Colin Firth and BlackAdder?

Came home from Thanksgiving last night and what greeted me in the mail?  No, not Cinnamin and  Clove, they were in the house, in the basement waiting for me to let them out...it was a DVD from Netflix called "BlackAdder: back and forth."  It came out in 1999 and I only ordered it as Colin Firth is supposed to be in it playing William Shakespeare the great poet and playwright.

Aargh, he only had 2 minutes or less of camera time.  I wasted 60+ minutes only to see 2 or less minutes of Colin Firth!!  The movie itself, starring Rowan Atkinson was appalling.  I recall watching this series back in the 1980s and was highly amused.  This sequel, "BlackAdder: back and forth," is very dismal.  The one highlight of the film is the part when BlackAdder goes back in time to the Romans at the Hadrian Wall in northern England and you see Rowan Atkinson in a small skirt (the Roman soldier outfit) and then you see Hugh Laurie (of "House" fame) in an even shorter skirt, and finally Stephen Fry comes into the scene, only speaking Latin and his Roman skirt is so short that you see his skivvies.  Truly the only funny moment in the film.

Cinnamin and Clove wouldn't tell me how they spent Thanksgiving.  Once I let them out of the basement they immediately went over to the furnace register in the wall and took a cat nap.  I wonder if they are peeved at me for leaving them home...

I can't believe I watched the entire thing...

it was awful, a movie Colin Firth was in and the movie tanked, it was so badly written, edited, filmed...it just stinks, even Colin Firth, doing the best he could, could not save "Trauma."  Dreadful awful movie.  Sorry Colin, it stinks to be you in this film.

Last night Cinnamin played two tricks on me by hiding.  In other words, he scared the boogers right out of me!  I got home late last night from work to hear a slow beep, beep, beep coming somewhere from the second floor and I run upstairs thinking the smoke detector up there, has a defective battery in it as I just changed it two weeks ago (you're supposed to swap out the batteries in your smoke detectors every six months).  Nope, once upstairs I find it's not the smoke detector but instead the CO detector, carbon monoxide...I'm breathing real fast here.  I unplug the unit and take it into a bedroom that has better light and see that it is flashing "lb" in addition to the obnoxious slow, whining beep, beep, beep.  Reading the very tiny print "lb" means "low battery" and my heart starts to slow back down...I go downstairs, put my coat back on and go to the store to buy new 9 volt batteries.  Lesson learned, change the battery in the CO detector when doing the smoke detectors.

So I come home and only Clove greets me at the door.  This is most unusual...usually it's the watchdog, Cinnamin who greets me coming and leaving.  I look around through all the rooms of the first floor and he's not available.  Yikes, I'm starting to get panicky again...can't explain it about Cinnamin, anything wrong with this cat and I freak.  I looked up the stairway to the second floor and don't see him behind the child's gate that keeps the 4 legged varmits to the first floor and basement.  I think to myself...did he get outside when I left for the store or when I came back...I exit the house and look in my tiny fenced-yard, even going to the garage and can't find him...the most unimaginable thoughts are racing through my mind...Cinnamin is on the other side of the garage door and if I open it, he will run away...!

With a heavy heart I reenter the house and immediately I see Cinnamin looking at me from behind the catdoor that lets the cats into the basement...thank goodness he's okay!

But this is not the rest of the story...I started to doing some walking throughout the house, cause I don't think I walk enough and walking at 10pm at night is the best time for exercise, right?  And then I notice that I can't see Cinnamin again...when I say he is the watchdog in the house, this is the truth, this cat will follow me everywhere just to keep an eye on me.  The only cat I can see is the evil one, Clove, sitting quietly on the carpet, looking as good as gold.  Where is Cinnamin...darn'd cat?!!

I know he's around cause I hear his tiny "meow,"  but where has he gone and why can't I see him but only hear him?  I walk by the stairway going to the second floor again, thinking silly Cinnamin has climbed the impossible child's gate to climb for cats, but he's not looking down at me from the other side of the gate.  I keep walking and listening for his distant, tiny-sounding meow.

I pass from the dining room into the hallway going into the kitchen and I see Clove run up to the hallway closet and from under the closet door comes a striped paw...Cinnamin went into the closet when I hung up my coat and didn't get out before I closed the door.  Big, dummy, Siamese Cat...

What did Colin Firth do on the 4th of July 2009?

Saw Colin Firth in the movie "When did you last see your father?"  It is an amazingly stirring story and well-done on Mr. Firth's acting part.  The movie came out in 2007 and I love Netflix sending me movies!

Not in the mood for blogging so I'll post a pic of Cinnamin and Clove who got out of the basement today for the first time since Saturday.

They are waiting for me to come downstairs, don't recall what I was doing on the second floor on the 4th of July 2009 (date of the photo) but if you click on the pic you will see that Clove is baring one of his sharp canine teeth at me...guess I was upstairs way to long!

Did Colin Firth have a favorite cat when he was growing up?

