Week 4 With the Foster Kittens: Seven Weeks Old and Part of the Family

Taboo

 Seven-week-old foster kittens are so fun!

They're mostly responsible enough now that they can have free range of the house while we're up and awake. Old habits die HARD, though, so there are a few pee spots here and there that I just can't seem to make less tempting--any and all advice is welcome, please!

Anchovy

Taboo

My favorite kitten is still the one that's sleeping on my lap and purring, but dangling a bootlace is now my second-favorite kitten-related activity. The other day I spent a full twenty minutes pulling the bootlace around for them (and I timed it because I was waiting for two teenagers to freaking GET READY TO LEAVE THE HOUSE ALREADY I SWEAR TO GOD YOU DIDN'T TAKE THIS LONG TO GET READY TO GO WHEN YOU WERE TWO AND FOUR!!!!!) and they were still racing back and forth for it when I stopped... although they did all collapse immediately into slumber once the game was over. 

Spots does not want anything to do with us these days unless we are literally outside, but Jones is even more on top of us--

--and even chases and wrestles with the more adventurous kittens. To be honest, it IS a little difficult to ascertain if he's playing or low-key trying to murder them (or both!), but it's terrific kitten socialization, at least!

Socks

from left to right: Socks, Athena, Anchovy, Taboo, and Pickle

The babies found themselves in the mirror last week and I didn't catch it on video, dang it, but this week they found their first sunbeams!

Athena and Socks

Taboo

I love watching each of their personalities develop. It's not safe to send them to their forever families until they're speutered, but it's kind of a bummer that they are being so adorable and sweet and charming and personable, and at seven weeks they're so hearty and easy to take care of (at least in multiples fewer than five!), but their families don't get to enjoy them. 

Socks

Pickle

Taboo

Athena

I really hope they all get adopted within minutes when they finally head back to the shelter in a couple of weeks, both for that and because my heart will physically hurt knowing that they're in a containment area instead of a comfy, loving home...

Athena

... especially Athena, who is my own personal little darling, and it is going to sting when I give her back. I just keep telling myself that everybody wants a kitten, and if I really want to adopt I should take a senior cat, but also I don't want to adopt, because when the kids are both in college I want to travel more. 

But then Athena climbs up into my lap and falls asleep, purring happily to herself, and I forget again. I should make signs and post them around the house at my eyeline!

Here's our foster kitten glow-up so far:

• Four Weeks Old
• Five Weeks Old
• Six Weeks Old

Girl Scouts Love State Parks, and a Very Strange Cemetery Visit

In Indiana, it wasn't great timing for the annual Girl Scouts Love State Parks weekend. The forecast called for just enough rain all weekend that one could neither plan confidently nor cancel confidently. Normally, my Girl Scout troop is fairly tolerant of miserable weather (we've happily completed entire badge meetings and cookie booths and camping trips more-or-less in the rain!), but all of the activities that they most wanted to do--full moon hike! Trail ride! Campfire dinner! Earning the Ambassador Photography badge!--called for fair weather.

Also, high school students are so busy! I fear that I'm past the days when I can gather my entire Girl Scout troop together at the same time in the same place. Someone's always got their part-time job or volleyball practice or play rehearsal or a college visit or, ahem, ballet class six times a week.

So it was with a much reduced number of Girl Scouts that I went to a local history program put on by one of our nearby state parks one Sunday morning. Not the whole day of fun some kids had hoped for, but we'd learn some local history, at least, spend some time together outdoors, and, most importantly, earn those fun patches! Honestly, I was going to be thrilled if the rain held off long enough for us to at least take a walk around the historic cemetery and take some photographs.

Happily, the rain held off long enough for us to attend the entire program and have a (quick) picnic afterwards AND take a (few quick) photos for the badge.

Allens Creek Cemetery has an unusual reason for being. The land we live on once belonged to the Miami nation. In 1809, William Henry Harrison unethically "purchased" most of Indiana from the indigenous nations who lived on it, then the Shawnee leader Tecumseh led a protest, then Harrison led an attack on Tecumseh's people that he later used as a campaign slogan, then he talked so long at his presidential inauguration that he became ill, then he died. 

Meanwhile, post-Battle of Tippecanoe but pre-Inaugural speech, let's say around 1815 or so, settlers, mostly Scottish and Irish, came into the area to take over the Miami's former land and farm it.  Some of their descendents were still on that same land, still farming it when they weren't working at one of the local limestone quarries, when the state government used Eminent Domain to buy their properties away from them so Monroe Lake could be built. 

