Cats and the icon meme

I am supposed to be doing laundry before packing to go to Chicago tomorrow (and thence, Lake Geneva -- yay!). But I took about twenty minutes off chores to play with my cats, something I do all too infrequently. Rilke had been being pissy -- wanting to be petted and then biting at the hand petting her. So I used three of my four or so cat toys, first playing with Maya and the rubbery fringy dingus, which Rilke ignores, and then with a simulated bird feather toy, on a long string attached to a wand, which Maya likes but is not very good at. And then, for the grand finale, I used the "cat dancer" which magically imitates a bug's motion, and is made out of rolled-up cardboard and a bouncy curved wire about the tensile strength and thickness of a wire coat hanger. Rilke LOVES that toy. Rilke reverts to kittenhood immediately with that toy, and forgets she is thirteen, almost fourteen years old. (I had to go look at her folder and edit this; May 1st, 1994 -- that's her estimated birthday). She looks great for her age, I have got to say, despite her asthma.

She is so hilarious with it. She's like a combination cat and miniature lioness, because she leaps to catch the little cardboard bug thing, absolutely accurately, and then plants it firmly in her jaw and tugs at it, furiously, until I let it go. And then she tromps off with her prize, dragging the wire and all behind her, to go guard her kill. Eventually I sneak it away from her and we start all over again.

Now she is all purr-y and cuddly, and sitting under my chin while I type.

Here's the meme I am propagating, carrying on from florence_craye:

Leave a comment, and I'll pick 7 of your icons. You then explain what they mean, in comments here or in your own LJ.




This is a detail from some 19th century colonialist/Orientalist watercolor painting of Cairo with a bellydancer. I wanted a belly dancer/haremesque icon for those, um, moments when I would like to be bellydancing? Or just celebrating the body female, curvy. Which is fairly frequently. I forgot already who the (English, I think) artist is.



I wanted an icon with neon, for an image that looked like a dive bar. This isn't really quite right. I should just go down the block and take a picture of George Kaye's neon sign; that's a dive bar, and also one of the last ones that still allows smoking (legally, because it's owner-operated) in the Bay Area. Thus, it's my father's second favorite bar out here. His first favorite is still Brennan's.



Ooh, I love this series. It's from some WWII propaganda on how to save fat for the troops, or for making some needed war matériel, but I just love 30s and 40s imagery anyway, and I like the icon for... cooking, for domestic endeavors of other kinds, and sometimes for things to do with body image. I wish I could get my hair to do those 1940s hairstyles.



That's James P. Cannon, who was in the IWW as a young Kansan, and then joined the early, early Communist Party, and then split to help found what became the Socialist Workers Party (back in the beginning, when they weren't nuts with a cult(-ish gathering) around Jack Barnes), back when they were the American franchise of Trotskyism, anointed by Trotsky himself, down in Coyoacan, Mexico. James P. Cannon... he was Irish; he was a drunk; he was pragmatic as fuck; he was jailed under the Smith Act; he was a great organizer and a hard-assed political operator. I don't admire his internal maneuvering (The Struggle for a Proletarian Party; which could be subtitled: "The Struggle Against Artsy-Fartsy Bourgeois Intellectuals and the Wearers of Green Corduroys, which I think may have been code for homosexuals), but then, I don't admire his opposition's politics, so it's a little difficult. I like the historical personages icon theme, obviously.



Good samosas (well, I don't know, obviously; I just googled Indian food). Mmm. It's too bad they're like, 95% carbohydrates. Icon used for Indian cookery. I guess.



Probably my most dear inanimate possession. Seriously, I've had this red teapot from fucking Tesco's for twenty years, I think, and it somehow symbolizes Britain, and living there, and acquiring my tea addiction, and the calming act of drinking tea. When I broke it last year -- maybe almost two years ago, by now -- I was devastated. I tried buying other teapots, but none of them worked for me, at all. I gave them away. (I do have a metal teapot; the lovely cheap aluminum or tin kind that you can sometimes find at thrift shops; I bought it my first week in Oakland, from some charity shop for the blind... but it's my traveling teapot). Semi-miraculously, I was able to glue the pieces of my teapot back together well enough that breaking it has receded to a distant memory without pain.



Xmas lights. I firmly believe that no living room decor is complete without Xmas lights in the window. I get very depressed when mine finally burn out. Until the advent of the internet, it was very hard to find any to buy in the off-season, so I had to suffer until November. These ones are from my small tree, last year.

I so wish I could get a photo of me typing with Rilke circled by my arms, her tail over the touchpad, purring up a storm. It's cold and grey (you know, as cold and grey as it gets in the Bay Area) out, and she is warm and comforting. She likes to see the motion of my fingers. I think. But she's not offering to bite them. Aww, she's trying to go to sleep, and pillow her head more comfortably on my arm.

Oh, laundry. Sigh.