 

Continuing my childhood saga with cats, the following will be my ode to Bibs.  After we'd moved from the farmhouse we rented in Lum, Michigan to the big city of Imlay City, Michigan (seven miles southeast of the farm), we had Mittens, son of Buffy for not quite a year.  He was mostly black and had white paws, not unlike Bibs on the left here.  Mittens moved on sometime in 1972 or early 1973.

Bibs moved in with us in the fall of 1973.  We saw him hanging around outside the TV room window and I am not certain who was the first to feed him, my mother, or my sister Beth Anne, but before long, Bibs had moved into the house and Mom and Dad let us keep him so long as we took care of his vet needs and litter box stuff.  My sister, Beth Anne took on all this responsibility.  She had a job at the local store similar to the "Dairy Queen" and she paid for Bibs to become altered, that is neutered. In doing so this robbed Bibs of his wandering habits (known to most unaltered male cats) and he was happy to be inside our house every night.

Bibs stayed with us from late 1973 or very early 1974 until he passed in April 1981.  He was a typical housecat who enjoyed going outdoors and then coming back in.  We were his door openers, when he wanted out, he would roll over in front of the kitchen door to the landing (leading outside) or before the front door.  His favorite place in the house was in the dining room, which was the most central room in the house, meaning that you had to pass through the dining room to go to the kitchen or to get to the upstairs.  Bibs would lie under the dining room table which was in the center of the dining room and sleep there for hours, or if not sleeping, he would just keep an eye on the house.

My parents didn't like cats on the furniture and neither did I.  But with Bibs, I could seldom refuse him anything.  Here you see him on my bed with some of my sister Jennifer's and my stuff animal toys.  He let us doing anything to him normally.  Jennifer and I would put great barriers from the TV room to the dining room and get Bibs to jumb the barrier which he did skillfully.


Bibs was an excellent hunter.  He would catch rabbits and birds, and was most especially lethal with bats.  We lived with bats in our house in Imlay City for years.  Sometimes we would be lazy and put Bibs to bed in the garage at night, and Bibs was so clever that he could raise the garage door (that is open it) to go outside and the morning he would often leave 2 to 3 bats on the door mat for us to discover.  I can't recall why we would put Bibs in the garage at night because when you think about it, he was kept away from his food, water, and litterbox.  And with his opening the garage door to exit the garage, this could probably be how bats entered the house, going through the rafters in the garage and then into the house. We were really stupid now that I recall and write this. 

Getting back to Bibs' skills as a hunter, one time I moved a chair in the living room and found a dessicated mouse (very small) under the chair.  I never told Mom about this, just removed it, dry heaving all the way to the garbage.  Beth Anne usually got stuck with cleaning out Bibs' litterbox and picking up the dead bats in the morning.  I, myself, had to remove the bat carcasses, but I don't remember swiping out his litterbox.  I wonder why Dad didn't get rid of the dead bats on the mat like he had with the dead mice in Lum when I was a child?  I guess it was a chore for us kids to do if we wanted to keep Bibs.

Bibs had other stuff he could do.  He could open doors that were not securely latched.  He'd reach under the door with his paw and pull until the door opened and he was free.  He loved cheese.  We would go to the fridgerator and open the aluminum door and if he heard the sound of plastic wrap unpealing, he would come running to the kitchen.  We could get him to beg for a scrap of cheese, begging like a dog and he was not too proud to get his cheese.

Bibs was also very tolerant of us when we introduced other pets into the household.  He'd be standoffish at first (going under the kitchen floorboards in the basement and howling his displeasure), but he'd come around and accept changes.  The first animal to disturb the sanctity of Bibs' home was my grandmother's horrible dog, Spunky.  After Bibs calmed down with the wretched dog in the house, he would come and spook Spunky in the nighttime when we were all in the TV room by coming out of the dark and stretching a long front black paw, with claws extended, around the corner of the door when Spunky would be lying down and then withdraw it very fast and this would set off Spunky on  a barking binge.

Here you see Bibs patiently waiting to be let back inside the house, what you can barely makeout in the photo is our German Shepherd Kinder, the last pet that Bibs was forced to share his Humans with.  Kinder, of course was many times bigger than Bibs, even as a puppy (the aforementioned Spunky was only a tad bit larger than Bibs).  Kinder loved to chase Bibs, loved to clean out Bibs' litterbox and food dish.  We were forced to find an alternate place for Bibs to eat his food, hidden by the keen smelling nose of Kinder, and we were forced to put a cardboard cover on top of the litterbox. 

Bibs was an exceptionally accomodating cat.  He lived with us for 8 years, dying in the spring of 1981.  I was away when this occurred.  My parents had given me their car and I and my roommate had driven to Bronson, Michigan for a weekend at her grandparents cottage.  Jennifer was at Michigan State University.  Mom and Dad were in Puerto Rico, leaving Susan and Beth Anne at home when Bibs became ill and when the Vet said that his heart was enlarging, Susan and Beth Anne did what was necessary to put Bibs at ease and ended his life in April 1981.  I knew nothing of this because of I was gone and when I returned to Oakland University, my other roommate, Susan told me the sad story how my sisters, Susan and Beth Anne had called, trying to reach me.  Terrible time leaning of Bibs' dying.  He was the last cat my parents ever had, and clearly, Bibs, as a cat, was a tough cat for other felines to follow in his paws.

