Wordless Wednesday - Willie Cross Paws

Taking the DARE Tuesday - by Bianca

Well, you have heard us mention several times that we once lived with a very adorable, hermaphroditic, ginger guinea pig named Fred. He had very floofy orange and white furs, and he was very funny. Mosaic Lady saw his cute little black and white photo in an ad for the Monterey Humane Society, and his eyes called to her. Before you could say: "Cavies like to crap on carpets!!" -- he was ours. The rest is pig-story! He didn't live with us very long 'cuz he got very sick very suddenly, but Mosaic Lady and we elder cats really loved him so much. We have old photos we must share with you when we can get to them. One is of me sleeping with Fred in his cage and the other is of me and Willie laying on a blanket on the floor with Fred in between us on the night he died. We were keeping a hospice vigil for him.

Mosaic Lady met Dark Oak Woman, Molly, online recently, and must've mentioned Fred 'cuz Molly invited us to come see her blog last week. Look what we saw!

Ginger (Gingerbread for long) in a HAT! We knew our fashion forward feline friends would flip! She lives in northeast Texas with a big family of five persons, FIVE other pigs, five cats, and three dawgs. Wow. That's some family, huh? Here she is on a very good hair day...


Ginger was adopted from a pet store where she was living (the kids who had her before got tired of her.) Molly's family adopted her so she could be a foster mom, or Auntie, to two little newborn pigs. Their mom, Luna, died right after giving birth and their Aunt Shimmer was also having a baby at the same time but she did not care for Luna's babies much at all. So now Ginger has three girls and two boys in her pig family. The girls share a cage and the boys have their own place across the living room, so no more babies! Phew.


We wonder if guinea pigs like sour blackberries? We sure pick a lot of them every day and saw a turtle gobbling some down yesterday in our yard. Molly has kindly offered to drop Shimmer off at our house during an upcoming trip to our 'hood, which is very nice and very tempting! We know Sadie would LOVE a little pig because she plays chase outside with all the baby bunnies who live around our yard. We know she really is playing with them and not hunting them because if her intention were to hunt them, there would be a big pile of bunny bodies at our back door by now.

Anyway...as much as we would all love a guinea pig to join our family, we suspect that if it ever happens again it will be much like the first time when Mosaic Lady gets wind of a pig who needs rescuing (Yes, she's already been on Petfinder looking! Did you even really have to ask?) But until then, it's really fun for us to have made six special new friends not of our own species!

Thanks, Gingerbread!
(and Shimmer, Basil, Moonshine, Rainbow and Magic Panda!)

(And thanks to Karl at The Cat Realm for creating such a wonderful and kind-hearted DARE!)

Mancat Monday -- Willie's Search

for The Real Killers!

Absolutely, 100% Not Guilty!
Bianca, his accomplice.

Share Your Critter Art Sunday, #2

Welcome back to Sharing Your Art Sunday! It doesn't have to be about cats, or critters, but almost all of ours is, so that's what you get from us. We learned how to use our new scanner, and we are very excited! This lets us share images with you that we never hoped to have access to (like all the old photos of US you are starting to see!) Most of these images are from greeting cards or photos.

We wanted to share more of Vicki Ledray Grabicki's art with you. We told the story of how Mosaic Lady found Vicki and came to own two of her originals in our post here. You may recall that ML saw one greeting card at Nepenthe's gift shop in Big Sur.
It was this:


Queen Hanorah With The Much Loved Slyvester
-Celtic goddess of Creation, the arts, and cats.

Mosaic Lady was HOOKED. The kitty was Willie, of course, and while ML was working for an artist at the time, she was desperately unhappy and had not even started to make her own art mosaics yet. Something in this image spoke to her very deeply, as many of Vicki's images do. This was the first thing she ever bought from Vicki and the large print hangs in a neat green frame in our dining room today. We love it!

We have a (not yet framed) print of this one:

Shaman Calling Her Allies

This one is called Sister Cathie.
Lookit the ginger!

We have a (not yet framed) print of this one, too, and we LOVE the title:
Remembering Who She Is

Until we got out our old folder of correspondence we had forgotten that the name of this original painting that we adore is: When All is Well. Isn't that a great title?
The one at the top of this post that is similar is one we did not buy but really wish we had!
The second original we have from Vicki is called The Awakening but we forgot to scan that! You can see it hanging on the wall behind Willie in this photo.
Mosaic Lady really should connect with Vicki and see what she's up to. It's been a while.

In other Art Sharing news...last weekend for WCB we featured some darling cat images on tiles by Mary Tagliarino of Wildflower Studio: Sharing Cat art that we Heart - Weekend Cat Blogging, July 27.
Just this morning we discovered this comment on our post from Mary's kitties who are her muses, of course:

Thank you! Thank you, all! And a special thank you to Laura for featuring our mama's artwork! You must realize that none of it would be possible without us, don't you? We are the indispensable inspiration here at Wild Sunflower Studio - in fact we reign supreme on our cat gym overlooking the easel and all the mess on the art table....

We are really in charge of quality control. Sometimes, at night, we sleep on Mama's desk after we inspect everything because we can't do it when she is awake. We were drawn to the paint water because we like to drink colored water even though we have fresh water by our food bowls, but now that Mama has caught on, she always covers it up.

Thank you again for the compliments!

