Thus Spoke Marble

Marble has been very talkative lately, rushing about meowping in her squeaky little voice, she never manages a full "meow" so it pretty much sounds like she's running up and down saying "eek! eek! EEEEK!". Perhaps she's channeling Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit.

Marble smudge face

Marble smudge face, originally uploaded by Rosemary Grace.

As an indoor cat, Marble does not get many opportunities to get her snow-white self all mucky. However, she is a hard working, innovative kitty, and often manages to smudge her nose by pressing it against the dusty window screens while bird watching. This morning she has impressive amounts of grime on her nose, which made me wonder if she'd been trying to head-butt her way out through the screens.

Turns out the culprit is Matt's dusty sandals from a walk we took yesterday. She's been running over to them and snuzzling the mucky things frantically all morning.

It was a great long weekend, culminating in getting our feet good and dusty. Saturday morning I briefly Skyped with my sister in Berlin, & the APs in Edinburgh. On-screen time being used to play show-and-tell with everyone's new eyeglasses, Eve held her laptop out the window so Matt could see the Berlin TV Tower live, and three cats in three countries got waved at their respective owner's webcams. Then Matt and I retreated to a friends house on the hill overlooking our neighborhood, where we lounged by the pool and watched people make beer while catching up with my friends from the lab. I took my swift and wound a couple of balls of yarn while chatting, then bravely bared my bathing suit and spent some time in the pool.

On Sunday we ran errands, did laundry, watched movies and hung out on the patio once the sun dipped behind the hills.

Monday, Labor Day, I woke up with a hangover (did I mention we had gin on the patio?), so I retreated to bed for a bit. Around noon we headed up to the mountains for a picnic lunch and to lounge under pine trees listening to the breeze. We took a walk to a spot claiming to be a small lake, it was really a damp patch of ground, but there were five cows munching away on the water plants, and we sat watching the pastoral scene for a while before continuing around the loop back to the car. We also saw a gorgeous blue jay, and heard a few woodpeckers thunk-thunk-thunking. Both of us had beige feet by the end, the classic "dust tan" effect of walking in the fine dry dust of Southern California. We had planned a pasta dinner when we got home, but discovered we were missing the necessary fixings, so we ended up at BJ's for dinner (fish and chips!), and then back home for pineapple upside down cake for dessert.

Marble evidently appreciates the dusty shoes resulting from this adventure, but I think I'll take them outside for a good shake so I can have my clean white kitty back.