Last night I watched Colin Firth in the 2003 film "Hope springs."  It was okay, of course he did an excellent job in his character.  After this I put in "The last legion," with Colin Firth which came out in 2007, I think.  A film that leaves a better resonance with me for an overall good film.  "Hope springs" is okay.

I don't suppose that Colin Firth likes to play with dolls?

As with cats, I have been a life-long doll-lover.  My first doll I remember receiving was on my 3rd birthday, a short-haired blonde plastic doll that had no flexibility about it.  I called her "Debbie" and I chewed up her hands pretty good and possibly her feet.  Debbie moved to Lum with the family on 3 December 1965 but I don't recall what happened to her after we moved.  The first Barbie doll I received was on my 5th birthday which occurred on Easter Sunday 10 April 1966 and I got Scooter!  I was so excited to get her and she is on my doll shelf to this day.

I recall growing up when visiting my grandmother in Mt. Clemens that she had dolls of my Aunt  Kay in the glass display shelves of her desk.  Sometimes Gram would take out the dolls and we had to be very careful while handling them.  My aunt later retrieved these dolls when she and her family moved from California to Wisconsin, and I remember one time in Wisconsin, that Aunt Kay got out all her dolls for us and we  marvelled at them, all little dolls (I could be mis-remembering), some only 3 or 4 inches high, the name of the manufacturer I can't recall at this writing.)  I was fortunate to possess one of these dolls eventually when I was visiting my sister who lives in Appleton in an antique store.  A little blonde doll with a pretty blue dress on and she had her original box and tag on her arm.  I paid $25.00 for her and I know that I got an excellent deal!

Clove is indifferent to dolls.  He might sniff them and then he moves on.  He prefers sitting in a box over becoming disturbed by my dolls.

Clove today about 4 or 5pm.

Clove last summer while in the basement waiting for me to come home from work.

Cinnamin, on the other hand, take adversion to dolls.  I can't explain it, he's otherwise a happy go-lucky cat who lets me do whatever I want to him.

Colin Firth was sublime in "Then she found me." Get it from the library and check it out!

Yes, I really enjoyed watching Colin Firth in "Then she found me," a movie that came out on 2007 and was directed by Helen Hunt, and the picture starred, Helen Hunt, Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler, and Mr. Sublime, Colin Firth.  Great story.

Why do our cats love us?  This is a very perplexing question.  My ex-companion said that Cinnamin and Clove only had affection for me as they viewed me as the feed bag:

I tend to disagree with this.  I don't see myself in the mirror with this image, and I don't think Clove and Cinnamin do either.  Yes, they are most excited when I visit them each morning and put out new cat food and water, but when they're done eating they come to me and let me pet them, probably hoping that I'll let them out of the basement so that they can sleep on the furniture all day after I've left for work.  (they think they are so crafty, and that I'm blinded by their loveliness).  Nope, my cats stay in the basement while I'm at work and then again at night when we all retire.

But resuming the cats' love, or affection towards me, just after they've been fed and they do their cat-washing routine, they both come to me and let me pet them, usually for as long I want to pet them, but ordinarily this is a short period of time as I must rush through getting ready for work.  Cats aren't as slavish in their love for their human (I do belong to two Meezers, Cinnamin and Clove) as are dogs (and I don't think dogs consider people as their "human"), but cats show affection all the time.

What would Colin Firth do

if  he came home from work at 9pm and after walking 15 minutes to finish up 1 hour of exercise for the day, would he read a new book on Lady Jane Grey, England's 9 day Queen, or would he watch a new movie about  himself that he hadn't seen before? 

This is really a no-brainer option, go for the movie, pick up the knitting sticks Colin and watch yourself in the movie, "Then she found me."  At least that is what I am going to do were I you.

I must do justice to Clove the demon seed Siamese cat who came to my house on Halloween 2004.  Here he is on that very day.

What is it with kittens, perhaps just for Siamese, they always look like big ears and big paws until they grow into them.  I drove across the state of  Michigan to get Clove and he cried all the way back, 150+ miles of meows and screams.  He doesn't like the sound of car tires on highways.  Poor kitty.  From the moment he came  home, he's been into everything trouble he can find.  Even now at 5 years old he's chasing his tail that he never did as a kitten.

Here the little meezer is about 10 weeks or so, just around Thanksgiving.  He's not really into getting his head petted unless he needs real comforting, usually around feeding time.  Other than that, don't touch him.  He won't sit in your lap unless he wants to.  You pick up Clove and he will jump back down in two seconds or less (it takes him two seconds or less to realize he's been moved from where he wants to be, to somewhere he doesn't want to be).

