Usually I stand up for cats in general to people who write them off as difficult or aloof. But today, I'm a bit annoyed, tired of the attitude that my particular Pride adopts. I'm not a neat freak, but I have had it up to here with picking up the same things off the floor every single day. I try to contain my messiness to a few piles of paper, and a scattering of random accessories (hair clips, garden gloves, etc) across a few horizontal surfaces. I am convinced that the old man cat has devoted all of the time he has left on this earth to finding ways to get me to yell at him, not that he could hear me. He follows me around the house, yelling in his deaf Siamese cat voice, and he sleeps only in places where I have my little junk piles, so that he can spend his entire nap squirming and pushing things onto the floor. Like an idiot, I just pick them up and put them back where I had them, and the cycle resumes, Every. Single. Day. He is the only one of the gang who even tries to make it look like an accident. The girl cats grab things with their paws, and intentionally flip them to the ground. "What's this? The cap to the half and half? Ground." I have stopped bothering to look for hair ties on my bathroom counter or bedside table, where I put them when I let my hair down at night. The first place I look, as I'm brushing my hair back into a pony, is the floor, by the toe kick of the cabinet, or just out of view under my bed. I will never agree with people who think cats are aloof, but I'm right there with people who say that cats are jerks.
I need to put out another urgent call for advice on my magnolia tree. Whatever is attacking it has spread throughout the entire tree now. The leaves are spotty, turning yellow and brown, and dropping off in great numbers. I want to save it. It's a huge tree. Please, does anyone have a suggestion for a treatment? Who has experience with diseases or pests that affect magnolias? Or is it just a mineral deficiency?
It was time to prune the first round of spent blossoms off the roses today. It seems like it was just a few days ago that I was squirming with anticipation of the first flowers, and now they're already scattering petals and getting crisp. I thought about collecting the petals, for some crafty reason that I never fully developed, and I started stacking the clipped roses along the rail of the deck. It didn't take long before I found Athena, standing in the succulent bowl, reaching for the collected roses, pulling them to the ground. Thanks, Ewok. Thanks for being a jerk. I suppose I shouldn't have expected anything different.
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