Here's a quote from Herbert Lucas, one of the landowners whose property was taken through Eminent Domain:

"You know, you grown up and read about how they took the land away from the Indians and you don’t sympathize until it happens to you. Then you think about it.” (Salt Creek Valley)

Interestingly, he was also specifically upset that the government planned to take and move the cemetery where all his family, including the great-grandfather who was the original homesteader of his property, was buried. 

Our event was to tour where they put Herbert Lucas' great-grandfather, as well as all the other residents of all the other cemeteries that were moved during this process. 

I'd worried that the tour would be boring for the kids--it was a very deep dive into very local history, and although you know how *I* feel about very local history, the kids couldn't possibly be expected to feel the same.

It was, however, very interesting, and VERY strange!

A volunteer was there to demonstrate the proper way to clean an old headstone. Although you can clean more thoroughly with D/2, or even engage in restoration work, it turns out that you can get most old headstones quite clean with just a low-pressure water sprayer, a soft brush, and a non-metal scraper:

A future community service project, perhaps?

And then we took our tour!

As the naturalist explained, this cemetery held the burials from several prior cemeteries, all moved from the Salt Creek Valley during the preparation to create Monroe Lake. 

[here is where the kittens decided to help me!]

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Here's where the kids and I had our first whispered, furious conversation: That's all they did?!? But surely they missed some people!

We brought this up to the naturalist, and she agreed that yes, they surely missed some people.

Some of the cemeteries that they decided to move would be well underwater when Monroe Lake was completed:

Others actually wouldn't have been, but might still have been subject to seasonal flooding:

When the workers came to move the cemetery, they used the surveyors' work to locate the graves, and when they placed them in Allens Creek Cemetery, they preserved the original placement of graves in location to each other, but put them closer together.

If a headstone had any carving on it, it was moved, as well--

  

--but if it was a fieldstone or had no discernible carving, it was left and a standardized headstone was put in its place at Allens Creek Cemetery:

At this point, the kids had another furious whispered discussion, then I was marshalled to ask what it looked like when the Black migrant tobacco farmers who had been hired for this project exhumed graves: did they find caskets, or did they gather skeletons, or?

And so here's where the naturalist blew all our minds: in most cases, they found nothing.

The naturalist said (and Will and I Googled it on the way home because we didn't believe her, but she was correct!) that remains, even bones, decompose within 20 years. So what the workers actually did was excavate down until the soil composition changed, then collect the 12 inches of dirt above that line, put it into a box, and bury that box in its new location in Allens Creek Cemetery.

The kids and I were all, "WHAT?!? JUST... WAIT, WHAT?!?"

Government administration, Folks!

This pointless transferral of dirt was also mandatory. If there were any living relatives of the deceased, they could choose to have the remains re-buried in a different cemetery, at their own expense, but the relatives could not choose to simply leave the dirt that used to be their loved one in its spot to be covered by the lake.

In case we thought that this might have been completely fine with the Salt Creek Valley citizens of 1965, the naturalist told us the story of the "missing" cemetery. It had been surveyed, with a census and photographs of the grave locations, but when the workers went back to that spot... there was nothing there. Were they bribed? Did the family members remove and hide all the headstones? Was there an administrative mix-up with the original survey? Nobody knows, or if they do, they're not telling!

After the event, the troop had a picnic in the back of my car, then we tried to work on the Ambassador Photography badge for a few minutes before the rain really got going. One of the kids brought this awesome prism that she let me try out--

--but when I looked up from playing with it I discovered that all my Girl Scouts were actually in the street and I had to go supervise, because those edgy standing-in-the-middle-of-the-country-road photos only look cool if you don't get hit by a car right after you take them!

Frankly, I hadn't expected a lot from this event. All I'd needed was for the kids to not be too bored while we did an activity that was just long enough for them to earn their Girl Scouts Love State Parks fun patch. So I was STOKED at how legitimately fascinating the tour was, and how fascinated the kids clearly were! It was an especially great event for teenagers, because it got them thinking and talking about big questions that don't always have a right answer. Here is just some of what we discussed:

• Why should a government get to take land away from someone who already owns it?
• What's the point of moving a cemetery if you know you're going to miss some of the bodies?
• What's the point of moving a cemetery if there are no actual bodies to move?
• Why couldn't people choose to let their loved ones stay in their original cemetery locations under the lake?
• Would it have been useful to do an archaeological excavation of the cemeteries as they were being emptied?
• Where did the contracted Black workers stay, and how were they treated? And were they hired because they would work more cheaply, or because it was work that made white people squeamish, or because it was work that white people thought they were too good to do, or because it was work that local people refused to do because they didn't want their cemeteries moved?

