SOTK 2019

State of the Kitties Report: Summer 2019
by Tanner

(chief house cat)

Some things have changed since the last time I posted. Camilla, the 20-year-old cat matriarch, died recently and was buried near Dylan and Olivia. The kitties, Otis and Charlotte , are a year old and are all grown up and have their own interests. And I have a new job. 

The kitty Otis has always been scientifically inclined.  For a while, he studied string theory, as you can see in this video that Mommy posted on Facebook. 

You can also see it on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/becky.mushko/videos/10214820297961022/

But Otis has given that up and now studies geology. Here he is with part of his rock collection. He can throw the little white rocks, but he can't move the big rock no matter how hard he bats it.

The kitty Charlotte isn't as experimental as Otis so she likes to think inside the box. Sometimes she thinks  inside several boxes.

But getting back to my new job: For a couple of years I have done night rat patrol in the garage. Well, Alfreda helped, but I did most of the work and I was the boss. I got so good at it that rats stopped coming into the garage and stayed outside. That's when Mommy offered me and Alfreda jobs as perimeter patrol cats, and we accepted. We have to walk around the house several times a day and check under bushes. It is a big job because there are a lot of bushes. Here I am contemplating a spot of sunlight and looking at suspicious leaves. 

We have to work for Jim-Bob, who has been in charge of outdoor cat-work since George died a couple of years ago, and he can be a demanding boss. But he often takes breaks after he's gotten us to do cat-work.

He makes us attend cat-meetings. Here is a picture of one of the meetings. Jim-Bob is showing us where we will work that day, or we are more or less looking in the same direction. Even if we don't share his vision, we pretend we do.

Chloe, who is Jim-Bob's sister, also works for him, but she mainly does her own thing. Sometimes she stays out all night.

  

Anyhow, we mostly stay outside all day. When Alfreda and I come in for the night, we are exhausted.

I gave my rat patrol job to my kitty Arlo who has given up being an artist and decided to do meaningful work, so he stays in the garage at night now. I don't have a picture of him working because it is dark in the garage. Sometimes Alfreda or I will join him, but we are usually too tired after working all day (see above picture) and it's not like rats are over-running the garage.

I still have my part-time job, promoting my mommy's books. If she sells books, she buys cat treats, so it's a win-win situation. If you haven't read her books, you might go to Amazon and take a look. Click on the title and you'll go right to the Amazon page: Patches on the Same Quilt, Them That Go, and Miracle of the Concrete Jesus. These are also available as ebooks.

  

You can learn about my mommy's books on her website, too: beckymushko.com (Remember, books sold = treats for Tanner.) I promise I will share the treats with the other cats.

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To Read or Not To Read

Since I'm get elderly and don't have as much time left as I used to, I'm getting pickier in my reading selections—or at least in what kind of novels I don't want to read.

I don't want to read about misery. I did a blog-post about that back in 2008: http://peevishpen.blogspot.com/2008/07/misery-loves-company.html I don't want to read about abuse to children or animals. I don't want to read about graphic violence, so I don't want a blow by blow description of someone's murder/torture/decapitation/etc. I don't want to read horror (though I used to love Stephen King) because there's enough real horror in the world. I can tolerate a little misery in my fiction as long as it isn't too bad and something good comes out of it, but I don't need a misery overload. (Some novels I've recently read and liked that included some misery were Necessary Lies, The Eduction of Dixie Dupree, and In the Unlikely Event, but those novels had a lot of redeeming value, too.)

I'm not keen on science fiction (unless Ray Bradbury wrote it), and—though I used to watch Star Trek and Next Generation every week—I'm not interested in reading about space travel. I'm not much into thrillers (the exception being a Lee Child novel). I'll read an occasional romance, but I want it to be realistic and non-formulaic—and have  characters I can actually identify with and a small town setting, like this one.

I don't want to read a novel that isn't nicely wrapped up at the end. I don't want to have to read the next in a series to find out what happens to characters I've come to care about. A sequel is fine—same characters but different story line, or same setting but different characters—but I want that sequel to also have a logical ending. I hate cliffhangers.

I don't want to read a novel that's loaded with errors. While I'll forgive the occasional typo in a self-published book (Heck—I recently corrected a dozen of them in Them That Go a year after it was published!), I don't forgive continuing misuse of punctuation. Recently, I almost bought a book on Amazon whose description made me think I'd enjoy it. Then I "looked inside" and saw that the author had repeatedly used a hyphen with a space on either side when she meant a dash and—in several places—had put periods and commas outside quotation marks when she wasn't British. Plus she'd started the book with a description of the character driving somewhere. Nothing actually happened for the couple of pages I read before I decided I wouldn't waste my money or my time with that book.

