to focus on the memories of her love for me; she and Dad always made sure we knew we were loved, and I'll need that knowledge to sustain me for the rest of my life.

Pandemic: ephemera

OME minor odd things I've noticed regarding pandemic conditions, which may or may not be forgotten by history unless someone (say, me) writes them down:

• Decluttering is tough right now. There's plenty of time to do it, but thanks to widespread states of depression or dysthymia there may not be much internal motivation to do it. And then there's the problem of disposing of all those unwanted but still-useful items. Due to fears of COVID-19 contamination, Goodwill and other secondhand stores aren't accepting donations right now. Unless you want to break out the bazillion Amazon boxes in the garage and start trying to sell items one by one on eBay, you're kinda hosed.
• So. Much. Flour. With lots of free time on their hands and a strong yen for comfort food, many Americans have rediscovered baking -- which means that flour, yeast and other ingredients for baked goods have vanished from stores almost as quickly as face masks and toilet paper. (Fortunately for me, the chocolate supply is still holding up!) I'm no stranger to this activity; a few weeks ago I picked up some instant yeast online, and since then this household has feasted on homemade bread, cookies, calzones made from homemade pizza dough, and Swedish apple cake. (You know I can cook.)
• I get tired of cooking all the time, and sometimes other family members spell me off, but every now and then nobody wants to take the responsibility and everyone's hungry. That's when we yell TO THE TACO TRUCK! and light out for Westside Park. Someone in our neighborhood cut a deal with several area food trucks, so nearly every weekday around lunchtime there's a truck parked at Westside, slingin' hash and takin' names. We've seen some familiar faces from the neighborhood while waiting in line for lunch (maintaining good social distance, of course).
• I've noticed you can now tell where other grocery shoppers are getting their news. Most people around here wear masks. Above the face coverings, their eyes are concerned, resolute, occasionally friendly. They keep a respectful 6 feet of distance from other shoppers and apologize when they get too close. Conservative media fans, on the other hand, tend not to wear masks in public (though this will change in the coming week, as King County is making it a requirement). Their expressions range from confusion to frank disdain of their fellow shoppers with masks. They don't maintain reasonable social distance, they never apologize for coming too close, and they tend to get angry when people ask them to move away.
• Last week I had a run-in with one of these clowns, an older man with no mask, at the grocery store. I was boxed into the produce section (another shopper was blocking the exit behind me) and I couldn't get past him safely, so I waited for him to back away and let me out. But Grampa Boomer wanted something next to me and wasn't willing to wait for it, so he got really close and started passive-aggressively coughing in my direction. I had to push past him to get away (with a single-word opinion on the status of his parentage, I'll admit), but if I had a do-over I would've gotten a closeup photo of his face. DUDE. Deliberately coughing at someone else during a pandemic is a form of assault. You are old and have lived your life, and if you want to play tiddlywinks with COVID-19 that's your call, but I have a family to take care of. How dare you put me and them in danger because you want your broccoli 5 seconds faster?
• In the same vein, I'm continually amazed at the people who are out protesting life-saving quarantine measures for reasons I can only describe as frivolous. I'm not talking about protests due to concerns most people would recognize as valid (resuming needed medical treatments, financial assistance to get through lockdown, fear of increased domestic abuse, etc.). I'm talking about people losing it because they "need" a haircut, a manicure, a massage; they are demanding the return of summer camp and the reopening of Disney properties not because it's safe, but because they're already sick of their kids. *sigh* ... really? I know, I know, these conditions have never before happened in your lifetime. They've never happened in mine either, and I can think of hundreds of things from "normal life" that I'm missing right now and would dearly love to have back, but not at the expense of other people's lives. I don't think Patrick Henry would've been on board with milling around in front of the capitol building, yelling GIVE ME PEDICURES OR GIVE ME DEATH through a bullhorn.
• Quarantine has been fantastic for Charlie-cat. I honestly think he's going to have some kind of feline nervous breakdown the first time all three of us humans leave the house at once. He's adored all the extra company, attention, toys and treats he's been getting for the last two months. (As I typed this, he hopped onto the computer desk, curled up next to me, leaned his head on my left arm and is now purring contentedly. D'aww, fuzzy beast.)

