Look What the Cat Dragged in, Phase III

Several years ago I documented our cat Stella Luna’s odd obsession with bringing wads of dried grass into the house and depositing them in various locations. Later, her interest morphed into transferring gloves, hats and socks we kept in a basket by the door to other parts of the house.

In the last few years, she’s pretty much limited her artistic efforts to a carefully placed toy mouse or catnip pillow, announcing each installation with a forceful yowl. This activity invariably takes place shortly after her staff has gone to bed for the night. We drift off to sleep mildly curious to see what awaits us in the morning.

As she did earlier in her artistic career, Stella’s now exploring another new medium. She’s been working with fabric lately, using scraps and strips from my work table to articulate her own creative vision. Frankly I don’t think it’s as strong as her earlier work, but at least somebody in this family is putting in studio time.

Bag Lady

Ages ago, when she heard I’d gotten into quilting, a friend in DC sent me a couple of dozen Marimekko fabric samples. They’ve been maturing in my stash until two or three months ago when I decided to make little purses from them. Most of the swatches measure about 8 x 9 inches which, trimmed and sewn, is just the right size for a bag to hold the walkabout essentials: cell phone, reading glasses, house key, kleenex and, for dog owners, a plastic bag or two. I have tons of commercial printed fabric for lining, and a vast collection of ribbons for shoulder straps, plus my grandmother’s button tin and random embellishments I’ve accumulated over the years. It’s time to use some of this stuff up!

Since the Marimekko samples are one of a kind, the front and back of each purse is different, which I guess makes them reversible. It’s fun playing mix-and-match, pulling out yardage I’d once considered star-quality quilting material to use as lining, inventing loops and closures, maybe adding a flap or pocket when I find a scrap that works.

I’m quilting each bag, just a bit, with perle cotton, to keep the layers together. Some of the samples included tiny patches showing additional colorways; I’ve left those on. The overall effect is funky, but functional (hey, there’s a marketing slogan). Each purse is slightly better constructed than the last, and takes less time to put together, since I’ve figured out the basics. The first one (below), which doesn’t have batting, I’m calling “summer-weight.” The others are all padded.

This one (below) is lined and trimmed with a plaid cotton that used to be one of my favorite skirts. I still like the muted purples, browns and grays. The closure incorporates the buttonholes from the original waistband. I love this kind of recycling.

I feel like I could crank these out indefinitely while half-watching TV or listening to podcasts, but I’ll probably stop once I’ve exhausted the Marimekko stash and move on to something equally exciting in another realm. The downstairs sofa is calling out for pillows.

It’s an... egg! No, it’s TWINS!!

I found two eggs in the nest box yesterday, two months to the day after we got our chickens. The farmer told us the girls were four to five months old at point of sale, which meant they were on the verge of starting to lay. For the last few weeks I’ve tried not to obsess about when, or to worry about all the possible weirdnesses -- shell-lessness or other malformations -- that occasionally happen with novice layers. This is probably the small-scale chicken keeper’s equivalent of counting your newborn's fingers and toes and hoping their chromosomes are okay.

But these eggs were perfect. Of course I immediately cackled all over Facebook and The WELL, and someone asked if we were going to eat them. No, I said, we’re going to bronze them, like baby shoes, duh.

Jerry had his egg sunny-side-up this morning, with a commercial egg alongside for comparison. The homegrown one (on the left in the pic), aside from being smaller as pullet eggs typically are, had a much perkier yolk, and the area of the white immediate surrounding it was visibly firmer than the outlying portion. This is normal, and you can sometimes see it in commercial eggs, if they’re fresh enough.

I don’t generally enjoy runny yolks, so I cooked mine in the shell, starting in cold water and timing it for three minutes after it came up to a simmer. Peeling the egg without breaking it was a challenge, but the consistency was exactly what I wanted. I smeared it on a slice of toasted Dave’s Killer mega-grain bread and added a grinding of pepper and a sprinkle of kosher salt. It was possibly the best egg I’ve ever tasted. Thank you, chickens.

More specifically, thank you Maxine and, possibly, Rachel. Maxine is a Barred Rock and Rachel a Partridge Rock. Though they don’t look at all alike, they’re considered variants of the same breed. Finding two eggs in the nest box yesterday, I assumed for no particular reason that the Rocks had synchronized their cycles. (Michelle, the third chicken, is a different breed, a blue-laced Wyandotte.)

