sandrakwilliams.net

One day my little friend Sydney caught a bird and left its bleeding carcass at the back steps. (She loves me, oh yes she does.) It lay there for several hours before I found it, and by that time the blood had soaked into the concrete.

I washed the spot with a bleach-based bathroom cleaner, and still the bloodstain remains. You can see how the cleaner killed the lichen and bleached the area immediately around the stain.

(The lichen is a welcome guest, by the way, and grows on the vertical sides of the steps and in broad patches on the patio itself. It will eventually eat through the concrete, but I enjoy watching it change through the seasons. The lichen gets a little furrier during the winter, flakier in the summer.)

Why on earth did I file this under Writing? Research, of course. You never know when you might need to know what a pool of blood — and that bird had an amazing amount of blood for a critter so small — does to concrete.

Last Thanksgiving our daughter temporarily shipped out her new companion while we visited, afraid we’d scold her for taking on a lifetime responsibility when she was still living like a, well, college student. As if we’d have been able to scold her when there was a two-month-old kitten to play with. Sheesh.

Here she is: Stella, a Manx. I only saw a little bit of her, but she seems very sweet-tempered. She kept winding through the living room where people were sitting, but she wouldn’t let anyone touch her.

Hobbes used to be our scaredy-cat. She puts on a good show of being terrified still, but if she were really scared she’d do her rabbit gallop away from us, not practically over our feet.

When we first got her as a kitten in 1991, she was far more timid than she is now. My daughter admitted a few years ago — after she’d left for college — that maybe the kids’ playing doctor on Hobbes made her so fearful. Geez, who woulda thought?

This picture of Sydney is about three years old. She’s a little less rambunctious now that she’s passed the mature age of 10, and she disappears somewhere in the backyard to sleep most of the day. As soon as I go outside she turns up, though, meowling pathetically the whole length of the yard — 150 feet — until she reaches me and is properly rewarded.

To celebrate, I’m inaugurating this blog.

What could be more appropriate than a picture of a recent very long day? We awoke at 5 a.m. to drive to UC Santa Cruz for our daughter’s graduation ceremony, and arrived back home sometime after midnight.

See Ivory waiting for her name to be called? Of course you do. She’s the one with the yellow tassel. Okay, look for a person with a white blob near her robe’s neckline (which is really a giant daisy she appropriated from one of the campus flowerbeds), just above the straw hat in the audience.

Added: I have just created a business blog to celebrate the new year.