Pandemic: just checking in

ONJOUR, mes amis! I've been hesitating to check in and say things like "we're all well here," because I realize how quickly our circumstances could take a turn for the worse (whenever I leave the house to get groceries or prescriptions, or Miss V leaves the house for dog-walking or errand-running, or CM leaves the house to get work-related hardware, we're potentially putting ourselves and the entire household at risk to catch a case of COVID-19. Charlie-cat, who never leaves the house -- though not really for lack of trying -- is our social distancing champion). For the nonce, we're all healthy and hoping to stay that way as long as we can, or until there's a viable antiviral or other treatment available.

Easter was a pleasant, if subdued, affair. I planned in advance (novel change of pace, ne?) and ordered a big box of See's candy by mail weeks ago, so we had plenty of chocolaty goodness for our Easter baskets. We had a short church service at home, then CM made a delicious pork tenderloin with cherry peppers and potatoes (recommended) and we watched a slew of movies: Father Goose, Meet the Robinsons, The Good Dinosaur and Coco (the English version and part of the Spanish version, just for comparison's sake). I'd never seen The Good Dinosaur before, and while it's far from Pixar's finest story work, it has its moments. It's best described as a dino-Western; it even has Sam Elliott doing voice work. It also has a scene where our dino hero and his pet feral child get stoned on rotten fruit, which I'd characterize as mild nightmare fuel, so if you intend to see it, be warned.

V has been making fabric face masks for family and friends, so she was busy cutting and sewing most of the afternoon. CM, as mentioned, has been cooking and making Minecraft videos for fun and (minor) profit. I've just been trying to keep on top of the dishes and laundry and making notes on whatever's running low around the house, so that when I do go out I can make my errands as effective as possible. I also do handwork -- basic knitting and crocheting, stuff that requires little to no brain power so I can do something productive while watching movies.

Speaking of movies, we also saw Onward the first day it was available on Disney+. It's very much worth watching and rewatching. We would have caught it in local theaters if they hadn't all closed down for social distancing purposes the weekend after it released. I got a kick out of the comment (I think it was on Twitter) that it could have been named The Brotherhood of the Traveling Pants.

Oh, yeah, also: want a random postcard? I'll send one to anybody who sends me a mailing address. I'm not a huge fan of the USPS, but it's in danger of going under thanks to a combination of pandemic conditions and no bailout from the U.S. government, and it needs all the help it can get, so I'mma send POSTCARDS GALORE. Sling an email here if you want one.

Take care this week, find creative things to do inside, stay healthy, read, try a new recipe, etc. If you're on Facebook, I recommend following the hashtag #coronavenger for some commonsense advice on how to get through pandemic conditions. And if you have advice about how to handle various kinds of stress and strain associated with social distancing, please share. I'd be delighted to get your thoughts.

For now, though, I'm going to bed. Later skaters!

Pandemic: Life on Pause

month has gone by fairly rapidly, with many changes, and I haven't taken the time to write about many of them. And it occurs to me that I should be writing these things down, because though I've felt relatively calm and self-possessed about the changes that have occurred within the last 30 days, I also realize that I'm living through an experience that doesn't happen every decade, nor even every generation, but perhaps only once every few centuries. I take strength and comfort from the thought that the people who lived through the last major worldwide pandemic -- the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1919 -- had their lives upended in ways much more severe than ours, and that eventually society shook it off, righted itself and got back to normal (or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof). So although things are chaotic at the moment, I try to think of this experience not as the end of life as we know it, but merely of life with the Pause button on for a while.

So at the end of February I was finishing up the most recent travel experience with Miss V, visiting a couple of potential graduate schools in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. We'd heard about the nasty viral outbreak in China and how someone in the U.S. -- actually, someone in our state -- had come back with a case of it, but we didn't yet know it was in the full community transmission phase. But when the news about Life Care Center of Kirkland broke, I knew things were about to get nasty.

The rash of cancellations and closures started in early March. An interfaith network meeting I usually attend, a St. Patrick's Day celebration at Seattle Center, a live podcast recording V was planning to see, Emerald City Comic-Con all got nixed. Church was canceled at first for just one week, then until further notice; we've started holding church services at home. School districts shut down one by one, switching to distance learning, and college students were told to leave their on-campus apartments and go home; some had as little as 48 hours' notice to vacate the premises. Missionaries were sent home, given temporary new assignments, or confined to their apartments. First the Seattle temple was closed, then every temple around the world was closed. There were public recommendations: practice social distancing of at least 6 feet from others in public, limit public gatherings to 50 people, then to 10 people. And always, always, "wash your hands for at least 20 seconds and don't touch your face." Commencements were canceled. Weddings were canceled. Funerals were canceled. Restaurants, especially Asian restaurants, became ghost towns even before the governor restricted all restaurants to delivery and carry-out services only. Non-essential businesses at first tried to stay open by limiting the number of customers who could be in the store at once. Eventually they had to close completely.