This morning, though, I surprised Maxine on the nest. The other two were standing nearby, kibitzing, just like when you go to the ladies room with your girlfriends. I excused myself while she completed her business: another lovely egg, identical to the earlier two. So now I’m thinking that Maxine, whose comb and wattles are notably larger and redder (an indication of maturity), might be the only layer so far. Conceivably I’d managed to overlook her debut offering on Sunday, which would account for Monday’s double surprise.

I’d actually almost resigned myself to not seeing eggs til spring. Egg production is highly dependent on the amount of light chickens receive, and in these days of dwindling sunshine, it’s not uncommon for laying hens to slack off or even stop entirely, and for pullets to postpone the whole affair. After researching the pros and cons of adding a few hours of supplemental lighting during the darker months, we decided a couple of weeks ago to install a light on a timer. It comes on at 3 AM and goes off at 8, after the sun has risen. (That was one more clock we had to remember to turn back last weekend.) Perhaps it made a difference.

Or maybe the dummy eggs had something to do with it. Some chicken keepers put a fake egg (a plastic Hanes pantyhose shell or even a golf ball will do) in the nest box, to show their pullets what’s expected of them, and where. It’s a fairly common practice, I gather, though the chickens usually manage to figure it out on their own. Last Saturday, on a whim, I removed the “demos" -- a pair of quite pretty Mexican onyx eggs I’ve owned for years -- that I had optimistically placed, one in each nest box, shortly after the chooks arrived. By Monday we had our first eggs.

I was surprisingly verklempt when I opened the yolk-yellow egg door and found two actual eggs, well, nestled there. The phrase “today you are a woman,” sprang to my warped mind. I’m still kvelling for Michelle (and maybe Rachel), and I have no idea why Yiddish words seem most apt to describe my feelings. Perhaps egg-laying brings out my grandmotherly instincts. If so, I don’t what to think about what eating them implies.

New chix on the block

I hadn't quite pictured acquiring my chickens this way, hanging out in the Trader Joe's parking lot at 7:30 AM, waiting for the farmer's wife to show up. Another woman was sitting in her car, too; I sidled over and verified that she was there for a transaction similar to ours. Apart from the schmoozing about coops and breeds, it felt like we were parties to a drug deal.

We'd been instructed to look for a dark-green Buick sedan, and to bring a crate and cash. Ms. Farmer slid smoothly into the space between our vehicles. I checked the girls over with an unpracticed eye as we shuffled them from her pet carrier to ours. A barred rock, a partridge rock, a blue-laced red Wyandotte. Young birds, pullets, on the verge of starting to lay. Yup, that was our order, all right. I caught myself expecting meowing from the carrier on the short ride home. I wonder if the poultry smell will linger to drive the cats wild on their next trip to the vet.

Here are the barred rock and the blue-laced red Wyandotte. The latter is a pretty fancy breed, though reputed to be as good a layer as the more common rocks.

I'd been negotiating with the farmer, who goes by the nickname Cooper, for several days about varieties and delivery options. There was a chance they'd arrive over the holiday weekend, so I quickly finished painting the coop and went to Naomi's for a galvanized feeder and waterer. They're such simple, pleasing, farm-y looking devices; the design probably hasn't changed in decades. Jerry picked up a couple of carabiners -- apparently raccoon R&D hasn't yet figured these out -- to secure the nest box and human access doors.


Here's the finished coop, shortly before occupancy. The area behind the blue door and under the solid box is open but fenced with hardware cloth. The ladder on the left leads up to the enclosed roost. The yellow door is for access to the nest box (and eggs!) from the outside. There's another, slightly larger door, on the right-side wall, inside the enclosure. That one is for cleaning and replacing bedding material. The theory is that the chickens will climb the ladder and roost inside at night. So far they haven't gotten the idea, though a combination of coaching and cooler weather will probably help.