Lastly  here's Clove sometime in 2005, still a kitten, but looking so darned cute, what can you do when he acts up and looks like this?

Off to watch Colin Firth in the new movie, "Then she found me."  Oh boy!  :)

Where was Colin Firth on 6 November 2009...where was Cinnamin and Clove, let alone me...?

Cinnamin, Clove and I watched a movie called "Conspiracy" with Colin Firth in a starring role and we did not care at all for this movie!  Not that Colin Firth did a terrible job, precisely not this as he is an incredible and highly talented actor.  No, we were sadly disappointed in the plot of the movie, it was a true story of the meeting of Hitler's tops Nazi thugs to develop the "final solution," that is planning the extermination of the Jews in Europe that had not yet been murdered by the Nazis.  Colin Firth played a German lawyer who thought out legalistically how the Jews could be deprived of their rights as citizens, among other things.  He can play a bad guy very well.  Poor Cinnamin and Clove fell asleep as they didn't care for this movie of their favorite English actor, Mr. Colin Firth.

What is so special about 6 November 2009 you might inquire?  First, it is the day on which my father's father, Roy Brooks was born in 1893.  Secondly, it is the day Cinnamin came to me in 2003.  He has been my boon companion lo these 6 years.  Yes, yes, Clove is the other half the boon feline companions in my household but Cinnamin was the first cat I've had in years and years.  As I mentioned before that Clove is a blue point siamese, well Cinnamin's markings are called "color point," a new markings for  Siamese, and specifically I guess you could say his color is "Seal Lynx Point," or "Chocolate Lynx Point."  He's a sweetheart whatever his markings.

Cinnamin then in 20003

Cinnamin today.

Did Colin Firth have cats in his childhood that were promiscuous like Buffy?

Just a few more memories of our farm cat Buffy.  As I mentioned two days ago, she was always getting pregnant.  I believe she nearly had 4 litters in just one year!  We were fairly certain that the male cat who sired these 4 litters on her was our neighbor's yellow tabby cat named Buster.  Once Buster was our cat for about 20 minutes or the time it takes to drive a car from Imlay City to the farm in Lum.  Our minister at the First Congregational Church UCC in Imlay City gave us Buster as we could always use another farm cat.  I remember going in the car with Mom and my sisters to pick him and how angry he was on the 7 mile ride back to the farm.  I'm not certain at what time in the history of us living on  the farm when we brought Buster home, but it could have been before we got Buffy, Fluffy, Jeanie, and Tigerlily.  I remember that Friskey was still on the farm, but as soon as we pulled into the driveway and let Buster out of the box he was transported in, my  memory recalls that he jumped out of the car window and ran straight away!

Once Buffy was of age to conceive kittens, we would occasionally see Buster lurking about the barns.  We found out that he had run away about one half mile going west on Lum Road to our neighbors, the Pollacks.  Mom was great friends with Ted and Frieda Pollack and we would go over there in the long summer nights and Mom would have intelligent adult conversation and cigarettes while we kids would go swimming in the pool in the Pollack's backyard  and it is here we found our stray runaway.

Buffy had her first litter in the springtime of 1970.  I guess I was in the 3rd grade and it was on an early Saturday morning that Mom pulled us away from watching Saturday morning cartoons and made us go outside to look for rhubarb to pick and we followed Mom with our grandmother who was visiting to the Horse Barn, and inside there we saw Buffy nursing 4 tiny kittens in a box.  We were all so amazed at these little kittens, we were very careful with touching them and Buffy was most gracious and gentle with our presence while she nursed these little infant felines.  Sadly these kittens never survived the week.  We were told by Mom or Dad that an animal had gotten into the barn and had eaten every kitten.  We were all sad and poor Buffy was very distraught...what had happened to her kittens.  Word got out about our loss and the best friend of my younger sister, Jennifer, told her parents, I believe, and they gave us a kitten that had recently been born to a cat of theirs.  We weren't certain if Buffy would adopt this little calico kitten, but she took to Mixie (as we named her) instantly and nursed and raised Mixie to an adult.

When Mixie was weaned, Buffy had her second litter and being not a very bright cat, she began to have the kittens on the back porch.  I think my grandmother was the first to alert my father and mother to this news and we were all drawn outside to see this event and I remember Dad going to Buffy and putting her in a box and taking her inside the shed that was just off the back porch of our house.  As he put her in the box, she was giving birth to the first kitten!  We all crowded into the shed and I saw the miracle of life of a cat giving birth to 4 kittens. I really can't recall anything about these kittens, their names or their markings but their birth was a remarkable experience to a 9 year old girl. Two of the kittens' names were Sylvester and  Marmalade..sorry that I can't recall the other two kittens' names.  My thought is that my father must have taken these kittens to the County Animal Shelter in Lapeer, there just isn't any memory of these kittens other than their birth.