Panic-buying and stockpiling set in early. Certain items became difficult (and, in the case of face masks and hand sanitizer, virtually impossible) to find at groceries and pharmacies. I've been exceptionally fortunate throughout most of this, because although we've never hoarded or stockpiled anything, I've managed to keep the family in enough toilet paper for our needs.

At first I continued picking up groceries via Epic Late-Night Grocery Run, since nearly nobody was in the store late at night and it felt safer to pick things up when I didn't have to risk getting (or giving) a case of the 'Rona. Alas, I cannot do an Epic Late-Night Grocery Run now, because no grocery store in this area is open later than 11 p.m. and the governor has advised Washington residents to shelter in place, only running errands for groceries or prescriptions. To make sure my errands out are as productive as possible, I've been keeping track of household items we need on a Post-It-style phone app. Once the list gets full or something critical runs out, I venture forth for a massive coordinated errand run where I try to get everything done in one pass.

Captain Midnight has been working from home since the beginning of the month. He set up a workstation at the far end of the kitchen table, and the area is slowly being taken over by the equipment he's testing. CM is getting used to Charlie-cat hopping up on the kitchen table and sitting on his laptop keyboard for attention, disrupting online team meetings. Charlie should be a minor celebrity at CM's work by the time all this is over.

Miss V had an internship in Seattle this month, which abruptly came to an end. She's been working on some sewing projects and picking up a few paid gigs here and there. I know this isn't the way she imagined Spring 2020 would go, and she's had some anxiety and a number of disappointments over canceled events, but overall she's done her best to maintain a positive attitude.

Me, I spend too much time online. (Yes, even more than I already did.) I knit from my overflowing stash of yarn, read a library book that's now on extended checkout through the end of April because the county library system is closed down, and work on putting together a Discord channel where people can gather to tell each other stories during the pandemic. There are days when I go geocaching to feel a bit more normal, focusing on caches close to home. And there are days when I only go outside to pick up the mail. Most days I sleep until noon because I've been staying up until 3 or 4 a.m. just to recharge. There's a lot of love in my family, but we're also all introverts and we need our space, even from each other. There are days when I'm fine with doing the typical household chores (laundry, dishes, pickup, garbage, etc.) and days when I just don't wanna do squat. On Thursday Miss V, who usually avoids cooking, stepped up to the plate and made Indian food for dinner. I don't know what I appreciated more: the taste of the food or the satisfaction of not having to cook for an evening.

When I do go out, the streets are abnormally still, like what one might expect on a Sunday morning at 5 a.m. Even during rush hour, traffic is nearly nonexistent, and it feels like drivers are routinely speeding to keep from staying out any longer than they have to. It's allergy season as well (because of course it is), and high pollen counts make me clear my throat frequently as I try hard not to cough in public. I sanitize frequently during errands and wash my hands thoroughly as soon as I return, but in the end I'll probably be the one who brings back a case of COVID-19. I mean, I hope that won't happen, but I see the exponential growth of this thing and the continued lack of widespread testing and realize that, especially in the next few weeks, the virus will be essentially everywhere I go. The best I can hope for is that we'll get mild cases that clear up without need for medical intervention, and that we'll stay sufficiently isolated so no one else will get it from us.

I have... thoughts about this administration and how it's handled the pandemic. I'm sure you do too. I also have some fairly strong feelings about people who break quarantine to play on the beach in large numbers, but I can't express those feelings without resorting to profanity, so... moving on.

For the time being, Captain Midnight has a job. I realize how fortunate he's been to keep his employment when so many others are out of work, and I'm grateful for it. Other things I'm grateful for: the ability to cook from scratch (thanks Mom), the ability to self-entertain most of the time, the smartphone I swore I'd never get which has helped me stay organized through this (thanks Julie), my bullet journal (thanks Ryder Carroll), getting officially diagnosed with ADHD before all this went down, home delivery of nearly everything, chocolate as a self-medication for stress, getting my (actual) medications filled early (thanks Bartell Drugs), my family and Charlie-cat, and -- overwhelmingly -- the healthcare workers, pharmacists, grocery clerks, delivery drivers, restaurant cooks, and all the other folks who keep the most necessary parts of our society functioning. I know it's not safe to do it right now, but once the pandemic is over and life switches from Pause to Play again, I'm giving all y'all hugs. And it will be both super awkward and awesome at the same time.

