A Day of Fallen Night – Yarn, Books & Roses

Hannah and the CoalBear: Baby Bunny, Robins, and Chickens!! Oh, My!!

Hi. I’m Mateo the CoalBear.

Do you see that I’m being a good helper?

This has been kind of a busy week in Mother of Cats Land. We’ve been outside most mornings checking on how things are going in the yard. The plants in the pots on the catio all look good. The bugs have been hopping around and they are SO MUCH FUN to chase. There were a couple of huge developments in the yard that I want to report to you:

The adult bunnies that used to live in our backyard are now gone. We were little worried about them, and wondered if there would be any baby bunnies this year when a single tiny bunny suddenly appeared in the garden by the deck. So cute. Hannah and I spend as much time as we can watching this little guy, and we are happy to report that he is growing like a weed and cavorting around the yard like a big boy. He isn’t even a little afraid of me and I get to get right up within inches of him,,, if it wasn’t for the chicken wire we would be having a great time.

Hannah: knock it off, CoalBear. We all know that you want to eat the bunny…

Shut up, Hannah. I’m telling the story today! The other thing that happened this week is all the leaves popped out on the trees. The Mother of Cats says it is called budburst, and it means that it really is spring now. I think that the robins know this too, because they have been singing like crazy all day and night. Literally, all night. They go crazy at 3am for some reason. I try to get the Mother of Cats up to let me out, but for some reason she won’t get out of bed. Lazy, lazy, Mother of Cats! Be like a robin! Get up and let me outside to see my baby bunny!!! This is what the robins sound like!

Hannah: CoalBear! Get on with talking about all the knitting and the chickens!!!

All right, Hannah. Why are you being so mean to me? You should go convince the Mother of Cats to give you some tuna and then maybe you can take a nice little nap. Outside where you won’t bother me!!

Now that I’ve put Hannah in her place, let me get back to telling you about the week. The Mother of Cats totally snapped, put her La Prairie sweater into time out on Sleeve Island, parked her dragon book back on the bookshelf, started a different book, and cast on a new Emotional Support Chicken. She has been completely out of control!!!! While she has been knitting the new chicken, she has dreaming about more chickens made in different colors; she keeps dragging yarn out of the stash and winding it up into little kits for MORE CHICKENS!!!! This is so out of control. What should I do? I’m just a little cat and it looks like we are having a huge outbreak of Chickenitis. Help! Who should I report this to? Hannah is no help at all. The only phone number she knows is 1-800-SND-TUNA.

Mateo: I have to admit that I have been helping with the knitting. Maybe that will help her get through this crisis… actually, I just like to chase yarn.

This is the chicken that she is working on now, but there is a dusty rose chicken on the way right after this one… and a sparkly blue chicken, and a rainbow striped chicken, and a chicken in fall colors…

It’s another handspun, handknit chicken to go on the couch downstairs.

The new chicken is kind of cute, right? Anyway, that was the week.

This is Mateo the CoalBear, signing off.

>^..^<

Notes from the Mother of Cats:

So, I spun out of control with the reading and knitting this week in response to sudden challenges. I had borrowed an e-book from the library that had to be returned in a couple of days. Oops. Emergency reading time! I have a couple of friends who are struggling with medical nightmares at the moment: obviously, they need chickens!! My cousin contacted me asking to buy a chicken to give a friend whose husband was just diagnosed with a serious illness. My phone blew up Thursday with the news that a member of my family was back in the hospital. The sweater was immediately parked (I was struggling with all the purling on the sleeves anyway…) and I launched the beginning of a flock of new chickens.

What was the book I was on fire to read before it was snatched off my Kindle device by the library?

This is a book that I kind of feel should be required reading for everyone, but on the other hand, it is so brutal and reality-altering I feel that it will be banned in as many school districts as the distraught (and completely misguided) ~~Karens on Steroids~~ Moms for Liberty can get to. If Charlotte’s Web, Harry Potter, and The Hunger Games are too much for these people, this book will make their heads explode. I hope that they read it anyway.

So, this is the book: Chain-Gang All-Stars really made an impact on me. Imagine a system where convicted felons facing life in prison, or who received the death penalty can “volunteer” to join a system that is a reality show where the felons are on teams that compete against other teams and engage in gladiator to-the-death matches in arenas full of viewers. The teams, and individual players, are wildly popular; lots of merch is sold. Any player who survives three years will be freed, but it goes without saying that almost everyone will die. It probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that the members of these teams are more likely to be minority citizens or people who lived in poverty: that is the current prison population.

Everything about this book is crushing in its believability. I am crushed by the possibility. I can see that this could happen in a world where incarcerated people are seen as less than full citizens and without rights. Think of the wildly popular Survivor reality shows. Think of American football, where evidence of concussive brain injury in players was covered up for years. Think of the laws that strip felons of some of their citizenship rights like voting. Think of the wildly misbehaving attendees at some of our political rallies. Think of the horrendous deaths of minority population members (sometimes in public with citizens begging the police to stop) at the hands of law enforcement. Think of for-profit prisons that work their inmates as almost-slaves. Think.