Mixie was a gorgeous calico cat who grew up with a supremely cat attitude.  There are very few cats that I have never been able to accept me as a friend.  Miss Mixie, like I said was not very socialable to me, so my memories of her are rather distant.  I do recall that she had one litter of 5 kittens, one died at birth, one was a calico, as beautiful as Mixie was who was called Elsa (Susan named her and claimed her for her own...she was named "Elsa" for the lion  Elsa in the movie "Born Free" which we watched on television sometime in the late 1960s or in 1970.  Another kitten was a dark tortie and I took her for my own and called her Pearl.  Jennifer chose a small grey and white male with bandit markings and called him Tuffy, we always thought Tuffy was the runt of Mixie's litter as he was much smaller than the other kittens.  I can't remember what the kitten looked like or its name that Beth Anne chose, perhaps it didn't live long, but its memory is forgotten by my sad brain.

During the summer of 1971 we had many cats on the farm.  Buffy had had her 3rd litter and three kittens were still alive, Clare, Lafayette, and Mittens.  Mixie had 3 or 4 kittens, Elsa, Pearl, Tuffy and maybe the 4th forgotten kitten.  We had too many cats and we had to get rid of some.  To us girls this was not the best choice, we wanted to keep the cats but, again, we were not wealthy people, and we couldn't afford buying large amounts of cat food all the time.  Elsa was the first kitten to be given away.  She went to the Watz family who lived in Lum and they renamed her "Ginger."  I was appalled at the change in her name, not only was she a beautiful calico kitten, but "Elsa" fitted her beauty.  She was not a "Ginger."  I don't remember what happened to my Pearl, I think she was given away as well, but my memory plays me false here.   I'm pretty sure that we gave away Mixie and Pearl to someone who wanted them, but the memory of this event is missing.

Tuffy wasn't going anywhere.  He was a very special kitten who truly had 9 lives and my father performed a medical miracle on this little kitten.  Sometime during the summer of 1971 we went to Mt. Clemens and stayed at my grandmother's house as it was the 20th class reunion for my mother who grew up in Mt. Clemens.  When we returned to the farm the next day we found that Tuffy was limping on his back paw and we believe that a lawn chair that was on our back porch had fallen over on him and broken his tiny leg.  My father took toothpicks and splinted this tiny kitten's back paw and over time, healed the leg.  When the toothpicks were removed Tuffy ran around without a limp!  Later he met his end by being run-over, and we were saddened to learn this as he was "Tuffy" and had survived a broken leg.

During the early spring of 1971 Buffy gave birth to her 3rd litter, of which Lafayette, Clare, Geraldine Josephine and Mittens were the babies.  These kittens were born in early March and we were about to go to Georgia where my father was from to take a small vacation visiting my grandparents there.  Because Buffy's kittens were so young and recalling what had happened to her first litter, we put Buffy in the basement of the house with plenty of cat food and cat litter I'm assuming, so that she and her kittens would be safe until we returned home from Georgia.

It was on this trip to Georgia that we learned that my father's father died as we were driving south to visit.  It was a distinctly sad time for us all.  We drove up the long driveway to the house at Hickory Hollow and all the lights were on and lots of cars in the driveway and we thought all the family had gathered at my grandparents to greet us.  Not so, I remember we had tried to call my grandparents several times to say we'd be arriving late that night (11 March 1971) but my father could never get a call to go through, and as we were getting out of the car, my father's brother, Roy came towards us very fast and said, "James, Daddy is dead!"  This is how I remember this sad night, perhaps Uncle Roy had different words to alert us to the death of my grandfather.  I know that night I didn't sleep because I was sleeping in the bed that Pappy always slept in when we came to visit.  This was my first experience with a loss of a close loved family member.  I wept and wept at Pappy's funeral.  No more would I hear him calling my sisters and I, "Chickadee, o' Chickadee," or watch him go off down to the pond fishing, he loved  to fish!  No more hearing his deep Southern voice trying to tell me stories from  his childhood.

We returned very much saddend to Michigan sometime later.  We eagerly ran to the basement. my sisters and I, to see how Buffy and her kittens had fared.  I think we were all a little scared thinking they might have died too, but no, Buffy and  her 4 babies had thrived and the little kittens all had their eyes open (they'd been closed yet when we went to Georgia).

As I said, Buffy was a great hunter of mice and rats and it was always something to watch her bring up something live and then turn it over to her kittens.  I saw this once or twice during the summer of 1971 with the 3rd litter.  Buffy got pregnant again during the summer of 1971 and I'm not even sure if the her kittens from the 3rd litter were fully weaned as I can recall Lafayette still suckling on her late in the summer.  I never did like Lafayette, he was a long haired black kitten with a temper, perhaps we were never able to get him to like humans, or perhaps it was just children he didn't like.  Dad took Buffy and Lafayette to the County Animal Shelter either in the late summer of 1971 or early fall.  We girls were all angered that Mom and Dad had done this.  Now I think perhaps they took the two cats to the shelter as we were planning to move away from Lum to Imlay City and we wouldn't be able to have more than one cat living in the city.  I think my sisters and I were so angry at Mom and Dad because they didn't tell us that they were getting rid of Buffy and Lafayette.  I think had they told us their reasons there would have been little fuss, well maybe more than a little fuss, Buffy was pregnant and I wouldn't have wanted to miss the birth of new kittens.