Pandemic: signs of the times

Miss V and I had to run a few errands today before we (mostly) retreat to the house for the next several weeks. As the coronavirus pandemic has pretty much turned the entire Puget Sound into a ghost town, I thought I'd take a few photos.

Traffic today, even during rush hour, was like Sunday morning around 10 a.m.

A literal sign of the times. Variations of this notice are posted on businesses and grocery stores all over town. You still can't buy toilet paper or hand sanitizer anywhere, not even at Poor Man's Costco (I tried, and they were sold out of anything and everything labeled "sanitizer." But they did have huge honkin' bags of onions, cheap bulk popcorn and a box of SKOR bars, so my visit there was not in vain!).

While V bought sewing notions to finish a project for a friend, I went off to QFC to recycle a load of plastic bags.

Let's just say the mall looked... different. Ordinarily this place is full of chairs as well as tables, and is teeming with life and movement: young families feeding their kids, teenagers flirting, retirees swaying to big band music, bookworms sipping their vanilla soy lattes, old guys playing chess, cute li'l grandmas and laundry faeries knitting in public, alla that. It was eerily still and silent today. There were probably all of ten people in the place, and that's counting the folks who were running the few restaurants still operating for take-out customers. A woman passing me enthused, "We have the mall all to ourselves!" Well, yes. But even for introverts, there's not much of a draw.

The signs on the tables have some legal verbiage indicating that the food court has been closed to dine-in service by order of the governor.

All this scene needs to complete the ennui is a single lonely tumbleweed to blow through the frame.

On my way back, I noticed that Uncle's Games was open and bravely soldiering on, even without customers or gaming groups, so I went in and bought a card game from the cashier. I know we'll want some family diversion in the next month. People are comparing the effect of COVID-19 on the Seattle area to a zombie apocalypse, but I noted to the cashier that so far it seems more like a vampire apocalypse... people hunker down in their homes, a few people furtively sneak out during the day, staying well away from everyone else, and by dusk everyone vanishes. AND THEN THE DARK MYSTERIOUS ONES RULE THE NIGHT.

*pfft* yeah right. That's when I do my shopping. I'm about as dark and mysterious as a doorstop.

At least one of us is perfectly happy to have all the hoomans stay home and lavish affection and treats upon him. So that's good.

In the next few days I think I'll do another outing, this time to choose a public place -- city park or vacant lot, I'm not sure yet -- and clean up the trash. I'll do a little geocaching in places where I can maintain a safe distance from others. I'll read a lot, finish projects, write, do a lot of cleaning. In fact this coronavirus thing might finally do what Marie Kondo couldn't: help me get my house organized.

What are you doing to wait out the coronavirus pandemic?

What a little care and feeding will do

Some of you may remember what Charlie-cat looked like when we first brought him off the street. For those who don't, a quick review:

Scrawny 10-month-old Charlie

And here he is after a few months as an inside cat, being regularly fed and played with:

1-year-old fuzzy cannonball Charlie

He's filled out a bit, hasn't he? While not exactly a full-on chonk, he has the body of an adult cat and not a lerpy teenager. He has grown a lot more solid and quite muscular (during his last vet visit, our veterinary tech commented, "That is one strong cat!"), and we DO NOT free feed him because, like many former street cats, he would be eating day and night if we let him. He's also becoming a bit of a lap kitty, and he loves jumping into empty bags and boxes and declaring them kitty cat clubhouses. So that's fun.

Plus he's still a huge flirt. So yay for the little fuzzy cannonball!

Criss-cross-applesauce

Autumn has come to the PNW. It was colder today, with a fair amount of rain. Charlie-cat was busy trying to find warm spots all over the house. (He's currently in his favorite place, curled up on the back of the sofa.) And I mostly stayed in to do various household-related tasks.

One of those tasks was taking care of some apples. I bought a bag of slightly imperfect apples from the Used Food section of the QFC a while back, and they were getting to a stage of flavor development best described as "wizened," so I needed to do something with them fast. That something turned out to be pressure-cooker applesauce, and it also turned out to be super easy.

