29 April - Offerings Accepted



The gates of the Temple of Max are open, and the Pontifex Maximus, Max, is ready to accept offerings. Kibble or something with tuna in it, I fancy, would be acceptable.

Which reminds me of one of Max's predecessors in office,

28 April - Ex Voto Gato



Here's another fine cat-related ex voto - a devotional painting commemorating a miraculous intervention -

My cat had acquired the wrong I inhabit of pi in the furniture of the house, even in the bed it did once and my wife got so mad that she gave me an ultimatum, she told me that to next time that the cat was urinated inside the house I would have to choose between the cat or her, I loved both a lot and I prayed to the Virgen de Guadalupe for a miracle and the Virgen made the miracle of made understand to my cat to that he should never urinate inside the house and it began to pi outside all the time and I thank for the astonishing miracle.

21 April - Low-Keyed Catwalk



A brisk catwalk seemed just the thing with the day turning out to be warm and sunny after last week's

21 April - Art of the White Dog



After viewing

21 April - Nutmeg's Outing

21 April - Historic Cottage at the National Gallery


Glenn Perry and his painting of the Historic Cottage

20 April - Tappahominy Trash Talk


Indian Creek Road

Here's the latest from Friend of the Museum

This afternoon neighbor Curtis Crump and I did our quarterly cleanup along Indian Creek Road. Curtis is compelled to the task by his love of the land, his innate sense of orderliness and civic duty, and the fact that there's a sign down by the Gidsville turnoff that says he has adopted the last five miles of our road.

I am compelled partly by my memory of my first trip up Indian Creek when I was retirement househunting. In a decade of driving rural Virginia dead-end roads in search of a secluded mountain paradise I had always encountered ever-increasing roadside trash, with the head of any hollow usually being a horror of abandoned vehicles, ruinous house trailers and reeking dumps. The farther I went up Indian Creek Road that sunny Saturday, the less trash I saw. The last five miles -- Curtis's detritus domain -- I saw no trash atall, and I had a strong and accurate sense that I was going home.

But the real attraction of these outings is quality time with Curtis. He knows every inch of the way, and who owns it, and who used to own it, what they used to do here, and what became of them. This little track leads to a wineberry thicket of amazing density and extent (but you have to beware of the bears); that old logging road takes you up to Murder Meadow, where early in the last century a salesman's wife was used to sunbathe nude, until the afternoon when the salesman paid a man to go up there and turn her into hamburger with a shotgun; here is the biggest patch of Indian pinks Curtis has ever seen; there are wild pansies, rue anemone, spring beauty and dutchman's breeches. Curtis knows all this stuff, and delights in it all, and I delight in him.

Although Curtis has collected trash along this roadside at least a hundred times, and I've gone along on upwards of two dozen forays, we are always amazed to find things you wouldn't think we could possibly have overlooked before: mattress springs older than either of us, steel beer cans, Mason jars from the 19th century, a logging chain that could anchor the Queen Mary, a horse-drawn sickle bar. Mostly, of course, we find beer bottles and cans: Bud Light is the winner and perennial champion.

Close inspection of the roadside brings awareness of the other creatures that pass this way. Deer sign dominates, and the patterns are curious: Often the deer choose the highest and steepest banks as pathways to and from the fields, when a diversion of a few yards to left or right would present an easier climb, yet as any hunter will testify, woodland deer trails efficiently follow the gentlest contours.

A stretch of soft sandy ground is laced with coon, fox and coyote tracks, a predator hierarchy in which the fox clearly seems to be losing ground. A coon can't take on a healthy fox or coyote, but neither can either follow it up a tree; the coon need fear only me and my traps. A ten-pound fox is dog meat to a 30-pound coyote, which can run faster and farther and dig deeper.

At one end of this skein of tracks are a few tufts of rabbit fur, toward the other is a squirrel tail. Off to one side grins a groundhog skull. This bosky dell, this blossom-bedizened bower, is a killing ground. All of Gaia's glades are killing grounds, and we all were born to die. But hey, spring is springing.

At the end of the day we have filled the bed of Curtis's pickup, largely with things that have lain moldering since before we were born. It is a satisfying measure of our diligence that we have to look harder and longer each time to find these things, and often have to dig or winch them out. Our goal is that a traveler along the road will not see any trash atall, just as I did not when first I came along. Some of life's goals are reachable.

20 April - Continued Dumpling Experimentation



I had another bash at making cornmeal dumplings the other night. After

15 April - Songs of the Criminality-Based Community


Jesse James, the Outlaw No. 2, 1897 -

14 April - The Cat in the Kufi



Haw, haw! Cat Max did his very amusing imitation of our maintenance man

14 April - Springtime on the Capitol Redoubt



Of course, this beautifully composed photograph, taken a few days ago on the U.S. Capitol grounds, may just show a bunch of saplings ready for planting. But knowing well the mania of the authorities on Capitol Hill

13 April - Der Rechtestoff



Is it so surprising that even test pilots need a little tender affection from time to time? Above, Alois Stiploschek, test pilot for the Austro-Hungarian aircraft firm Oeffag (Oesterreichische Flugzeugfabrik AG) receives a nice little scritch under the chin from the pilot of the Oeffag 50.14 triplane fighter prototype, 1918. From the magisterial

7 April - Nature Compensates



April is being particularly cruel today, it being quite cold and blustery - it even snowed overnight. So the catwalk was brief, and the after-catwalk nap was correspondingly long - real wheel of nature stuff, and very beautiful in its way.

Above, Cat Natasha in her fierce pre-nap mode.

7 April - Zeppeliniana



I happened to catch the takeoff of the Zeppelin NT07 on an excursion flight from Friedrichshafen on the Deutsche Zeppelin-Reederei

6 April - Kurzschluß und Hohes



Friend of the Museum

1 April - Lab Wallowing

1 April - Scenes from a Catwalk



Yesterday starting sunny but turning cloudy but still pleasant, we equipped ourselves with Cats Leroy and Natasha for a brisk catwalk in the greening Janus Museum Forest Preserve. Above, Cat Natasha urges us on.



We made our way to

1 April - More Llamas in Lluray