And of course, most importantly:

• WHAT IS THE REAL STORY OF THAT MISSING CEMETERY?!?!?!?

The Harper Tunic, a Second Try--And This Time It Fits!

 

The bad news first: fewer kittens fit in your pockets when your Harper Tunic actually fits!

Although to be fair, the kittens, themselves, are bigger now, too. Look at these nearly seven-week-old chonkers!

The lightest of them (our picky Pickle!), is about one pound, 10 ounces currently, so we'll probably have these foster babies for another couple of weeks. 

With my first try at the Harper Tunic, I took the advice that if I was between sizes, I should size up, but the finished tunic was just too roomy.

This time, I cut the pattern down to an OSP, and I love it!

I also love sewing this tunic. It's got some nice details, but is overall quite quick and easy to sew. My fabric of choice was a $5 thrifted sheet, the perfect price so that if, as with my first tunic, I didn't love it, I hadn't thrown too much money at it. I've got enough leftover from the sheet to sew some other projects, although not enough for another garment.

Don't you love a nice spiral of tidy double-fold bias tape?

Also as with my first tunic, I sewed a second pocket onto the front. When I tried the first tunic on, I just wasn't feeling the asymmetry, so I added the second pocket to this tunic as a matter of course:

Good thing, because the pockets are my absolute favorite part of this garment! I can hold so many kittens, sure, but also gardening shears, oregano sprigs, and sunflower cuttings:

It's also VERY comfy, but alas, it's still not anymore flattering than it was with my first try. I, personally, don't care, but as we were getting ready to go out the other day, both Matt and Will each asked me separately if this was what I was planning to wear:

It most certainly was! Here I am in a McDonald's parking lot, waiting for my French fries and Diet Coke:

After that, I wore my new tunic to the Museum of Miniature Houses (yay for Smithsonian's Museum Day!), then to IKEA for dorm stuff for Will, then to Trader Joe's for almost every single seasonal autumn product they had in stock, and then back home to lie around drinking pumpkin cider and eating Halloween Joe Joe's while my brand-new vanilla pumpkin candle burned and kittens used my body as a battleground:

That's probably all the Harper Tunics that I need for myself, although I do have the short-sleeved version printed out, and I could see myself sewing it up next summer when it's hot but I miss my giant pockets. Will's also somewhere in the middle of piecing together a Harper Tunic pattern of her own (oh, the hell of all those 8.5"x11" pieces of paper that must be trimmed, lined up, and taped together!!!), so that will be a fun beginner sewing project for me to help her with.

And then we can go out and about with our matching unflattering but comfy tunics!!!

Week 3 with the Foster Kittens: Six Weeks Old, and Sort of Starting to Make Sense!

Athena

 Six-week-old foster kittens are MUCH better house guests than four- or five-week-old foster kittens! They've ceased their habit of simply dropping trou whenever they have the urge to pee, and now mainly hurry off to their designated litterboxes. Alas, old habits die hard, so there are still a few sneaky little corners that they're reluctant to be dissuaded from. If I can't completely block off a tempting pee spot, I'll liberally sprinkle it with a stinky but cat-safe essential oil, or put a food bowl or litterbox directly on top of it. 

Athena

My favorite kitten is still a sleeping kitten--

Taboo

Athena

Anchovy

--but it's also fun to see the kittens awake longer and playing more. We still need to introduce them to more people, but we've socialized them to vacuums and flushing toilets and other in-house chaos, although Will is still doing her best to turn Pickle into an ipad baby:

Pickle

And Syd FINALLY managed to wean them off of baked and pureed chicken and back onto wet kitten food and dry cat food. Athena is also down to eat her chicken straight from the source:

Athena

When we had them for two weeks, we passed the incubation period of all viruses they could be potentially carrying, which means that we got to introduce them to the other pets! Spots hates all other animals and just avoids them, Luna is mostly okay but I don't think she'll ever be predictable with other animals so I don't really let her around them, and Jones...

They are obsessed with Jones. He is their reluctant god. I thought he'd be a little more into them than he is, considering how much he pesters my uninterested Spots, but mostly he'll just wrestle with a kitten for a bit, then try to steal their food and get told off by a human, then ask to leave the room.

Taboo

It's good socialization for the foster kittens, at least!