I don't want to read a novel where characters speak every word in phonetically-spelled dialect. I'm picky about dialogue.  I want word choice, grammar, and sentence structure—and only occasionally a phonetically spelled word—to reflect the characters' dialect. Earlier this year, I encountered a self-published Appalachian novel where the characters spoke long sentences with an occasional grammatical error inserted. There were no regional expressions, and the dialogue didn't ring true.

I don't want to read a novel where situations don't ring true either. In the above self-published novel,  a couple of children (who were looking after a relative's ill-tempered workhorse) tried to get the horse out of a shed where it was eating cow feed. They dropped a pitchfork from the roof into the horse's tail, twisted the handle so it stayed in the horse's tail, and then tried to pull the horse out by the handle. The horse backed out, but ran off while the pitchfork kept pricking its hindquarters.

Books with mistakes where horses are concerned really bother me. Having owned horses from 1977 until until six months ago, I know a good bit about them. I found several problems with that scene: (1) A farmer is not likely to keep a bad-tempered horse that won't stand while he hitches it. Trying to plow with an uncooperative horse would be a disaster. (2) A pitchfork twisted into a horse's tail won't twist very far because of the tailbone. (3) An ill-tempered horse would have kicked the daylights out of the kids. (4) Even if a pitchfork could have been twisted into a horse's tail, the horse would have stepped on the handle when it backed out and dislodged the pitchfork itself. (5) The horse would likely have foundered from eating all that cow feed—didn't those farm kids consider that?

Another self-published novel I read a few years ago had some people, allegedly knowledgeable about horses, find a wandering Tennessee Walker with its legs wrapped in plastic wrap. They go on for a bit about how the horse was sored, how horrible soring is, how they need to call a vet, etc.—but they didn't take off the plastic wrap and hose off the horse's legs so it might get some relief. And, the reader eventually learns, neither did the guy who—in order to save the horse from mistreatment—took the horse from a barn where it had been sored and released it in a neighborhood where it would be found. Why didn't he take off the wrap?

Though I am now horseless, I still like to read novels that have horses as characters. But I don't care for books in which the author has no clue about equine nature. I liked most of Year of Wonders  by Geraldine Brooks, but when I got to the part where the young woman canters bareback through the town while carrying a baby and her belongings, and then this: "I was halfway down the road and going at a canter, when I realized that I could not let it end so. I turned then in the saddle and saw him standing there, his gray eyes fixed on me. I raise my hand to him. He lifted his in return. And then [the horse] reached the bend that leads to the Bakewell road, and I had to turn away and give all my attention to the downhill gallop."

So—she turns away from the direction the horse is going and raises one hand, leaving the other hand to secure the baby (which fortunately sleeps through all this) AND guide the fast-moving horse. Then she gallops the horse down a long steep slope while carrying a baby (which is tied to her via a sling) and her belongings (which might have been tied to the saddle, but surely the galloping would cause them to flop up and down). Scenes like this are accidents waiting to happen. You don't gallop down a very steep hill unless you want to experience the horse somersaulting. You let the horse carefully pick its way down.

Another novel I read years ago—by a big-name author, no less—had a woman put her horse in an otherwise empty barn that she'd come across and leave the horse for a couple of days while she hid out elsewhere—and the horse was fine when she returned.

A best-seller that I reviewed here thought that General Lee's horse Traveller was a mare, not a gelding. Arrggh! (You can tell from the picture below that Traveller was not a mare.)

(Note: Authors who don't know much about equines might take a look at these links to articles about writing about horses: http://www.tor.com/2017/02/20/the-sff-equine-troublesome-tropes-about-horses/, http://writinghorseback.com/2014/03/horseback-riding-mistakes/, and http://www.writing-world.com/sf/horses.shtml.) Or they should ask a horse person for advice.

So—what do I want to read? I like Appalachian and Southern lit. I like novels with a strong main character who accomplishes something. That character should also be likeable. I like characters who are three dimensional and believable. I like a definite setting—I don't care if it's made up, but it should seem like a real place. And I like a well-crafted and believable plot. If the book is historical fiction, I want accuracy.

And I want a happy ending.

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If you have any recommendations for books I might like, please leave love the titles in the comments.

Kitty Tale

by Arlo, second-in-command house-cat to Tanner

My mommy went to the Read Local event at the Salem Museum a week ago where she and a bunch of other people were selling their books. (You might remember that I have helped Mommy promote her books before, but she didn't take me with her to help. Which was fine with me because being outside scares me. But that's another story.) Here is what her table looked like:

Anyhow, she came home with a book just for me! It is a book about a rescue kitty.  See— it's called Cat's Tale of a Rescued Kitty! A cat named TC Eichelman wrote it.

 I was a rescue kitty myself. Mommy rescued me in 2015, and you can read about it in this blog-post: "Refugee Kitty." She also also rescued a bunch of other cats besides me—Olivia (Chloe and Jim-Bob's mama) in 2009 ("A Cat Tale"), Tanner ("Latest Addition") in 2013, and Alfreda ("November SOTK") last fall—and a lot of others, too. Since so many of us in the household are rescue kitties, stories about rescue cats interest me.

