I have become a Crazy Old Cat Lady (+1 tip!)

Apparently the fur collected from brushing a cat, can be used by birds to line their nests. After brushing* your cat, take the gathered fur outside and let it ride the winds. You can do the same with bits of yarn.

Usually I just go outside my back door and distribute it from the porch. But last year I collected a bunch of the fur in a plastic bag. The idea was to place it among the plants in front of my work. There are always birds making nests in the O of the COFFEE sign.

I carried that bag in my work satchel for over a year and finally, today I remembered to pull out the bag. After work as I started out to walk home, I went over to the big cement planters and stuck tufts of fur in the leaves of the plants themselves. I saw a sparrow just a couple of days ago grab an old stem for its nest from right here.

Oblivious of other people I moved from planter to planter, pulling out tufts of fur from my little plastic bag and stuffing them into the bushes. A breeze came up, I started pulling off smaller pieces and letting them loose on the wind. The white fur looked like poplar seeds floating on the breeze.

I continued my walk home, methodically plucking little bits of fur and just letting them float off. The whole time I fighting off an image at the edge of my mind's eye of the slightly demented old lady providing for the birdies with the castoff fur from her kitties.

I just kept on walking and then I couldn't fight it off anymore — I have become a crazy old cat lady.

*(TIP) I prefer to use a comb to groom my cats. The tabby has a very thick topcoat and undercoat so I use a regular rat-tail comb. My white kitty has very soft fur, so I use a comb for baby hair.

Where'd the Owl come from?

I first fell in love with an owl when I bought a print of Albrecht Durer's Screech-Owl (1508). I was maybe 12. Then I started to collect owls.

At the age of 17, I lived in the shadow of one of the best owl roosts in the world -- The Parthenon in Athens, a temple built for the Greek goddess Athena often depicted with one of her symbols, the owl.

By the time I was in college my interests wandered and most of the collection disappeared on its own. Then as an adult, my father started to give owls to me.

It all began with a t-shirt that my father brought back from Kauai. It was grey green with Poipu Beach and an owl on it. Every spring he went to Kauai and always found another owl to get for me. He even brought me a sweat shirt, the match to the original t-shirt. I continue to add to the collection now that he's gone.

Back to the spectacular owl's roost, I watched the PBS show NOVA on television this weekend. This episode was titled Secrets of The Parthenon. It chronicled the last 30 years at The Acropolis Restoration Project in their magnificent undertaking. There goal was to save The Parthenon from the ravages of pollution, ill planned restorations and history itself.

One of the initial discoveries is that there are almost no right angles in The Parthenon. Each block of marble is individual and can only fit in one place. All of these tiny adjustments just add to the enormousness and grace of the temple.

The original temple took about 12 years to build in mid 5th century BCE Classical Greece. In modern times, the turn of the 21st century it took 30 years to discover the secrets of the building's structure and then restore it.