Seattle usually gets a snowstorm that washes away in a couple of days, maybe once or twice in a winter. Occasionally, it’s a lot of snow + a cold system that keeps it on the ground for a week. This year it was multiple storms in quick succession with occasional, desultory warming leaving zones of slush and ice, making this hilly region a disaster area for a week and a half. Even our best insulated family member is completely over it.
… we don’t get autumn leaves in San Francisco
Mind you, there’s another tree in flower about 30 feet from this one.
Looking through the photo gallery on my phone last night, I came across this picture I took on Halloween.
It’s getting to be winter-festival time, whether that means celebrating a few more minutes of sun or a special birthday, or just the transition from one major calendar period to another. And for some reason, I’m thinking about summertime.
I’ve been more watching than doing lately. Little by little I’ll get back to some doing, though.
I have mixed feelings about hairless cats. The result of careful breeding of cats that were hairless as result of a spontaneous mutation, the breed itself strikes me as a demonstration of man’s willingness to sustain something that should not be. Fans of the breed tout its “natural mutation” origin as if that means hairlessness is not a defect, but there’s a reason we don’t see populations of these cats in the wild: cats without hair lack temperature control and basic skin protection.
There have been attempts to give these cats a backstory as a natural breed, but they were essentially unknown except as occasional “natural mutations.” Their story feels to me like the story of companion animals in general – they are prized for their dependence on humans. The Sphynx, as the breed is called, has a reputation for being exceptionally affectionate, a “Love Mooch,” according to the profile at Cat Fanciers Association. Their skin is not completely smooth, having a very light hair. A hairless cat’s skin is generally described as similar to suede or chamois, and warm to the touch (although they can chill quickly). They look and feel so vulnerable, they are bound to trigger more than the usual parental protection feeling in people who encounter them.
The photosharing site, Flickr, can almost certainly take at least some credit for increasing the popularity of the breed. Cats are phenomenonal subjects, and hairless cats are some of the most visually interesting cats out there, sharing the physicial proportions of breeds like Siamese. They are often described by their owners as a “great conversation piece.”
I can’t fault anyone who goes to the trouble of getting a pet from a breeder for wanting to share pictures, at least, of their pet with the world, but it can be hard to find a picture of a hairless cat that doesn’t look frankly malevolent. I made an effort this week to look for a different angle. I looked for the curious, the snoozy, the engaged, the loving. They will always look odd to me, but after finding these pictures, and others like them, they do look a little more like the cats I’ve known and loved.
The other day I overheard someone quoting “really like your peaches, wanna shake your tree,” and it’s been going through my head ever since. Really just because it’s funny. Then I saw this article in the New York Times about William Eggleston’s work, illustrated with the photo above, which now looks even more wonderful to me than usual.
Eggleston took pictures of “nothing” and “nobodies” in color when art photography was very serious and very monochrome. He also did this in the Mississippi delta. Now that the country is engaging in an extra helping of hand-wringing over regional divisions and, here in California, a new crisis of civil-rights, his intimate, loving photography of a deep South in transition is helpful and humanizing.
I’ve been taking a lot of bike rides at lunchtime this year. I nip out to Fort Point and back – about 10 miles round trip. Sometimes I bring a camera, because there are lots of birds on that route, but sometimes all I have is my phone – which almost did the job on this partly cloudy, drizzly day, when a rainbow stretched from Alcatraz to Fort Mason as I rode back to the office.