I liked it that the cat on the cover is a tuxedo cat just like me. I think tuxedo cats are the best! In his book, TC told about he was thrown out of a car window and how he was rescued. He went on to have a good life (just like I did!). I like books where kitties have happy endings.

Like me, TC doesn't like to go outside and he likes boxes. Like me, he also has some toys he likes to play with. However, he doesn't live with any other cats the way I do, so he didn't have another cat  raise him like Tanner did me. Like me, I don't think he remembers where he came from (Tanner once tried to tell me about where I came from in this blog-post: "Arlo's Origin." Tanner could probably have wrote that as a book, but he is kind of lazy and prefers to hi-jack Mommy's blog instead.)

Anyhow, I really enjoyed reading TC's story, but I hadn't quite finished when Tanner and Chloe decided they wanted to read it. So they took it with them, and I will have to sneak it back when they aren't looking.

If you have a kitty who wants something to read, you might get him this book. TC's mommy and daddy want to make people aware that rescuing cats is a good idea, and this book might help.

And, if you are interested, you can see pictures from the Read Local event at Mommy's friend's Blue Country Magic blog.

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Temple Secrets

I love southern literature with strong women characters, a bit of the paranormal, and a happy—or at least mostly happy— ending. Throw in wisdom, a little humor, eccentric characters, redemption, and a strong sense of place, and I’m hooked. 

Temple Secrets, by Susan Gabriel hooked me and reeled me in. I hated to see the book end. Temple Secrets has a lot of what I like to find in a book.

I like a book with a strong opening paragraph, and this one has it: “Iris Temple has been threatening to die for three decades, and most of the people in Savannah who know her want her to get on with it. Queenie looks up from the crime novel she’s hidden within the pages of Southern Living magazine and takes in the figure of her half-sister, Iris Templeton, across the sunroom. Everything about Iris speaks of privilege: the posture, the clothes, the understated jewels. Not to mention a level of entitlement that makes Queenie’s head ache. An exasperated moan slips from her mouth before she can catch it.” 

That paragraph tells us about the two main characters and the relationship between them. It tells us where they are. The details made me want to read more. Why did so many want Iris to die?

I like a book with a strong sense of place, and Temple Secrets surely has it. My husband and I visited Savannah when we lived in Charleston during 1968-70 and took day trips when I wasn’t teaching/getting my MAT from The Citadel and he wasn’t working on Polaris subs at the shipyard. I can see Gabriel’s setting exactly. I can feel it, too, because there’s nothing like the heat and humidity in those cities.

I particularly like elderly women characters who have a “gift.” (Remember Aint Lulie in my self-published novel, Them That Go?) Old Sally, age one hundred when the book begins, communes with ghosts, is precognitive, and knows Gullah. The granddaughter of a Temple slave, she knows a few secrets, too. Old Sally’s daughter, Queenie is also a strong woman, who’s kept one secret for sixty-some years. For generations, Old Sally’s ancestors were the white Temples’ slaves. After emancipation, a few of the slaves’ descendants were employed as domestics by the Temples, and the Temple men took advantage of the situation.

But the ill-tempered Iris Temple, who has a delicate constitution and suffers from horrendous flatulence is up in her eighties and won’t last forever. She’s promised the family mansion to Queenie, but her son Edward Temple III, who rarely visits, wants it all. Iris’s daughter Rose, who’s missing a pinkie fingertip because Edward cut it off with a family sword when she was five, is estranged from her mother and has been living out west for the last twenty years and likely won’t inherit much, if anything. Rose writes to Queenie, but she and her mother don’t communicate. Meanwhile, Old Sally’s granddaughter Violet helps support her school-teacher husband and her two teenage daughters by keeping house and cooking for Iris.

But who’ll get the book of Temple secrets that’s kept in a safe deposit box. Iris uses the information supposedly contained therein to threaten Savannah’s society and bend them to her will. And therein lies the complication—someone is leaking these secrets to the newspaper. Soon threats are posted to the Temples on the wrought iron fence, a brick is heaved through a window, anonymous phone calls disrupt the household, etc. But I won’t give away any more of the plot. Suffice to say that it has some interesting twists and a few secrets revealed.

I like books in which characters share their philosophies or their wisdom—especially when their thoughts impart a universal truth. Since I’m elderly, I could identify with this passage about Old Sally:  “That’s what it’s like to get this old, she thinks. You look up one day and your whole life has rushed past so fast you barely caught a glimpse of what’s what’s passing. Then before you know it, you’re at the end of your life and wondering how you got there.”

I liked this book so much that before I knew it, I was at the end. And I wondered how I’d gotten there so fast.

I highly recommend Temple Secrets!

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