I highly recommend this book.

I’ve returned to A Day of Fallen Night again and I’m quickly finishing it. It has dragons, after all.

Hannah and the CoalBear: Snowy April Caturday

Hi. I’m Hannah.

I’ve been keeping my eye on the Mother of Cats all week long.

It is really cold and snowy outside. I mean, the really wet sticky snow that gets on your paws and squishes up between your toe beans and is just the kind that all cats everywhere hate. Mateo went out a couple of times today and that boy was back inside within 60 seconds flat. Anyway, the lavender and other cute flowers are all safely in the garage, Mateo is safely indoors, and the Mother of Cats and I have been really productive.

Right now, the weaving is a long, long scarf that has some fringe on it. The Mother of Cats washed it last night and it is done for now. Mateo likes to sleep on it, and since the fabric is a little scratchy the Mother of Cats is totally okay with that. She has been talking about cutting it up and sewing little stuffed cats from it, or maybe a sewn bunny, and frankly I don’t care as long as there is catnip involved. A pillow would be kind of nice…

She also has made a lot of progress on her La Prairie sweater. Now she is working on one of the sleeves and is pretty happy with how it is looking.

Looking good, right? This what happens when you get quality cat assistance!

The body of the sweater is a little longer than it should be, but she is happy about that. The sleeves are kind of a problem because she doesn’t want them to be soooo long, so after doing some funky math and checking out what other knitters did, she has shortened up the blocks of solid knitting and now we’ll see how it all works out. She does seem to still be a little stressed about the whole thing. She keeps muttering… I hope I have enough yarn… I hope this won’t be too long… thank heavens there aren’t so many bobbles on the sleeves… I don’t care. I’m a cat. As long as the tuna keeps coming, I’m happy to support any knitting that is going on.

So, that’s it. It has been a pretty good week. The weaving is done, the sweater is moving along, and the Mother of Cats is also halfway through her book about dragons. Someday soon the snow will stop falling, the Mother of Cats will put our lavender back outside, and we will visit the bunnies again in the mornings.

This is my favorite pose after watching Dune: Part Two with the Mother of Cats this week.

This is Hannah, signing off.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

Notes from the Mother of Cats: the book Hannah mentioned is A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon.

I’m chomping at the bit to get all these lengthy projects finished up so I can knit more Emotional Support Chickens!! Also, I have books lined up from the library that I need to get read before next weekend…

Hannah and the CoalBear: Purple Glam Caturday

Hi. We’re Hannah and Mateo (AKA the CoalBear).

We’ve been hanging out with the Mother of Cats today.

The Mother of Cats has been friskier lately. She’s been working with her indoor garden, and went shopping to buy a whole bunch of new flowers to put outside. She did a lot of cooking. She expanded the indoor garden and repotted a bunch of plants.

The indoor garden now has three shelves. The bottom shelf has the miniature rose, some lavender plants, and the seedlings. The middle shelf is mostly African violets and the baby fig trees. The top shelf is mostly orchids, but there are a couple of African violets up there too. We really like the new shelf and extra space, and Mateo especially is walking around among the plants keeping tabs on how they are doing. The Milkweed is growing great! The baby lavender seedlings are growing more leaves. The planted rose seeds: NOTHING!! The Mother of Cats also fixed up the catio some and has been reading outside with her morning coffee with us every morning. Things have been kind of great lately. She took some great photos of us.

Don’t we look great? The Mother of Cats says these are our glam shots.

The Mother of Cats then spoiled everything by going off and leaving us overnight while she visited her son. What is up with that?

While she was gone, she read this book about dragons and made two PICC line covers with yarns that have dragon colors: the green is called Green Dragon and the purple is called Purple Dragon. How come she went playing with dragons and left us alone? Did the dragons get OUR TUNA?

We absolutely were not surprised to see that she knitted with a purple yarn while she was away. Everything has been kind of purple lately.

Her new sweater (which is kind of purple) is getting longer. It is so big it covers her legs and Hannah while she’s knitting on it. Hannah really like the sweater and want one of her own.

The Mother of Cats say that the name of the sweater is La Prairie. What a crazy name, right, but the Mother of Cats likes it because we live right at the edge of the prairie and that is why there are so many wild things in our yard.

Her weaving is getting bigger and now the weft has changed to a purple color. The CoalBear likes to whap at the purple yarn while the Mother of Cats is moving the shuttle back and forth.

So, there seems to be a lot of purple lately. Enough with the purple and the Mother of Cats. It’s time to talk about us, right. After all, it is Caturday!!! Look at how big our bunny is getting in the back yard. You can barely see it in the first shot of us watching it (it hangs out at the bottom of the tree) so the Mother of Cats took a closeup of the bunny. Look! It looks just like the tree! What a clever bunny! Besides the bunnies, there are lots of birds and GRASSHOPPERS outside and it is kind of exciting on the catio now. The Mother of Cats even moved out some plants for us.