I won't go into detail about Dad's ride to Lapeer with two cats who didn't like riding in the car.  Lafayette never got to Lapeer.  He jumped out of the car window somewhere between the Lum House and Lapeer.  Buffy was the only cat who arrived at the County Animal Shelter.  Life is hard growing up, we're all forced to make choices that we dislike and Dad was most lenient with his 4 girls, so I know he didn't relish getting rid of our cats. 

We purchased a  house in Imlay City sometime during the fall of 1971 and we moved into the house on 3 January 1972 and only one cat came with us, Mittens, Buffy's nearly grown cat that belonged to Jennifer and he stayed with us in the city for a good part of 1972.  He went missing sometime in late 1972.  I went through all of 1973 without having a cat.  Mom and Dad were out of the cat-getting business and it was a lackluster year for me without being around cats.  I would go across the street to our neighbor the Briegers and play with their big orange long-haired tabby male, it was always a sad time when I had to return back home.

Not too long ago I saw a great movie, besides "Nanny McPhee" with Colin Firth.  It is called "Easy Virtue" and is set in the 1920s and Mr. Firth plays a world-weary member of the English aristocracy who doesn't interact much with his family until his only son returns home married to an American.  A great role for Colin Firth and I highly recommend the period peice as the music, costumes and set location are wondrously done.

I think Colin Firth would have played an excellent Bond, James Bond...

and preferred his vodka martinis shaken, not stirred...in my dreams of course!

This is Cinnamin two days after I got him from somewhere up north in Michigan on 8 November 2003.  He was all ears and paws.  He weighed two pounds and was 10 weeks old when my dear friend, now deceased, Charyl Frounfelter went up north with her husband, Larry, to visit this Siamese  Cat Breeder for me to get Cinnamin.  He was sick for the first month after he came home with me on 6 November 2003.  He had fleas and worms and you see a little bruise on his nose where he had major problems with the cat carrier the first time I took him to the vet.  

Cinnamin cost me $100 and this was a very modest price for a pedigreed Siamese kitten.  Charyl and Larry came home with Cinnamin's littermate, and named him Brendan, and he is an exact match for Cinnamin.  I was going to call my new kitten "Cimmaron" after a river in Texas, but my then-boyfriend's daughter convinced me to call him Cinnamon.  I did indeed call him Cinnamin but of a varied spelling.  As I said before, Cinnamin was born on 26 August 2003 and this Friday on 11/6/09 will mark the 6th year that he has been a part of my life.

Clove, on the other hand I purchased from a legitimate Siamese breeder in Holland, Michigan for $275!!  He actually had a complete pedigree that I brought home with him. He was born on 8 September 2004 and moved to my house on 31 October 2004.  The only day my doorbell rang in the 5 years that I've lived in my house was on Halloween when Clove moved in.  My friend, Angie went over to Holland with me to pick up Clove.  The breeder had several Siamese kittens running about and she had two Blue Points which was exactly what I was desiring in a color for my second Siamese.

Clove in this photo is about 12 weeks old and I took the picture on the day after Christmas 2004.  Look into those baby blues of his and you see him thinking, considering how he can get into trouble.  E-V-I-L is how Clove spells his name in Siamese!

Regarding Mr. Firth a reader made a comment and pointed me to a neat website called Firth Essence.  Go to Firth Essence and take a gander at all the cool photos of Colin Firth.

I hate working 9-5, I imagine Colin Firth doesn't have these boring work hours...

Okay I lie, I have to work noon until midnight, or it seems that long.  Whatever...getting back to Cinnamin and Clove, afterall this blog is about them and little about Colin Firth.

As I explain in my profile, I have been an admirer of cats since I was a small child.  Even though I was born in the Cereal Capital of the World (Battle Creek, MI) and spent the first 4 years of my life in Saginaw, Michigan, during my 4th year (1965) my parents moved our family to a farm in Lum, Michigan.  Here we were given our first pets, cats.  I do not know why dogs never became part of the family, but the cats were necessary to the farm, they kept the mice out of the house.  The first cat in my life was a sleekly black, shy female cat I named Cynthia.  She never let us get very close to her but she always hovered around the periphery of our family and the backdoor of the house.  A vivid memory I have just after we moved in was when Mother, Jennifer and I had come back from grocery shopping and Mom had the back door in the kitchen propped open so we could bring in the groceries.  Cynthia lurked around the door and ran away when Jennifer or I would try to get close to her.  Sadly for Cynthia, she had a short life on the farm, not too long after this the farmer that rented the farm fields (Mr. John Crawford) told my parents that he'd found Cynthia dead in the bard, probably from rat poison, meaning that maybe she'd eaten a rat that was full of poison.

