| || eight, cover, shrank, catnip, escape hatch.
Image from the Internet.
The opening poem contains all the words (or variations of them) from today's Jumble.
Comments are welcomed!
Do not explicitly reveal any of the actual answer words until after closing time, but embedding them surreptitiously in comment sentences is encouraged.
13 comments:
"Feline Escapism"
Our cat gave birth under cover in a closet
next to the pipes that watered the tub
in the neighboring bath. She was quick to deposit
eight tiny kittens who raised a hubbub,
mewing their way toward her nipples.
From that motherly chore she shrank
until our son made resistance shrivel
with a bit of catnip. ... She purred while they drank.
The moral, I suppose, is To each his Own.
Babes get a snootful. Mom's in a stoned zone.
~ OMK
Two-thirds of a dozen for one,
Eight for the other.
How many idioms
Should that cover?
If you shrink from
The mathematical,
You could hatch a plot
To escape the tyrannical!
Do it in a bar
Where you nurse a nip,
If you need a cats-paw
It will be just a nit!
Well that's two fine pieces of poetry in varied styles. I like that ee cummings style of Owen, economically combining four J's and the riddle-solution without too blatant a hint.
If Misty decides to teach a poetry course she could label Keith's work as OMK'ism.
This was fairly routine solve for me as when I jotted the letters in a different order, #3 and #4 popped out. Or were hatched, so to speak.
As soon as I had 11 letters I had the riddle-solution. Btw ..
Rosie, our crimson bellied conure is sitting on eggs and they're due to hatch in a few days.
WC
And..
Origin of cat's paw
In the vernacular, a dupe. As a tool it looks like This. Also, apparently it refers to a double eyed knot used for mooring.
All thanks to Owen and Google.
.
WC
This was a sweet memory for me.
Our home at the time was in the Fan in Richmond, VA. The mother was a calico cat we'd named Libby, after our red-headed baby sitter.
We didn't know she was preggers. We couldn't find her for two days. She had made a nest among blankets at the back of the closet, near the wall that held the plumbing for our upstairs bath, probably because of the warm water supply.
She actually had seven kits. We managed to find homes for five of them. We kept two--that we had neutered.
~ OMK
I'm bummed for two reasons.
First, because I had a terrible time with a Monday jumble! The fourth clue for me down and then I couldn't make sense of the solution. On Monday!!
Second because the U.S. Open, weird as it was, is over. Two weeks of great tennis to watch and it's done! Boohoo.
Thanks for the poetry, guys; it helped raise my spirits.
I always had cats when I was growing up. Plural because my mother would never let them be house cats and something always happened to each one. Finally one, by name of Sukoshi, stayed for years until I was the one who left -- for college. That was a long time ago, for sure.
Delightful poetry and cat discussions this morning--very enjoyable. I actually had trouble with the fourth word until Keith's poem gave it to me. But I had the solution even before that and found it a cute and funny Jumble cartoon.
My first pets were also cats, but I lived in a third story apartment with my little son, and so let the cats outside during the day. Sadly, my favorite turned up with a smashed leg one day--she'd been hit by a car. And when I moved to Tulsa and rented a house with a fenced in back yard, I got a dog, who would be safer than a cat there. So, sadly, goodbye kitties. But thankfully my sweet dachshund Dusty is as loving and amiable as a kitty.
In my bachelor years at a rented house I had a roommate. Male as de rigueur in those days. Somehow we came upon a stray and adopted her. And she loved us rescuers to pieces.
He left and I promised to care for the cat. Then he came back and I left with my wife to be. So I left the cat with him. Said cat did not like Betsy at all.
WC
Before we had cats, I had a dog. This was in the flat we rented when I was in grade school. He was the first pet I remember—a dog named Crackers, a mutt my dad must have found at the pound. I was 7 or 8, in the 3rd or 4th grade.
Crackers loved me. We played endless hours indoors and on the Union Street hill outside.
When I was walking home from school, he would spot me from over a block away and would come barreling down to jump all over me. I would beat him down, spanking him for being so wacky.
One day Crackers got into the garbage cans just inside our back door. He made a mess, and our landlord was furious. He ordered us to get rid of the dog.
I cried a lot. I remember sitting for hours with Crackers, both of us in mourning, the day before he was to leave. On the day itself I came home early from school, sick. No Crackers ran down the hill to me. I remember lying in bed as my mother told me the usual fable, that my dad had taken Crackers to live on a “beautiful farm.”
That didn’t help at all, because I knew wherever Crackers was, he was feeling miserable, missing me as much as I missed him.
And I felt terrible guilt--about all the times I’d swatted him when he jumped up on me.
Later on, we only had cats
~ OMK
My family had a dog while I was growing up. Actually she was my much older brother's dog, that he got when I was only four. But he went into the army and the Korean War, so she became truly the family dog. She was a real lady, sweet-tempered and loving; she scared off strange cats, but once introduced to each of mine, she treated them gently and accommodated their nearness. Missy was her name, and she was very pretty. A mutt, she was a collie-chow mix, with collie coloring and conformation, only a little smaller and noticeably stockier. I thought her face was so much better looking than the purebred collie needle nose.
As the years passed, she got older and frailer; I remember how sad it was to watch her go carefully up the three steps onto our back porch, instead of leaping up the way she had before.
Eventually she got very arthritic and was in evident pain. So my mother one day regretfully took her to the vet where she was put to sleep. I cried a lot; my mother was sad, but more stoic than I.
Well, sorry for such a long story, but though I was fond of my cats, Missy was like family to me.
Sandy, Misty, Wilbur ~(Maybe this should start with a "Trigger Warning.")
It's the awful downside of having favorite dogs or cats.
They have such short lifespans that we are likely to outlive them. We had two lovely pals, Lady (a Golden) and Radarblip (Yorkie), when we moved into our current home.
They were pretty old, and within a year they went into terminal illnesses. I sat with each while the vet "put them to sleep." The only good thing to report is they had gentle passings in the company of someone they trusted.
Yes, we have their ashes on our mantle.
Now we have three guys, another Golden and Yorkie duo, plus a chihuahua mix. And they are getting on.
I don't mean to be sappy but to share what I think is the positive side to this--that nature's design assures us that in most cases we are the ones who take the emotional pain.
It is far from pleasant, but we can handle it. It saves them from having to lose us.
~ OMK
I remember when my daughter and her then-husband's dog got old, sick and in pain, they paid a vet to come to their house and 'put her to sleep', so she could be in comfortable, familiar surroundings with both of them soothing her.
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