Peel, core and cut up apples (welp, that was the hardest part). Throw 'em in the Instant Pot insert along with a half-cup of water, a tiny sprinkle of salt, and some cinnamon and cardamom. (I could have also added some lemon juice, but I didn't have any... and maybe some sweetener, but these apples were plenty sweet enough on their own... so out of necessity I kept it simple.) Clamp it down, cook it on high pressure for 5 minutes, let the pressure drop naturally 5 minutes, then vent the rest of the way. I zapped the cooked apples with an immersion blender, et voilà, homemade applesauce.

It's easy to forget because it's ubiquitous, but store-bought applesauce is a convenience food. In my 1950-reprint Betty Crocker cookbook, any recipe that calls for applesauce first directs the cook to make some, indicating whether it should be thin or thick, plain or spiced, etc. for the recipe. And because it's so often bought instead of made, it's also easy to forget that homemade applesauce is delicious in a way that store-bought applesauce will never be. I grew up with home-canned applesauce made from the sweet-tart Gravenstein apples growing in my auntie's back yard, sweetened and spiced perfectly, and it's spoiled me for life. (It's also why I add cardamom to my applesauce because, hello, YUM.) Tonight's batch of homemade sauce was made with all sweet apples, so it doesn't have the complex flavor or the little tart kick that my auntie's applesauce had, but even so it's still better-tasting than 90% of the bland, watery, mass-produced gunk at the grocery store.

And now I have applesauce to make my great-grandma's chocolate applesauce fruitcake! Um, or not.

The cat in the trap

OXY is still missing. It's been two months.

We borrowed traps from MEOW Cat Rescue the first day she was gone and started setting and baiting them immediately, putting in catnip and the smelliest food we could find. We set and checked traps around the neighborhood for weeks. We reported Roxy as missing to the microchip company. We put up huge pink LOST - PLEASE HELP posters all through the neighborhood so that no one could miss them. We put up "Lost Cat" alerts on social media sites and in specialty groups on Facebook (Lost Cats of King County, etc.) We bought an infrared camera to try to catch sight of her next to a trap. We tried to hire several pet detectives to come out and help us search (none of them would come to our part of Washington). We hired a man with a cat-sniffing dog ($300) who could not find her. (If you have a lost cat, we strenuously do not recommend this service -- he will probably end up chasing your cat further away, which is what happened to Roxy.) We performed two house-to-house searches, one in our neighborhood and one around my friend Wendy's house where Roxy was spotted. We put out traps and food near Wendy's house (Roxy didn't touch them). We borrowed a drop trap and stayed up two nights running with it trying to catch Roxy (she didn't come near it). We printed more than 1800 flyers asking people to help us find Roxy and hand-delivered them to every single house in the neighborhood. (If people had "No Soliciting" signs up, we took note of their addresses and mailed the flyers to them, so nobody was missed.) We went through the neighborhood at night looking for her, sometimes silently, sometimes calling softly. We bought an e-book from a pet detective in Texas to try to figure out things we weren't already doing. We changed our voice mail message to mention we are looking for Roxy and checked the phone multiple times a day for leads. We followed up on every lead every time someone called to say "I think I saw your cat." We asked people to check their security cameras for signs of Roxy. We offered $50 to anyone who could provide a verifiable picture of Roxy within the last 24 hours. (So far, no one has.) We created a Pawboost alert for social media that went out all over the greater Seattle area. We put up "lost cat" ads on Craigslist. We checked and continue to check the shelter websites every night and morning to see if Roxy has been brought in. We gave flyers to local vets, pet stores and MEOW Cat Rescue. We let all the local shelters know we were looking for Roxy. We left water and a little cardboard "kitty house" next to the door in case she found her way home. We left the door open all day and night in case she found her way home. We prayed, had many others praying for us, we fasted for Roxy, and I put a cat's name on the temple prayer roll. (I'm not sure if it's allowed, but I did it anyway.)

All in all, we have spent nearly $2,000 so far to try to get Roxy home. We've also lost many hours of sleep and I dropped about 10 pounds from constant worry. And nothing has come of it. Roxy remains missing, and we are trying to come to terms with the fact that we may never see her again.

Yes, it hurts. Every day. And yes, I'm bitter about it. If you went to this much trouble to find a lost pet and had absolutely no success, I guarantee you would be too.