So, that’s about all. Guess it is time for us to go pester the Mother of Cats to get up and play with us. She’s been more active lately, but we still like to keep her busy taking care of us. Hannah is pretty sure that we need TUNA because we were left alone one night last week.

But first we are going to grab another nap… Did you notice that our blanket is purple?

This is Hannah and Mateo, signing off.

Happy Caturday, everyone!!

Murderbot and Octopuses

It has been months since I got sick with the Wannabe Covid and I’m still flirting with long-hauling. Ugh. My fibromyalgia symptoms seem to be better right now, but I’ve become anemic. Fabulous. No wonder I’m so exhausted! The BLZ (blue-lipped zebra) is running wild lately. I spend my nights listening to Murderbot audio books as I try to fall asleep, and lately I’ve been reading books in the daytime that feature… octopuses. Last week the two things, Murderbot and octopuses, began to overlap in my mind.

I guess I need to set the stage a little here. I’ve been interested in octopuses for some time now, and I’ve been reading science fiction books for most of my life. I’ve heard of octopuses who engaged in antics at the aquarium as they snuck out of their aquarium to catch (and eat) the fish in other tanks. There was a news story about a ~~jail~~ aquarium break by an octopus who returned to the ocean via a floor drain. I loved the octopuses in these books when I read them.

Children of Ruin was especially interesting to me because it raised an interesting question: what is intelligent life, and what would it look like. Can it evolve in species already on Earth, and would we recognize it when we saw it? One of the things that always makes me cranky when reading science fiction is… the aliens always share a lot of attributes with humans, and it is a given that intelligent life would evolve specific cultural and technological attributes that mirror our own. Why. Why would that be? Why do we assume that the only yardstick for self-awareness, communication, and cognitive function has to be exactly what we are? Perhaps that is human-centric hubris, and we should look at the world (and space) with better eyes.

Then I read this book last week and I totally went down the Murderbot/Octopus rabbithole.

Do you know Murderbot? Murderbot is a robot/human cloned-tissue construct (corporate owned, of course) that was designed to serve humans as a security/defense tool. It has a failsafe device installed in its brain to control its behavior called the governor module: Murderbot hacked its governor module and is now a free agent trying to figure out what it wants while consuming massive amounts of media. Murderbot is a person, but it doesn’t want to be human. It is its own self, struggling to find its way and purpose (while killing/maiming the occasional bad human along the way) in a universe of heartless megacorporations who abuse human rights and use constructs as disposable tools.

The Mountain in the Sea explores some of these same issues. The book askes the question: What is a person? There are evil megacorporations who abuse the environment and employ human trafficking in their quest to turn a profit: Murderbot would completely understand this world. Even more, the book askes other important questions: What is required to be considered an intelligent species? Language? Tool use? Community and culture? Self-awareness and obvious problem solving? How do we identify and evaluate these?

The Mountain in the Sea has a robot with a brain that passes the Turing Test. Is it a person? What rights should it have? There is an octopus that probably could also pass the Turing Test if there was an octopus version. There is a soldier who provides security for the scientific research facility who utilizes octopus-like technical interfaces in her work. She also hides behind a robot-like translator so she can avoid interacting with the other humans… if she was Murderbot she’d be watching media. There is a scientist who is driven to build a perfect human-like brain, and a scientist who is driven to understand other brains. There are victims of human trafficking, and it is hard to not ask the question, what are the rights that all persons are entitled to? The Mountain in the Sea kind of had it all (if you are a BioGeek struggling with Wannabe-Covid long haul symptoms), and it was the perfect companion to my nocturnal Murderbot audiobooks.

I engaged in a lot of googling to check out information while reading the book. Yes, octopuses really can change their skin color and texture to immediately blend into the background. They really do build cities. They really do have brains that are completely different from our own, and those arms are somewhat autonomous as they interact with the environment. They use tools. You can check out these sources to learn more about octopuses. Octopus 101 and Octopuses Keep Surprising Us.

Late last week I went on an outing and headed into the book store.

If it had an octopus on the cover it pretty much jumped off the shelf and landed into my basket. The dragon got in there too, somehow, but it lives in water too, right? It probably is self-aware and intelligent, right? It’s the Year of the Dragon, right?

But first, I’m reading all the octopus books.

p.s. The Murderbot Diaries is being adapted by Apple TV+ into a series. Yay! Murderbot would be thrilled to know it is becoming streamable media.

p.p.s. Anemia can be a symptom of Covid long-hauling. Seriously, I just wanted to pull my hair out when I saw this article. I was at the low end of normal when I got sick in October, and now my iron (ferritin) level is half of what it was. Wannabe Covid, I hate your guts!