My uncle Sol is probably rotating in his grave, but of course we had to name our chickens. We seem to have settled on Maxine for the black-and-white barred rock, Michelle (as in Obama) for the bellissima textured Wyandotte, and Rachel (as in Maddow) for the chestnut-colored partridge rock. Though the nuances of their individual personalities have yet to reveal themselves, Max has roosted, the last two nights, on the perch we installed in a corner of the run, with the other two snuggled on the straw bale underneath. So I'm calling her marginally more dominant for now. I could be entirely wrong. What do I know about chickens?

Hens and Chicks

When I was a kid, I spent part of several summers at my uncle and aunt's chicken farm in Vineland, New Jersey. I helped feed and water the chickens. I collected the eggs, sometimes from under the bellies of the recalcitrant hens, placing them gently, one by one, in the enameled wire basket. I learned to work the simple but ingenious machine that candled the eggs -- shining a light through them to inspect for blood spots, embryos, and multiple yolks -- then chugged them along on a tiny conveyor that gently tipped each one into the appropriate chute, sorted by size and weight. On at least one occasion, I accompanied Uncle Sol on a trip to the slaughterhouse. Aunt Hansi was a fabulous cook and baker; most of the double yolks went into her cakes.

Though I loved going about my chores in their dusty midst, the chickens themselves seemed to me, for the most part, an undifferentiated white clucking mass, sometimes somnolent, sometimes excited. My vacation reading at the farm one summer was a thick, profusely illustrated manual of poultry diseases. I was particularly fascinated by the color plates of Newcastle Disease. I intended to be a doctor at that point, so the interest was professional.

Years passed. In the early '90s my friend Mary Carter wrote a charming series of essays about her small flock in Marin County. The "Chicken Lady" writings are archived as part of The Best of the WELL, and available to members of that pioneering online community (www.well.com). Chickens came in colors, I discovered; some breeds were temperamental in one direction or another; individual birds might have personalities as unique as humans.

Mary was a forerunner of the urban poultry movement. Now, at least here in Portland, it's a chicken on every plot. Actually, we're allowed three hens (more with a permit), though roosters are forbidden within city limits. Our back-fence neighbors have constructed what they refer to as a chicken Taj Majal; neighbors two doors up have a coop; a couple of houses up from them there's another. I hear telltale clucks from yards throughout the neighborhood whenever I take a walk.

Two years ago, my friend Jackie gifted me with the charming couple at the top of this page. They've been living in the southeast corner of the backyard, exactly where the coop is going now. I thought of them as mere garden ornaments, but it's clear that they've been placeholders all along.

Here's a shot of the coop in progress. I bought the plans from theGardenCoop.com and Mike, our builder, modified the design to fit our somewhat-constrained space.

The most labor-intensive part of the job was trenching the base around the perimeter, avoiding damage to major tree roots in the process. The bottom edge of the hardware cloth -- a sturdier, finer mesh than so-called "chicken wire" -- that covers the coop will be buried several inches, as a barrier to burrowing predators.

When the coop's completed, I'll do some exterior painting, cueing off the colors I used on this old and extremely tall wooden ladder I found a couple weeks ago, which I plan to place picturesquely... somewhere. After that we'll turn to the serious matter of acquiring chicks, pullets or full-grown laying hens. What and when depend on timing and availability. I'll keep you posted.

The giant ladder is currently sharing deck space with several container gardens I potted up last week, following a trip to Xera Plants, a remarkable local nursery that's generally wholesale-only. (Hardy Plant Society members got a special tour plus discount shopping opportunity; that alone is worth the price of membership.) Most of the plants I bought are succulents, a broad and fascinating family. One of the best-known species is sempervivum, which typically grows as a central rosette surrounded by smaller offshoots. Its common name is hens and chicks.

Dating myself

Yesterday I indulged in what my friend June termed an art date with myself. R. Crumb's Genesis drawings are on display at the Art Museum, and I wanted to hear what chief curator Bruce Guenther had to say about this icon of my misspent youth. He lectured for an hour, engagingly, before turning us loose in the exhibit. A little over a year ago, The New Yorker published an excerpt of Crumb's work; I happened to lay my iPhone on the opening page, floating in God's void.