With kindest regards,
Anastasia (Miss Ana), Noodle, and Marchello (Chelly) all of:
Wild Sunflower Studio
www.wildsunflowerstudio.com
wildsunflower@comcast.net

Happy 15th Birthday, Bianca! - By Willie

Bianca was rescued back in 1992. She was a teeny tiny lost kitten wandering in the parking lot of a market in Paso Robles, California. A very nice woman from a very famous California family dynasty whose last name begins with "H" rescued her. (No, not Hilton, but you're very close!) The nice lady is a fur lover times 10 and shared her life with many cats and always traveled with a mini-Schnauzer named Musetta back then. She was also a very frequent guest at The Cypress Inn, Doris Day's Pets Welcome hotel in Carmel-by-the-Sea. (See, Miss Peach! We told you that you'd like this story!) Mosaic Lady was working at the Cypress Inn back in late summer of 1992 when Mrs. H. checked in with tiny Bianca, who she'd already named. (You didn't think this was OUR name, did you??)

Mosaic Lady would check on the kitten whenever Mrs. H. would go out shopping or dining and the next thing we knew...Mrs. H. was asking her to foster the kitten for just a small amount of time while she went to Italy for the month of October. Well, once ML brought Bianca home and got a look at her next to me (I was only 9 months old myself and had only been with ML and crabby Gracie for six months), you can guess the rest, right? Our landlords were not happy with us. And then we found Fred, our guinea pig, and they really hated us, but that's another story for another day. I will tell you that Bianca would sleep in Fred's cage with him and one day when we can get to our old photos we will prove it to you.


Gracie became Bianca's mother and I, her big brother. Bianca has always been the most low maintenance of all of us cats -- the background kitty -- the quiet kitty who demands little. (Except when she's in the car. Then she is the LOUDEST of all kitties.)

When we left Monterey for New Mexico and then onto Colorado, we started adding boy cats...Merlin, Milo and then Walter. Bianca sort of got lost in the shuffle. She stopped sleeping on Mosaic Lady's bed for over ten years. The boys often bullied her and sometimes kept her from her litter box. Bianca slept under a chair for a long time, and started going potty in inappropriate places. Those were very hard years for all of us. No one was very happy in our family!


Right after we moved to North Carolina early this year, Bianca started to get very sick with her hyperthyroid symptoms. Gracie died of the heart disease associated with this so we all knew the signs. (Doesn't Gracie look like a big Sadie?!) Fortunately, the goop that Bianca takes in her ears is working very well, so that is good. And her heart is not damaged like Gracie's was when the disease was discovered. Even though Mosaic Lady would love to add some fresh fur to our family now that we are down to just three cats, she's being uncharacteristically deliberate and thoughtful about this issue. What we mean by that is that she has not gone out and picked a new fur (yet), even though she thinks of it every day and has a list of possible kitties to adopt! Bianca now sleeps with Mosaic Lady every night, and has taken over Walter's spot on the bed pillows during the day. This seems very important to Bianca, to reclaim her position in the family again. And so for right now, we are honoring that. And today we are honoring her.

We celebrate Bianca's birthday on August 3rd because it is also the birthday of Mosaic Lady's father, who art in heaven. It's really cool that it's on a Friday this year so that we can celebrate with all of our wonderful new friends at Weekend Cat Blogging, hosted this weekend by the very exotic boo_licious at masak-masak. They are in Malaysia! That is a long way from Carmel-by-the-Sea!!

Temptation Thursday

Here we see Willie's brief moment of temptation (lapse in sanity) as he considers playing ball with Leah. Nothing good can ever come of that. And no. They never look each other directly in the eye. It's all part of their delicate paws de deux.

Who let a trained seal into our yard?


SPEAKING OF TEMPTATIONS, we got some! Our first EVER. Mosaic Lady underwent the torture that is Wal Mart yesterday and got us two kinds: turkey and chicken. She hasn't bought us stuff like this since Pounce was all the rage because it always came right back up on the rugs, all pink and gross. "If I wanted pink puke on the carpet I would've put it there myself!" blah blah blah blah. So we all gathered in the kitchen as soon as she got home and tried the turkey. Sadie ate hers so fast that Mosaic Lady was sure she was sitting on them. She did that three times in a row! Sadie can hoover up four turkey Temptations before you even have your hand back to yourself! (How many is too many? Mosaic Lady has portion control issues. Let us know how many we can eat before we puke so they don't get taken away again.)

Willie ate one and then got confused and disoriented, sort of sniffing around. HE CAN'T SEE THEM! Maybe he needs to borrow Daisy's Mommie's glasses.* Bianca could care less, which surprised us, but she's more of a Cheetos, string cheese and Chunky Monkey girl. The Dairy Queen. Next time we'll try the dairy blend flavor for her.

So that was the big deal at our house yesterday afternoon -- $2.50 "blown" to make us happy. Oh yeah...another $1.82 on some feather fishing pole toy that scared Sadie so badly she begged to go back outside. NO TENTS OR TUNNELS! "If I can't afford $40 for some guy to come mow the yards I'm not spending blah blah blah blah blah blah blah..." You know how they drone.

You don't know how bad we have it here! Be very grateful for all the things you guys get to eat, drive, ride in, grow, and play with!! We're living in some impoverished, third world, cat-as-chattle, oppressor nation around here. Why do you think we sit out Fashion Friday? Sadie and Bianca would be sporting burkas! (No offense intended for our Middle Eastern girl cat friends, of course.) Watch this space!!

*We kid the Daisy Mommie! Mosaic Lady started wearing reading glasses two years ago (at the very young age of 47) and already had to increase her strength. She pretty much wears them for everything close up now -- even shopping, cooking and emptying the dishwasher. She's bitter.

Three Words Wednesday

CUT THE GRAAAAAAAASSSSSSSS!