As I said the big farm house that we rented from the Harvey Family in Lum, Michigan, was a haven for mice.  I recall trips to the basement with my father as he would pick up dead rodent carcasses (perhaps he used poison or traps in the basement), all I recall is the hunt for the dead mice.  Soon after the death of Cynthia, Mom and Dad took my three sisters and myself out to look for free kittens.  We found 4 lovely ones, Susan's was named Smokey, Beth Anne named her kitten, Friskey, Jennifer called her tabby male, Tiger, and I couldn't think of a name for my black and white masked female kitten.  It was a good thing for me that Mother suggested I call her Top Cat or TC for short.  I could write pages on TC, how she waited for me on the front porch when I came home from kindergarten, or when she'd come into the house she'd freak out and go under the sofa in the living room and was hard to remove, or Mom as says, she had a habit of climbing the large box elder tree in the backyard and getting onto the kitchen roof and wouldn't come down until my father had to go remove her.

Here you see my sisters and myself in the backyard next to the large box elder tree.  The year is about 1967 or earlier.  My sister Susan has taken the photo and Beth Anne, on the far left is holding her cat Friskey, Jennifer in the middle is holding Susan's cat Smokey, and I have Jennifer's Tiger.  I have no memory of where my cat TC went. Perhaps she climbed the tree and got up on the kitchen roof again.  This is the earliest photo I can find of me with a cat.

Sadly about these 4 cats, three of them met violent ends on the highway in front of our house, meaning they were run-over by cars.  My father used to explain their deaths to us, in that they would lie down on the road as it was still warm from the sun in the night and then the cars would hit them.  Now as an adult I have realized that my father tried to spare us grim details and I realize that the cats were crossing the highway to get to the fields on the other side of the road and never made it across the two lane road.  People used to drive very fast down Lum Road and this caused the deaths of Smokey, TC, and finally Friskey.  We never know what happened to Tiger.  He was an unaltered male and as they like to roam, he left one day and never returned.  We were very poor when I was a child.  Mom and Dad were able to have Smokey, Friskey, and TC spaded, but they never neutered Tiger. 

Regarding the subject of growing up poor in my definition:  we always had plenty of food and clothing, we never wanted for anything, but it seemed to me that we were poor as I recall from discussions from my father and mother on how hard it was for my father to find work the he could succeed at in the mid-1960s and there were many times where there wasn't much money.  Dad had several jobs when we moved to Lum, he sold animal food to farmers at grain elevators all over the Thumb of  Michigan for Monsanto and Wayne Feeds, he sold posters for a company, he worked for a manufactured home company, he was a salesman on the road and was gone for long stretches of time, until finally he found his calling in 1968 when he became afiliated with Woodmen Accident Life Insurance Company and sold life and health insurance products to people.

Smokey died first and TC was the next to go and she was killed on the road when I was in second grade and my mother told me that she had died when we were in the car on a Saturday morning, on the way from Lum to Imlay City where I would take a school bus to Flint to learn how to swim at the YWCA.  I never did learn how to learn to swim that winter of 1968, the YWCA gave me a certificate saying I "neither passed nor failed" in my swimming course.  (I later learned that summer how to swim and didn't need the YWCA).

Tiger disappeared sometime between 1968 and 1969 and we needed cats for the farm so Mom and Dad took all 4 of us girls on a car ride again looking for free kittens.  We found 4 new kittens and brought them home and Friskey wasn't real thrilled at first with the new batch of cats.  Susan named her black and white masked fluffy cat, Buffy, her tail was black and it wasn't a long, regular cat tail, but bobbed in some way.  Beth Anne named her female kitten, Jeanie and she was a brown tabby, like Tiger was.  My cat was an orange male tabby and again, I couldn't think of what to call him and everyone gave me great suggestions, even my father told me of a pet he'd had as a child called "Tigerlily," who I think was a dog.  Jennifer named her female kitten, another black and white masked female, of duller markings like Buffy, "Fluffy."

I was in the 3rd grade and really stressed that I couldn't name my kitten and realized I had to name him something.  When I went to bed that night I had a dream of the movie "Peter Pan" and there is a scene where Peter Pan saves the Princess Tigerlily.  So in the morning I recalled Tigerlily and that was the name of my orange tabby kitten.  This second round of cats didn't last very long like the first 4 kittens.  As we were very poor, Mom and Dad could not afford to alter the male and 3 females, or perhaps they realized that these new cats might get run-over on the road like the other cats had, but these 4 new kittens were never altered. It was a very cold winter in 1969 and there was a wave of worms making it through Lum and Jeanie was the first to die.  Tigerlily died just before Christmas 1969, Jeanie shortly dying just before Tigerlily.  I remember going to the garage where they had their cat boxes to sleep in and he was stone cold dead curled up in his bed.  My father knew how much we loved our cats so he went to the area behind the garage and dug up the cold, hard earth and we buried Tigerlily behind the garage. I chose a large orange stone in the rockfield to use as Tigerlily's grave marker.