While the traps didn't work as we'd hoped, they did yield some surprises. We caught two different opossums in various locations. We also started leaving a trap baited in our front yard in the vain hope of catching Roxy if she found her way home again. And while we didn't catch Roxy, on the morning of July 11 we found something interesting in the trap.

It was a young cat (the vet estimates 10 to 11 months old), a brown tabby with a white ruff and socks and green eyes. The cat was relatively small and underfed, but had the long legs and big paws of a lerpy teenager. He had no tags or collar, no microchip (we checked at two vets with three different chip readers), had never been neutered and probably never had his shots. He was also ravenously hungry and would eat almost anything, he had fleas and showed other signs of having lived on the street for months. But the most impressive thing we noticed about him was the level of fight in him. Somehow, after having followed the siren call of sardines into the trap, he managed to pull the entire heavy oilcloth trap cover into the trap with him -- probably while trying to escape. He then vented his frustrations on the cover, which was pretty mangled by the time we found him. (We're going to pay for a replacement... sorry, MEOW.)

He appeared to be a little street cat, but he wasn't feral -- he didn't hiss when humans approached his cage...

... he liked being close to us, and he loved being petted and brushed, so we knew that at some point in his past he'd been around people. Our best guess is that this cat was part of an unplanned litter of kittens from someone's unspayed pet. He was obviously played with and socialized, but when he grew past the "cute kitten" stage he was probably taken to a neighborhood far from home and dumped out to fend for himself.

I'm just gonna leave this here

All the signs pointed to this being an unwanted cat. Nobody had given him an indoor home, no one had chipped or even collared him, nobody seemed to be looking for him. I guess we could have decided it wasn't our problem, opened the trap and let him run away. But that's not what we did. We know firsthand what anguish it is to lose a pet. Besides, we've seen coyotes in our neighborhood. We weren't about to let this kitty run headlong into predators, no matter how much fight he had in him.

"Hi! You got treats?"

Also, he was really cute and a huge flirt.

Now, our county has laws about what to do if you find a stray cat. You can't just say "o well, finders keepers" and merrily yoink him off the street. The law stipulates two options: either you take him to the county shelter, where they try to find his owners for THREE WHOLE DAYS and then put him up for adoption, or you can keep him in your own home at your expense for A FULL MONTH, advertising him as a found cat on local bulletin boards and on the shelter website so that his owner -- if there is one -- has every chance to come forward and claim him. Once the month has passed, you're then free to pay the licensing fee and keep the animal if you want. Because we're kinda dumb (and because he was really cute), we chose to do it the hard way and foster the cat in our home. (And if you're reading this, it means a full month has passed with no contact from an owner.)

So was this a cheap way to get a cat? Well, not the way we did it. This kitty has already been to the vet five times -- to scan multiple times for a microchip, to find out why he was coughing, to check up on an enlarged heart (his heart is unusually big, but it works just fine)...

Alas, the Cone of Shame.

... to get him neutered, microchipped, screened for FeLV and FIV (negative on both), given all his basic shots and treated for fleas. You know, all the stuff owners are supposed to do for their pets.

And since he's going to be an indoor cat, we also put a bright orange collar on him and a tag that says "I'M LOST!" If you'd like to know why, read this.

This cat has been through several name changes. Because we trapped him on July 11, which in the USA is 7/11 (aka Free Slurpee Day at the 7-Eleven convenience store chain), we first called him Slurpee, but we soon decided that was an insufficiently dignified name for a masculine cat. Then, as the call of the wild began to tug at him and he came up with novel, loud and annoying ways to attempt egress from the house at 2 a.m. ...

"Some day, window. Some day."

... we toyed with the idea of calling him Hairy Mewdini, Escape Artist. But one day I just realized he looked like a Charlie cat. So we started calling him Charlie, and it's stuck.

It's still possible that Roxy will come back. If she does, we'll need to find a good home for Charlie. While we think Charlie is social enough to tolerate another cat, Roxy is far too timid to handle other animals in the house. But if she remains missing, we intend to keep this guy. He's stopped trying to escape (well, mostly), he's well-fed, well-groomed and flea-free, he gets to play with toys, randomly attack the sofa, and chase Tigger (a catnip-filled knitted tiger toy)...

... he sleeps anywhere he wants, and he has people who give him lots of love and attention and who think his occasional naughtiness is more endearing than it is annoying.

Local street cat makes good. Film at 11.