Maine Coon Love

Meet George:

George was the Maine Coon cat I had when I was a child. He was 22 pounds of pure love--the chillest, coolest cat I ever knew.

I adored all cats, but I adored George to the nth degree.

When I was 12, my family had to move from Kansas to California. My parents made me leave George behind. They found another family to adopt him. Leaving George broke my heart.

To this day, there's a George-sized hole in there.

This is my cat now. Roosevelt is currently about 17 years old:

Rosie was less than a year old when he wandered into our yard. The Hubby and I weren't looking for a cat, but he was clearly in need of a home. The vet said--judging from Rosie's broken-off baby teeth and abraded front paws--he was probably tossed out the window of a moving car.

Egads.

With such a rough beginning, Rosie deserves all our love and devotion. But when he eventually passes into the Great Beyond, I'm getting a Maine Coon cat once again. It will be a rescue, because that's the only way I do it. I always vowed I'd wait for a Maine Coon until after Rosie left us.

And then this happened:

This is an eight-week-old, unnamed female Maine Coon that a friend of my daughter's bought off Craigslist. (Bad Move #1, people: Don't buy pets off Craigslist!)

He brought her home to his anti-cat girlfriend, hoping she'd change her mind. She didn't. She told him to get rid of the cat. (Bad Move #2, people: Don't get a pet without the approval of everybody in the house!)

If this kitten lived in Los Angeles, I'd toss aside my vow to let Roosevelt be the One and Only, and I'd take this foundling into our home. I want a Maine Coon so much!

But she's in Boston. She's a kitten (cute but so destructive!). Rosie is still with us. And Lovely Daughter #2 says she's pretty sure she can find the kitten a Forever Home where everybody wants her and will keep her forever.

So, no Maine Coon for me yet. But when the time comes, I'm getting another one.

And boy or girl, its name will be George.

Halloween Dog Parade

Lovely Daughter #1 (the ER doc) went to the Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade in Manhattan yesterday. It's one of the best, most creative collections of costumed dogs and dog owners in New York City. (Take a look at the link in this paragraph to see some more of the wonderful costumes there.)

My daughter's posse of five 5 people and three dogs all piled into one Uber ride to get there:

Naturally, she took some pictures of Pugs, like YodaPug:

And TriceratopsPug:

SkunkPug:

And UnicornPug:

FBI Pug:

Some of the costumes were pun-tastic. This cutie was entered in the costume contest as "a wolf in sheep's clothing":

This weiner dog confused me at first, but LD#1 explains that he's a Bloody Mary drink:

A rainbow unicorn!:

Naturally LD#1 was interested in this fellow physician:

She says this little dude's name was "Pepe," no joke!:

Three Chihuahuas, three superheroes. LD#1 says of Batman on the left, "Extra points for drawing on the mask!":

And this Pom was about the cutest Chewbacca, ever:

Her favorite "Star Wars" entry was this trio. Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and the dog as "Princess Leia" in the slave costume. Daughter was laughing too hard to get a great photo, but if you look closely, you can see the pooch is rocking a metallic bikini bra, a long braid, and a bikini bottom with harem-style pants:

 Next year, I just may have to fly to NYC to catch this fun even in person.

Or, in dog.

Hotel Silver Bread Tray

Out on a walk a few days ago, one of my Pugs snuffled around in a pile of fallen leaves and faded Bougainvillea blossoms. He was looking for the perfect place to pee. As I gazed idly at him, something silvery caught my eye.

I picked it up: it was a bread tray--the kind of heavy silverplate that hotels and restaurants in the 20th century used. What was it doing in a place where dogs pee? I have no idea:

I brought it home and gave it a clean-up:

Even with a quick, imperfect cleaning, it is handsome. The mark on the underside is "DW Haber & Son NY."

I did a Google check. It turns out Haber & Sons is a purveyor of servingware to the hotel industry, and they're still in business.

I think I'll keep this. It's plain but handsome. It could come in very handy, serving cornbread or corralling mini muffins.

When I'm not using my silver and silverplate, it hangs out in my dining room's built-in bookshelves:

Books and old silver:

Two of my favorite things.

Art and People-Watching: The Broad Museum

Recently I visited L.A's newest museum, "The Broad." It was just completed, and it houses modern and contemporary art collected by Edythe and Eli Broad over the last half-century.

The Broad is an amazing-looking building. Here's "The Oculus," which looks like a giant thumb pushed into a part of the mesh-like outer surface of the building:

But what's inside is even more fun. I loved the balloon-like pieces by Jeff Koons:

His "Balloon Dog" is a gigantic 12 feet high:

Jeff Koons again. This is "Party Hat," and it's also huge--like 9 feet by 10 feet:

Other pieces I loved include El Anatsui's "Red Block," made of thousands of metallic liquor labels, hitched together like a woven Kente cloth. It was so hard not to reach out and touch it:

This is Jasper Johns' "Untitled." Too bad the Broads nabbed it; I would be so happy to hang it in my family room. Hah!:

Here's a detail of the same piece:

I also enjoyed Bernd and Hilla Becher's photography. They used a large-format camera to capture dozens of water towers in their native Germany. They grouped the objects according to their overall shape. This was what I'd call the "ball on stilts" water towers, and it reminded me of the ones that dotted the prairie in Kansas when I was a little girl:

  
I had fun capturing people in the same frame as the art. Somehow these pieces become more alive when somebody is interacting with them, even if it's just sitting in front of them and twiddling on a cell phone:

This painting, above, is a small part of the largest piece in The Broad. It's by Takashi Murakami, a mural 82 feet long, called "Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow." It blew me away. So detailed, so colorful, so drop-dead crazy.

In front of his piece was his amazing sterling-silver Buddha statue, maybe three or four feet high. It was a mind-bending mashup of traditional Japanese iconography and cartoonish anime:

The Broad itself is quite a work of art. The escalator from the ground floor to the next floor reminded me of blood cells coursing through an artery. The walls are Venetian rubbed plaster, and they are wonderfully smooth and touch-able:

The interior "skin" of The Broad is largely made of glass walls. The outer, mesh-like "veil" that forms the outer skin of the museum leans out from the glass, on the left. The rainbow colors on the glass panels are reflections from a colorful, large piece of art off-camera to the right. I have no doubt that the curators knew what they were doing when they hung the piece where it did. The effect is fun and unexpected:

Sometimes the line between art and people is blurred at The Broad. These look like they might be the museum's visitors, right?:

But really, they are huge, hyper-realistic panels done by Thomas Struth--enormously blown-up photographs he took of tourists at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence:

Struth captured these folks as they stood in the rotunda dominated by Michelangelo's monumental "David," which is off camera. 

But you get that they are affected by something--something big and awe-inspiring:

They look the way I felt when I toured The Broad.