This area was our cat cemetery, perhaps Jeanie was the first to be buried there and then Tigerlily.  Jennifer's cat, Fluffy ran away, and all that was left was Susan's Buffy and Beth Anne's first cat, Friskey.  Poor Friskey was next to be interred in the cat cemetery as she was run-over, the time of this event escapes my memory.

Buffy was the only cat we now had left and she was a character.  She was a great mouser.  She would catch rats and mice and leave only their skins on the mat outside the backdoor as a gift to our family.  During the summertime Dad would make a bonfire in our gravel driveway at night and we'd all sit around it and look at the stars in the heavens or roast marshmellows and other campfire things.  The next morning Buffy would roll around in the ashes and you would have to wash your hands almost immediately once you petted her.  She was the the sweetest female cat I've ever known.  Other times at night she'd be out doing her nighttime activities and in the morning she would be reaking of skunk scent!  We always thought it was because of her markings, black and white and that she didn't know the difference between skunks and cats.  Buffy was also a most promiscuous cat.  She had dealings with our neighbor's cat, Buster and was the mother of 4 litters.

 

Here we all are on Easter Sunday 1971 and we are each holding a kitten from Buffy's third litter.  Jennifer on the far left is holding Mittens, he was a great black and white tuxedo cat that moved off the farm with us in 1972 to Imlay City and then he ran away (a sad story for Jennifer and her farm cats).  Beth Anne is holding Clare who was a male with exact markings like his mother, Buffy, except that he wasn't long-haired (he subsequently was run-over).  My sister Susan is standing in the back with the other male kitten of Buffy's "Lafayette."  I am holding Geraldine Josephine who was a grey female with some orange marking on her.  Dad is next to me and you can see Buffy the proud mother cat at our feet.  My mother took this photo.

My poor kitten, Geraldine Josephine never survived kittenhood.  One day I was faking being sick so I didn't have to go to school and my father stayed home for work to be with me.  He was outside fixing his car and as it was about done and up on car ramps, he asked if I wanted to be in the car as he pushed it off the car ramps.  I said sure and Dad pushed the car off the ramps and as the car went down backwards I heard a cat scream and once the car stopped Dad told me a cat had been run over.  Now Dad was very upset as he knew how much we girls loved our cats (both of my parents were not "cat people" and had been raised with dogs but they knew that we as children had great love of our cats), and he described to me which cat it was and how it was Gerry.  He thought she might have been resting on top of the car tire as it was on the ramp before he pushed it off.  He told me he was going to have to end her misery so I ran to the shed and got out the shovel thinking he would hit her on the head (a story he'd told me as a way to end an animal's life gently) but by the time I got back to him with the shovel, he said that Gerry was already gone.  We walked to the cat cemetery and he buried her there for me.  I recall I didn't cry much, perhaps you get used to life and death with animals more simply living on a farm than you do in the city, but today as I write this I can still feel the thrill of that car going down slowly off the ramps and then Gerry's peircing cry of anguish and I am shedding tears profusely.

Does Colin Firth enjoy watching American Football on tv? I certainly do not.

Guess what Cinnamin and Clove are doing at this moment?  Give up?  They're sleeping.  What else.  Earlier Clove was playing with a piece of torn cardboard and when I would try to take his photo he would move into frozen mode, that is, quit playing with the cardboard until I put down the camera.  I find using my cell phone camera is more convenient that the regular digital camera because the cell phone is always by my side and the digitial camera is almost always across the room so that when my ordinary Siamese cats start to do something extraordinary and I get up to find the camera they became distracted and stop the uniqueness of the moment.  I have boring cats 99% of the time.

Cinnamin is the good cat and Clove is the bad boy.  Here you see Cinnamin in what I call his "watchdog" mode.  He sits by  me and watches me, even when he's in one of his average 18 hours-a-day catnap modes, he usually cocks an eyelid if I move my foot and lo! if I get up and move to another room, he will follow me. Cinnamin is really partial to two other humans, my mother, Judy, and my niece, Lee Anne.  With all other folks, he takes a while to accept them.  My poor niece Amy he has taken a keen dislike to.  And I find this most disturbing, because one of my nicknames for him is loverboy as he is so sweet, and again, he is the good cat in the family.  It's Clove who is the bad boy and you would expect him to act weird when people he doesn't know who come to visit.  Who can figure out the pea-sized brain of a cat?  One cannot herd cats as the saying goes, so understanding them is out of the question.

My goal is to watch every movie Colin Firth has ever made.  I think I can do it if Netflix has all of them.  What I have seen so far:  Love Actually, Pride and Prenjudice, Bridget Jones Diary 1 & 2, Nanny  McPhee, The Last Legion, and several others the names of which I can remember so I will have to review them again.

Beginning here I will state I prefer Colin Firth's "Mr. Darcy" to the actor in the Keira Knightly version or that version in the 1930s with Laurence Olivier.  Good  job, Mr. Firth as Mr. Darcy, most excellent job.