Crumb spent five years researching and illustrating all 50 chapters of Genesis. Granted, a Bible chapter is, what, a few paragraphs at most? -- it was still a lot of material to absorb. I'd figured I'd cruise through and look at the drawings, maybe read a bit of the text when something caught my interest. But damned if the story didn't suck me in, even the begats, over and over again. Genesis is juicy material, and Crumb, (Mr.) naturally, illustrated some of the begettings. Of course, the book was for sale in the museum gift shop, but I didn't want to schlep it all over town and on public transportation (I'd taken the bus in). It is a must-purchase, though. My birthday's coming up; just saying.

A wall-size Sol LeWitt piece was in the final stages of installation in the main-floor sculpture gallery. It consists of six primary geometic shapes superimposed on each other in pairs, white on a black ground, in all possible permutations. Very simple, but it grabbed me in a cool, rational, satisfying way. What a totally different aesthetic, and intent, from R. Crumb.


As long as I was going to be downtown anyway, I'd made a Genius Bar appointment to have my iPhone, which has been hiccuping since I "upgraded" to OS4, diagnosed. I had a couple of hours to fill before then, and I was hungry (must have been all that begetting). Southpark, one of our favorite default downtown restaurants, is just down the street from the museum. It was a gorgeous day, and they had tables set up on the sidewalk. So I ordered lunch and spent an hour or so eating a tuna salad sandwich and reading the book I'd brought with me.

A California friend had emailed me about a local gallery show featuring the work of two artists she knew, so I walked down 9th, across Burnside, and a few more blocks to the venue. En route I saw this conceptual art installation. Only in Portland, I hope.
With a couple of exceptions, the paintings (small format watercolor abstracts) didn't engage me. The gallery next door, though -- this is in the Pearl District, which is art-scene central -- had an intriguing exhibit centered on the graphic representation of editing, literary analysis, cultural history, and classroom teaching. Highly conceptual, hard to explain, but it spoke to my English major/editor heart. Here's a link: pdxcontemporaryart.com/anna-gray-ryan-wilson-paulsen.

I still had some time before the rendezvous with my Genius, so I dropped into the Contemporary Craft Museum, where I've been a member since shortly after we moved to town. There's usually something intriguing on display. The current exhibit hadn't piqued my interest when I read about it in their newsletter, but in person it was provocative. The title of the show is Dropping the Urn; the artist, from Beijing, is Ai Weiwei (I'm trying to put out of my mind the declarative English sentence that sounds like). He takes centuries-old vases and urns and repaints them, or reproduces their form but with the decorative glaze on the inside, as if they'd been turned inside out, or -- literally iconoclastic -- drops and breaks them. Here's a writeup: www.museumofcontemporarycraft.org/exhibitions/index.php?f=2010_07_weiwei

Finally it was time to hit the Apple Store. I pawed iPads for a short while, and then handed my phone over to Kid Genius. He ran some diagnostics which revealed very little. His advice was to sync the phone (which also does a backup), then do a full reset, which wipes all data and restores the phone to virginity, and then sync to reinstall my data. This is not as scary as it sounds, but I was hoping to avoid having to fiddle with all my settings again; I'd done a Reset without Erase earlier. Of course, today Apple released version 4.0.1 of the software, which might have helped with my problems. "Minor bug fixes" indeed. We'll see.

I left the A-store, resisted checking out the sale at Chico's across the way, and was rewarded, up on the transit mall, with the almost immediate appearance of the 19 bus.

I really should take myself on art dates more often.

Happy Birthday, Sophie

Hard to believe that it's been a year since this little critter attached herself to us while we out walking. She was dirty, disheveled and limping -- not at all like she is in this photo, fresh from a birthday bath. The beginning of the saga is here.

We knew almost nothing about living with dogs, and even less about integrating them into a household ruled by cats. We had no idea how old she was, or even what breed. Her record at the vet, last time I checked, still said "cockapoo mix."

Once we decided to keep her, we declared July 2nd, the day we found her, her birthday. After several months of waffling on the breed question by saying "We dunno; we think she's a Lhasa Apso or maybe a Shih Tzu mix," we sprang for a doggie DNA test. She's almost purebred Lhasa with a touch of Pekinese; the Peke part explains why she's on the small side for a Lhasa, and accounts for all her bad qualities, which are few.

Of course we've grown to love her. The cats would probably choose a somewhat less effusive verb, but still. The video features China Rose, who was so spooked when Sophie joined the family that she hid in the laundry sink for two weeks.