We've probably got 1-2 weeks left with this litter of kittens. They need to be approximately eight weeks old but definitely two pounds before they can be speutered, and these guys are currently ranging between 1 pound 6 ounces and 1 pound 8 ounces. 

Athena

They're adorable and we all love them, but five kittens is a LOT, and I don't think we're going to be weeping into our handkerchiefs too hard when we send them off to their forever homes!

Anchovy

If nothing else, I don't tend to buy paper towels or commercial spray cleaner, but I think I have bought more of both those items than I have since the first time I saw them in stock after the pandemic started!

Pickle and Athena

Now, off to go help Syd move kittens to my larger bathroom that she and Matt deep-cleaned last night, then scoop litter, dish out new cat food and clean water, put down a new fluffy pillow, and wash dirty cat dishes, put soiled fluffy bedding in the washing machine, and deep-clean the kids' bathroom. 

And THEN we can snuggle kittens while we study Paleolithic cave art!

Labor Day Weekend in Chattanooga: We Went to Ruby Falls

 

There were SO many caves that I'd wanted to see in Kentucky and Tennessee, but the timing didn't work out for most of them. In particular, my much-longed-for Crystal Cave tour doesn't actually exist, alas, although I have hiked to the Floyd Collins Homestead, at least. Dunbar Cave, where I REALLY wanted to see Mississippian indigenous peoples' cave art, moved their tours to just weekends the very week we visited, argh. 

But Ruby Falls, inside Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, was perfect for a late-evening tour after a long day playing pinball. I mean, why NOT go see a cave at night? It's going to be dark in there anyway!

The tour guide's explanation of how Ruby Falls was discovered was a little hard to follow (later, Matt and I were all, "The guy was excavating for a railroad, right?"), but this little podcast episode is short and precise:

And now I really want to see the original Lookout Mountain Cave! It's bonkers that it's completely inaccessible.

This cave tour wasn't the most educational I've ever been on, but it WAS super accessible, and our tour group had a wide range of ages represented. The tour guide was more fun and bantering than I, personally, prefer (I prefer a tour guide who recites a lot of facts and then lets me ask them a lot of questions and answers me with a lot more facts), but everyone else seemed to enjoy it, so I'm pretty sure the same type of self-reflection is required as when you find yourself continually surrounded by assholes.

(It's you. You're the asshole.)

We had a pretty large group walking down these long and narrow cave passages, and so to my horror, the tour guide introduced a call-and-response for the last people in the group, who THANK GAWD were not me and Matt, but a young couple just behind us. Every now and then, he would call out, "Tick, tick!" and the couple had to then respond, "BOOM!!!" To their credit, they all seemed really into it. It just made me not want to exist in this particular universe, is all.

HOWEVER, the cave passages WERE all rather long and winding, and various parts of the group would often pause to take photos or admire something, which would get parts of the group backed up, and then someone else would also want a photo so then those parts would get backed up further, etc. It was all well and good when it was a single passage, but at one point I came upon two identical cave passages in front of me, one straight ahead, one curved to the left. 

Which way had the rest of the group gone? Hmm, no way to tell. 

Should I choose one at random? Probably not, but think what an adventure!

Just then, heard very faintly from far ahead, came a distant "Tick, tick!" We still couldn't tell which passage it had come from, so the couple withheld their boom until the tour guide came back and fetched us.

The next time there was dilly-dallying, another visitor in our group was stationed at a confusing junction to wave us the correct way...

I really liked the informational signage that accompanied some of the cave formations, so we'd know what we were looking at--

--or just to tell us the names of the most famous formations:

The mood lighting was maybe a little cheezy, but I liked it, too:

It was a fun change of pace from the typical yellow lighting inside a tour cave.

Our tour was essentially an out-and-back trek to the titular waterfall:

Again, there was a little bit of a cheeze factor with a prerecorded light and sound show, but I thought we had plenty of time to gaze in admiration at the waterfall and discuss amongst ourselves its formation and the watershed that flows into it.

By the time our cave tour ended, everything else on-site was closed, but we could still walk up the stairs to see the original castle-like tower that Leo Lambert had built from the rocks he excavated while improving the cave entrance:

It must be an incredible view on a clear day, but it was beautiful even on this overcast night.

There is still SO much that I wanted to do in Chattanooga that we didn't have time for! I want to revisit the national park sites, ride the incline railway, stay in the Chattanooga Choo-Choo hotel, kayak to that island in the Tennessee River, and visit the bakery that I'd promised to bring Syd treats home from but it turned out to be closed on Labor Day, oops.

Next time!